A Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign this looks like Mission Impossible via a documentary by Adam Curtis, a Gears of war background story which shows fans E-Day and the birth of the series’ iconic ‘Lancer’ saw gun and a trailer which shows Perfect darkness not just still alivepotentially flourishing. Microsoft’s 2024 Summer Showcase was the best Xbox has looked going back to the Xbox One years. But this comes at a huge price, and the company doesn’t seem ready to admit it publicly.
Insiders have been rocking the window for days, in part due to the fact that the full list of revelations and announcements had already been leaked to some in the media and beyond. Fans have been burned before, expecting the Xbox to finally turn the corner, only to have football pulled again and realize the platform is still in another one of its inevitable “recovery” years. The proof is always in the games themselves, and how successful they are can only really be determined once they’re in the hands of players. For now, though, the showcase is delivered.
There were more than sixty minutes of games big and small, offering everything from zombie survival to a nostalgic teenage hangout, peppered with huge first-party franchises and third-party teases. If you own an Xbox Series X/S, there will be plenty to play this year and next. Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty’s years-long promise of a steady stream of quarterly Xbox games worth showing up for may finally be coming true. The only thing missing from the event was any accountability for what and who Microsoft sacrificed to get here.
It’s been a little over a month since the company announced closing three studios and reorganizing a fourth. One of the victims, Tango Gameworks and his 2023 hit Hi-Fi Rush, seems to symbolize the best of Xbox in the Game Pass era: a hyper-stylized passion project from a newer team that wowed critics and won awards and wouldn’t have been possible without the “let a thousand flowers bloom” strategy behind the spin platform to a Netflix-like subscription library. In a crushing twist, however, the wealthy tech giant cut the team, along with renowned immersive simulator creators Arkane Austin and others. According to internal comments from Booty and the head of parent company Zenimax, there simply wasn’t enough bandwidth for one of the three most valuable companies in the world to run so many studios.
The bad news and silly explanation might not have dropped like a lead balloon if Microsoft hadn’t announced massive layoffs just months earlier in several divisions, including newly acquired Activision Blizzard. The cuts hit everyone from Overwatch 2 team for Call of Duty the creators of Sledgehammer Games, and included the cancellation of Odyssey, a fantasy survival game that may have become the first new franchise from Blizzard in nearly a decade. Microsoft spent $69 billion on the acquisition, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer toured Activision Blizzard King’s offices shortly after the deal was finalized last fall, and then in early 2024, the mask dropped.
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer blamed the turnaround on a combination of investor pressure and the stagnation of the console gaming market in interviews with Game file and A polygon. In other words: capitalism. But the complete closure of Tango Gameworks, originally founded by Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami to train a new generation of artists seemed particularly capricious. The Xbox team didn’t mention the laid-off developers and their contributions in their remarks to a live audience before today’s unveiling or during the pre-recorded event itself. (Even after learning his fate, Arcane Austin is hard at work to push Redfallthe much needed latest update.)
Instead, Spencer opened the storefront by promoting Black Ops 6 and the company’s desire to bring one of the most popular franchises to even more players subscription power of $17 per month. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising given the billions Microsoft paid to acquire the series, but the choice to open the show this way underscored the new reality of an Xbox brand that now needs to make a return worthy of all those investments. “I haven’t talked about it publicly because right now is the time to focus on the team and the individuals.” Spencer said IGN later in the dayaway from the hundreds of thousands of fans heading to the showcase.
He continued:
Obviously, this is a very difficult decision for them, and I want to make sure through firing and other things that we’re doing the right thing for the people on the team. It’s not about my PR, it’s not about Xbox PR. It’s about these teams. At the end of the day, I’ve said over and over, I have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that means sometimes I have to make tough decisions that frankly aren’t decisions I love, but decisions that someone has to to take do.
Meanwhile, the display case didn’t even get cleaned the tape put up days ago by Jeff Keighley in the Game Awards host’s own showcase. Xbox President Sarah Bond, who replied with corpo word salad when asked about studio closures last month, closed the Xbox window by pointing to the future rather than addressing the recent past. “Our mission is to make Xbox the best place to play by including our own studios’ games in Game Pass at launch, by taking your games into the future with our commitment to game preservation, by pushing the boundaries in our future hardware and for to enable you to play your games wherever you want on Xbox console, PC and cloud,” she said. “This is what defines Xbox today and in the future, and we’re hard at work on the next generation.”
It was a commitment intended to appease fans still reeling from the shock of the brand’s recent changes. But the future is built on the past, and every shiny new Xbox game now comes with the question of what will happen to the teams Microsoft has bought or partnered with once it no longer feels they serve the bottom line.
Update 6/9/2024 9:10 PM ET: Added comments from Spencer’s post-show interview with IGN.
