The new CEO has been praised by consumers to hear their feedback and steer the company in new directions, eg guaranteeing physical disks, defocusing from AI features, etc.

So even if she doesn't know about creating video games, I wouldn't judge her as "a business first gamers last" type of person.

isn't XBOX dead already? that's the common sentiment I see.

as the console product line, it's just dead, nobody knows which xbox is the old or the new one, microsoft themselves probably can't figure that out too.

the issue with game execs is not just that they don't understand game development, but software development in general. game execs absolutely love scope creep. then they try to fight the growing scope by adding more people onto the project - when it's common knowledge that makes the project even more delayed. if you can't deliver a project, you have to deliver less, not add employees.

writing this I thought this might be why live service games fare better. they force the modern agile software engineering into games. the exec gets feedback and kpi's quickly. you could try to scream some sense into them however much you want, but they won't accept that their idea is crap until it's released and the sentiment rating on their dashboard goes down in response.

the exec has absolutely no imagination or domain knowledge. without the constant feedback, they just fly blind because they can't comprehend anything but the numbers in the spreadsheet. in a multi-year development process, until you deliver the project, there's no numbers to steer you. you need an opinionated director, auteur, not an excel monkey.

Is it run by the bean counting optimizer is the question.

There are some business people who are bean counters - they understand the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They will get rid of expensive engineers and then be shocked that they can't keep making money with the same version of the same game for all time.

There are other business people who know the usefulness of engineers making new product. However they don't understand the value and will hire too many and so the company will fail because the profit margins are not there.

You need the compromise. Nobody likes a compromise.

What I find weird is that these companies don't sound like they are run by bean counters... The budgets are something that sound absolutely insane if anyone who cared about costs were involved. It more sounds like they are run by empire builders and their legions of micromanaging middle-managers...

I assume they don't see themselves as a video game company anymore (although the marketing won't reflect that). They see themselves as a media company with IP to be mined.