Microsoft just raised the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $29.99/month, and fans aren’t happy. Many are canceling, some are calling for a boycott, and even Microsoft’s website is struggling to keep up.
Microsoft just raised the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $29.99/month, and fans aren’t happy. Many are canceling, some are calling for a boycott, and even Microsoft’s website is struggling to keep up.
Right. Microsoft’s website is struggling. The same Microsoft whose core business model is selling server/cloud infrastructure? Yeah, I definitely believe that.
Counterpoint:
Do you remember Xbox Live?
The thing I hate the most about XBox live is it convinced Sony that they should make the PlayStation network paid for as well.
Sure I know someone has to host all the shit, but man it sure would be nice to play games without having to pay for other services after paying for the game.
The number of games you can play offline seemed to plumit after Microsoft/Sony made paid for network access.
So, I actually used to work for MSFT a decade ago.
The uh… Xbox people and the corpo business people were, once upon a time, wildly different kinds of people, literally problematic 90s pc gamer dude bros vs ex IBM stodgy walrus people.
Basically, the walrus people won, made all the big boy business decisions, and things rather rapidly went to shit in terms of the business decisions being just insanely corpo.
Like uh, at the time Xbox Live came out… well there was this whole other paradigm for online video gaming set by Valve, but uh… lets just say you shouldn’t talk about Gabe Newell while standing on or sitting in a Microsoft campus.
I didn’t really have that important of a role, but lets just say I knew that half of Xbox 360s were coding 3RR or faulty in some way that necessitated a complete replacement (they’d just swap your hardrive into a new model and claim they refurbed it LOL) … yeah I knew that about a decade before that became wider public knowledge.
But anyway, here we are about 20 years later, Valve is having MSFT’s cake, eating it too, and the remaining husks on the gaming side of MSFT absolutely know they are fucking cooked, and are fully in the ‘suck all the money outta this shit while we still can’ phase, before the entire concept of MSFT gaming basically transitions to more or less a legacy system.
They’re rapidly headed toward just being a B2B oriented company, maybe they’ll use their hoard of IPs to effectively liscense out game dev, but when ‘everything is an Xbox’, fucking nothing is and they know that.
Game server uptime isn’t as profit able as business server uptime, either pump those numbers up or your branch of MSFT goes the way of the Windows Phone and Zune.
You know they are like, massively downsizing, right?
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-layoffs-continue-into-5th-consecutive-month/
Yeah, Seattle (and environs) is looking fairly fucked these days with Boeing imploding and all the major tech companies doing mass layoffs, BelRed property values are probably gonna tank lol.
Ugh, that evil G-man with his S-word!
Didnt do Playstation any good, their online service was still just as shit, they just pocketed the money. I think consoles reached their peak anyway, PC is a much more accessible and appealing option now, the market is shifting.
They most likely, and purposefully, relegate few assets to a cancellation page.
Yeah, that’s what was subtly hinting at.
This post tells me you’re not required to use Power Automate for work. It must be nice.
If you don’t believe Microsoft can fail at the things they’re supposed to be best at…lol …you 12?
Right, they’re supposed to be best at letting you cancel their services. They could handle the traffic, I’m just sure they choose not to.