Tweet
On May 7th, Microsoft shutdown three of their gaming studios. One of those studios was Alpha Dog Games, a development team that specialized in making mobile games such as Mighty Doom.
On May 9th, just two days after shuttering a mobile game studio, Microsoft announced that they are going to launch a mobile game store. According to reporting from Bloomberg, this store will act as an alternative to things like the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
This mobile game store from Microsoft will launch with Microsoft's own games, including Candy Crush Saga, and... Candy Crush Saga was all that Xbox president Sarah Bond mentioned in this announcement. I assume other mobile games like Minecraft and the Microsoft Solitaire Collection will also show up on this store. Naturally, this mobile game store will be open to other publishers, but this won't happen until some time after launch.
This mobile game store will be web based and not app based. Bond told Bloomberg during the Bloomberg Technology Summit, that this will make the store "accessible across all devices, all countries, no matter what, independent of the policies of closed ecosystem stores." This suggests that instead of publishers giving Apple or Google a 30% cut on sales, they can just give that same cut to Microsoft instead.
Announcing a new mobile game store just days after closing one of your mobile game studios sure seems a little tone deaf. I suppose it's at least a little better than, say, suggesting to make more "smaller games that give us prestige and awards" just a day after closing a studio that made a smaller game that gave them prestige and awards. Surely, no company would be so dumb as to do that at least. Surely.
Or something like that. Was it based on anything previously spoken? No. I just wanted to make fun of Epic Games without using any logic whatsoever.