So, I actually used to work for MSFT a decade ago.

The uh… Xbox people and the corpo business people were, once upon a time, wildly different kinds of people, literally problematic 90s pc gamer dude bros vs ex IBM stodgy walrus people.

Basically, the walrus people won, made all the big boy business decisions, and things rather rapidly went to shit in terms of the business decisions being just insanely corpo.

Like uh, at the time Xbox Live came out… well there was this whole other paradigm for online video gaming set by Valve, but uh… lets just say you shouldn’t talk about Gabe Newell while standing on or sitting in a Microsoft campus.

I didn’t really have that important of a role, but lets just say I knew that half of Xbox 360s were coding 3RR or faulty in some way that necessitated a complete replacement (they’d just swap your hardrive into a new model and claim they refurbed it LOL) … yeah I knew that about a decade before that became wider public knowledge.

But anyway, here we are about 20 years later, Valve is having MSFT’s cake, eating it too, and the remaining husks on the gaming side of MSFT absolutely know they are fucking cooked, and are fully in the ‘suck all the money outta this shit while we still can’ phase, before the entire concept of MSFT gaming basically transitions to more or less a legacy system.

They’re rapidly headed toward just being a B2B oriented company, maybe they’ll use their hoard of IPs to effectively liscense out game dev, but when ‘everything is an Xbox’, fucking nothing is and they know that.

Game server uptime isn’t as profit able as business server uptime, either pump those numbers up or your branch of MSFT goes the way of the Windows Phone and Zune.