One thing that has gotten lost in the noise of Xbox One's marketing mishap and the targeting of Mattrick is perhaps his history as a true entrepreneur.
While it hasn't shown so lately, Don does come from a grassroots background in gaming as a former 17 year old co-founder and programmer of Distinctive Software in 1982. His company was acquired by EA which likely put him on the path to executive level success. A kind of exit that some founders dream about.
It's easy to make a judgement and discredit or target him but I do believe he has genuine passion for gaming and hopefully he can infuse some of that in a place like Zynga.
Passion for gaming is great. He has a /lot/ of that.
However: Not a very good technical leader, extremely isolated from the troops (even the principal ones who are designing the new products) which badly affected direction and morale, and very bad at messaging (which I suspect is the /real/ reason he's going).
> and very bad at messaging (which I suspect is the /real/ reason he's going).
Was not he the guy who pushed for Kinect? I am not aware much about MS's internal politics but the timeline seems to match.
If so, then the real reason, in my humble opinion, is this:
Microsoft is now about to fight for the 8th generation with an underpowered yet $100 more expensive console.
When I was a PM for Xbox, I had the opportunity to sit down and have lunch with both Don Mattrick and his predecessor, Robbie Bach. Both were incredible tech leaders with a long history in gaming and a clear passion for the industry.
Moreover, people really liked Don. He was a leader that the division really rallied behind, and Xbox had its first profitable year under him. I'm excited to see what he can do with Zynga. I do find the transition a bit ironic due to his history at EA and EA's newly formed rivalry with Zynga.
I strongly believe that Bach was forced out after the incidents with Courier and the Kin. In the same suit, I have a deep suspicion that Mattrick also felt the heat from the Xbox One debacles. Best of luck to him in his new role.
A company specialized in (not so good) ports on virtually anything they could port stuff on. There were tons of companies doing ports at the time, and Distinctive Software wasn't the best one, that's for sure.
Mattrick has quite a nice background and he was a developer early on who worked on some fun titles, loads of credits at MobyGames (http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,15...) mostly as an executive now. He was at EA for a long time. Headed up the Kinect effort. I wonder if packaging it with XBone (pricing) and the recent PR and backsliding was part of this.
This is strange though, Windows 8 launches and Sinofsky is gone. Then Xbox One set to launch and Mattrick goes.
It's not like their PR campaigns went well in both cases, did they? Windows 8 still fails to impress, and Mattrick was one of the backers of the "repeated online checks" that was cancelled by Microsoft recently following Internet/gamers pressure.
I am far from impressed by Mattrick's legacy within Microsoft. He clearly failed to differentiate their offering vs Sony.
With what little info we have, this seems actually like a good move. Part of Zynga's core problem is that their games are frequently more psycological tweakery than legitimately rewarding or fun.
Importing someone who comes from "real" gaming seems like a good move in this regard. Hopefully this means Zynga intends to move towards "fun games with microtransactions" and away from "pretty one-armed bandits with microtransactions".
What does the head of the Xbox division have to do with the fun factor of the games? I would understand this comment if we were talking about the head of Bioware or Blizzard, but this guy seems pretty far removed the actual games.
Xbox One, real gaming? A machine that was going to lock all your gaming purchases down, so you couldn't even share your physical discs with friends? A company that charged $10,000 for patches—even trivial ones fixing serious, game-breaking bugs?
Microsoft's gaming division has become the definition a "pretty one-armed bandit with microtransactions", and no doubt thanks to Mattrick.
>so you couldn't even share your physical discs with friends?
Yeah, what assholes, instead they made it so you don't have to screw around with physical media and can instead share your games with 10 of your friends around the world without having to deal with a disc.
Also, they just removed that update fee.
Besides, bitching about the Xbox One's distribution model is kinda overdone at this point.
Yeah, what assholes, instead they made it so you don't have to screw around with physical media and can instead share your games with 10 of your friends around the world without having to deal with a disc.
Well, to be fair, there was nothing really concrete about their plans. And now that they've changed their minds they can talk big about how awesome it would have been. But I seriously doubt the end result would have amazing as everyone claimed it would have been.
Those details (that I mentioned) were fully disclosed before they changed their policies, obviously.
It's not Microsoft's fault that reddit blew up in a circle-jerk of misinformation. Granted, they could have marketed it better and made that story clearer.
I'll post this again, from an interview taken on June 10th.
[Phil] Spencer: But we're also trying to launch and we understand feature sets. We've got partners and publishers [we] want to talk to about how lending is going to work. We don't dictate pricing to our partners on our platform. We want to give them capabilities to support content and business models that they want to support with their content. It sounds like Sony is trying to do the same thing. How do we support what our partners want to do? We want to have the conversations with them and land on a plan.
We understand lending and the benefits of lending, so, funny videos aside, we get it. We want to make sure we land on the right solution that fits a digital ecosystem moving forward.
If you think about lending in digital ecosystems, it's not something a lot of other people have supported. We're going to commit... gifting, we said we're going to support that, secondary market we're going to support that even though the license is digital and it's not as trivial as just handing a disc to someone else. Lending, we want to do it, we want to work with our partners to make it possible.
Kotaku: You understand, obviously, that because these things exist on discs, it's why it seems so odd that—you're not launching until November—since I would think I can lend you this notebook and discs, surely I could do the same, but you guys are saying that you won't have the lending solution.
Spencer: We don't have a lending solution today.
Kotaku: You might have one?
Spencer: We don't have a path... I don't want to make a commitment to somebody without a plan of record on how that lands. I could over-promise, under-deliver on the features. I don't want to do that. I want to make sure. I understand how gifting is going to work. I understand how the secondary market is going to work.
From Phil Spencer's own mouth, sharing was never an actual feature of the XBox One.
That whole article that you link to is about the Share with 10 Family Members feature, leading me to conclude that "lending" in that sentence is explicitly physical lending and... you know... from the context directly around it, reselling used games.
>Xbox One will enable new forms of access for families. Up to ten members of your family can log in and play from your shared games library on any Xbox One.
That's a concrete statement from MS and one they made numerous times. And they more or less say "yes, we don't care who the 10 people actually are".
I mean, come on, did we both read the same block of text? It is extremely explicit at the end about being physical lending.
Saying "we don't care who the 10 people are" is a world of difference from "there are no restrictions on the 10 people you can share with." It is not implementation details that are defined in a contract. It is not information.
And again, Spencer was talking about "lending in a digital ecosystem." The thing Microsoft did not have concrete plans for. Yes, he mentioned they have a plan for gifting games, they have a plan for reselling games, but he contrasted this with the difficulty of, and their lack of plan for lending games.
Yeah I guess it's moot now, but at this point I always interpret a lack of specifics when talking about a product as marketing speak. We have fact sheets, we have plenty of discreet, unambiguous information of other features; when somebody goes out of the way to hype up a feature of a product while painstakingly avoiding concrete, verifiable information about said feature, and verifiable information about said feature doesn't appear in the previously mentioned fact sheets, I assume the feature doesn't actually exist yet. Especially when an executive goes on to literally say the feature doesn't exist.
I took the references to the "notebook and disks" in the critical section of that interview to be implication of physical disc trading/lending but I understand what you're saying.
"Give your family access to your entire games library anytime, anywhere: Xbox One will enable new forms of access for families. Up to ten members of your family can log in and play from your shared games library on any Xbox One. Just like today, a family member can play your copy of Forza Motorsport at a friend’s house. Only now, they will see not just Forza, but all of your shared games. You can always play your games, and any one of your family members can be playing from your shared library at a given time."
"Let's take this guy who has been recently reviled by the gaming community and hire him at our company that has always been reviled by the gaming community! It's a perfect culture fit!"
Interesting. It seems a lot of "potential Ballmer successors" have been let go from Microsoft in the past few years, from Ray Ozzie to Sinofsky, and now this one, too.
Did that hold up after the One debacle that lead to a total about face? And he was at least part of it, with comments like "if you can't take advantage of the xbox one, we have a solution for you. The xbox 360" (not exact wording but you get the point).
I could very much imagine the whole mess costing him a lot within MS and leading to him looking to go somewhere else and start over.
Looks like Pincus is staying around though, which seems odd. If the board is unhappy with his performance (and rightfully so), wouldn't starting fresh be a better move?
If you have very little data about a situation, and then start reasoning using only that bit of data, it's very likely you'll get a different result from those who have hundreds of times more data.
Pincus already cashed out and has enough money to live a lavish, comfortable lifestyle. Having someone else take on the task of turning around a publicly held company on a day to day basis is probably very appealing to him. Not to mention, Wall Street likes seeing this type of behavior from companies performing poorly.
Even in a somewhat controversial/borderline-hostile CEO replacement by the board, the ex-CEO often retains some sort of position in the company (say, a seat on the Board)
While it hasn't shown so lately, Don does come from a grassroots background in gaming as a former 17 year old co-founder and programmer of Distinctive Software in 1982. His company was acquired by EA which likely put him on the path to executive level success. A kind of exit that some founders dream about.
It's easy to make a judgement and discredit or target him but I do believe he has genuine passion for gaming and hopefully he can infuse some of that in a place like Zynga.