is Xbox cooked? | Asmongold TV

Xbox laid off over 9,000 people in early July, shut down the Perfect Dark reboot, and quietly canceled Rare's Everwild after years of development. The studio behind Perfect Dark, The Initiative, was effectively gutted. This came after last year's closure of Tango Gameworks—the studio behind Hi-Fi Rush, a game many assumed was a hit—and Arkane Austin after the disastrous Redfall. The pattern is clear: Microsoft is cutting deep into its gaming division, and the cuts are hitting studios that were supposed to be the future of Xbox.

The central question organizing the episode is whether Xbox is collapsing or simply recalibrating. The host argues that most of the panic is short-sighted. Xbox is not dying; it is being restructured to fit inside Microsoft's larger ecosystem, where it plays a role that has little to do with selling consoles.

The console is not the product

The host's core argument is that people misunderstand what Xbox actually is. It is not a console company that happens to be owned by Microsoft. It is a division inside a company whose primary product is Windows, Azure cloud services, and enterprise software. Selling Xbox hardware at a loss makes no sense when the same customer already owns a Windows PC. Every console sale is, from Microsoft's perspective, a cannibalized PC sale.