#342: Surrender

Microsoft, man! Again! Over the last four-and-a-half years the Xbox maker has cemented itself as the Main Character of this humble newsletter, and clearly has no interest in retreating from the spotlight as its star continues to… not fade, per se? More like explode, I think. Sick as I am of writing about the very public failures of Phil Spencer and his band of corporate goons, I am nonetheless grateful for their continued willingness to keep the ol’ #content pipeline this well stocked. What I find most remarkable about the recent run of Xbox fuckups is how well planned they are, how precisely spaced, ensuring there’s news of some fresh disaster every week or so. Credit where it's due: at least the Xbox implosion has a decent marketing plan.

Of all the terrible weeks in Microsoft’s recent history, this one might be the worst of the lot — worse even than the Activision buyout, the thirdparty pivot, the waves of studio closures and the endless price hikes. Worse than that time Phil Spencer went on a podcast and had a big cry, than the time he announced another round of closures and cancellations by trumpeting Game Pass’ success, than… well, take your pick, really. This, I believe, was the week that Microsoft killed Halo.

If you think that sounds a bit hyperbolic, bear with me. The announcement this week of the long-rumoured remake of Halo: Combat Evolved might not, in isolation, seem that ominous a portent. After all, it was quickly greenlit after the pan-flash of Halo Infinite; an opportunity for Halo Studios to discard the spaghetti tangle of tech debt that comprised its in-house engine and learn the ins and outs of Unreal instead, a move that would make recruitment easier and, it was presumably hoped, to remind the team of what it feels like to make and ship a game in a reasonably timely fashion, instead of rebooting everything like 800 times. These are noble goals, right? Good ideas, even. It sounds more like the start of something than the end of it.

Announcing Halo: Campaign Evolved, to use its official, execrable new title, for PS5 is, on the face of it, no surprise, consistent as it is with Microsoft’s recent transformation from platform holder to thirdparty publisher. But this one hits a little different, I think. The ever-dwindling army of Xbox fandom could understand, if not quite forgive, the decision to take stuff like Hi-Fi Rush and Sea Of Thieves to other platforms. They could even get over the loss of exclusive Forza Horizon; for all its qualities it has never been considered central to Xbox’s identity, and therefore to said fandom’s sense of self. But Halo is Xbox, and Xbox is Halo. Without it, Microsoft’s foray into the console business would have been a mere footnote; we would talk about it today the way we talk about, like, the Ouya. You could argue that the other thirdparty pivots were just good business sense, born of a solid understanding of the shifting dynamics of the game industry and its audience. This, though? This feels like surrender.

Which is presumably why GameStop, which used to be a successful retailer of videogames but is these days, as far as I can tell, an attention-hungry meme factory, took to not-Twitter with a press release proclaiming the official end of the console wars. “All claims to exclusivity are hereby dissolved,” the release honked. “Console loyalists are instructed to cease hostilities, disband militias, and enjoy this new era of gaming.”

This is quite funny, I suppose, if you like that sort of thing. But it is here that our story takes a rather dark turn. Another once-esteemed institution that these days functions as a meme farm, The White House, took GameStop’s ball and ran with it. It posted an AI-generated picture of the president in Spartan armour, energy sword in hand and US flag at his back, with the caption “Power to the players”. Hours later, the Department of Homeland Security pictured Master Chief at the wheel of a Warthog with the caption “Destroy the Flood”, followed by a link to the ICE recruitment website. Alyssa Mercante, the journalist and long-suffering far-right hate figure, sought comment from the government, and got it. “Yet another war ended under President Trump's watch,” White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai alternative-truthed. “Only one leader is fully committed to giving power to the players, and that leader is Donald J. Trump. That’s why he’s hugely popular with the American people and American Gamers.”

So, yeah. That’s Halo dead.

Members of the original Combat Evolved development team have reacted with horror to all this — well, mostly. Marty O’Donnell, the Halo and Destiny composer who has been struggling with boomer brainworms for a while now — he’s an outspoken Trump stan, ran unsuccessfully for a Republican congressional seat in Nevada last year, and is already seeking the big man's endorsement for another go in next year’s midterm elections — promised to “work with the Trump administration to destroy the Flood once and for all”. On the other end of the scale, Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto told Stephen Totilo’s Game File he found the ICE ad “absolutely abhorrent.” Jamie ‘30 Seconds Of Fun’ Griesemer called it “despicable. The Flood are evil space zombie parasites and are not an allegory to any group of people,” but Totilo notes he called the original White House post “amusing.” Mmm. I once heard a story about members of the Halo 2 development team taking a development build out to a US army base in the Middle East in a morale-boosting exercise; supposedly they returned all oo-rah and puffed up, acting as if they’d just come back from the frontlines themselves. Good to know these cats have a line they won’t quite cross, I suppose. O’Donnell aside, anyway.

Anyway! It is hard to see much of a way back from this. Halo used to symbolise the Xbox; now it symbolises the fact that Xbox doesn’t really exist anymore, while also serving as a useful allegory for America's pivot to fascism. The two-and-a-half remaining hardcore Xbox fans might have spent this week searching through the gaps in the fingers for something remembering clarity, or at least coherence, as they struggled to make sense of it all. Unfortunately, all they got was Satya Nadella, who this week spoke to TBPN (nope, me neither) about his gaming division’s current direction of travel — and the gathering acceptance that the next Xbox will be a rebadged PC, rather than a bespoke console. My thanks to VGC for transcribing this, a process I imagine involved much bleeding from the ears.

“We want to do innovative work on the system side on the console and on the PC,” Nadella parped. “And it’s kind of funny that people think about the console and PC as two different things. We built the console because we wanted to build a better PC, which could then perform for gaming. And so I kind of want to revisit some of that conventional wisdom.

“But at the end of the day, console has an experience that is unparalleled. It delivers performance that’s unparalleled, that pushes, I think, the system forward. So I’m really looking forward to the next console, the next PC gaming.”

Erm, thanks for clearing that up, Satya. You're worth every penny of your $96.5 million salary.

So yeah, Halo’s dead. Xbox is pretty dead too. And the man at the controls of it all is weird, and incoherent, and quite possibly an actual idiot. What a world.

MORE!

• Some additional fun/awful Xbox drain-circling that I couldn’t elegantly fit in today’s top story: Microsoft’s latest financial results reveal a precipitous 29% decline in hardware sales — a hole that not even the modestly successful thirdparty pivot can fill. Gaming revenue fell by two percent year on year
• Amazon seems to have admitted defeat in its long, costly and broadly invisible assault on the game industry. Studios in Irvine and San Diego have been closed, development has ended on the MMO New World, and an in-the-works Lord Of The Rings MMO has been cancelled outright. More on this in Quote Of The Week down below. 
• It’s been a troubling week for Finnish titan Remedy, which reported a 32% drop in revenue and an operating loss of $16.4m. The firm has blamed its decline on the failure of multiplayer shooter FBC Firebreak, which launched with a whimper despite being available on both Game Pass and PS Plus on day one and, look, fair enough. But the exclusivity deal with Epic for Alan Wake 2 can’t have helped either. The markets have demanded a blood sacrifice and Tero Virtala, formerly of Trials developer RedLynx and a thoroughly good egg, has duly been told to sling his hook as CEO. Bah.
• There’s been trouble at EA too, where a new report shed light on bosses’ endeavours to have AI eat the company from the inside out, while a College Football-shaped hole caused a 13% drop in revenue. EA’s struggles will no longer be made public, with this the last set of quarterly reports to be published ahead of the firm’s $55bn acquisition by the Death Eaters. Good riddance!
• There’s even trouble at Roblox! Fuck about! Shares in the bafflingly highly regarded slop factory, child-labour camp and paedo paradise suffered a 10% fall yesterday after investors seemingly cottoned on to the fact that nothing will ever stop this miserable bag of fuckwads losing money. DAU is up 70%! Revenue’s up 48%! Engagement hours are up 91%! And yet the company still contrived to lose $257m, an increase of 7% year on year. Apparently everything’s fine because it's sitting on a wodge of cash, and all the other numbers are going up. But when the only one that matters is going down… surely that means… no? Okay, carry on.
• Nintendo has won a lawsuit it brought against a Twitch streamer who played pirated Switch games and once emailed Nintendo warning them he had a thousand burner accounts and “I can do this all day.” Not anymore you can’t, old stick! Jesse Keighin, who streamed under the name Every Game Guru, has been ordered to cough up $17,500. 
• It’s not all been good news for the house of Mario this week, mind you. Nintendo has failed in its bid to patent Pokemon’s catching mechanic after Japanese regulators identified reams of prior art making Nintendo’s claim rather irrelevant. If Nintendo wants to patent this sort of thing — which it shouldn’t, obviously — it should probably be a bit quicker out the blocks. The claim was filed in March 2024.
• Apparently the Wachowskis wanted Hideo Kojima to make a videogame adaptation of The Matrix back in the day, but it was shut down by future Konami CEO Kazumi Katuae before Kojima even got wind of it. Cripes! I enjoyed this response from Xbox co-parent Seamus Blackley: “[Katuae] was the first Japanese publisher exec I spoke to about Xbox, and he both refused to say anything in English (‘Mr. Kitaue hates English’) and  assured me Americans could never make a console.” Time’s proven him right on the last point, in fairness.
• Remember Battle Arena Toshinden? It’s back, in Pog form. (The first three games are getting re-released on current consoles.)
• A seven-game Simogo compilation? And a gorgeous book from the HP chums at Lost In Cult? Yes and yes. 
• An eight-LP Breath Of The Wild soundtrack? Cripes and phwoarr etc. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

It’s a LinkedIn post, I’m afraid. Apologies in advance. 

“The mistake was that we underestimated what made consumers use Steam. It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well.

“At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers, but we underestimated the power of existing user habits. We never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions. The truth is that gamers already had the solution to their problems and they weren't going to switch platforms just because a new one was available.

“We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either. Just because you are big enough to build something, doesn't mean people will use it.”

A thousand thanks to former Amazon VP Ethan Evans for showing us his entire backside in this fashion. We didn’t really know what we were doing, and didn’t do anything to properly inform ourselves, but spent a load of money and time on a doomed endeavour we didn’t understand regardless. Nice work if you can get it!

That, I think, will do. I may feel well rested after a (lovely!) few days in the sun but I still have my limits — and that limit is pretty much 2,000 words, it turns out. Have a sumptuous weekend, whatever it may hold, and I’ll see you all next week.