Microsoft's excuse is a real laugh:
Huh, I wonder
why development costs have skyrocketed at all of these brain-drained companies. Perhaps Microsoft should tell their studios to include even more forced woke garbage, propaganda, body types, soy, microtransactions,
macrotransactions, and hire all the
DEI failures to head their handful of "Xbox First Party Games" left remaining to keep "Xbox" from just being "Bethesda and Activison-Blizzard."
To add more insult to injury, Microsoft couldn't even retain the masculinity in the two highest test franchises they had with Halo and Gears, but they now own King games after the Acti-Blizzard acquisition, so they
really have no excuse to continue the farce of catering to the "50% of female gamers" who just play mobile game bullshit. However, modern game companies are so out of touch from the woke kool-aid that they risk losing the women, too, because just like every functioning human, women don't want to play as uglified, androgynous freaks (see:
Pokemon Go's character changes).
Unlike Sony who raised hardware prices everywhere
except the US, other countries/regions stopped bothering to stock Xbox
anything, which makes that "development costs" excuse all the more sad when they know full well that not nearly enough people are
buying their games alongside the hardware. They piss money away making games for nobody in multiple facets because they've been whittling down the entire Xbox brand to the US alone, while shutting their eyes and ears to the overwhelming market demands.
Bonus line for even more of a laugh:
The former not only leaves no value for the latter, but calls into question the entire point of
being an Xbox player when Microsoft is seemingly intent on spitting in the face of everyone who bought anything Xbox (or Microsoft because the same applies to basically
everything that Microsoft makes, especially Windows). I almost feel bad for the people still being gaslit into thinking that Xbox is anything beyond a publisher and service provider
Sony's own drought of games and ideological capture producing their own brand of trash might be the best thing that could have happened to Microsoft at the moment, but now Playstation players are just as likely to start passing on Microsoft published games if they have an $80 price tag.
It's crazy, right? Just goes to show that the average consumer can screw everything up for everyone else, and it's only gotten exponentially worse as video games have been forcibly thrust into the mainstream. Look at how long it has taken for even the "normies" to grow at least noticeably tired of the video games industry's antics producing dreck.
To that end, not exactly the best timing on Microsoft's part because there is going to a smaller segment of an already shrunken audience willing to pay their premium, especially since Microsoft does no appear willing to crack down on their rampant quality control issues and out of touch bubble.