Did Xbox Pick the Right Studios to Cut?, Dark Souls Extraction, COD's Future - The Shane Satterfield Show 21

Greetings and welcome to boss fight a little segment that I do that gives me a chance to kind of riff on and give my opinion on Some of the big stories in the gaming industry for the week and as of yesterday There is no bigger story than the one I am about to discuss now one thing I will say is we are definitely gonna talk about this in this week's game face So there will be a little bit of overlap, but I have kind of a particular angle I want to talk on for the Shane Satterfield show related to this topic now What I'm getting at here is that information is starting to leak out about what Asha Sharma and the new management team at Xbox is planning to do with the Xbox brand.

And one of the things that leaked out yesterday is that first it was that Compulsion Games was on the chopping block at Xbox.

That was the first story.

And then later on in the day, Bloomberg followed up to say it wasn't just Compulsion Games.

It was also Double Fine and Ninja Theory.

Now, quick recap.

Compulsion Games does this crazy drug-fueled game called We Happy Few.

They also most recently created a game called South of Midnight, which was this awesome, like, southern bayou swamp adventure that was really good, but didn't do great financially.

At least we don't think it did.

And then, of course, Double Fine, Psychonauts.

They've been making awesome creative games for forever.

The last couple games that they released was one called Keeper, where you literally play as a lighthouse.

And then the latest game that it released is a game called Kiln, which is kind of like a MOBA where you play as pottery.

So, yeah, they try some pretty creative ideas there.

And then Ninja Theory is the studio behind the Hellblade franchise.

Now, they just announced basically Hellblade 3, Senua, at Not E3 Summer Game Fest 2026.

And like a week later, all of a sudden, they're on the chopping block.

So anyway...

These, as of right now, are the three studios that Microsoft is proposing shutting down.

Now, Bloomberg's story says that these studios are in negotiations with Xbox right now to either get sold to somebody else or basically purchased by the people who run the studio so the studios can continue.

There's really a lot of confusion around that right now, but that's not what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is the decisions that are being made as far as what to cut at Xbox and how to save money at Xbox.

So, these three studios, you may say, is there any common link between the three? There's really not, other than to say that they're three of the smaller studios that are currently sort of under the Xbox umbrella.

And I think what we all kind of know about smaller studios is that a lot of times they're way less risk-averse.

They will try new concepts, new ideas, see if they work.