#363: Say nothing

This week I’ve been thinking a lot — too much, really, I must get out more — about the scale of the task facing Asha Sharma, the newly minted CEO of Xbox. It’s been seven days since Microsoft confirmed the shocking, but not exactly surprising departure of Phil Spencer and his heir apparent Sarah Bond, and there have been a few... let’s say ‘interesting’ developments since. First, The Verge corralled a dozen Microsoft sources, many of whom were suspiciously eager to anonymously lay the blame for Xbox’s recent woes at Bond’s feet. Apparently one executive, taking neither prisoners nor bullshit as she sought to establish herself as Spencer’s natural successor, was able to force the division down a fatally ill-advised path that everyone hated but that no-one, not even her superiors, could do anything to stop. Mmm. There’s no finer way out of a crisis than the old ‘difficult woman’ trope, is there? Rather unsubtle, sure, but it gets the job done.

Sharma, meanwhile, has had her first foray into the interview circuit, and if she’s as attentive to Xbox’s struggles as she has been to her media training then perhaps things will be okay. Her two interviews have been masterclasses in saying smart-sounding stuff without really saying anything at all, which has been the Microsoft playbook for decades now, and her cause has been helped no end by her being granted perhaps the gentlest on-ramp into the media landscape I have ever seen. There is no easier interview than Variety, which flatters its subjects by chopping their ramblings up into three-or-four-word soundbites (the longest quote here is just twelve words long). Give 15 minutes of your day to the affably unquestioning client journalists at Windows Central, with Matt Booty along for similarly bland support, and you’re off to the races.

In the absence of any actual, y’know, insight from Xbox’s new leader, much of the discourse since Sharma’s appointment has focused on her gaming credentials. To her credit she has made no secret of the fact that she cannot hold a candle to Phil Spencer in this department. Her Xbox account is less than two months old, and while I understand the eyebrows that have been raised at the alacrity of her progress — she’s got 1,500-odd Gamerscore in Minecraft already, while racking up plenty of time in such other Xbox titans as Halo Infinite, Forza Horizon and, erm, Borderlands 2 — she clearly understands that there is more to her new job than sitting in meetings, placating shareholders and firing people; that there’s an element of community management to it as well. That she’s willingly engaged with known wrong’uns on not-Twitter is not the greatest of looks, admittedly, but hey. Media training’s a marathon, not a sprint.

So: does it matter that Sharma is not a capital-g gamer? To paraphrase Hit Points’ favourite film: do you have to have completed Halo on Legendary to make a good Halo game? Seamus Blackley, father of the Xbox, quantum physicist and ancient sourdough god, rightly pointed out in a GamesBeat interview this week that history is littered with the corpses of people who got into games thinking they could figure it out on the hoof, and fell absolutely flat on their arses. This is a tale almost as old as videogames themselves and, when we consider the recent fates of Google and Amazon, to name but two, clearly an enduring one. Sure, there are counterpoints: Strauss Zelnick, whose relevant experience prior to taking the big chair at Take-Two was limited to a brief stint at Crystal Dynamics more than a decade earlier, has been frequently cited in this week's back-and-forth. But if I have to pick a side on this issue, I'm broadly with Blackley.

In this specific instance, however, I’m not sure it matters. This industry has never seen a leader with credentials like Phil Spencer’s, and look where that got Xbox: basically nowhere, at a cost of a hundred billion dollars. It is impossible to overstate just how screwed Xbox is right now. It cannot sell consoles. It can barely sell subscriptions. The only thing it can sell is firstparty games on other platforms, but I don’t see how it can fix the other parts of its business without stopping doing that, which would of course destroy its already declining revenue and, well, yeah. I don’t think there’s a seasoned videogame executive on the planet who would touch that mess with a bargepole, let alone think they could turn it around.

Where Sharma takes Xbox from here is, for now, a mystery, though if we read between the lines we may find a hint of her plans. During my years as a journalist I learned that, when an interviewee isn’t giving you anything to work with, there’s often more value in the things they’re not talking about than the stuff they actually say. As such I find it very interesting indeed that not once in Sharma’s appointment memo, her Variety interview, or her chummy Windows Central love-in does she make a single mention of Game Pass. Could the signature innovation of the Phil Spencer era, the idea on which Xbox has pinned its hopes and spent a staggering amount of money, be the first thing on Sharma’s chopping block? Watch this space, I guess. Whatever the future holds, it is safe to assume that things are about to get very messy indeed.

MORE!

• It’s been another rotten week for the games media. IGN Entertainment is embarking on another round of cuts at Eurogamer, with VGC reporting that “the brand’s most experienced editors and its entire four-person video team” are on the chopping block and layoffs are also planned across the wider Gamer Network family. I mean, for pity’s sake, why buy it in the first place? Fucking useless. Elsewhere, barely a week after laying off its entire editorial team and replacing them with AI ‘writers’, the once-great videogamer.com has been booted off Metacritic after it published a 9/10 review of Resident Evil Requiem attributed to a fake writer. Properly, properly grim.
• Daniel Vávra, Gamergate pin-up and director of both Kingdom Come: Deliverance games, is stepping away from game development to oversee a movie adaptation of the series that, alas, made him famous. His departure will doubtless be warmly received by KCDII’s development team, who would have won a lot more awards last year if the public face of their game wasn’t such an awful bellend.
• What was that Seamus Blackley was saying about people with no gaming experience thinking they can wing it? Amazon has announced the shutdown of King Of Meat, a UGC-powered brawler for which it had high hopes (and I understand was actually quite good) just six months after launch. It has also cancelled a publishing agreement for the debut title from Maverick Games, a UK studio formed by veterans of the Forza Horizon series. Maverick is now on the hunt for a new publisher for the game, an open-world car-thing with, I gather, a strong narrative focus.
• I’ve never attended Reboot Develop Blue, which has always bugged me because Croatia’s absolutely beautiful and they always had cool speakers. Alas, it looks like I’ll never get the opportunity now, and nor will the rest of you: organisers have been slapped with a bankruptcy order by a Zagreb court over €520,000 in unpaid debts.
• Things look even worse for French publisher and peripheral maker Nacon, which filed for insolvency this week after its majority shareholder, BigBen Interactive, missed a loan repayment “following an unexpected and late refusal by its banking pool”, the firm said in a statement. Nacon, which I have for many years persistently mistyped as ‘Bacon’, is parent company to 16 development studios; their future now depends on the publisher being able to negotiate terms with its creditors. Yikes and crumbs and so on. They just announced a showcase, too.
• Nexon is so chuffed with the success of Arc Raiders that it’s named Patrick Söderlund, CEO of the game’s developer Embark, as executive chairman, where he will oversee all of the publisher’s games. I’ve always had a soft spot for Söderlund; I’ve told this story before, but since we’ve had quite the influx of new readers recently (hello!) I might as well do it again. I interviewed him at E3 one year when he was still at EA, promoting the new Battlefield. I was recording it on my phone with the mic angled towards him, and at one point he paused mid-sentence, glanced towards my phone, raised a quick eyebrow then carried on answering my question. When I got outside I saw I’d got a text during the interview from GQ’s Sam White, who was also at the show, saying “my god the new Battlefield is fucking boring”. Good times, thanks Sam. Journo pals: always put your phone on the table face down.
• Los Angeles County is suing Roblox Corp for “failing to protect children from predatory behaviour”; New York State is doing likewise to Valve for “letting children and adults alike illegally gamble”. Not sure I like this pattern; at this rate we’ll have Nintendo getting sued by an entire sentient continent. Sounds fun actually, carry on.
• If you’ve somehow not had enough Xbox takes over the last week, Kyle Bosman’s latest is very good indeed, and very funny. We are kindred spirits, I think, Kyle and I. Perhaps someone could point him towards Hit Points for me.

That’ll do! Regarding that Nacon/Bacon confusion, you might like to know that my two most common mistypes in my career have been 'Minceraft' and 'superherpes'. Even my fuck-ups are funny. Tell me yours! A final call for paid subscriptions — remember, you get 50% off your first month — and a polite nudge towards the tip jar below. Have a great weekend!