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Note that this post was written shortly after seeing the News so it's likely modestly incoherent, and only given the most basic of editing pass. As always, hopefully there's enough meat for discussion.
Link to article below, but today I was greeted by an IGN article titled:
That in the same breath IGN and Microsoft feel the need to announce Matt Booty's promotion, is... indicative of how they perceive the public reception of this announcement. Kiwi Farmers are likely feeling vindicated, and potentially mounting despair, as even under the most anti-DEI culture we've had in ages, a man retires and is replaced by a woman, chosen by the venerable Satya Nadella.
IGN provides this quote:
Now, I'm going to ignore all the fluff as it was incredibly well-prepared and likely approved by multiple PR people to have the just-right wording. I am be tempted to ask Satya: What was the point of letting (or directing) the closing of all those existing, profitable studios? You wouldn't need to back these ideas. Xbox has historically been a money-printer and the most present in consumers' minds, the one people would argue on forums and reddit and making youtube videos for days defending your honor? Such that even fanboys are rapidly admitting the rot has occurred under your feet?
And now, Gamers are left with shit on plates and eating it over the last 5 years, as Microsoft has done everything they can to push the limits of their fans' loyalties.
Xbox was already struggling under the thumbs of Phil Spencer, someone that actually enjoyed and was from gaming and gamer culture. Whether or not normies are going to Notice these canned and prepared responses and coincidental promotion alongside her remains to be actually seen, but even worse: the woman appears to have comparable-or-less Gamer Credentials than Zoe Quinn, so Sharma has to tap another person to be the internal "voice" of games. Probably already being talked about on one of the chans at any rate, so I'll leave that discourse to Those Places for the time being.
That said, unless I am blind and failed my reading comprehension like an average "Gamer", as far as I can tell, Sharma has done basically nothing related to games or gaming throughout her career. So the open-ended question is: why would Satya take that risk despite the general consumer climate?
Again, another quote:
So yes, I'm sure consumers, who have been finally pushed off the edge onto switching off windows, and upset that they literally cannot afford gaming hardware any more are extremely excited for the lady that put Copilot into notepad.exe and the beleagured and oft-derided Microsoft Recall.
Satya really loves his wordsoup that's for sure.
Loose thoughts that don't fit anywhere else in this already-eclectic post, and may be duplicated:
Notably, as far as I can read she does not have any qualifications or past interest in gaming.
Seems that Satya wants more wordsalad and wordsoup to throw at consumers to sound like they're Super Advanced and Definitely Things Will Get Better. Watch for more wordsoupification of the Xbox and microsoft gaming division.
More push into renting in order to play games.
CoreAI is one of Microsoft's largest money-sinks in the company-- they have done their absolute best not to discuss the cost vs revenue during earning calls.
Having been at both Meta and Instacart and head over the CoreAI department, means Sharma has some credible credentials toward running large teams and driving some level of product.
The incessant ai push means microsoft has gobs of compute, and gamers are being starved of what little compute they did have access to even a year ago
At any rate, if you're a capital-G Gamer, the sign was on the wall, but if you're actually invested in the future of the hobby, you probably want to migrate off Xbox before your xbox turns into an diffusion-ran agenticifed gas town, maximizing memory, entitlements, and workflows for such world-changing ideas as Microsoft has clearly been driving forward with such ... vision.
Hot on her heels is talk of more Indian fraud:
https://x.com/givemebanhammer/status/2025525203762073950
This behavior from microsoft and sharma makes it incredibly difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt in any capacity.
The people bringing up "wokeness is the real enemy" is darkly ironic, as if whites are not watching a DEI hire be chosen over someone with plausible credentials.
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Ok, the fact that she shared an obviously staged Xbox account is a hilarious unforced error, like Elizabeth Warren getting the genetic ancestry test. They realize she has a perception problem, but instead of just... ignoring it, as one of the most powerful corporations in the world, they insisted on trying to appeal to it. They legitimately could go, "she's not from gaming, but she's a good leader, and we think she's the best for the role," but instead they have to try to make up word salad about gaming passion and fabricate a record of gaming. Gamers are going to hate Microsoft no matter what they do, it's just in the culture, why are they trying to appeal to them? Make some good games and it won't matter whether a trained seal is in charge of the gaming division.
Well, exactly, and (to put on my armchair psychologist hat) this makes Sharma seem so much worse. There’s been a bunch of talk on the less salubrious corners of the Internet about the concept of “izzat”, an Indian cultural practice whereby faking credentials is seen as just as good as having the credentials because the real merit, to the Indian psyche, is in Dedication To The Facade, not in the distinction between facade and the reality. For an izzat-brained Indian, setting up a fake account is the smart, meritorious move, because it proves your hustle, your dedication to fake it until you make it, your savvy use of shortcuts, which is better than putting in the leg work like a chump and actually having achievements.
Ignoring a bunch of basement-dwelling no-life babies until they go away is not possible to a person who got where they are due to izzat, because she knows that spiritually, she is also a basement-dwelling no-life baby. Which might explain why she got her little brother to fake her account, idk.
I agree with this and think it applies even more broadly to a global personality type beyond just the sub-continent.
This shares an interesting with the Elon Musk Diablo controversy. The TLDR is that Elon went on Joe Rogan and randomly mentioned how he was ranked in the Top 10 of all online Diablo players. The internet rightly immediately went "lol. whut? How does the CEO of like 5 different mega companies have time to grind Diablo?" The ONLY way to get that high of a ranking is to grind. There is no giga-brained shortcut. You have to put in the hours. The immediate conclusion was that he was paying someone to ghost-play his account to boost ratings.
Well, Elon wanted to shut up the haterz and so live-streamed himself playing. It went as well as you would expect. A bunch of actual Diablo mega-grinders immediately pointed out tactics that Elon used that were dead giveaways that he didn't know what he was doing. IIRC, Elon eventually admitted that he did pay someone to grind for him.
Why in the hell would a literal centi-billionaire care so much about online video game rankings? Isn't it just enough to be the (future) Prince of Mars, the face of American rocketry, and to have had 14 - maybe 100 kids?
Elon and this Sharma lady both suffer from a personality deficiency where they don't actually model social esteem systems well. When a value system is totally objective and external - profit and less, share value, rocket re-use cost - their Autism engines get a turbo boost. But when it's more interpersonally subjective and based on relative-social status within niches (video games or, perhaps, dancing being excellent examples) they lose all bearing. I think it literally flips the "flight or fight" level of anxiety and they reflexively react by trying to "do the thing" at the same level of all-or-nothing that the dedicate to their primary pursuits.
These people don't have a real interpersonal or social core. The "sense of self" in a very immediate flesh and blood way isn't there. This is part of the genesis of the "Musk is an alien" memes. When he was on SNL he opined he may have autism or asperger's (self-diagnosed). Perhaps, but color be doubtful. I don't think it has anything to do with "brain chemistry" (a term I loathe) or even real-deal mental health (i.e. BPD, MDD, Schizo-class disorders). Instead, it's a socially rooted character underdevelopment that never was addressed precisely because they were hyper-indexing on whatever optimization problem was in front of them.
Elon musk and Ms. Sharma know that the piles of money they make are valuable because money can be exchanged for goods and services but they fail to make the domain transition and realize that having lots and lots and lots of money also creates real social value (and, if deployed correctly, political value as well. Musk has tried to do this but keeps fucking up because he truly doesn't get politics or government. His DOGE failure should be more heavily highlighted, IMHO).
As @urquan says, gamers are never going to "vibe" with MSFT because MSFT is an evil corporation that kills all the good games. And also makes them too, or whatever. The point is that the point isn't getting gamers to "like" you but to buy your products. Musk doesn't understand that Chinese EV buyers don't actually care if you can dance so long as you can sell them fucking robot EVs. These people aren't real because they don't conceive of themselves as totally human.
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If she was not a public figure I would assume that save files from non-Xbox-account-registered copies of the games were imported. But the CEO of Xbox can't very well say she's been playing pirated games, can she?
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