Xbox, do you even have a plan anymore?

thesixthaxis.com:

Ever since Microsoft started on their spending spree of acquisitions in 2018, gamers have feared the worst. Would Microsoft simply out-spend Sony to secure market dominance? Would PlayStation gamers be deprived of innumerable great games? Were they building Game Pass into a video gaming Death Star?

It turns out we should have feared the opposite. Death Stars do have a tendency to blow up, after all…

The past six months – pretty much ever since Microsoft closed the staggeringly huge acquisition of Activision Blizzard King – has seen almost every aspect of Xbox as a platform thrown into doubt. From first party games being console exclusives, to potentially quitting the hardware business, and now even the mere continued existence of their expensively acquired studios, there’s a complete lack of certainty to where the Xbox business is heading.

This week’s closure of Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin, and Alpha Dog Studios, and Roundhouse Games’ integration elsewhere came as a massive shock. Arkane Austin’s Redfall was a flop, there’s no denying that, and the fact of the matter is that, even if a studio has been pushed down a particular path by management, no team is truly immune to failure. But Tango’s Hi-Fi Rush wasn’t a failure, far from it.

This time last year Hi-Fi Rush was held up as a shining example of what Xbox can do. Tango won’t have a chance to make a sequel.

Here was a game that potentially proved Microsoft’s plan from the end of the last generation. Hi-Fi Rush was a smaller production, a cheaper release and an eye-catching addition to the Xbox Game Pass library. It snagged 3 million players in just a few months, but it helps that it was a critical darling that ended up as a genuine Game of the Year contender, but it just did very well in general. “Hi-Fi Rush was a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations,” Xbox marketing exec Aaron Greenberg tweeted a couple months after its release.

Reports suggest that the nail in the coffin