Looks like they’ve cancelled the Perfect Dark reboot as well.
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Comment posted by Arkane Studios founder Raphael Colantonio:
I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade, subsidized by MS’s “infinite money”, but at some point reality has to hit. I don’t think GP can co-exist with other models, they’ll either kill everyone else, or give up.
— Raphael Colantonio (@rafcolantonio) July 5, 2025
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Aftermath picks up from Colantonio’s Tweet above in the following article.
“I think Game Pass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade, subsidized by [Microsoft’s] ‘infinite money,’ but at some point reality has to hit,” he wrote on Twitter. “I don’t think GP can co-exist with other models; they’ll either kill everyone else or give up.”
Microsoft has proven hesitant to publicly admitwhat common sense would infer to be true: Games included in a relatively cheap – though increasingly expensive – subscription package sell less. Microsoft, meanwhile, insists that Game Pass is at least profitable on its own terms, but Colantonio believes otherwise.
“Game Pass is only [profitable] if you ignore the 100 billions that MS spent in acquiring content for GP such as Zenimax and Activision,” he wrote.
The Game Business’ Chris Dring added another layer to this dynamic: “I asked for clarification on the ‘Game Pass is profitable’ claim, and was told no first-party costs are included,” he wrote on Twitter. “What they don’t count is the lost revenue that Xbox’s first-party studios are seeing as a result of the service. I have to imagine if first-party studios received similar compensation [to third-party studios on Game Pass], that profitability might not be correct.”
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So basically they are bullshitting everyone. Who’d have thought? I always felt GP was a scam, guess I was right.
It’s funny/ sad to see the evolution of opinion on Phil Spector from the saviour of MS/ games to the harbinger of its destruction.
Shame the article is behind a pay wall, would have liked to read the whole thing.
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If you use the reader mode in your browser you can read the whole thing. While I advocate for Aftermath subscriptions, if you’re only reading one article it’s fair to use the reader function.
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Ah, didn’t think of that. Thanks.
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A Microsoft employee has drawn criticism for sharing a widely-ridiculed AI image to advertise empty roles on Xbox's graphics team.The image, which features a woman sat at a computer typing code — shown on the rear of the monitor, rather than its screen — is clearly made by AI. Accompanying text states: “Xbox Graphics Is Hiring”.
Reaction to the post, which went live on LinkedIn over the weekend and is still available at the time of writing, is a mixture of bafflement and outright anger — with many responses criticising the “embarrassing” quality of the image, and the timing of the post, just weeks after mass layoffs at Xbox as Microsoft doubles down on AI.
"Do you think this image communicates 'this is a company where we value people who can make stuff look good?'," wrote a fellow Microsoft staff member.“Posting this days after MS laid off 9,000 folks in gamedev, while including an AI-generated image wherein the monitor is backwards… like, dude, read the room,” wrote an employee at Meta.
“This st is just embarrassing. AI gutter-slop image (THE SCREEN IS ON THE BACK OF THE MONITOR) to advertise a graphics post," wrote a Ubisoft employee. "Do. Fking. Better.”
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This post is an Xbox.
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I was really looking forward to that game becasue i loved the trailer!
Yeah, it sucks. I’m still smarting over Scalebound (even if the protag came across as an insufferable doosh 
)
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Microsoft CEO Comments On Recent Xbox Layoffs, Doubles Down On AI
TL;DR -
From
"Before anything else, I want to speak to what’s been weighing heavily on me, and what I know many of you are thinking about: the recent job eliminations. These decisions are among the most difficult we have to make. They affect people we’ve worked alongside, learned from, and shared countless moments with—our colleagues, teammates, and friends.
to
“To deliver on our mission, we need to stay focused on our three business priorities: security, quality, and AI transformation. We are doubling down on the fundamentals while continuing to define new frontiers in AI.”
Yeah, piss off mate.
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Business-to-English translation:
'These are the decisions that people will judge us on, and rightly so. But we make them anyway because we don’t give a damn. Please don’t hurt me, because the only difficult thing is getting away with it and convincing you that we actually care. MUHAHAHAHA!"
And:
‘These layoffs affect people we robbed of their lifetime, as well as their physical and mental health, in exchange for very little. Now, we’re throwing them away with a handshake and the tiniest severance package the law allows, while expecting them to thank us for our best wishes for their future, where AI bots will prevent them from getting hired anywhere.’
These speeches are definitely AI-written because, if you compare them, they use the same words 99% of the time. What changes is the buzzword: currently, it’s AI. In the past, it was ‘meta’ or ‘NFTs’ or ‘games as a service’. That’s how you can tell which year the speech is from. You still can’t tell which corporation it’s from, though, because they’re interchangeable.
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“Here at [insert any giant corporation here], we believe very strongly in magic beans, to the point it might be a little unhealthy. (laughs) We have spent 450,000,000,000,000,000,000 dollars on the magic beans, and will soon start earning some money from them probably, somehow. We hate all our human workers, the planet Earth, and basically everything to be honest—except money and magic beans. And the magic beans will definitely get us a lot of money someday. I guess it doesn’t matter either way though, I’m already obscenely rich. Is this interview over? I’ve got to spend more money on the magic beans.” - Every CEO this past year, as far as I’m aware.
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Personally it won’t affect me as I never use the social aspects anyway.
I don’t think age verification is a bad thing in principal, it’s just that the data is never going to be safe. There is no way a government or company anywhere in the world can 100% assure people the data will not be hacked, stolen, or misused in any way. Even the local council of my town gets cyber attacked. It’s just impossible to ensure safety of people’s data which is the main issue IMO.
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There are ways of age verification that store nothing. It is easily done for countries that have actual passports. That the US hasn’t is the problem and that’s why facial recognition and alike might be used which are terrible. But passports are seen as evil while at the same time orange man wants everyone to walk around with wearables that can track them even more than their phones already do, while they post reviews on google of all places they visit and personal pictures of everything they do or eat… This timeline is so messed up. On top people giving away their DNA for free “to find out if they are 12.8 % German” … I will never get that one, it is so, so American.
I was saying that Steam needs proper age verification since I have my account (14 years now) and was stumped that I did not have to verify my age when I made it.
I just got a new sim card from a new phone provider. The verification process took 5 minutes online, nothing got stored, just a flag got set. I could have done it by visiting a post office in person and showing my ID too if I did not want to trust an online service. It just takes a few hours longer to have the flag set that way. I would not use facial recognition or finger prints.
Amazon verified my age by my bank, because they have seen me in person and verified my age for them. Again no information was stored that Amazon didn’t already have, the bank just proofed I did not lie about my age.
Age verification needs to become a thing and people need to educate themselves on how to do it with the least risk involved and stay away from services who use this as a way of collecting data that is unnecessary.
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The US takes after the UK on this regard, with a deeply dystopian level of unethical surveillance. Not surprising for two “free countries” currently making it illegal to hold certain opinions or support certain marginalized groups. All the better to track and index the people who oppose the current governments’ fascist policies.
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I wasn’t aware of the passport thing, but I remember in the UK when the idea of a national ID card was bounced around. It wasn’t going to hold any more info than a driving license, but could have been used for stuff such as this age verification thing.
People went madder than a box full of chooks over it. “My privacy” this and “stealing my data” that. Thing was, all these dinlos were posting this over Facebook and other social media.
But because of that backlash, the card never happened and now we’re stuck with this crap middle ground system
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