Microsoft is cancelling like a pro

[Dark Jaguar]

This is going to sound glib, and it is... but seriously, MS if you don't want to make a bunch of games, maybe stop buying every single game company in existence?

Everwilds is Neverwilds now.  Perfect Dark is truly perfectly dark, because it'll never see the light of day now.

[A Black Falcon]

It's really sad that Perfect Dark got cancelled.  Apparently both Everwilds and PD were, despite having been in development for like 7+ years each, still at least 3 years away from completion.  PD had playable 'vertical slices' but whether it actually had a game coming together or not is unclear.  The Bethesda MMO that was cancelled was similar -- a game that had been in development for years and people liked in testing, but that was still years away from finishing.  It is clear that Microsoft badly mismanaged their oversight of their studios over the past decade or so by giving teams too much freedom and no controls or focus, and these games and studios are some of the casualties of that approach.  Of course, I wish that despite the mismanagement and unfocused years of development teams wandering MS had committed the funds to complete these projects, with teams more clearly focused on their task, but sadly they went for the easy, standard corporate approach of 'cancel stuff and fire lots of people' instead of the better, more Nintendo-like approach of helping teams succeed and keeping them focused on their task.  Unfortunate.

[Dark Jaguar]

The problem is that MS should never have bought ALL these corporations to begin with.  They wanted exclusives, and because of THAT so very many people have to suffer, to lose their jobs?  That's not a good enough excuse.  It's just destructive greed.  This consolidation of so very many corporations under one banner is harmful to the public at large and to the people forced to work under it.  It should never have been allowed in the first place, but of course today the government oversight that would have investigated and prevented such a ridiculous level of consolidation has no teeth, nothing like in the 90's when they were able to slap down MS and force them to unbundle Internet Explorer from the guts of the OS.  Now, MS's LLM AI is being forced on all of us against our will, and the justice department has nothing to say about it.

Oh, and I should toss in Google as being JUST as guilty of this while I'm at it.  I hope they get split up, but under our current government, that's not going to happen.