Xbox Almost Spoiled the Best Time of Year for Games

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But I always get a kick out of this part of the fall, because for a six- to eight-week period, all there is to think about and write about is new games. Often pretty exciting ones. It’s just a great buzz, and a welcome refocusing on what really matters, what unites us all in this crazy business/hobby/obsession. It’s like playing a particularly dopamine-addled mobile game: ooh, shiny new thing! Ooh, another one!

I’m juggling two good review games and the World of Warcraft: Forever beta and having the time of my life. The Polygon team has yet to find any limit to its appetite for writing about Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave. And did you hear that Ace Combat 8 is actually amazing? Yes, that’s right — Ace Combat 8! One of the year’s highest-rated AAA games, a bona fide must-play.

A month ago, I welcomed this season with open arms as the end of a long summer of depressing news and messy discourse. At last, it would all be about the games. And the early fall has mostly delivered, give or take a Wolverine. So of course, this week, Xbox decided to ruin our lovely time with one of its periodical bad news bombs.

Microsoft laid off 268 more Xbox employees and reduced Halo Studios to a vestigial rump. It handed Halo — Xbox’s founding franchise, once its crown jewel — to Activision, along with Rare. The quieter subtext to all this is that Xbox Game Studios, the flagship first-party publisher and studio group, has also got the “vestigial rump” treatment. After all the closures, divestitures, consolidations, and restructurings, XGS comprises just three studios.

You might ask: What does it matter? With the mighty powerhouses of Activision, Blizzard, and Bethesda under its wing, not to mention the biggest game of all time in Minecraft, Xbox is still a huge force to be reckoned with. And that’s true. But branding and identity matter, and after all of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s talk about refocusing on the console business, she has now shifted the center of power away from Xbox itself and toward these historically multiplatform businesses.

And Halo matters, too, even if it hasn’t mattered as much as it should for far too long. That just makes its rescue more important. Unsentimentally, we can admit that it never really worked out for Halo Studios (née 343 Industries), but the prospect of another reboot is hard to get excited about. Will it really go any better than last time?

I’m not going to prejudge these moves. The turmoil is head-spinning, but at the same time, it’s not like Xbox Game Studios was a hit factory, or Halo was where it should be. Carrying on wasn’t really an option for Xbox, either. Maybe this time it will work out.

But it’s hard not to feel queasy when reading through Polygon’s summaries of everything that’s happened to Xbox so far this year. This much change, this fast, can’t be good for the actual games that remain in production. Can it?

It’s overwhelming. But let’s not be too discouraged. Somehow, even though it seems to be the hardest thing in the world to do, people keep making video games. And those games keep astounding us. How could Ace Combat 8‘s clouds look like that? How could Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave contain so many gorgeous anime hot messes? It doesn’t seem probable or even possible that these things could exist, but here they are, more of them than you could possibly keep up with. This too is overwhelming. In a good way.

Plus this: