Well, well, well: isn’t it the case that Microsoft is beginning to realize the simple, yet perfectly valid, claim that money doesn’t solve everything?

Microsoft came up among the topics during Jeff Grubb’s Game Mass broadcast. During the show, he talks to GamesBeat editor Mike Minotti about hardware sales and the state of Sony and Microsoft. The latter has been rightly criticized over the last few years because while Sony tries to release a lasting first-party game several times a year (their schedule looks pretty pale this year unless Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 does come out in September), Microsoft is lagging.

Grubb says that they’re mad at Xbox inside Microsoft, to put it mildly. In 2022, how many significant first-party games came out from Xbox Game Studios? (Obsidian’s Pentinent doesn’t count here.) Not many, converging towards zero, and Grubb says many people are starting to regret putting their money down on Xbox during the current console generation because if they want something to play, they don’t have much choice when it comes to exclusive titles.

Hi-Fi Rush from Tango Gameworks, released earlier this year, was also a topic of discussion. Grubb said the game underperformed, even though it was a surprise release on Xbox Game Pass and Steam (it was one of the best-selling games on Valve’s platform for a while, but perhaps the momentum stalled because Bethesda put Denuvo in that game too). Minotti said the game was too good for such a release, but Grubb disagrees. The game has not yet recouped its development costs, although the press and gamers have well received it, and he thinks it could be the Game Pass causing this unusual situation. Many people are simply not buying the games because of the subscription.

And for Hi-Fi Rush, Xbox marketing chief Aaron Greenberg came out of the darkness and said Hi-Fi Rush was a resounding success, meeting all the key expectations. But it’s his job to say that…

Source: WCCFTech