Xbox Chaos: Studio Closures, Leadership Changes, and What’s Next?

Welcome back to Digital Coffee Gaming Brew.

I'm your digital barista, Brett Dystra.

This week I'm diving into the Marathon Server Slam, New York, suing Valve over Loot boxes, Dune Awakening updates, and the chaos at Xbox.

It's a wild one.

Grab your favorite drink, settle in, and let's catch up on all the biggest stories in PC gaming.

Mmm, that's good.

All right.

So Marathon, the Server Slam is happening this weekend and it is.

It's an interesting game.

I don't really know if I actually like the art design whatsoever.

And there have been reportedly pretty significant bugs with this game.

One specifically, I didn't play until later Thursday ish night.

And so all those problems didn't really exist.

But there was an issue with if you alt tabbed, you couldn't play the game, or mouse did not work, or you could only play with the controller and it worked.

Or there were a lot of issues with the UI and just the bugs.

That looks like they finally got it dealt with.

The other problem is that later on towards the night, I didn't really see anybody to fight with whatsoever.

It was just the robots.

Which robots can be quite difficult at times.

If you don't have the right gear or if you're not coordinated at all, it can be very difficult.

So it's one of those things where it was.

It's a hero shooter, extraction shooter.

That's really the sum of it all.

It has nothing to do with the original game Marathon that Bungie created when they were only creating for Mac.

So it was specifically a Mac game that never came to Windows until recently, the old games.

And now they've rebranded Marathon to be what it is.

And I get what they're going for, the art design, it's just.

There's just some issues.

It doesn't look like they really fixed a lot of the issues from the original alpha, but it runs well, I will give them that.

I didn't really have any issues whatsoever.

It runs well now.

Yesterday or Thursday, it peaked about 150,000 players.

I think maybe 160,000 around that it didn't.

It never beat Arc Raiders.

Arc Raiders was still on top with about 180 ish thousand.

And as of Friday today, during the late morning middle of the day, it hasn't really peaked at 100,000.

Again, it's been around about 60, 70,000 players playing now, given it's not prime time.

So that's another thing.

But a significant drop like that is not good.

And I can see why people are like, I really don't want to like this game.

As of right now, this is recording.

It's hit about 67,000 players on Steam.

I don't know anyone else because no one else gives us actual player numbers, which I do think every company should.

This should be way more open than it is.

And as of right now, ARC Raiders has 163,000 over a little over 163,000.

ARC Raiders is number one.

It is undefeated so far.

Can it be defeated?

Of course it can.

But man Embark hit on something.

They it was like lightning in a bottle for them.

Just crazy.

The amount of people still playing this game now.

Will it forever be this way?

Probably not.

But it's still pretty good.

Now the service land does end March 2, so you still have some time to actually play it.

Basically the weekend.

But as I agree with most players, it's.

They call it font slop because there's just a lot of font, a lot of different like colors and the colors just.

It's like trying to be the retro.

Retro tech but new.

And it doesn't.

I don't think it works as well as they thought it did.

I think they needed to keep some color schemes fine, but others just have a more unified.

Just not a pastel color throw up.

I think it's the best way of saying it, but it's all right.

I mean it.

It's confusing at times.

Some of the missions are confusing at times.

I wish it was better, but it is Bungie.

And they seem to have well, lost their way a little bit, I don't think.

Just like many of the modern western game developers, they've lost the plot on who actually plays the games and they try to design and market it to a customer that doesn't exist or is a very small portion of the gaming community.

The gaming community from a PC and console standpoint is majority male, hands down.

You're not going to be able to refute that.

Mobile, mostly female.

Fine.

But remember, you're trying to market to the majority of your customer base and I don't think they understand this or they just hate us enough where they don't care until it starts hitting the bottom line because again, at the end of the day, this is a business trying to make money.

I don't know.

It was.

It's confusing.

When I was doing it like I was like, where do I buy like gear?

Those in the Armory.

The Armory really doesn't suggest that you buy it there.

The Armory suggests that you already have it there.

Vendors suggest that you buy things like the Words don't even make sense.

And I get the whole unlock system thing.

I think that's fine.

I think having an unlock system is fine.

I don't think it's that.

That's that terrible.

The gameplay is a little slow.

Do I really care about that?

No.

And like guarded and unguarded extraction points don't really make much sense to me because it feels like it was like guarded by players, but it was just basically guarded by robots.

So if you ever run into that, it just basically means it's guarded.

The proximity chat was a very late add on to it.

They didn't originally do it, but if they didn't, people be like, why is there no proximity chat?

Why can't I talk to other people now for the most part, it's better played with people and it's better played with your friends.

So if you're playing it by yourself, you can play solo, but it's going to be a lot more difficult to play solo.

All in all, I don't think I am that impressed with it.

I think it has a lot of interesting ideas.

I think some of the buffs and boosters need to be condensed a lot more.

It's.

There's a lot of stuff and I don't think having so much boosters and everything in the beginning of a game is the right way of going about it.

I think everything.

I think the gunplay is solid.

I think the movement is pretty good.

I think the stamina is.

Could be readjusted a little bit, but I think it's fine.

But all in all, it's a below mid game to me for a $40 price tag, mind you.

So I don't.

I'm not really sure if this is going to get the attention it needs to get to be an ongoing gang.

All right, so moving on to the New York State Attorney General Leticia James has announced an intention to sue VAL for alleged illegal gam gambling related to loot boxes in Counter Strike 2 and Dota 2.

The lawsuit claims that Valve allows both children and adults to engage in gambling through these loot boxes.

The legal finding is 52 pages long and indicates a statement from Attorney General James highlighting the potential harm of illegal gambling, particularly for young people.

The lawsuit is being handled by Assistant Attorney Generals Mark Montgomery and Alex Xander Height, along with senior Enforcement Counsel Jordan Alder and other officials.

The virtual items obtained from loot boxes are described as cosmetic, can be highly valuable, with rare items selling for thousands of dollars.

Yeah, so this has been going on for years.

New York, you've got a lot of other things to deal with.

A lot of other things to deal with.

This is not one of them.

Second of all, for kids and adults, isn't it the adults or the parents responsibility to make sure their kids are not gambling like this?

This is just nanny state, weird weirdness going on here.

Plus, they have like family options within steam.

I'm pretty sure they have options to like control that.

And the parents just don't do it until the parents complain to the government and the government goes, we must do something.

I'm like, no, the parents need to do something like make sure that the kids don't have access to the credit card so they don't buy thousands of dollars of virtual stuff.

Maybe teach them that these items are not that valuable.

Value is a perceived notion.

It's only valuable because people want it.

If there was no value to it, no one would care.

I never understood it.

I never really cared.

I still don't care.

I was like, oh, so a knife skin is worth thousands of dollars.

Why?

It has no value in the real world.

And once everybody stops caring about it, it definitely has no value in the real world.

It's just weird because New York has a ton of problems and it's all stemming around affordability, taxes and regulations.

The new mayor is not helping at all since he's just threatening to raise taxes or whatever way he can raise taxes.

Nothing is going to work out well for this.

So I am confused on why they decided to pick this battle specifically given that this has been going on for a while.

The loot boxes for counter strike.

Very long time.

It's been years.

It hasn't changed all of a sudden.

So I'm a little confused.

I get that you're trying to quote, unquote, protect the citizens, but the weird push in the age verification thing is a little weird and it just seems to be getting worse.

Governments.

Ooh, another thing we can thumb down on our citizens.

Prove you're at their right acceptable age.

Oh, wait, you can't vote.

Voting with an id that people can't do that.

You know, hard it is to do that.

It's.

But don't you have to have an ID to do almost anything as an adult?

Like I said, New York has got bigger issues and this is not one of them.

This is like the Attorney General going, look, we're doing stuff.

That's what it is.

All right.

Moving on to Dune Awakening and has announced a character migration and server consolidation plan as part of Patch January 1st, scheduled for March.

Developer will provide a list of affected servers in early March to prepare players for the change.

Players can choose to initiate a token free character transfer or wait for the server to close, at which point their character and possessions will be stored automatically.

Funcom apologized for the recent exploit known as the Hoga Basin Incident, which led to a server shutdown due to its severity.

As compensation players affected by this exploit, Funcom will offer resource packages and double rewards for the lands RAT missions from February 27 to March 2.

Here's the rundown is Dune Awakening is not doing as well as when it first launched.

A lot of people are not playing it as much because Arc Raiders has taken everything by storm and is taking no names, taking prisoners, which is the players because players love it so much.

It's just one of those games where it's once in a generation a lot of times, or once in a decade.

About a decade since Witcher 3 came out.

And that was a very special game too.

So man, EA and Dice letting go of those old school DICE employees.

Bad move for you, but got to give it to him Bark.

They are hitting it out of the park.

Finals is still really good.

It's not as popular as Arc Raiders, but it's still a really good game.

And you got Arc Raiders and now they're going to be making more games.

Why not?

They made so much money off of Arc Raiders, might as well make other interesting games.

I mean they're the few company that actually is making like new IPs.

Everything else is just everybody else is just like doing their old trusted ips.

Battlefield Call of Duty because Activision is only Call of Duty, which is funny.

And so it should be interesting to see where everything goes because Dune Awakening was great when it launched.

Everybody was playing it and then it died off quickly.

Battlefield 6 was great when it launched.

Everybody loved it.

Died off pretty quick.

Now you got Arc Raiders, the only one that's done a healthy amount of keeping the player base for the most part.

You also have Resident Evil Requiem which recently came out, that's doing pretty well.

And you're gonna have Crimson Desert coming out next month, which looks to be a really fantastic game.

You also have Toxic Commando coming out next month.

And you have Death Stranding 2 for PC coming out next month.

So we'll see what actually happens with all this.

But it's a good time for single player games.

Not gonna lie.

Resident Evil is only a 10 hour game, but when you get older you're like 10 hours awesome.

I don't spend like months and months trying to Beat this game.

All right, so Nvidia has made an announcement to everybody that's not surprised whatsoever in anything is that there's going to be a shortage of gaming chips that expected to last until the end of the year, which will probably more likely last until the end of 2029.

You're like, they didn't say that.

I know they didn't say it, but let's be honest with you.

If Western Digital, Seagate, Micron, Samsung, Sdhenix, all are out of inventory for the rest of the year, you know it's going to be a while until the, well, until the bubble hits.

I'm still thinking there's a bubble.

I'm still thinking that this sustainability is not going to last very much longer.

The fact that it is crazy in the amount of just hyper, the intensity of the market just expanding is one of two ways.

One, it's a healthy, extremely healthy and growing, or two, there's a huge bubble with a few companies making a killing, which is Nvidia is one of them in all the RAM and basically the data storage companies.

Because us normal people were like, all right, fine, NVMEs are really expensive.

I'll go to just the bigger SSDs.

All right, those are expensive.

All right, I'll go to hcds.

Oh, now I got nothing.

I guess I'll go back to cloud, but that's expensive too.

Oh, thanks, companies for not really adjusting to the market demands and just letting go.

Twiddling your thumbs.

This is where we're at.

We don't matter as much anymore.

As I always say, these companies, we matter to them when they were growing and now that they're not growing in this industry anymore, they don't care.

They'll say that they care about us because that's what they do.

It's, oh, we really care about our customers.

Really, you do.

That's why you don't have any supply.

That's why everything else is super expensive because you really care about the customer, which is us.

Hard to believe.

I got a PR degree and this, it stinks as a really bad press release and a really bad way of trying to tempt down concerns and hasn't really worked very well.

And I'm really just shocked about the amount of callousness on our radio.

Consumers can't buy anything, but who cares is really what it's at.

It's just callousness.

I get it.

They're making money hand over fist on a HBM wafers because they're bigger and they take up more space and they're more expensive to actually produce.

But at some point, at some time, these data companies have got to figure out an efficiency way because it's not efficient and they all know it.

And that's why they're doing it, because they get a lot of money out of it.

It's why Micron's like, no, we're out of the gaming market.

Doesn't matter.

We aren't making our money from there.

Later, losers.

It's just not a fun time in the tech hardware space at all.

It's I'm gonna get a. I'm gonna get a NAS server, try to get some hard drives at a decent price and then just not care.

We have my local AI that way.

Do some open source stuff and say, peace out losers.

All right.

Do you remember the games like Guitar Hero and DJ Hero?

There's a new rhythmic game being developed by Red Octane called Stage Tour.

Stage will be a digitally only release on for consoles and PC.

The game will include a branded microphone, drum controller and new guitar controller modeled by the Gibson Kramer.

Players can use standard game controllers or keyboards to play the game.

Players will have the option to select the preferred instrument or sing along with the backing track.

Unlike Guitar Hero, Stage Heroes is a planned as a platform rather than a series of sequels or standalone games.

So it looks like this is going to be like a live service type game, but I think this actually can work for them.

There are some games that live service will do really well.

I think this is one of them.

You make one game, base game and then you just keep on updating with song catalogs and everything.

I think if they do it right, brilliant.

I think what Helldivers have done with PvE, brilliant.

I think what Our Grace have done, brilliant.

I think what Marathon's trying to do, not so brilliant.

But they're trying.

Like I said, there's just some things they're right.

Battlefield 6 not so good at trying or even doing and they've had issues.

But E for effort I guess is the best way of saying it.

Hey, I like season two, so don't hate on me.

I think the map is great.

I think the little birds are a little overpowered, but still great.

I think trying to get little bird is super frustrating.

But hey, that's Battlefield.

So should be interesting.

Should be interesting to see how well people want to do this.

But I think if they model it as a live service of you buy this controller and then even backwards compatibility would be a huge win for them.

But I think a live service type of New rhythmic game is the smartest thing you can do because then you can update it for years and years and years.

Development costs will go down because you're only developing micro stuff for it.

And you can sell it for whatever you feel like you can sell it for.

And I don't think this is a terrible idea.

Hey, if the developers of Guitar Hero Arrigment and Rhythm games can help do something really great, all power to them.

I really do wish them the best.

All right, so Overwatch his back.

No more Overwatch 2.

It's not Overwatch 3.

It's just Overwatch.

People get it right.

We had Overwatch, then we had Overwatch 2, and now we have Overwatch.

Because naming is totally planned out this way.

But in this episode of huh, that happened in Overwatch, you could actually type in the chat the little carrot icons or the little, like, greater than, less than signs.

I guess the best way of saying it in the it had to be the one that is pointing the little arrow carrot or greater than.

Is it greater than one lip pointing to the left?

If you did it several times, it crashed the game.

And so we're just like, yeah, we're disabling chat until we can fix this bug.

I'm like, that's a good bug to have.

So when I was playing that day, you could not type in anything in the chat.

It was the most positive Overwatch I've ever played because no one could rage unless you wanted to go on voice chat.

No one does unless you want to rage on voice chat.

It was the most positive because no one could talk.

No one could flame you at all.

It's just, this is a very fun game now.

No, I really wish that text chat would be disabled.

Be even more fun game because no one wants to talk.

The problem with these games now is that they're like, we are listening and reading your text to make sure you don't say anything hateful.

Even though this is a competitive game, be nice or else.

Thanks, mom and dad, but yeah, that's a pretty funny exploit.

It doesn't really do anything.

It just crashes the server.

It's like, you're losing the game.

Come on.

Gotta do it several times.

Crash the game.

You're like, yes.

No, I don't have to lose a game now.

My SR won't go down.

Oh, no.

Whatever will I do?

Apparently it was just in competitive mode.

It was just being very disruptive because I'm pretty sure people losing the game were just like, I'm just gonna type this in and we're gonna crash the server.

Everybody was thinking about doing that.

And then when they disabled the text chat, everybody's damn.

Now I have to actually try and make sure that I'm doing good.

Or get flamed.

Not really.

Just get flame in voice chat.

All right, so a modder has created a mod that integrates Ground Zero Mission with M Gear Solid, the five, the Phantom Pain, which was originally the vision that Hideo Kojima actually had.

He basically said, I want to have this combined and then do.

The publisher was like, nope, we're not going to do this.

They made his life not great, and so that's why he eventually left, which is unfortunate for them because they had no visionary for Metal Gear because he was the main guy that was doing the visionary work for Metal Gear the whole time.

You could tell that Metal Gear Solid five was not complete.

You could tell by the end of the story.

I was like, this does not feel complete.

Great game.

Not complete at all.

And that was.

I think that was the more frustrating thing about it.

I was very frustrated about that.

I was like, why do I feel like I'm missing a lot of pieces to this puzzle?

It was a great game.

Fun game.

Still works really well on your PC, too.

Played it several months ago.

Still a great game.

Engine's still really good for it being over a decade old now.

Yeah, about a decade old around that time.

So it's not new by any standards, but, man, is that a testament to that.

Fox Die Engine.

I think it's called Fox Die Engine.

Fox Engine.

Is it just.

I think it's just Fox Engine.

Yeah, it's a testament to the Fox Engine in general, just how good it was back then when developers actually made their own engines, not just relied on Epic for everything.

And then all you have is Unreal Engine.

Oh, look, shuddering.

Oh, look.

Preloading the shaders.

Yay.

That's where we're at now.

And dlss and everything else has eventually gotten better, but it hasn't really made it that much better.

I think 4.5 is the first DLSS that actually is adequately good.

But yeah, that's really cool that they've bridged the gap with Ground Zero and metal gear solid 5.

So you can play as one cohesive game instead of two games.

Yeah, that's great.

All right, so now I'm going to finally talk about the debacle of Xbox.

I guess the best way of saying it because look, it, it has not been doing well for a while.

They have shuttered studios.

Some that wish they probably shouldn't have shuttered like hi Fi Rush Studio, like Arcane Studio should never have been shuttered.

Honestly, there's a lot of them where I'm like scratching my head on why was this shuttered?

Just because of one bad game or serious But Bethesda's fine with Starfield.

So last week the Funny how it started on the weekend.

On Friday it was announced that Phil Spencer was going to retire and also Sarah Bond, the president of Xbox was fired.

She was let go.

She was gone and effectively immediately.

On Monday we have a new CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Asha Sharp Sharma.

And no experience in gaming whatsoever, but experience in AI, which is always a fun thing when you're like yay, experience in AI.

That's what gaming really needs is more AI slop.

So during the course of the week she was being very communicative with gamers and saying things.

Everybody was like, this sounds suspicious as we all do now.

And it seems like it may have been AI responding to some of these things.

Now mind you, she's an AI executive and people have pored over her LinkedIn and everything and it smells like a DEI hire, to be honest with you.

And then she hired another guy.

It's in a high position that all of his credentials are again AI.

And then she's yeah, let's bring back the slice on Xbox and how she wants to get away from this is an Xbox campaign that didn't really resonate whatsoever and maybe move away from Game Pass that has only really gone up in price and hasn't really got given you anything except for you need to pay more money to play games.

For $30 a month you can play all the games you want that are on our platform or I can just buy the game that I want to and not worry about this.

So it doesn't look good for Xbox.

But let's be honest, Microsoft hasn't really been on a home run streak for a while.

We have Copilot that's just atrocious that I have erased from my Windows 11 because why do I have that when I can have other better localized AI chatbots or I just have Merlin AI that gives me all of them except for Copilot that I never use that.

We have Microsoft Breaking Windows 11 left and right and making it really just frustrating for gamers.

Now we have Xbox Game Pass rising in prices astronomically for whatever reason.

And now we have this.

Now Phil Spencer we all knew was a gamer.

I think we all respect him, that is that he was a gamer.

He was brought up in this industry well understood that may not have been the best leader.

At least he was a gamer.

He understood that gaming was about gaming anywhere you want to and not being beholden to something.

That's why the new Xbox is supposed to be allegedly a PC, because Microsoft is the PC for now, once we finally get the Steam machines.

That may actually not be the case as much anymore because us gamers are starting to get tired or are beyond tired of Microsoft and their antics with Windows.

Not a great.

Windows 11 is not a great operating system.

I'm really lenient.

I didn't mind Windows 8, but man, does Windows 11 make me want to go back to Windows 8.

And that wasn't even a good one, but at least it was more functional and less of a headache than this one.

Windows 7, Windows 10, Windows XP, great operating systems.

Windows 95, great operating system.

Windows 98, great operating system.

Windows MB, me, what?

That was quickly gone because it was terrible.

Windows XP, great.

Windows Vista, that was quickly gone of Windows 7.

And they decided to not learn their lesson and go, we're going to do it for the modern machine.

And I'm like, now you're doing for the smartphone, which I'm not on a smartphone.

I'm on a PC.

This is a PC.

This is an Xbox.

It just.

It does not look good for Microsoft to have all this turmoil.

It did not look good for all these layoffs.

It does not look good for all this turmoil.

And I don't think she's going to fix anything.

I think the problem is on the higher leadership and not really listening to gamers at all because you weren't really listening.

You have Activision, who makes Call of Duty, which Black Ops 7 is not good.

It was beat out by Battlefield 6 when it launched.

Battlefield 6 is having its own issues because it was not as well optimized as we thought it was.

But to be fair, it was one of the best launches I've seen from Battlefield recently.

Now, don't come at me battlefield 4 because battlefield 4 was a mess for a year and a half.

So I know it's a great game now, but everybody forgets how terrible of a mess that game was when it first launched.

It was a big mess.

Bellfield one was a good launch too.

Bellfield five was a good launch, but marketing messaging of if you don't like it, don't buy it was the wrong thing to do.

So what can Xbox do to fix its image?

1, stop laying off everybody.

I would say stop laying off the good developers.

It's probably the best way of saying it.

Cut out the DI did.

Wait.

Make sure your game is catered to the male audience.

Again, male audience, not female audience.

Majority is male.

Please apply it to the male audience.

I don't care if you hate the male gaze.

I don't care if you say the words manspreading and mansplaining.

Because you probably need men explaining a man spreading in your life.

Ladies, make it for the male gamer.

Drop the price of Xbox game.

Pass.

We'll lose money.

You're already losing money because you lost about half your customers.

Because you're like oh, the ultimate $15 a month.

It's a 30 now.

And we're like wait, what?

Get back to what Xbox 360 was.

Because that was the best time for Microsoft and Xbox.

The best time.

The first one was an introduction.

Xbox360 was the goat for Xbox line.

And then you had subsequent not so good.

The current one, not so good.

Get back to that.

Get back to making great exclusive exclusive games for Xbox.

You can release it in a year or so on PlayStation and everything else.

But your priority should be Xbox and PC and everything else.

Will get it eventually.

Not day one.

Eventually.

Make good quality single player games.

Make good quality live service or multiplayer.

I prefer multiplayer than live service.

Make Call of Duty.

Not yearly releases anymore.

It has not helped it and the declining quality has shown.

I know that there's several developers so it leaves frogs developers.

But it's not showing.

Redouble your efforts on Warzone and make sure that it is good.

I didn't really.

I played it like the first month or so and I was like, I'm warming up to distraction shooters.

I still just don't like them that much.

Or Battle Royale.

Sorry, Battle Royale.

They all run together.

But Battle Royale and promote people with merit.

Not race based, not sex based, merit based.

If you want a strong thriving business in the gaming industry.

Merit based focusing on your customers and you're focusing on your customers and not the modern myth of the modern customer.

Because the customer has always been the same.

Cater to that.

If you have developers begrudgingly hating males, cut them out.

You don't need them.

Cut them.

Say, look it.

This is the marketing plan.

It's wild.

We're going to market to males, our primary customer.

If you don't like it, there's the door.

That's it.

Focus on what's important.

Focus on what's in it for me.

For the customer.

What's in it for the male customer on your games.

Are they going to be told that they are terrible, awful.

And if your game doesn't do well, they're terrible and awful because we'll just ignore you.

We're fine with ignoring you.

Trust me, it's easy to ignore that.

We don't care anymore.

Stop thinking this actually works.

It doesn't.

Not at all.

And that will help with making good.

Become a great publisher for indies.

Help them with putting it on your platform.

Also help them with putting it on Steam and everything else.

Become an indie platform as well and you will thrive.

Because indies are like the main thing that people are looking at now.

We see AAA games as like movie studios where they just make the same thing over and over again.

So having a little budget for the indies to help them would be great.

So again, let's reiterate for Xbox.

Focus on your branding.

Get it straight this time.

Focus on what your products do well.

If nothing, then focus on the future and focus on the actual customer, your male audience.

And then on the, I guess more B2B side.

Be like an OEM for for indie game developers.

Like, hey, we'll help you with this.

Best way to thrive.

What do you think?

Do you think Xbox has a great shiny moment or are they in trouble?

Let me know in the comments below.

But thank you for listening to Digital Coffee Gaming.

Really do appreciate it.

Please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps.

Leave.

A five star review really does help with the rankings.

Let me know how I'm doing and join me next week.

Let's talk about what's going on the gaming industry.

All right guys, stay safe.

Get to playing the games you want to play.

If it's marathon arc Raiders or whatever or Resident Evil Requiem and see you next week Later.