Xbox Entertainment Studios

~ the obit ~

The pitch needed a living room I did not have. Microsoft's whole argument for the Xbox One in 2013 was that the console should be the box everything in the house went through, the television included, and around that it built a studio to make the television. In Turkey the console was a games machine, bought as a games machine, and nobody I knew was going to route their TV through it. what makes this one worth writing is that the assumption did not hold in the United States either, which is why the studio is in the ground.

Steve Ballmer hired Nancy Tellem in september 2012. She had run the CBS Network Television Entertainment Group until 2009 and had Warner Bros. television behind that, so this was not a games company promoting someone sideways into video. It was a broadcast executive brought in from outside and handed a studio in Santa Monica to make original content for a console. She reported to Phil Spencer. The studio was announced publicly in february 2013.

For about eighteen months it looked like it might work. The development slate ran to roughly fifteen series, and some of the names on it were not small: a live-action Halo show attached to Steven Spielberg, a remake of Blake's 7, children's programming with Sesame Workshop, a science fiction drama called Humans co-produced with Channel 4 in Britain. that list is mostly what the studio is now, a list of things that did not get made.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually shipped ~

Every Street United came first, eight episodes in june 2014, a football series built around finding street players before the World Cup. Halo: Nightfall followed in november, five episodes tied into the launch of The Master Chief Collection, and it did the job it was hired to do without anyone claiming much more for it. There were live events too, Bonnaroo in 2014 and Miss Teen USA.

Then there is Atari: Game Over, which came out on 20 november 2014 as the first installment of a documentary series called Signal to Noise. In april 2014 a crew went to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and dug, because for thirty years the story had gone around that Atari had buried its unsold copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial out there after the game helped take the company down. They found the cartridges. that dig got covered everywhere, well outside gaming, and it is the one thing this studio made that people who have never owned an Xbox still know about.

~ the day it died ~

On 17 july 2014 Microsoft announced it was cutting eighteen thousand jobs, the largest layoff in its history and the first big move of Satya Nadella's tenure. Xbox Entertainment Studios was inside that announcement. Phil Spencer confirmed the studio would close over the following months, with the language about refocusing on games and gamers, and Tellem along with executive vice president Jordan Levin went in the same round.

Projects already in production were allowed to finish, which is why Halo: Nightfall and the Atari documentary shipped in november out of a studio that had been publicly dead since july. The formal end was 29 october 2014. i was not close to this at the time. Two years from hiring a CBS president to closing the building she was hired to run is quick even by the standards of things buried on this site.

~ what survived ~

Humans went to AMC and Channel 4 and got made without Microsoft. It ran three seasons, drew the biggest audience Channel 4 had given a drama in twenty years for its opening episode, and is the strongest thing that ever had this studio's fingerprints on it. Atari: Game Over is on ordinary streaming services now with no console attached to it. Both of the projects worth remembering are ones that got out.

The lesson was not that Microsoft could not make television, because two of the things it made were fine. It was that there was no reason for the television to live on the console. in fairness, Netflix and Amazon were spending on original content in exactly the same window and it worked for them, because they were selling the content itself rather than using it to justify a box under the TV. Microsoft's shows existed to make the Xbox One make sense as a living room device. once the company gave that argument up and went back to selling a games machine, the studio had nothing left to be for.

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