By Nelson Schneider - 03/16/25 at 05:28 PM CT
Well, well, looks like it’s time to add another voice to the ever-growing choir of people who think Xbox should just go away. Enter one Bobby Kotick, who looks like a cross between some sort of sheep and a Wizarding World goblin, the former CEO of Activision-Blizzard(-King) before Microsoft initiated the purchase of the massive Industrial Gaming publisher to use it as fertilizer for the ever-struggling Xbox Division back in 2022.
In a recent interview, Kotick, now free from the shackles of Microsoft as a redundant executive unleashed a full salvo of disparaging comments about the Xbox Division. According to Kotick, Xbox was near death before the merger, and Microsoft’s desperation to acquire Activision was spurred by the fact that only the infusion of a massive existing customer base could possibly jump-start Xbox’s flagging life-signs. Prior to the Activision/Xbox deal, Kotick had even advised Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, that purchasing Activision in order to feed it to Xbox was a bad idea, and that the software titan should have just gotten out of videogames altogether. Kotick further urged Nadella to shift Microsoft’s gaze toward purchasing other software service companies, like SAP or Workday, stating that “[Microsoft] are not a creative company.”
OUCH!
While I’m normally loathe to admit that any of the gold-plated parasites of the Corporate Executive Class know anything or have any useful advice to share, in this case, Bobby is absolutely RIGHT, and it’s vindicating to see more and more big names within the Corporate world finally pulling their heads out of their rears and getting on MY level. After all, I’ve been saying exactly such unflattering things about Xbox and Microsoft’s endeavors in gaming since 2001 (when the original Xbox released as competition with the Dreamcast, Gamecube, and PlayStation 2… only one of which it managed to “defeat” in the 6th Gen Console Wars… and that was because Sega and the Dreamcast committed seppuku).
Sadly, as is the case in so many things, what we’re witnessing with Microsoft and the Xbox Division is just repeated history of what happened to InterPlay back in the ‘90s. Microsoft even went so far as to gather the scattered fragments of InterPlay, like some sort of Belmont collecting the pieces of Dracula, and attempted to reconstitute the entire dead publisher within themselves, probably in the hopes of re-creating its empire as the dominant PC Gaming publisher of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Of course, we are no longer operating in a videogame development or publishing environment that even remotely resembles that era, so all Microsoft has effectively done is burdened the struggling, mostly-dead Xbox Division with the responsibility of keeping all of these other studios afloat, productive, and profitable, in spite of never having managed to do that for itself!
