In the recent high-profile Epic v. Apple case, various internal documents were leaked, which can be said to directly reveal the bottom line of various game development companies, including revenue, profit and even operating philosophy, competitor analysis, and so on. One of the most interesting is Microsoft. Although Microsoft does not have much advantage in the competition of the three mainframes, it seems that Microsoft should spend a lot of time studying its opponents and forget its own duty.
In a high-profile Xbox 2020 Q3 and Q4 release summary, there's a lot to know about rival Nintendo's most important upcoming releases. The report was published in August 2020, when Xbox believed that Nintendo's series of games to be released in October-December 2020 included The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2, Angel Hunt 3, Metroid 4 and Shin Megami Tensei 5. But none of these games went live within the forecast time. But the report also mentions a few other games we know about and are ultimately slated for release in 2021, like No More Heroes 3 and Brave the Impossible 2.
But the PS5 files on Xbox Analytics are all blacked out during this time. It can be seen that Microsoft may already know a lot about some of the games that are currently unknown PS5 plans to release.
And Xbox is more interesting about its own game release analysis, three games in the file are blacked out, one game is scheduled to be released in the third quarter of last year, and the other two are scheduled to be released in the first quarter of this year. In addition, a large amount of text was painted out in games released in the first quarter of this year.
In addition, Microsoft has also made an internal analysis and evaluation of "The Last of Us Part 2" released by PlayStation.Xbox praised The Last of Us Part 2's gameplay as a "significant improvement" over the first game, saying its visual quality and attention to detail "is top-notch in basically every area, and the overall presentation is clearly ahead of the others. Anything the team creates on console and PC." Xbox's internal team said they were "often stunned by the visuals of the game, which has rarely happened these days."
In the disclosed documents, Xbox also Writes: "The Last of Us Part 2 is a very rare video game that pushes forward the art of video game narrative as a medium, not whether everyone 'likes' it, or even whether everyone 'Have a lot of fun'."
If there is any criticism from Xbox's internal analytics team, they say the biggest complaints are the inventory system, and the lack of "quick switching" between any items during gameplay. In addition, Xbox also criticized the gunplay content in the game, "Naughty Dog still doesn't seem to be able to create decent gunplay content in any of their games, and this game is no exception."
It seems that Microsoft is really serious in analyzing opponents It took a lot of work. If you were so focused on making games, it probably wouldn't be like this!
In addition, as a third-party witness in this lawsuit, Lori Wright, the vice president of Xbox business development, was arrested by Epic lawyer Wes Earnhardt asked how much profit Microsoft made on selling Xbox consoles? Lori replied that they don't make any money, they are selling consoles at a loss. When asked if Microsoft has ever made a profit on the sale of Xbox devices, she replied: "No."
Finally, Microsoft executives also testified in support of Epic, saying that Apple also excluded Microsoft's game services! The main focus is to refuse to let Microsoft's XCloud application on the store.
