#390: Nothing else matters

This week Asha Sharma, together with her band of C-suite goobers, sundry nodding dogs, and a presumed army of Microsoft staffers who know full well the whole gig is fucked upside down and inside out but also know they’re lucky to have a job right now, and so are just going along with it, smiling in meetings and whispering in corridors and delicately, reverently opening each payslip like buried treasure — we see you, we love you, we get it — have done some stuff which, objectively and in isolation, is really rather cool.

In the latest leaked memo to have magically found its way into the hands of The Verge — how does this keep happening! Someone should look into it! — this week Microsoft outlined to development and publishing partners its plans for backwards compatibility on the next-gen console Project Helix, as well as PCs and Xbox-ish handhelds like the ghastly Rog Ally X. There are two components to the feature. Firstly, developers will be able to sell original Xbox and 360 games through the Xbox store; Microsoft will handle all the technical stuff, but give the developer or publisher full control over release timing and pricing. Secondly, owners of physical games from the era will be able to pop a disc in their console or PC and receive a digital licence for the game, bound to the player’s Xbox account and the disc itself. If the disc later changes hands, the licence goes with it — an uncommonly consumer-friendly move in these fuck-you-pay-me times of ours, and a well-timed one given Sony’s recent abandonment of physical media, and therefore the loaning and trading of it too. (If you are wondering whether this ‘leak’ has been carefully timed in an attempt to capitalise on the Sony outrage for an easy PR win, pat yourself on the back, and help yourself to a biscuit).

Like I said: pretty cool, and on the face of it, it's good for all involved. Studios and publishers get a new revenue stream — not a particularly lucrative one, sure, but in this economy it's all good — that requires them to do basically no work. For Microsoft it starts to restore, if only by a little, the Xbox value proposition after all the self-inflicted damage of the last few years. The prevailing question about Xbox in the dying days of the Spencer era was why on earth anyone would buy one of the things when everything it was good for was already on rival platforms; here, at least, is something worth having that you can’t get on PS5 or Switch 2. It also repositions Xbox as something more akin to Steam than a traditional console, encouraging and rewarding loyalty by having all your purchases, not just the recent ones, persist across hardware upgrades. And of all the things Microsoft could choose to be doing right now, I can think of no finer way of currying favour with that core audience of capital-G gamers whose hearts Microsoft has publicly committed to winning back. Decades later, with all those billions spent and largely wasted, the first two generations of Xbox remain its brightest days. Drag those games into the present, and you probably bring a decent number of their fans along too.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, not a word of that paragraph matters. None of it counts, or will change a thing. This week Microsoft also announced its latest round of price rises for Series consoles, with SRPs in some markets rising by 50%. The Series S, pitched back in 2020 as a cheap and cheerful route into the next generation, now has the same price in the UK as the Series X did at launch; its 1TB model, at £519.99, now bears the same cost as the considerably more capable digital-edition PS5.

How are we feeling about Project Helix now? About its backwards compatibility, and what we're going to need to pay for it? Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of buying a new console, setting it up and immediately popping in the disc for Blood On The Sand or Fable II or whatever. But I’m not paying a thousand pounds for the privilege, and nor is anyone else out there with even a modicum of common sense. (Besides, at the rate things are going it’s likely to cost far more than a grand anyway.) Increasing a value proposition by increments means nothing when your pricing model keeps rolling through town with the force of a hurricane.

These constant, massive price rises remind us all that Microsoft is one of the primary culprits in the AI component crisis, and that despite its billions in profits and staggering cash reserves it still expects us to foot the bill. Its wanton overinvestment in this miserable technology is ensuring that the audience it purports to covet is being priced out of the hobby entirely. Project Helix’s failure is preordained; it is a fate that no amount of well-timed leaks of groovy little features will ever, ever change, and if Microsoft is looking for someone to blame for all this it need only turn to the nearest mirror.

MORE!

• Rockstar has announced a lovely long look at Grand Theft Auto VI later this month. Evidently Take-Two’s been shopping this thing around and sold it to the highest bidder: it’ll be exclusive to Netflix for six whole hours. Wonder how much that cost, sheesh. Good for Rockstar and Take-Two I guess, but I’m not sure what Netflix gets out of it. If they seriously think I’m re-subbing for a videogame trailer that’ll be all over YouTube within an hour, and everywhere else a few hours later, they’re absolutely off their heads.
• Good news for all you fans of nominative determinism: Devolver has belatedly realised that being a publicly traded company isn’t cool at all actually, and intends to take itself private again. (The fact that its share price has fallen by over 90% since its IPO may also have had something to do with it.) “The stock market has not rewarded the company for its successive and substantive operational improvements,” the board of directors harrumphed.
• EA is officially a private company again following the completion of its $55bn acquisition by Jared Kushner, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, and the ghosts of Idi Amin and Jack the Ripper. Mass layoffs are now, somewhat inevitably, coming down the pipe as the new owners seek to cut costs by $700m.
• Roblox’s latest financial results saw another set of targets missed, and were powerless to stem the bleeding that has seen its share price fall by over 70% in the last 12 months. Tell me that one about UGC being the future of everything again, would you? It gets better every time. We have got to stop talking about this vapid shower of shit as if it’s some kind of success story.
• Sales of Switch 2 slumped by over a third year-on-year, but Nintendo is all smiles after a $300m tariff refund saw quarterly profits jump by over 50%. Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream has somehow sold over 8m.
• I am not in the slightest bit interested in Big Walk, the latest from Untitled Goose Game developer House House that launched this week to rapturous acclaim. But Eurogamer’s review, by esteemed Hit Points chum Chris Schilling, is the best thing I’ve read in an age. Remember the old days, when you’d read about games you had absolutely no interest in because the work was just so good? That.

That’ll do! A quick one this week as I try my best to juggle work commitments without completely neglecting the children. A Rock Band afternoon awaits, methinks. Have a great weekend!