Yet as the pandemic has lifted, the extent to which Microsoft is still being kept afloat by that goodwill is getting harder and harder to ignore. The company's financial results this week showed pretty much what you'd expect, with the figures for Xbox being solid even if the comparisons with the pandemic years are a bit tough.
After the huge spending spree Microsoft undertook in an attempt to build a software pipeline to rival the PlayStation studio system, the single biggest announcement on that front has been… another acquisition. Namely the planned purchase of Activision Blizzard, which will be the biggest deal in the industry's history if regulators allow it to happen.
Beyond that, Bethesda's Starfield is pretty much the only really huge new game in the pipeline that Microsoft has to show for the billions it has spent. An event earlier this week was meant to be a showcase of upcoming games for the year, but ended up showing off relatively little software. There's no doubting the talent Microsoft has amassed by opening its warchest and buying up studios and publishers, but the actual results of this strategy are yet to materialise.
In that context, it's not unreasonable to wonder just how far goodwill can carry Xbox in the absence of concrete information about system-selling exclusives, let alone the actual appearance of those exclusives themselves.
Many of us had hoped that 2023 would be the year in which Microsoft's software drought ended and the fruits of its acquisition spree fully ripened; it now seems pretty clear that this will not be the case, and Xbox will continue to be in a weird half-light of goodwill and expectation for the coming months. This must, however, be the year when the pipeline comes into focus.
If we leave 2023 with the same lack of clarity on what's on the Xbox software roadmap as we have right now, it's hard to imagine a situation where Sony doesn't straight-up eat Microsoft's lunch again, and no amount of goodwill for the Game Pass offering will offset the decades-old logic that exclusive software sells consoles in the long term.
The question of whether Microsoft is going to be able to buy Activision at all will loom large this year, but there's actually an even bigger question underlying that: if Microsoft can't demonstrate the ability to effectively utilise its existing acquisitions of studios and publishers to create a competitive, compelling game software pipeline for Xbox, isn't buying a bigger publisher just a case of throwing $70 billion of good money after bad?
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/how-long-can-microsoft-float-on-goodwill-opinion
After the huge spending spree Microsoft undertook in an attempt to build a software pipeline to rival the PlayStation studio system, the single biggest announcement on that front has been… another acquisition. Namely the planned purchase of Activision Blizzard, which will be the biggest deal in the industry's history if regulators allow it to happen.
Beyond that, Bethesda's Starfield is pretty much the only really huge new game in the pipeline that Microsoft has to show for the billions it has spent. An event earlier this week was meant to be a showcase of upcoming games for the year, but ended up showing off relatively little software. There's no doubting the talent Microsoft has amassed by opening its warchest and buying up studios and publishers, but the actual results of this strategy are yet to materialise.
In that context, it's not unreasonable to wonder just how far goodwill can carry Xbox in the absence of concrete information about system-selling exclusives, let alone the actual appearance of those exclusives themselves.
Many of us had hoped that 2023 would be the year in which Microsoft's software drought ended and the fruits of its acquisition spree fully ripened; it now seems pretty clear that this will not be the case, and Xbox will continue to be in a weird half-light of goodwill and expectation for the coming months. This must, however, be the year when the pipeline comes into focus.
If we leave 2023 with the same lack of clarity on what's on the Xbox software roadmap as we have right now, it's hard to imagine a situation where Sony doesn't straight-up eat Microsoft's lunch again, and no amount of goodwill for the Game Pass offering will offset the decades-old logic that exclusive software sells consoles in the long term.
The question of whether Microsoft is going to be able to buy Activision at all will loom large this year, but there's actually an even bigger question underlying that: if Microsoft can't demonstrate the ability to effectively utilise its existing acquisitions of studios and publishers to create a competitive, compelling game software pipeline for Xbox, isn't buying a bigger publisher just a case of throwing $70 billion of good money after bad?
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/how-long-can-microsoft-float-on-goodwill-opinion
