Hit Points by Nathan Brown

@hitpoints.bsky.social

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A newsletter about the game industry, by consultant, writer and former Edge editor Nathan Brown. Sign up for free: https://newsletter.hitpoints.co/

A paragraph of text from the newsletter Hit Points by Nathan Brown: “ What, then, are we to make of all this, beyond the rather self-evident fact that this bunch of sorry clowns are every bit as useless as their predecessors, and are if anything even worse? I genuinely do not get it. After this week’s misery we are left with a company going full steam ahead on a new console despite the fact that no one is asking for or can afford it, and there is no hardware team to actually make it. That plans to back it all up with a line-up of megabudget games that cost the earth and take an age to make, and will take even longer now that the bosses have sacked off so much talent, experience and institutional knowledge. That has effectively told its remaining staff that the beatings will continue until morale improves — which, as the boss has recently made clear, will only be when a billion people play Xbox games every single day. Just do Roblox seven times over, gang, and all of this will be over. What a dreadful, despicable mess, and what an awful, evil, deeply unserious company. Fuck off out of my sight.”
A paragraph of text from the newsletter Hit Points by Nathan Brown: If you’ve been reading Hit Points for a while, you will know the reasons for my distaste. For one thing he wrote the literal book on the Metaverse, an international best-seller during that mercifully brief Silicon Valley fever dream. His reports, while heavy on detail and largely correct in their explanations of how the game industry has got itself into this mess, take some rather odd leaps of logic (my favourite one from this year’s report sees him ascribe the downturn in game spending to the rise of, among other things, OnlyFans and Polymarket). Most of all it’s that, despite stuffing 200 slides of waffle down my gullet every January, he has vanishingly little to offer in terms of answers. He’s good at explaining the problems, sure, but if it’s solutions you’re after — and I think it’s safe to say that, in videogameland of late, we most certainly are — you’re shit out of luck.
A paragraph of text from the newsletter Hit Points: That this should arrive so soon after the not-E3 festivities — so soon after Microsoft apparently flew a load of fans and influencers to LA, showering them with freebies, pretending they were so fucking back — reveals that Sharma is, despite her varied CV, Microsoft to the core. If there’s one thing we can take away from the last decade of Xbox it’s that these clowns can’t take one step forward without immediately taking two steps back, and at they end of the second step they fall flat on their arses, shit themselves, and ruin the lives of like two thousand people. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Xbox will die and deserve it.
A paragraph of text, reading as follows: For ‘content’, meanwhile — or ‘games’, to use normal, non-LinkedIn-person parlance — Sharma’s new north star can only be bad news. Focusing on daily retention is nothing new to the game industry: it’s what got us battle passes, daily resets, FOMO cosmetic stores and every other miserable tactic in the live-service dark-pattern playbook. Extrapolating that approach across the entire Xbox business is ominous enough, but from a software perspective it seems, at least from this remove, calamitous. At the big-budget end of the scale, what does it imply for the future of Xbox’s traditional big hitters? What does Forza Horizon 7 look like, for instance, when its development team is being judged internally on daily metrics? For smaller studios, the prospects appear even worse. You liked Keeper, right? And Pentiment? Good for you. Don’t expect any more of them. This is no place for artful, experimental games that are over and done with in ten hours. They will not help the numbers at all.
Throughout it all, even when things went bad, Spencer clearly understood games as a medium, a profession, and a business. Having an Actual Game Guy at the top of a big gaming company is far rarer than it should be, and while there was a lot of facade to Spencer — particularly towards the end, when he used faux-candour and his gaming credentials to try to mask the godawful shitfest he had spawned — I imagine this is the aspect of him we will come to miss the most. Heartening though it is to at last see a woman in the big chair in this most historically blokey of industries, I do not see much in Asha Sharma’s track record to suggest things are about to get better. (And that’s before we get into all the birthrater stuff.) So, yeah. Phil was a good bloke, and he did some good stuff. I believe his heart was in the right place right up until the end — but unfortunately for him, and the rest of us, Microsoft these days is no place for hearts. Let’s have a quick look at the three big moments where, to my mind, it all went wrong for Phil Spencer.
With new blockbusters taking longer and costing more than ever to make, and nostalgia never a more powerful currency, shuttering a proven specialist in remakes and remasters is frankly insane. Casting out a team of such deep technical expertise and, more crucially, such broad institutional knowledge — Bluepoint doesn’t just know its own tools and technology, but also those of the studios whose games it has modernised, from Sony Santa Monica to Naughty Dog, Team Ico to FromSoftware — is simply inexplicable. Pretending there’s nothing for Bluepoint to work on, when the market for remakes has never been bigger and the long-rumoured, widely coveted Bloodborne remake has reached Shenmue 3 levels of mythicism, is unbelievable. Everything about this decision, from top to bottom and viewed from any and every angle, is ridiculous, baffling, an affront.
A screenshot of a paragraph from the Hit Points newsletter that reads: Little remains of Meta’s VR-game acquisition spree, which began in 2020. Ready At Dawn was closed down in 2024, and Downpour Interactive followed last year. According to the in-the-know cats at UploadVR, Meta’s only remaining studios are Beat Games, maker of the colossally successful Beat Saber; BigBoxVR (me neither); whoever’s left at Camouflaj; and Ouro Interactive, which I’m not sure counts because it exclusively makes games for the Horizon Worlds legless-metaverse-thing. You do not need to put on a headset to see the writing on the wall, which is just as well because all the headsets are in cupboards or lofts or little storage boxes, and would need digging out and charging and who can be bothered with that? In a way, I suppose, that’s been VR gaming’s story all along.
When Tango and Arkane Austin got whacked last year, I called it cultural vandalism. This is too, of course, but I have a simpler description for it. This is loser shit. Phil Spencer has spent ten years and, at a conservative estimate, eighty billion dollars taking Xbox from last place to last place, and now the game is up he is systematically dismantling the largest and most powerful videogame business the world has ever seen like he’s on some anti-Brewster’s Millions shit, torching the legacies of endless cherished studios and game series while trying to convince us all that everything is going to plan. He is fucking useless and it is all absolutely pathetic, though that doesn't make it any easier to witness. A quarter of a century ago, Microsoft entered the videogame industry with an eye on global domination. Today it is merely a stain on it.
Keighley’s schtick these days is to clumsily retrofit some sort of kumbaya-ish narrative onto the paid-for parade of games he is about to show off. Last year, it was all about the indies, baby. This year it was discovery, peppered with a bizarre, factually suspect and, given the recent discourse around Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, thoroughly ill-advised fixation on developer team sizes. As Hit Points has pointed out several years in a row now, it is not Geoff’s fault that he has slimmer pickings at his summer showcases than he does at The Game Awards in December. There is so much more competition at this time of year. But I do wish he would stop trying to pretend that the vast majority of the games he shows off are there for any other reason than that they were available and their cheques have cleared. This year’s show portrayed a game industry dominated by anime gacha games, Soulslikes and extraction nonsense, and while there’s a degree of truth to that it’s not exactly something to crow about. Does the man have no taste, or does he simply not care? Judging by his choice of footwear, it’s probably a bit of both.
It's ante 20 in Balatro.