Every time Xbox steps on a rake and makes headlines for stepping on a rake, people on the internet angrily ask, “Why does the media keep saying Xbox steps on rakes!?” Well, this might shock you, but there isn’t some conniving anti-Xbox plot cooked up behind closed doors by a cabal of games journalists in hooded robes making satanic chants to their Sony overlords. Xbox is just a mess.
Asha Sharma herself admitted that the business “is not healthy”, and the highlights of her tenure so far include mass layoffs and the pointless XBOX rebrand, as though yelling the name of the console will somehow make it sell better. All of this has been done under the guise of ‘restructuring’ to cut through bureaucracy and make better games, even though all the reports coming out of Xbox speak to teams of developers who are demoralized and fed up.
Nothing gets good games out the door like a franchise-first corporate mentality that asks teams stretched thin to churn out IP as they wade through the corpses of their colleagues’ careers.
There are countless myths about games journalists that are peddled by bad-faith actors—believe me, I’ve heard my fair share of Cuphead jokes. At this point, angry emails and comments are part of the job (email in bio), but the idea that we have some invested stake in the console war is laughable. It speaks to how people read news and reviews in an online world increasingly dictated by algorithms that are tailor-made to drive engagement, usually through outrage.
Commenters often accuse games journalists of being paid when a game they don’t like scores well, so when headlines are made about Xbox messing up for the umpteenth time, there must also be a conspiracy behind it. Like, say, Sony paying us. It doesn’t. There is no conspiracy, and the whole argument falls apart if you take even a second to look deeper. Games from triple-A publishers also review poorly. Did they just forget to cash a check? And when Sony messes up, we write about that too. Remember when it closed the PS3 storefront, nixed discs, or told gamers they don’t own anything? Did the Sony money run out that week?
The problem is that a handful of readers will pick and choose news stories to try and shape a narrative, when the reality is far more boring: games journalists cover the news, and Xbox makes a lot of news because it makes a lot of mistakes. And if you engage with that news, the algorithm feeds you more and more of it, until it’s all you see.
I won’t unpack every single mistake Sharma has made to prove my point, but the Xbox “reset” has been a disaster. Dangling the idea of keeping discs and saving Hideo Kojima’s project, while certainly positive news, comes across as hollow attempts to sanitize the layoffs with ‘exciting’ reveals, not to mention the obvious fluff pieces on Sharma responding to customer tickets directly. It’s hardly surprising given the allegations that Sharma spends more time looking at social media than talking to the developers who are now carelessly being laid off. But what good are exciting reveals if announcing games isn’t even a guarantee they’ll be made?
With that being said, to pin the entire blame on Sharma would be disingenuous. This all started with the misguided Xbox One launch, and was worsened even further when Phil Spencer tried to acquisition his way out of a bottomless pit.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/xbox-media-bias-explained/
