A brief glimmer of hope in the early days of the 360 aside, I've always considered Microsofts involvement in the gaming industry as a harmful one.
There are of course stories of healthy, successful partnerships and masterpieces of gaming that have come out of them, but the whole company, not just the Xbox division, has a sordid history of out of control egos, petty selfishness and toxic, incompetent or often even deliberately malicious mismanagement.
I've said it before, but what sets Sony, MS and Nintendo apart more than anything when it comes to games is their backgrounds as companies, and how it affects their attitudes toward the medium.
Sony has a history of providing entertainment, and building products that convey artistic mediums to people in an at least luxurious feeling manner. Their creative output in film, TV, and particularly music shaped the PlayStation devision, and Sony has always treated game developers as commercial artists, and embraced the more experimental and speculative side of gaming because of it.
Nintendo is of course a toy company. Play is at the heart of what they see as games purpose, and while that has often limited their scope and style, means they end up supporting many small developers with just a fun idea and themselves churn out well crafted, fun, family friendly titles at a constant rate.
And then there's Microsoft.
The software giant, the only real name in PC's to most of the planet, the ruthless cut throat business that sees everything as a disposable software product to be sold on a platform they can control people's access to, where programmers are a dime a dozen, bullying, intimidation and personal egos have always been actively encouraged by upper management, and they're always chasing the next big thing that will replace what came before it and maximise their profit margins.
Microsoft are not in gaming for anything other than profit. Sure, it drives Sony and Nintendo too, but there's an underlying understanding that, whether it's as an art form or a toy, there's a fundamental relationship relationship between the creator and the consumer in games that goes beyond a simple numbers game of product to profit that MS simply lacks.
Apple are another example of the same. Apple have made it clear, time and again, that they do not give the slightest shit about gaming beyond what money it makes them. They've cultivated a toxic environment on mobile that lets festering free to pay, whale focused, addictive, low brow, race to the bottom shovelware drown out quality in favour of maximising revenue.
And the only difference between Apple and Microsoft, is that Apple are better at managing their brand image, and they don't feel the need to bother putting on a song and dance with their own gaming division to pretend they're an active, willing participant in the creative process.
Microsoft are never going to get, or even respect games. Individuals at the Xbox offices, sure, but the company itself, the people holding the purse strings and setting policy, they're what matters, and they will only ever have their own interests at heart, and those will always be at odds with what is undeniably a creative medium, and you'd have to be blind to not see all the evidence of that over the course of Xbox's history, Scalebound, and its ramifications for Platinum, are just the latest example, and won't be the last.
