Thousands of layoffs, a couple of booted studios, and a re-organisation of Obsidian away from its newer projects and onto Fallout later, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has reportedly taken to an internal town hall and talked about the importance of new IP.

The transcript, as shared by Windows Central, goes as follows: "We're backing our strongest franchises. I want our great games to become great global billion-dollar franchises. I would also like to see us continue to create enduring new IP. We will not survive if we only revive [sic] on the past. We have to find new ways, and courage, to have invention on new IP, that reaches new sets of audiences."

This is, to put it gently, very confusing. As part of Xbox's "Reset", the studio has done the following:

That doesn't smack to me of the kind of courage and new IP invention that Sharma is talking about—most of these studios had either just made interesting new IPs (South of Midnight) or are in the business of doing cool, inventive new stuff (Double Fine).

From a numbers-driven, capitalistic point of view, were they making bank? Likely not, but the phrase "trying to have your cake and eat it too" exists for a reason. The mouth isn't talking about what the hand is doing—waxing lyrical about courage and new IP while making some of the most cutthroat industry cuts we've seen in an already-dire decade.

The one counterpoint to this is that Xbox has picked up Hideo Kojima's Physint .

Source link