Xbox Entertainment studios is getting the axe

So much for original television content on your Xbox One. While the Xbox brand is remaining largely untouched by Microsoft’s sweeping 18,000 job cuts, there is one significant casualty: Xbox Entertainment Studios is being shuttered. The studio was created in order to make exclusive television content for Xbox owners. Not everything went according to plan, however, and the studio—which employs roughly 200—is being phased out.

Click to expand...

Kind of sucks. I mean, I haven't played a video game in a while, but some of the things Xbox was doing seemed fairly interesting. I wonder if this was caused, or partially caused by the backlash they got when they announced the online connection requirement and the used game reselling limitations. I'm guessing they planned on getting a certain income from those things, and after they were forced to drop those requirements, they weren't able to stay profitable. Then again, it's also possible that they were just being run by people that had no idea what they were doing , and they crashed face first. Oh well... Sony should be pretty happy about now.

Not really surprising. Xbox was doing this in competition with Hulu and Netfiix, both of which are available on Xbox... and Sony, and Roku, and on computers, etc. And Hulu and Netflix are still only tentatively successful, with a much lower barrier to entry. MS was simply stretching the market for non-broadcast TV too thin. They realized this, and corrected it. I'd bet good money this division would have been scrapped before too long even without the company wide layoffs.

BE interesting to see what is going to happen with the projects they have been working on...like the Halo show