I have a feeling Palworld is going to be a monster hit that addicts millions of players and consumes many lives, but will somehow be less important in the gaming world than 12 hour interactive single player movie games.

I wonder if they'll ever fix Genshin Impact where you can play it remotely and it doesn't think you're playing a tablet version. Probably not.

I don't think Stellar Blade or Rise of the Ronin will be hitting Xbox next after the Helldivers 2 announcement. Those games combined wouldn't sell nearly as much as HD2 is going to. Xbox just isn't a great platform for Asian games. It could have been, sure, but they blew that.

Remember when Xbox allowed Bungie to go independent? I wonder what the Xbox brand would be like if Microsoft did that with Xbox. I have a feeling it would be a LOT more exciting than it is right now.

MS sent out emails to devs asking them for feedback on AI tools to make development easier. Basically, it translated to "give us money for our AI tools that way you can fire all your devs too!". MS killed the Xbox brand, but they're not satisfied until they've killed others too.

Microsoft removed the Contraband trailer from their youtube page. Dang, they're even killing games they don't own.

I have a very hard time believing MS closed game studios to fund AI. I once got laid off because the geniuses hired other people thinking they were going to get a big investment that never happened, but that was a poor company. MS has trillions.

Anthem getting shut down in January. I had some fun times with friends on that game. The combat was excellent, but you spent most of your time walking around town or flying or listening to an audio log. It was such a fixable game, but they didn't want to fix it.

Helldivers 2 is coming to Xbox in August. Very surprising, but finally some positive Xbox news (and it had to come from something related to Sony. Oof).

Obsidian will have released more games than pretty much every other MS acquisition combined. That's why you don't hear about them having layoffs. They're actually making games.

One thing's for sure, there will never EVER be another Perfect Dark game. Ever.

I know things look bad, but don't worry - High on Life and The Ascent are coming to Game Pass this month. I guess that's how they'll make it look like Game Pass has a ton of games. Just keep putting games back on after they're removed.

If I ran Xbox I would have had Double Fine and Rare make a Banjo/Crash Bandicoot crossover game in the "It Takes Two' style, but more adventure-focused. But I'm a dummy, so what do I know?.

What should Rare do now? I feel like their ultimate fate is to be shut down and become IP donors to other studios (like what happened with Battletoads and Killer Instinct).

Expedition 33 cost less than $10m to develop. Palworld was $7m. This is what people do when they have limited funds. MS has trillions of dollars, so they just throw all this money at devs and don't understand why they dont get a 500% ROI.

Xbox owns a ton of classic IPs that you could release titles for in 2 years dev time (Banjo, Crash, Kameo, Viva Pinata, Spyro etc). This is what Nintendo does. But instead, they'd rather spend 7 years making something just to cancel it. Real geniuses calling the shots over there.

Now that Xbox has cancelled like half the reason for Game Pass to exist, I fully expect them to raise the price to $25 later this year.

Everwild has also been cancelled with layoffs hitting Rare as well. Honestly, we should probably just assume all those games MS didn't show at the June showcase are getting cancelled. If Fable wasn't close to release it would 100% be cancelled, no question.

20 years ago Xbox wanted to be Sony - in 2025 they want to be EA.

"I really screwed up. Welp, time to fire everyone that did what I told them to do!" -Phil Spencer, probably.

Half of Turn 10 is gone, The Initiative is gone - along with Perfect Dark being cancelled. MS already killed Tango and Arkane. And somehow people like Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond still have jobs. Amazing you can run a company into the ground and you get to fire everyone for it.