Shareholders: "Wow, Microsoft is really expanding by buying up those studios, promising great output for them in the future!". Line goes up.

Microsoft then does nothing except investing all of their money into AI.

Shareholders: "Wow, Microsoft is really streamlining their organisation by dumping all of those useless dead weight studios. Excellent management". Line goes up.

Im not even sure the extinguish part is intentional here. I think they are just genuinely this incompetent, but Greys Law applies here imo.

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Embrace. Expand. Extinguish.

That implies careful planning.

In this case, MS thought just mindlessly throwing money around will somehow bring in massive profits.

Yep. They don't understand games so they buy studios that DO understand games, and then turn them into divisions of Microsoft instead of game studios and are surprised that they no longer can make games.

Or user privacy.

Or valuing their own workers.

Or how to respectfully be a part of the F/OSS ecosystem.

Or humanity's desire to not live in a pollution stream from their AI processing centers (they're not really "data centers").

Or that we all wish LinkedIn would self-destruct under the weight of its own bullshit, and magically blink itself out of existence.

They had vision and knew how to build a brand. The current CEO's idea of branding is to name their products after a tool that absolutely no one will be using.

Probably true, although Ballmer didn't screw it up and Nadella did screw it up for one simple reason. He's a 1 Cloud Pony. He came from the cloud and that's all he really knows, and his narrow Senior VP perspective helped him extract earnings from cloud but nothing else at Microsoft.

I have talked to a mobile game Dev, a very drunker heart to heart. He had an India mobile game (like alto). He made about 120k in 5 years between two versions of the game. And then some tenent adjacent studio offered him 650k for the IP.

In his words "All I could think was that in 650k, my house would be paid. My education loan would be paid and I would still have enough money to ensure my kid goes to college and not worry about an education loan. I knew selling game would mean enshittification of my baby. But then i looked at my actual baby and I knew I had to betray the digital one"

That's the first time I saw it from the dev point of view. He wanted to keep the project, but between choosing fans of his games that can't keep a subreddit alive and doing right by no name, no face fan base vs 650k hard cash from a shitty studio that would concretely secure his family's future. I am not sure if I would hold out.

I know it's not the same with the studio Microsoft bought..... But I can't help but wonder people who sellout might not be such horrible pieces of shit that we imagine them to be.

Microsoft has a lot more problems than that, but I suppose that's the only one Steve Jobs would care about.

Not nothing. They remade a bunch of games worse than the originals.

(Some people did enjoy Viva Pinata, but I didn't play that.)

Wait, there's a new doom game? (Not joking, just noting that I've missed any mention of this whatsoever)

FYI Doom The Dark Ages was available day 1 on game pass and they were boasting on social media that they had over 3 million players on the first week if I remember right.

It's Microsoft's fault the game didn't sell. Most people (me included) opted to subscribe to game pass for a month instead.

They are blinded by their own goals, and forget how things are interconnected. Or maybe its just arrogance.

I've seen it on the smaller business side too. They want immediate profit, so cut key staff when the work slows a bit, rather than carry the veterans till the next projects. Then complain that things aren't getting done and the costs to outsource the missing skill set is high.

While the lower levels are like : this is exactly as we predicted it would go.

Because it's run by fucking idiots with MBAs who have no connection whatsoever to the company's profits and losses.

For a long time, their value proposition was "use us because what else can you do?" Trying to monololize the gaming industry by buying up whatever good studios they can is just a part of that.