Thomas Mahler, developer of Ori and the Blind Forest, recently criticised the Game Pass model, arguing that the service could have worked if the catalogue had been strong enough to make players happily pay every month. His harsher point was that Xbox needed to understand what players actually want, rather than pushing out mediocre content like a factory. It is a brutal criticism, but it points to a deeper design problem: content volume does not create player desire by itself...
The most interesting part of Xbox hiring Matthew Ball and Scott Van Vliet isn’t the individual appointments themselves. It’s what those appointments represent. For years, the games industry operated under a relatively stable assumption: bigger budgets, bigger subscriptions, bigger acquisitions, bigger ecosystems. Scale was the strategy. That strategy is now under pressure. Xbox bringing in industry analyst Matthew Ball as chief strategy officer and former Azure OpenAI infrastructure lead Scott Van Vliet as CTO signals something important: Microsoft no longer sees the current games market as a straightforward growth problem. It sees it as a structural problem. And honestly, that’s probably accurate...
