Breaking Microsoft's Year Of Shame

Can't make a few trillion dollars without ditching game developers, going googoo gaga for AI and supplying tech to the military, I suppose!

The last ember of optimism in my subconscious wants me to believe that by putting the four words above in sequence, shouted in 30pt font, the truth of it has already rung out in your mind. You don't need the impassioned argument about how Microsoft is the shameful poster child for just how contemptible an American megacorp can be in the year 2025. You don't need me to muster every bit of evidence I can find, because even if you don't remember each step in the bleak parade you can recall the shape of the march.

Or maybe that's just the end-of-year fugue trying to convince me it's already past time I surrendered to the sugar coma and don't have to do any more work. Who can say? Either way, when you chalk up this many Ls in a single year, I don't think the passing shame of a single week's news cycle can do the whole picture justice. For as much criticism as Microsoft has gotten this year for closing game studios like Arkane, for pivoting Windows away from the kind of software that has a fun hot dog stand color scheme to a bloated whale carcass that even non-techies are considering ditching in favor of Linux, it deserves more.

Microsoft's leadership will no doubt point to the stock price as proof 2025 was a great year for the company. Call me crazy, but I feel like profiting while laying off talent, making your products materially worse, and firing your own employees for protesting your morally bankrupt deals with a bloodthirsty military is a bad look, actually! But get that bag I guess.

Has it become passé yet, pointing out that the things executives say in their work messaging fall somewhere between "detached from reality" and "outright deranged?" I think you can see Spencer grappling with this in the memo he sent internally, when he wrote: "I recognize that these changes come at a time when we have more players, games, and gaming hours than ever before. … The success we're seeing currently is based on tough decisions we've made previously."

I guess that's what I'd try to tell myself as I closed The Initiative and canceled Perfect Dark, binned Rare's Everwild and a shooter being made by John Romero, and axed an MMO that I apparently thought was awesome! Just some real tough decisions, super tough, but necessary. No way around them.

What else was I going to do: Not spend half a decade consolidating half the gaming i

Source: PC Gamer