That was one of the largest acquisitions of any company in history.

That's going to turn the eye of sore on on you internally, I would imagine.

Because eventually, like, you have to justify a purchase like that.

You can't just make it and be like, okay, anyway, back to normal.

This changes everything.

Yeah. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Nathan Grayson. Nathan is a co-founder of Aftermath,

a worker-owned gaming news website, and the author of Stream Big, the triumphs and turmoil of Twitch and the stars behind the screen. It's a really interesting read. You probably saw the recent news

that Microsoft laid off another 9,100 workers, and many of those

were in its Xbox gaming division.

Now, there's been a lot of talk recently about Microsoft's focus on AI and all of the money and

resources that it's plowing into data centers and trying to make itself a leader in generative

AI, chatbots, and, you know, all of these tools by rolling it into so many

of its services and pushing it on its cloud clients. But that has also meant sacrifices for other

parts of Microsoft's business, especially if they're not living up to the expectations of the C-suite

as it makes this major AI push. And the gaming division has been in the crosshairs as a result of all of that.

That's why I wanted to have Nathan on the show today, not just to understand what's going on

with Microsoft more broadly, but how its corporate decisions are affecting the gaming division

and how a number of decisions made over, you know, the past decade or so, have tried to upend the video game

industry as a whole by moving it from a focus on buying games and owning consoles or PCs

to just having a subscription service where you get access to a library of games like we see

in music and video. But gaming is quite a distinct market, and that doesn't seem to have worked out,

...