Cliff Notes – Games Inbox: Has Xbox become irrelevant this generation?

Leadership Criticism: Phil Spencer faces intense scrutiny for his management of Xbox, with calls for his resignation following significant layoffs and perceived failures in console performance.
Concerns Over Future: Many readers express doubt about Xbox’s viability, suggesting that ongoing mismanagement could lead to the brand’s eventual shutdown, particularly if new leadership does not emerge.
Competition Landscape: The consensus is that Xbox’s current offerings, including Rematch, lack the competitive edge needed to rival established titles like EA Sports FC, raising questions about the brand’s relevance in the gaming market.

The graph is everything (Microsoft)

The Thursday letters page reacts badly to the Xbox layoffs, as one reader agrees that Rematch is not real competition for EA Sports FC.

Blame game
I think these latest job cuts will be the final straw for many people when it comes to Microsoft. They have been failing so badly for so long it’s got to a point where I think they’re already irrelevant for a lot of folks, but this has got to be the final straw. Or at least it should be, because the final straw should be Phil Spencer, and all his horrible friends, leaving Xbox and brand new management coming in (or Microsoft just shutting it down, which is actually looking increasingly likely in the long term).

I just do not understand why this man still has a job. When hundreds of other developers get dumped for the crime of simply existing why is Phil Spencer, who has overseen two failed generations of consoles, still in charge and appearing in videos to pretend everything is fine.

He has got to go, and Microsoft has got to accept the mistakes he made. I know he tried to be everyone’s friend but that only made it worse in my opinion. Of all those gaming T-shirts he wore, hinting at a revival of an old retro title, how many actually got made? Zero, nilch, nada. Unless Hexen 3 secretly came out and I missed it. We’re not even getting Perfect Dark now.

I’ll give him the fact that Game Pass seemed a good idea in theory but now it’s clear it didn’t work out that should be it, he’s had all its chances. But no, he’s still there even after this latest round of redundancies. Xbox is dead and Phil Spencer killed it.
Tom Meadows

Numbers go up
Funnily enough, the one thing that came to mind with all this Xbox madness is that at one point they were convinced they were going to buy Nintendo, with that awful email from Phil Spencer about how he knew better than them what they should do and how they shouldn’t make their own consoles.

Expert, exclusive gaming analysis

Can you imagine what would be happening now if they had bought them (I believe they were trying around 2020)? What would have been pocket change for Microsoft would’ve meant destroying the longest serving and most revered company in gaming, just to watch the numbers go up on a graph.

The Xbox leadership couldn’t organise a you-know-what in a brewery and I’m both shocked and not shocked that Spencer is still there. Has he no shame? Considering he must be a multi-millionaire, at the very least, why not just take the hint and retire into the sunset. Do you really want to still be at Xbox when they finally pull the plug on the whole thing? Because I don’t think that’s going to be long now.
Trepsils

Summer racin’
Fun list of summer games. I’d also add Wave Race: Blue Storm, another game with a summer feeling thanks to beaches, sea and lakes.

I finally picked it up this year (despite owning a GameCube for decades) and it definitely holds up thanks to its unique controls (which are hard at first but amazing once they click), water effects, and graphics.
Barry

GC: Blue Storm isn’t usually most people’s favourite, but we were tempted to include Mario Kart World in our list, specifically for the Wave Race-esque areas.

No competition
I agree with RInce, Rematch has no chance of replacing EA Sports FC, it’s barely even competition for it and anyone who says otherwise really doesn’t understand football and the fans of the beautiful game.

But I do believe that a football game without licences *could* compete. Imagine something like a Sunday League Football game. It would need realistic physics and would preferably be a continuation of the vastly superior gameplay of PES.

The players could be AI-generated ‘normal’ people, you could manually input yourself and as many of your mates as you wanted. It could be more difficult and true to life and keep the realism (it’s just wrong if you are running around with Messi and making him play badly).

You would be creating your own universe of rivalries and heroes as you played, which you do to a certain extent in EA Sports FC, after playing a season or so anyway.

I’ve talked myself into this! It sounds awesome. Inbox magic make it happen.
Themadmonk82

Mushroom casserole
Personally, if Donkey Kong Bananza is the alpha team, then what I would like to see most from a new Mario would be the A-team, B-team, C-team, even the Luigi team, all making a standalone Mazza game, 10-15 hours long each, akin to Bowser’s Fury.

So, four or five games in one package, all buzzing with crazy individual ideas, as even the lowest ranking Nintendo teams would be near top tier compared to most other stagnant developers. Make it so.

I love the Luigi’s Mansion games, just not the middle one.
big boy bent

GC: The Luigi’s Mansion games are made by Next Level Games, who are Canadian.

The awful truth
I know I shouldn’t be surprised at what’s going on at Xbox, especially as we had the leaks, but it’s still awful to see. Who knows how many people will be let go once it’s all over. I think the only reason Turn 10 wasn’t shut down completely is that they’re helping out with Fable. When that’s finally done, I doubt they’ll survive.

I don’t know how long Rare has got left either, once Sea Of Thieves starts to fade in popularity. If they’ve had to cancel Everwild have they even got any new games in development or are they basically a support studio now, for their own game?

As for what’s going on with Perfect Dark. As you said, that’s just so obviously Microsoft’s fault, in terms of bad management, it’s just kind of pathetic. The amount of talent they had working for them, and they produced absolutely nothing and were apparently a disaster the whole time anyway.

And then there’s some new MMO at ZeniMax that they’ve been making since 2018 but now it’s been canned? What an earth was it? Was it really not close to being finished at this point or is Microsoft’s bad management catching and Bethesda had forgotten how to make a game properly too.
Watson

GC: There were faint rumours the ZeniMax game might have been the Starfield equivalent of The Elder Scrolls Online, but there was no evidence of that.

Oops! I did It again
After seeing what Xbox has done yet again, letting people go, I’ll never buy an Xbox game or console in my life. The big bosses keep their jobs and overpriced wages, yet someone that does all the work for 1% of Phil’s pay packet gets kicked out the door.

What a joke of a company and I hope the next gen Xbox drops like a lead balloon because my cash will never go in his pocket.
David

The human factor
I’m not sure what to say about this latest Xbox disaster, except that I’m very sorry for anyone losing their job. Which seems to be a lot of people. Of course, none of them have done anything wrong. It’s not their fault Xbox is in the state it’s in. But of course, business being what it is, it’s the people most responsible for a problem that are the least likely to be punished for it.

How Phil Spencer hasn’t been kicked out by now I do not know. Maybe he’s got dirt on someone at Microsoft because at the very minimum he should’ve gone once it was obvious the Xbox Series X/S wasn’t working out, so several years ago. You could argue at the end of the Xbox One era, when it was obvious he hadn’t turned that around.

Him and all his other cronies, there’s not one of them that seems to have a clue as to how to do their job properly, although I suspect that the real problem is that the people above them, in Microsoft proper, have no interest in gaming and don’t like that it’s not the easy money all their other stuff is.

For me, I’ll never touch an Xbox console again and cannot believe there’s any point in releasing next gen, hardware because I don’t know who else is going to want it, especially if it’s going to be pushing AI rubbish. Personally, I’d prefer my games to be made by human beings. One day, it’d be nice to have them as execs too.
Gordo

Inbox also-rans
100 % agree about EA Sports FC 25; absolute joke. It’s all about store packs with EA, pay to win.
Gary

With all this talk of AI, I have a real bad feeling about the PlayStation 6. Especially as it’s now got no competition from Xbox, pushing Sony to do better.
Blench