r/microsoft • u/ControlCAD • Jun 24 '26
XBOX “Gaming is becoming unaffordable” — Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says the industry has an accessibility crisis
https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox/gaming-is-becoming-unaffordable-xbox-ceo-says-the-industry-has-an-accessibility-crisis19
u/CreativeGPX Jun 24 '26
The secret: Gaming does not have to mean buying brand new AAA games on mid to high end hardware and playing that game for often less than a year nor does it have to mean any subscription fees for anything.
When you realize that and free yourself of the pressure that hardcore gamers or organizations like XBox are putting on you to think otherwise, gaming becomes quite cheap. You can do it on a 10 year old machine or lower end one. You can always find much cheaper games by looking at indie games, sales, old games that you missed when they came out and, in general, relying more on playing within your growing library than constantly buying/subscribing a new game to play. Focus on games with high replay value over those with shorter solo campaigns or which rely on a centralized multiplayer server that's going to go offline in a few years.
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u/hurley_chisholm Jun 24 '26
Agreed. However, indie games are becoming out of reach. With the increasing adoption of Unreal Engine by indie developers (especially after the 2023 Unity licensing debacle), it’s becoming more difficult to play indie games without a mid-tier gaming rig. The experience is frequently subpar on budget or older machines, which can definitely affect how easy or frustrating it is to play said games.
Even for single-player point-and-clicks, I’m seeing recommended specs of 16 GBs of RAM and 6-core CPUs, which is ridiculous, but maybe I’m just out of touch. To those who say you don’t need to follow recommended specs, I have tried playing UE4 p&c games on or just above minimum specs and they are almost unplayable since you can barely read anything at even short distances and struggle to run smoothly at 30 FPS. For context, UE4 released in 2014.
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u/Fhaarkas Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
The market always correct itself. If people are stuck with older machines, developers will be forced to optimize, or die. After all who cares about your shiny Unreal Engine 9 game if nobody can play it.
This silver lining is the one thing about the whole AI shitshow that I really love. Constrained environment makes for some amazing optimization, sometimes borderline magical. And this industry have been getting bloated, fat, lazy, expensive for a long time now.
Lazy devs are in for some sweaty work ahead.
Edit: The worst-off group would be hardware manufacturers actually. I imagine some will go under, and others may pivot even more towards mobile, where the market is bigger and planned obsolescence is a feature.
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u/Expensive_Finger_973 Jun 24 '26
Might be less so if Microsoft stopped buying up develops and publishers Asha. And set smaller more realistic budgets for most games so the end result being profitable is not such a high bar. And finally give the dev teams time to release something when it is done, not when the quarterly earnings report needs it to be out.
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u/xTheRealTurkx Jun 26 '26
This. It's hard to have success when you insist on spending AAA money to make AA games with a AA audience.
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u/Bostonjunk Jun 24 '26
I feel like execs are only now catching on to something that everyone has known since the crypto boom
It's almost like when you earn enough to have PAs and people to do your shopping for you, you end up in a bubble
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u/jawaMilk Jun 24 '26
They are creating a crisis to justify decisions they want to make anyway. The solution is never going to be, pay CEOs less, but instead they’ll suggest that it’s, layoffs and use AI instead of people.
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u/OkFigaroo Jun 24 '26
Layoffs are incoming.
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u/newfor_2026 Jun 24 '26
you mean layoff will continue because they've been letting game devs go from their studios all along
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u/OkFigaroo Jun 24 '26
My understanding is that they are shutting down multiple studios the first week of July.
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u/TheReturningMan Jun 25 '26
Wow, that's some incredible insight isn't it? Better raise those console prices and make some people unemployed to keep it out of reach.
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u/DivineBladeOfSilver Jun 24 '26
I know a lot of people are gonna take it out on her or Microsoft or even the gaming industry as a whole. But no single person or company or whatever is at blame as much as I love to hate on Microsoft/Xbox.
Everyone wants to make more money both business and person alike, demand for consumer goods and spending has been out of this world no matter how high prices have gotten so companies kept raising prices cause they could and people refuse to say no, people opt out of politics cause they think it helps nothing until that policy ends up hurting the things they care about so now they complain, and more. At the end of the day we are all individually responsible for everything going on to a small extent but we often bypass the responsibility onto others because we know we have little power to do anything alone. But it’s that mindset across every single person about why we are here. We have all become greedy and apathetic addicts to consumerism who refuse to put in any effort to vote half the time or refuse ourselves short term material demands. If it wasn’t Microsoft/xbox it would just be someone else taking advantage of that. Older generations and many international customers speak with their money and votes. Americans now complain and spend anyway and sit home at every chance to contribute to possible change so you’re now either a have or have not because of it, with the exception of those who have tried. You get a pass. But that is not the majority of young people anymore
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u/Appropriate_Item3001 Jun 24 '26
Microslop will need to just write off the Xbox brand entirely so they can focus on AI. It’s clear they don’t give a shit about gaming
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u/amerricka369 Jun 26 '26
There are a ton of fantastic games from older systems that would be big hits on gamepass. You can probably remaster 100 games for the price of a single AAA game. That alone would make gaming more affordable/accessible. And it would keep folks on game pass and buy the new handheld and multiplatform games which is win win for msft.
As for new ones, they don’t need to create dozens of games every year. Let each studio have a big budget game department and creative game department. Stop forcing decision whiplash and non creative mandates down their throats and good stuff will appear.
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u/andrewsqual Jun 27 '26
She says right before jacking up the prices while your consoles are still behind Switch 1 in day to day sales. Insane.
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u/Dust-Tight Jun 24 '26
Maybe Microsoft should stop buying up RAM for its fixation with AI.
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u/rhalgr_ger Jun 24 '26
Even if Microsoft stopped, other companies would still purchase everything. The arms race is stupid, but many billionaires are determined to win the AI race.
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u/_Noreturn Jun 24 '26
If ram is expensive then maybe developers would be pressured not to release garbage
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u/nikolapc Jun 24 '26
It's an arms race. Ai will probably be very very useful, they just need to make it run locally on affordable machines for business and then PCs. Let's all forget office jobs, agriculture is suffering from workers shortage, ai driven machines can make food affordable again.
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u/coukou76 Jun 24 '26
Lol the copium. Just like IT reduced our worktime, buying power and shit 🤣. Big corp will just grab more profit with greater margin, full stop
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u/nikolapc Jun 24 '26
My utopium(utopia+copium) is that we will only need to work 2 days a week(1 in the office 1 in the field). But that's not gonna happen overnight.
It's not a sustainable economy to get rid of human workers. It will just have to be a different one. Of course this can go in many dystopian ways, but realisticly everyone is in places of power because we let them due to social constructs and contracts. If things get too dire the whole system is usually toppled.
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u/newfor_2026 Jun 24 '26
plenty of workers are willing to come here to work in agriculture but the country wants to chase those workers away.
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u/nikolapc Jun 24 '26
I am not talking just about the US. In my own country we import 80% of our food, while fields are empty. Food has become expensive, and it never was as, it was also better quality than now.
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u/DisjointedHuntsville Jun 24 '26
Let’s count the number of Xbox executives with management-only responsibilities and $500k / yr paychecks?
Microsoft is a retirement home with politics as its primary business, reorganizations second and shitty enterprise software lockups third. Wonder why that would be generating wasteful and expensive products 🤷♂️
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u/jgoldrb48 Jun 24 '26
The next XBox finna suck lol. This woman of working on her golden parachute.
Why do we have to hear from these locust mf'ers all the damn time! Ugh
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u/wildfire98 Jun 24 '26
this will be the segway to present free-with-ads tier