Microsoft bought more studios than they can oversee (they might be big but they are just one publisher) and now they are paying the price.
The problem isn't that Microsoft can't oversee their studios. They absolutely can. Remember, Microsoft didn't dissolve ABK or Zenimax when they bought them; they left the existing studio structures intact instead of integrating the studios into their existing structure. The real issue is that Microsoft's taken a light hand approach to studio management and basically let their studios do whatever they want. This wasn't by accident, it was intentional. It was a course correction because Microsoft took a lot of shit in the past for attempting to assimilate their studios to Microsoft and either running them into the ground or running them off. Microsoft's meddling was a massive complaint by Rare staff after Microsoft outbid Nintendo for them, and eventually precipitated a massive exodus of staff members. It was directly contrasted with Nintendo's more hands off approach in fact. Meanwhile, Bungie openly chaffed under Microsoft's attempts to force them to assimilate to Microsoft's corporate culture and actively fought against it, eventually culminating in the studio breaking away from Microsoft, even at the cost of losing control of its biggest franchise. Everything Microsoft's doing now has been a calculated attempt to avoid going back to that era, but its backfired.
The PS2 was the most used DVD player of all time to watch movies. PS3 is likely the most used Bluray player of all time in terms of watching movies on it. Then you factor in that those devices played games and you have the entire home media experience right there. There is a large demand for people to be able to watch movies and stream from video services on their console. It's one of the main ways that college students watch television shows, sports, or movies which is a huge market. One of the biggest selling points of these devices is that they are a home media center.
Stuff like forcing always online, removing physical media, forced camera integration and motion controls, and other nonsense helped kill Xbox for sure. But being able to watch movies and shows is a huge upside for owning these devices. The convenience of playing a game then watching a movie or television show all on the same device is great. Nothing else is needed.
While the media stuff is a popular use, lets be honest; its primarily because these consoles lack games, and most people who do own them are only playing a few titles, at best. So their greatest use is as a media machine. But them being media machines is not their selling point or the center of their marketing; its ancillary to their actual intended use. If it was a major selling point, both the Xbox and PS5 would have sold more consoles; instead, the Switch is the dominant console of this generation and will walk away the undisputed champion of it.
Turning consoles into media boxes isn't going to help them like the DVD player helped the PS2. The selling point of the PS2 wasn't that it was a DVD player, but that it was the
cheapest DVD player on the market at the time. It had no competition on that front, and that's what allowed it to dominate Japan, at the very least. The current consoles don't have that selling point. Everything they can do, a smart tv can do, and those are cheap. Don't want to buy a whole tv? There are little Google boxes that you can buy, like the Onn., right in Walmart, for the fraction of the price of a console. Or you can just get an Amazon Fire Stick. There's no reason to own a console just for media shit because any device can do what they do. Even your phone, tablet, or computer. Its not really a selling point. The people primarily using their consoles for that purpose are doing it
because they have nothing else better to do with them, because they aren't playing games.
When the Xbox One launched, it was highly castigated for focusing on the TV shit. Because that's not why you buy a console. You buy it for games. And by the time the console launched, it was not even worth discussing because so many other devices could already do what it could do, and they would soon be joined by dozens more. It wasn't actually a unique niche that Xbox could claim for itself, and it didn't wow people. Nobody cared.
