They say that the bigger a company is, the harder it is for it to run like clockwork, where actions are always coordinated and measured. Microsoft, one of the three largest companies in the world, has just demonstrated this with a colossal mistake.
And if Microsoft was already huge, since the acquisition of Activision / Blizzard / King, things have only gotten bigger. Right now, Satya Nadella’s company has tens of thousands of employees and it’s not easy to manage from the top.
So much so that what was supposed to be the announcement of the year by Xbox, Microsoft’s gaming subsidiary, has accidentally leaked through a mobile push notification to users who have the Game Pass app installed on their smartphone.
An error that will haunt Xbox for years
The best-selling and most played game in the industry, for over two decades, is Call of Duty. This saga has been synonymous with success since the first one was released in 2003. That’s why there was so much desire to buy Activision on Xbox.
Well, the community didn’t know if Xbox was going to dare to include a game that generates so much money in sales and cosmetics per year in the Game Pass, the Xbox subscription service where for only 16 euros per month you can play over 200 games and all Microsoft releases on launch day.
Xbox has been discussing what to do for months, as the policy to follow in this specific case where Call of Duty generates so many profits as a paid IP was not clear. The same goes for World of Warcraft, and we still don’t know what they will do.
The thing is that Xbox made a decision a few days ago and they were keeping it a secret. Probably to announce it to the world during their June conference at the Summer Game Fest (new E3 after the death of the original).
With an announcement like “Game Pass acquires Call of Duty and all games will arrive day 1 on the platform,” a company like Xbox could say that they have been the true winners of the fair this year. Without a doubt.
But, as we were saying, yesterday someone on Xbox forgot to deactivate the notifications from the Game Pass app on mobile… which ended up causing the announcement to leak a week early and in the worst possible way.
Such was the disaster that Xbox had to confirm it with a brief official press release on its website. Undoubtedly, one of the clumsiest moves we have seen in years in an industry where not only do you have to be good at what you do, you also have to appear to be.
