…the programme still allows for used game sales, game borrowing and so on. If you buy a disc, convert it to digital, then sell it on, whoever inserts it next into their Xbox console will get the entitlement for their account and remove it from yours…

This seems great.

This is so ridiculous.

1. I, personally, want discs - or at least real ownership - of games to continue. In the past I bought almost all my games used.
2. That doesn’t matter. Most people - even those who know the current trade-offs - would rather ‘buy’ digital games. Physical sales are a tiny fraction of game sales. With a purely financial head on: it’s going to cost Sony more to continue having them than to stop production. You can’t fight it (or, at least, the fight is unwinnable).

The only winnable fight here - and I still think it’s a long shot - is convincing governments to legislate to allow download of and resale of digital purchases.

They’re trying to spin the studio off without shutting it down. This allows them to talk about their ongoing/future work publicly.

Honestly, they need to do this. It can’t be possible to manage that many studios from the top of the Xbox organization. And, without market pressure as a clear feedback mechanism, it’s got to be difficult for the managers of the studios too.

The original sin here was buying so many and trying to become some game-production monopoly. The whole plan was crazy.

Hopefully this is good for the industry long-term. I’d love to see a bunch of independent studios pop up run by the people Microsoft temporarily ingested.

To be clear, this is terrible for the people involved, and it is all Microsoft’s fault (or, at least, Phil Spencer era Xbox’s fault - never understood why he was so respected inside or outside of Microsoft when he kept making one surely-obviously-bad decision after another). But it was surely inevitable.