I don’t think big companies know how to make a good FPS campaign anymore, let alone hone in on classic deathmatch multiplayer. The last FPS I bought was Half-Life: Alyx four years ago, and the first one to come along and interest me since then was Phantom Fury, but I’m letting that one iron out bugs for a few weeks before I pick it up. Even former TimeSplitters devs, given the opportunity to make a new TimeSplitters, made another Fortnite instead. Likely this new Perfect Dark was built to turn it into a live service that keeps players playing it forever rather than just making a fun deathmatch to play with your friends a handful of times, which would be missing the point. And all this is to say nothing about how those devs must be feeling when even a great game that sells well won’t save you from Microsoft laying you off.
They’ve actually stated within the last year that they are in fact considering moving away from the games industry if certain things dont happen for them. This came out during the whole court proceedings surrounding their attempted Activision buyout.
I can’t remember the details and I’m too lazy to look into it again lol. There are some interesting articles out there tho
They want to be a cloud gaming provider and sell Xbox fire TV sticks instead of consoles, with controllers that connect directly to the azure server running their games. Why do you think Nvidia and the UK weren’t happy with Microsoft a few years ago and they made so many deals with cloud gaming providers like boosteroid and GeForce now?
Microsoft turned every Windows PC into an Xbox overnight with XCloud and they had little to no overhead costs. That’s where their business is right now, cloud and AI, not gaming, Xbox will take a backseat and I’m going to bet we will see them transition from a console maker to simply publisher that conveniently sells a cloud TV stick that can play games.