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every week, MS announces record profits, cuts devs by the thousands.

Call of Duty is doing gangbusters? Fire a bunch.

Ho-lee-sheeeeeit that remastered hot garbage Oblivion rejiggering is selling like HOTCAKES! Aw yiss, fire a shitload of them.

Maintain dominance, fire some people.

Oh fuck, let's spend a shitfuckton on AI! That's always profitable! And fire some devs.

Oh shit it's a day that ends in -Y? FIRE 'EM UP.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck we fired too many people, hire a third of linked-in.

Then fire most of 'em.

Strategy of capitalism. You have to shoot for short term hail-marry profits at the expense of, well, every thing else.

strategy is look like you're doing stuff so investors get excited and your stock goes up. Then close a bunch of studios and layoff a bunch of people so it looks like you're "maximizing efficiency" so investors get excited and your stock goes up

I’m so happy my early alpha forever Minecraft Mojang account I tried to log into a couple weeks ago is DELETED ENTIRELY because I didn’t tie it into a Microsoft bullshit account before an arbitrary point THANK YOU MICROSOFT I WILL DEFINITELY INSTALL WINDOWS 11 EVER

It’s called “number go up”. Every quarter, all the time, until the heat death of the universe. Extremely sustainable

What a lovely coincidence.

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"...it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization"

~ not Gaius Petronius Arbiter

Embrace, Extend and Extinguish...

Its a Microsoft strategy.

The studio I was just laid off from was super successful and Microsoft has now gutted it with the last layoffs. I don't think it'll be successful for that much longer, morale is now non existent and people don't want to work.

Business decisions made by C suites rarely make sense on the ground.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

I think it is an actual business tactic. I thi k they're buying up good devs so they won't be bought up by other companies who might use them to make bank.

Extend Embrace Extinguish

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I don't see it as Ms deciding not to make games, more like their field of failure spreading and infecting all the developers they own

Make shareholders happy.

Sales here. I know people who sell Azure and I can tell you for a fact that Microsoft's sales srategy is literally "well, you're already familiar with Windows/Office, so you might as well..."

"Killing morale" would me my guess.

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It's been reported that a lot of cuts to Xbox studios were due to losses in MS's AI business.

I had always viewed Xbox game studios and game pass as a platform dominance thing. Like, keeping players on Windows/Xbox products and keeping a large amount of the games industry under their control.

In general, just trying to keep players on the Windows ecosystem.

Take out the competition rule.

Embrace Gaming, Extend Gaming, Extinguish Gaming.

Its genuinely crazy how the biggest software compsny on the planet is genuinely completely and utterly incompetent at making software. Like xbox is one thing, but even their core PC software is a complete fucking joke.

I unfortusntrly have to work with microsoft enviroments and if youre using a sharepoint list to store data and you hide a column, then want to unhide it, you need to go into the the kegacy version of sharepoint, then into the list settings, columns, then unhide the colum from there. And the "new" version of shsrepoint is like 3-4 yesrs old at this point, but still diesnt have all the basic features.

Then theres powerapps, which is genuinely just awful. Like say you have an app with multiple buttons you want to change the colour of. You cant select more than one at a time and change the colour en mass, you have to do each one individually.

Or when importing a project from another enviroment, you cant import multiple power automate workflows at once, you have to do each individually.

And that not even touching on fucking windows.

If they djdnt have the desktop PC market held completely hostage, they would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.

I don't know anything about financial markets, but Microsoft seems like the tech equivalent of Lehman Bros

This strategy is called putting all your eggs into the AI basket and then panic when the basket starts rip. So you patch it up with Xbox money because everyone says that basket will be awesome one day. This strategy only works when you have successful developers to sacrifice.

make 0 games ??