Destructoid Checkpoint: Get in, Satya, we’re doing movies now!

Xbox is getting into the movies business. The Microsoft offshoot has announced an offshoot of its own, XP, which is going to act as both hub and home for all Xbox experiences that are not games. This largely means movies and TV, but also covers the broader umbrella of consumer products, strategic partnerships, and live experiences.  

It’s not a hugely surprising move for a company that has been doing the restructuring that has been driving Xbox forward in recent months. They can get a disparate group of people who have likely been doing similar work across departments all in one place and actually manage them with intent, while also showing Microsoft at large, whom they have been hugely beholden to since the near $70 billion investment to buy Activision-Blizzard, that they are super serious about leveraging their portfolio into every available revenue stream.

Now, the most important thing is what this is not, which is a production company. The group of people at XP will be license-fishing, which means trying to find the people willing to pay the most money to produce shows, films, and everything else based on their IP. It’s a solid earner, but an area where Microsoft has been a little weak from the point of view of the people paying the money for said licenses. 

Bethesda found itself in the shadow of a very successful TV show and effectively did nothing at all to either capitalize on that success or help Amazon to add a new growth vector to it. The show was good, and people watched it, but they had nowhere to go after it except old games.

The Minecraft Movie also did amazingly well, but the game it featured offered little in the way of enticement or change. It almost felt like the success of these things was surprising, and people were playing catch-up after the fact. The Fallout thing is not really Microsoft’s fault, as that deal was done before the merger, but it’s never good to wake up and realize that the culture you just spent a lot of money for is showing the same problems as the culture you already have. 

The reason licensing is better than production is that Xbox is trying to make a profit. They don’t want to put a lot of money into a project; they just want to get some cash on the books, then use some accounting magic to make it appear when and where they need it the most. A deal can be struck to assign initial fees to quarters that might be trending a little down, helping to keep overall investor confidence high. 

Licensing can also be a surprisingly lucrative and safe way to build your IP outside the normal channels. Nobody ever stopped playing good games because adaptations ended up being bad, but people certainly started playing them because those adaptations existed at all. 

Normally, a move like this would also bring some trimming of the headcount, but I would imagine such things were rolled into the last batch of layoffs that Microsoft and Xbox went through. All in all, a smart move for Xbox, and I suspect you’ll see some IP showing up in Wizards of the Coast products very soon. 

Sony’s Big Nightmare

While I don’t think that Sony executives are worried, I’m sure that they are angry to see AnyPS5, a new open-source project that tries to run PS5 games on PC without emulation. Now, this is all much smarter than I am capable of being, but I will do my best to explain. 

Rather than emulate the PS5 operating system, AnyPS5 instead converts PS5 executables into Windows- and Linux-compatible ones. It is actually the PS5’s processor that makes this possible, as the game code is already capable of running directly on a PC processor. 

It’s early days, but impressive work, if you feel like tracking it over on GitHub. Where things get awkward is the actual executables themselves, which will not be easy for the average person to get, making overall interest and impact niche.

This looks like a super fun project from the outside, and it is always fun to see how people poke and prod at the established order and do odd and interesting things out in the fringes. 

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Scott Duwe has been battling the Locust in Gear of War: E-Day, and he digs it. - “Along with its best-in-class visuals, E-Day is buoyed by its campaign, which is the best in the series since Gears of War 3. The storyline turns back the clock to 14 years before the original game, on Emergence Day, the day that the Locust came up from beneath the surface to invade Sera. And they are the true star of the game.”

Andre Barovic has been speeding around in Star Wars: Galactic Racer. - “Racing games exist in this sort of limbo within the industry where no one is really sure what makes one great. Is it the number of vehicles available to the player? The depth of their customizability? The vehicle handling? The maps? The story, if there even is one? And to which extent do any of these improve or detract from a racer? No one really knows.”

And Tiago Manuel dived into Skyrim with DLSS 5 on max settings, and wasn’t quite ready for what was waiting for him. - “I know it looks awful, but I forced myself to go through the mental exercise of trying to come up with an excuse for this one, and I landed on “well, you’re not supposed to have everything cranked all the way up to 100. You’re obviously going too far.” Then I remembered that gamers, PC ones, especially, actually love to be able to play most things on max settings.”