Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra says Xbox should decide what its identity should be going forwards, instead of trying to be a jack of all trades.
Ybarra, who served various roles at Xbox [9,984 articles]” href=”https://www.videogameschronicle.com/platforms/xbox/”>Xbox Live and Xbox Game Pass) before becoming
Ybarra was later asked by a follower whether he knew anything about the Xbox layoffs reportedly planned for this week, but he stressed that he knew “nothing about what is going on there and haven’t for years”.
Ybarra’s comments follow those of former Microsoft Game Studios employee Laura Fryer, who recently shared her thoughts on the company’s current direction on her YouTube channel, stating her view that Xbox’s recent partnerships with external hardware companies like Asus, Meta and AMD leads her to believe its own hardware business is effectively “dead”.
“Obviously, as one of the founding members of the Xbox team, I’m not pleased with where things are today. I don’t love watching all of the value that I helped create slowly get eroded away,” she said.
“I’m sad because from my perspective, it looks like Xbox has no desire or literally can’t ship hardware anymore. So this [ROG Ally] partnership is about a slow exit from the hardware business completely.”
Microsoft has adopted a multiplatform approach for its first-party games, with many titles now releasing for committed to releasing a next-generation Xbox console to succeed PC [11,229 articles]” href=”https://www.videogameschronicle.com/platforms/pc/”>PC-like device with access to multiple stores remains to be seen.