Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: Xbox

Gaming and why it’s the perfect time to get out

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I’m back to talk more about gaming. Here’s my last post in which I just meandered all over the place, but I did manage to talk about Sarah Bond and how she “resigned” to  be with her family and pursue other oppportunities. I believe it even less today than I did yesterday. All the things the Xbox execs are saying are just noise. I. Don’t. Believe. Them. Period. I just fucking do not.

I’m old. I’m tired. I’m mad. I ain’t got time for this shit. Do not fucking tell me that the sky is green and expect me to believe it. I have included a video from Paul Tassi below. He’s solid, and I trust his reporting. He mentions the same The Verge article that I cited in the post yesterday. Again, I don’t have a sub, so I’m relying on what others have said about it.

I’m pretty anti-capitalism to begin with. I mean, as much as I can be in a very pro-capitalism world. Specifically in the gaming world, I don’t buy games on release day for the most part unless it’s a FromSoft game on PC (BIG sigh over The Duskbloods being a Switch 2 exclusive, but also, mixed feelings on the nature of the game).

I haven’t been happy with the gaming industry in general for the whole time I’ve participated in it, and I’m thinking it might be time to bow out. I have never considered myself a gamer beacuse I have never felt welcome in the community. I mean, let’s face it. It’s a community of mostly cishet dudes in their twenties. Not exactlyy my people.

For the most part, I didn’t care. I mostly play games by myself, so it didn’t really matter if I was part of a community or not. However. I hate what’s going on in the gaming industry in general, and I’m not sure I feel comfort supporting it. At least the AAA developers.

I always separate indie devs from the rest of the gaming industry because it’s a whole different situtaion. Well, we need to get even more granular than that. When I say indie, there are different levels. Anything less than twenty people is a small indie dev to me. Twenty-one to fifty is medium. Fifty-one to a hundred is larrge. I just added the last category right now. I’ll be honest. A hundred-person company is too big to be indie to me. Wait. Larian Studios. They have over 400 employees, but they self-published. They are considered an indie studio, but some people don’t really consider them indie.

Do I? Huh. I’m not sure. I mean, they do self-publish, but they are gigantic. I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it more and deal with it later. It’s not really relevant to what I’m trying to talk about in this post, so I’ll let it go for now.

For the most part, I play games that are made by truly indie teams. We’re talking ten or less people. My favorite game last year was made by a studio (Promise Mascot Agency, Kaizen Game Works) that has 3 fulltime employees. They do use contractors, but still. My favorite game so far this year (The Spirit Lift, prettysmart games) has two people on the team. They also have other people they use, but the team itself has two people.


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More talk on remakes and Xbox, probably

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Well. Sarah Bond, the missing ex-president of Xbox, has finally spoken. She issued a carefully-crafted statement about being appreciative of her time with Xbox, but it was time for her to move on to new things. Here is her statement in full. Not one single person believes it’s true for several reasons. One, there was a post on her LinkedIn just a few hours before Phil Spencer (her boss) “retired” that was about accessibility. The way it was stated made it clear that it was just a common post and that there was no hint of her resigning. The post was taken down several hours later, so clearly, Sarah Bond ‘resigning’ was not planned.

People in the industry have pointed out that while there’s a lot of love being given to Spencer (by the Xbox team as he “retired”), but there was no mention of Sarah Bond. At all. It was as if she never existed. And today, not only was there the statement above by her, but there was a piece about her in the Verge by Tom Warren that talks about how she was not well-liked by Xbox employees. I can’t link it because  I don’t have a subscription, but I have included a Kinda Funny Games video below that talks about it at length.

It talks about how she was the one who pushed the ‘everything is an Xbox’ idea (meaning, you don’t need an Xbox console in order to play their games). Except, Phil Spencer was the one who came up with the idea; he was the one who brought Sarah Bond in; and he was the one who nudged her in that direction. She was presumed to be his handpicked successor, which means that she probably didn’t do much without his approval.

I want to say that I have no insider knowledge I am not in the industry, so this is all my personal observation. I want to make that clear.

There is no fucking way she left of her own volition. There just isn’t. I understand why Microsoft might choose to play it that way; really, they didn’t have much of a choice. So, as far as I have read/heard, they were planning on doing this today (Monday), but they got word that IGN was going to post something about it on Friday, so they had to act quickly.

Look. I have no love for Sarah Bond or Xbox. I dropped Game Pass once they made the boneheaded decision to hike up the prices, especially the ultimate or whatever the highest level is called. I never really used it, anyway. I mean, I tried out one or two games every other month or so. It probably was worth it in the long run, but I still was just sick of their shit.


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