Over the past 24 hours, PlayStation and Sony have taken a pretty nasty PR beating thanks to Marvel's Wolverine being kind of mediocre, and Xbox snatching up Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear successor out from under their noses.
Xbox locking in another Hideo Kojima game alongside OD is a no-brainer from a business perspective, as you get the added prestige of a creator like Kojima being on your platform. Kojima is also winning because he gets an almost limitless supply of cash to fund his new game that was reportedly almost canceled by PlayStation. For both parties, it's a win-win.
However, Xbox's overall reaction to securing this partnership has been anything but normal. It's been fawning over the creator on social media, tweeting that the pair are going to "build the future together", and Xbox marketing manager Aaron Greenburg took things one step further by briefly changing his profile picture on Twitter to a weird photoshop of Kojima holding a Series X like a bazooka.
Is it a coup to be publishing another Kojima game that you could potentially make exclusive to your console? Of course. But, Xbox is also currently acting like it wasn't just responsible for one of the biggest and most brutal rounds of layoffs the industry has ever seen. Studios were gutted and 1,600 people lost their jobs, and better yet, another 1,600 are set to lose their jobs before the end of the fiscal year.
In fact, literally as early as last month, Bethesda employees were up in arms and striking outside the studio's offices over said layoffs, erecting a giant inflatable rat to greet Xbox CEO Asha Sharma as she visited to preview The Elder Scrolls 6.
At its best, celebrating the fact that you've just given Hideo Kojima another big bag of money to make a game, just months after laying off thousands and continuing to lay off thousands more, showcases an incredible lack of empathy — and lack of professionalism in the case of Greenberg. It's all deeply strange, and paints Xbox as a whole as a ghoul of a company.
I don't blame Kojima for going where the money is, especially if recent reports are true and Physint has been missing deadlines. It will probably have an astronomical budget and will struggle to make its money back if sales are similar to Death Stranding. That being said, Xbox could stand to have more grace and professionalism about the whole thing, especially when it's continuing to ruin the lives of the developers that it's jettisoned just so it can give Kojima more money.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/xbox-boasts-kojima-partnership-despite-layoffs/
