In a week when Xbox fans were hoping to hear a response from Microsoft to the PS5 Pro, the software giant is making a third round of gaming layoffs instead. 650 employees at Microsoft’s gaming business are being laid off, part of continued cuts at Xbox after Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Microsoft cut 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox jobs earlier this year and then shuttered four studios it acquired as part of its $7.5 billion Bethesda acquisition in May. Thankfully, Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango Gameworks was eventually saved from Microsoft’s shutdown after Krafton, the South Korean publisher behind PUBG: Battlegrounds and The Callisto Protocol, acquired the Japanese studio from Microsoft instead.
If Cortana had copilots LLM behind it, it might have survived.
I don’t think it’s that simple. Cortana came out too late, well after Google and Apple’s assistants had fully taken over. Their speakers were large and clunky. To compensate they forced it in front of everyone, adding it to everything just like copilot. it’s just their poor approach to marketing, they think shotgunning it everywhere is a smart idea.
I think they’re going to face the same issues with copilot. I think it may have moderate success, but everyone I know goes to ChatGPT, they don’t use copilot. I see a lot of resentment too about it popping up everywhere, and not just from the super techie people here - but average users too. It just feels the same as Cortana. The problem is that it is cool tech, they just don’t understand how to market it well. ChatGPT is simple, it’s cool, it’s right there when you need it. Microsoft makes their products somehow always uncool, not fun to work with, and annoying.
Do you work in the corporate world? Because Microsoft Copilot is included in E3 and E5 licenses so nearly every enterprise Windows corporation is running it. Copilot is being pushed hard at our company and at a recent conference everything was about Copilot. I don’t think it feels anything like Cortana, it feels exactly like ChatGPT. What you state may be true for personal users, but the real money for Microsoft is in the enterprise business.
I do, and I’ve seen about half and half. Half of the companies are rushing to pay Microsoft gobs of money, the other half are like consumers trying as hard as they can to turn it off.