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.

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