"Investing in crap" — the cause of huge financial problems at Xbox has been found

You don’t need insider access to notice that Microsoft’s Xbox arm has been bleeding money — profit margins are basically nil these days. Why? There’s a simple, messy explanation: for a long stretch Xbox was splashing cash everywhere, often with little filter. Projects that never saw release, things billed as “games” that barely resembled finished products — Xbox funded them anyway, and in big sums.

Sergey Grigorovich of GSC Game World* put a finer point on it. FYI, he said the temporary Xbox console-exclusivity deal for Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl paid for the whole development run and then some (yes, apparently it produced profit). That episode is exactly the kind of outlay people online mock — dubbed, rather bluntly, “investments in crap.”