Fact is, Phil was right when he said that they lost the worst generation to lose, not just becaue of the digital library though. it's becasue last gen was when game development time ballooned to its current insane state. Xbox had next to no first party studios outside of Turn 10, 343 and Rare at that point. They let Bungie go, they didn't capitalize on their early exclusives, and they made a decision halfway through the 360 generation that first party did not matter. Lionhead was shut down, and while Sony was buying up all of their second party studios since the PS2 era, MS was letting all of them go and get bought by other publishers, often to disastrous results. Miswalker, Bioware, and others moved away from the Xbox brand during the 2nd half of the generation. Then came the disastrous launch of the Xbone, bad messaging, bad focus, total lack of understanding of where the market was. Clawing back to any relevance at all was a herculean effort. Loved my Xbox, loved my 360, and dropped it like a hot potato for the PS4 until I got a bone for $150 dollars with 5 games from a friend a couple of years later.
By the time Phil started buying up all these studios in order to solve Xbox's biggest problem, the lack of first party, dev time wasn't 2-3 years anymore, it was 5-6. Bethesda had 2 times exclusived on PS when they bought them, Doom Eternal had just come out, and . Double Fine had already promised Psychonauts 2 to multiple platforms, Obsidian was bought right after POE2 so had nothing in the chamber to fire for a while, and so on.
It's been 5 years since 2018 which IIRC is when the buyouts really started. it used to be, you could buy a studio and pivot within a year or two, no longer. Now you buy a studio and chances are its games have had marketing deals set years before it was announced, and a game takes what would have been an entire console generation in the 1990s to develop. Five years later, we are finally seeing a regular release schedule, because it took THAT fucking long to make AAA games.
And that isn't just an Xbox problem. An isofuckingmetric RPG with a 400 person dev team took 6 years to make, We have seen basically nothing from Naughty Dog since TLOU2, when we used to get a game from them every couple of years, Suckerpunch hasn't even shown Ghosts 2, and even cross gen sequel like GoW: Ragnarok took four years, Horizon, five.
By pure necessity, MS is going to be digging itself out of its hole for years to come. This year was really just the beginning.
