Chatted with IGN about the whole XBO ... Xbox thing. I was pretty candid. Some of my comments from the article:
"You can't tell tens of millions of console loyalists 'the box is dead, move to Windows' overnight without torching the goodwill you just spent 100 days rebuilding – or potentially pissing off 25-year fans. So, Xbox is still shipping hardware and keeping some smaller exclusives to keep the core warm, but the actual centre of gravity is quietly sliding to PC, mobile, and cloud. Helix being half-console, half-PC is that compromise made physical. The word 'Helix' is most commonly known from biology, to describe human DNA, where two intertwined, spiral strands form a twisted ladder. It’s literally in the name – Xbox is converging console and PC."
''On layoffs, the studios most exposed are the ones that are brilliant for prestige and rotten for the spreadsheet. The Double Fines and Ninja Theories of the portfolio – beloved, talent-dense, critically adored, and small – are on the chopping block. They’re wonderful for hearts and minds, but hard to defend in a margin review."
"I'm genuinely worried about that tier of studio given the rhetoric in the memo," Elliott said, of Xbox's smaller development teams. "They were acquired in an era of growth-at-all-costs, and that era is explicitly what this memo is unwinding. And again, it’s not new, either. In 2024, Xbox shut Tango Gameworks, fresh off Hi-Fi Rush, and closed Arkane Austin too. Those studios were prestige-rich, talent-dense, modest on the balance sheet. The memo's 'we expanded the studio system... [and] found ourselves over extended' is the same logic that ended Tango under Booty and Spencer."
"There's a messier possibility worth naming," Elliott concludes, "that the confident language and candour are masking real strategic uncertainty. The clearest evidence is the contradiction sitting inside the comms – choosing to forgo revenue by pulling games off the biggest install base one week, then lamenting that revenue is too low in the same breath. When you talk out of both sides of your mouth, trust starts to dissolve. The Spencer era had that habit, and the Xbox of new reads like a continuation of it, now with employees being gently primed for another round of layoffs a few months after Booty said: 'To be clear, there are no organisational changes underway for our studios.’ I also note that Xbox said there would be no layoffs after the Activision Blizzard acquisition. There were a lot of layoffs.''
"A healthy Xbox is good for all of us, competition included, and they're saying a lot of the right things. The candour is real and their diagnosis of the problems are mostly correct. But there’s no easy cure. Trying to be simultaneously the world's largest game publisher and a first-party hardware platform, at a 5x component premium, with a first-party slate that can't yet carry exclusivity on its own – that's the bit I can't make add up."