Comment by the_snooze
5 days ago
>One evil thing they were doing that they've suddenly given up on: they spent a ton of money buying up gaming studios (highly anti-competitively) to win on the console front and to stymie Steam's ability to move off Windows. They wanted to make Windows/Xbox gaming the place everyone would be. They threw all of that away because AI became a bigger target.
No kidding, the totally threw it all away. It used to be that Windows was already the place for gaming. And the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation. But that was a long time ago. Has any Microsoft gaming release exceeded expectations lately? Call of Duty will always sell like hotcakes, but the latest Black Ops is a hot expensive mess that underperformed last year's title.
> the Xbox 360 arguably won its generation
Maybe it won some battles in your part of the world, presumably North America. But the PS3 outsold it globally as its contemporary, and even the PS5 passed the 360 in global lifetime sales as of November 2025: https://www.vgchartz.com/article/466599/ps5-outsells-xbox-36...
Microsoft seems to have decided that they can't make all that much money with gaming. But they are underestimating the mindshare they are losing with that.
Slightly related, they also discontinued most of their PC peripherals in 2023, many of which were quite good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35748645