While MS does not have a monopoly on gaming the same pattern has taken place that Jobs explains in this video, and it is just so incredibly evident.
Jobs talks about product genius" and "product sensibility" being rotted out and sales and marketing taking over.
Anyone remember Robbie Bach and J Allard? The guys responsible for the OG Xbox and the 360? Driven out of the company and replaced with Mattrick and later, Phil Spencer. Product guys (look at Allard's resume) replaced with sales guys. Mark Cerny is a product person. There are obviously people in charge of gaming at Sony who care about making great games for their customers.
Listen very closely to Jobs' words, and listen to the whole thing. The parallels are shocking. I've echoed similar sentiments on this board. Spencer clearly doesn't understand games. If he did, he wouldn't have approved Battletoads to look as it did. He wouldn't exude so much confidence after so many years of empty promises. He wouldn't have been "proud" of this past week's Xbox showcase. He wouldn't think he's succeeding because Game Pass is slowly gaining users while their biggest IP is embarrassed on a global stage. This the big problem with Xbox. The people in charge don't even know how to turn things around.
Xbox fans should be mad as hell that the Xbox division is run by bean counters and sales folk and not by people who care about making great experiences. The reason it felt so much cooler during the OG Xbox and 360 days was because guys like Allard were heading up the efforts. Get rid of Spencer and bring in a person who loves to make and play games. Someone like Graeme Devine. John Carmack. Tim Schafer. I don't think any of those guys would do it, but I'm talking about someone who fits that mold.
You're making a lot of assumptions on how the division is managed and how they decide what is done/important. There really isn't a lot of marketing to it all. People watch podcasts, interviews and whatever and they take Phil or other peoples business talk and then they create sensationalized articles and people on here call it "marketing". Companies are never going to say something is bad or mediocre about themselves in the present or future. In the past, sure that happens more but not when you are trying to sell stuff. Even Sony says positive things when they had crap during the PS3 days.
There were many people in charge that cared about games. Even Don Mattrick was said to be a huge gamer. The people who left the xbox divison lately still post on Twitter all the games they play and whatever.
In regards to that battletoad example, there's nothing about being a gamer and liking/not-liking the art style. I'm a gamer and I think it looks great. You may not like it, most(?) fans of the franchise might not like it. But there's nothing about it that shows that if you like it you aren't a gamer.
Those two were not driven out of the company. I've read a Linkedin article from one of them a long time ago and he wanted to leave the company many times and then talks about wanting to do other stuff and work-life balance/family. Like even when the 360 was doing well, Peter Moore quit for personal reasons too. Founder of Naughty Dog and a bunch of other company founders often leave their company to do random other things too.
Gamers weren't ecstatic that his multimedia focuses but at the time making a $400 piece of hardware that has multi-core processors, internet connectivity and more ram than most devices under your TV to do more than just play games was arguably the intuitive decision. Sony was even trying to do the same thing, they just weren't making it a part of their E3 press conference. Being technical alone does not make you a great manager. Getting someone who understands the technical part will arguably give you better prospects but you need a balance.
People are upset Halo didn't blow them out of the water and upset that they weren't able to do which is make a baby in less than 9 months by using more women (and in Microsoft case the women are already pregnant). Microsoft should have something better for the launch. But it's not a problem you can fix by throwing money at it or just having better management.Things take time and efforts.
Phil also faced other problems where the new CEO basically wanted to sell off the Xbox division and wouldn't really give them extra money/resources to do things. It's like being in a rich family, and you try to start a business and you do a bunch of stupid things before which lower how much money you have to do new things as an individual so you only have what money you actually have because your parents want to disown you and don't want to give you any more money to be successful.
I'm not an "Xbox fan" I'm a gaming fan that wants everyone to be successful so I get better games, and I'm not mad. I do wish that Microsoft improves in certain areas, they aren't perfect. But the people getting mad for saying subjective things like "proud" and that they have "great" and "existing" things to show is absurd. Yeah you can think it's not exciting, but you shouldn't expect companies to be like we got some "mild announcements for you".
I think the problem with Microsoft is really their lack of technical people at the top/bottom and their lack of creative people at the bottom. They need more opinionated game designers/directors driving the individual games that result in better products. People like Cory Barlog. The other problem is that Microsoft needs a better business person at the top. Sony doesn't just bring value by producing everything themselves, they also bring a shit ton of value by locking timed or perpetuity deals. Microsoft is out of that game (so they say) and so the value to the consumer looks worse. People praise Sony for FF7, Death Stranding even though they don't make it and just paid so that you can't get it on other consoles. It's not because they have someone who understands games at the top. It's because they have a business person willing to strategically throw money at third parties like Don Mattrick used to do during the 360 and early Xbox One days (Ryse, Sunset, Dead Rising, Titanfall, etc.). They need technical people at the top that understand what kind of things need to be done so that all their studios can create games faster and provide a higher level of quality. Sony has many technical teams in I think it's called just Sony Studios now (worldwide studios) that help out all the studios get the best out of their games. The Sony ICE team who is arguably responsible for making Sony games look so great, is said to be hardcore tech people not hardcore games people (I can't find the article, might have been a gameinformer scan, but they said something along the lines of they were huge Linux nerds who like getting into the nitty gritty of everything to squeeze out performance). Mark Cerny isn't great because he makes good games or plays games. He's great because he's a technical person who understands what it takes to make a game, and can understand technical problems which he can then articulate with his business communication to communicate why it matters to the people making the ultimate decision for things related to hardware.
I don't think we need to get rid of Spencer, I think we need at least a more technical person advising him. Like how Mark Cerny got promoted and has more pull with Jim and all them. And he needs to be more of a shark. We also need a different strategy to expanding XGS. Most of the studios they bought also kind of suck IMO. I think that going forward they should build new studios so that they can poach the talent from other studios to run their new studio to built optimal teams from the ground up. You buy a company who has mediocre performance and hope that with money they will get better, and you hire new better people while leaving the leadership and everything below it in tact, then you are still stuck with all the mediocre employees and mediocre leadership. Maybe they'll work better with the funding but you don't want to improve low-potential employees you want every employee to be a rockstar developer (this is a term in development not referencing that company). Look at what Google is doing, they poach top talent and open up studios in development hot spots to attract talent.
