So, I think you folks need to reframe your understanding on how Western megacorps and their leadership view things, especially from the sociopaths with the MBAs.
What Microsoft has largely done for 16 years has been purely focused on winning press conferences. They green light things, announce things, and focus on making fantastic presentations. The details on these things are secondary (and even tertiary) compared to just creating an amazing press conference to give the impression that they are 'winning'.
I want you to think of two very different examples of this, and how games media reacted in the aftermath of it - the PS3 Killzone 2 video, and the Xbox E3 2014 conference.
Sony's initial Killzone 2 reveal was immediately called out as not being feasible at runtime graphically at the time, and the media did not let up on seeking out clarity and trying to hold Sony accountable for that misrepresentation. This was held over Killzone as an IP by the media even as far forward as Shadowfall's release in 2013. It was very important that the media did this, and the result of it was an industry that was far more cognizant on misrepresenting their product with marketing assets.
Microsoft's E3 2014 press conference is noteworthy in a multitude of ways. Its one of the first press conferences where nearly the entire slate of announcements there either got cancelled in the following years, or were large misrepresentations on just what those titles were, or what they would be able to deliver. This was something that almost no one in the media called out until much, much later, and even then - team Xbox never got held to account for that to the degree that they should have. An entire E3 press conference, deals being signed, with titles that would just disappear.
This wasn't a practice that stopped. For the leadership team at Xbox, it was always more about being able to make impactful announcements that could sway public opinion. If we lived in a world where a product would be successful purely on the strength of press conferences, the Xbox would have been in a far better position than they were. Unfortunately for them, we live in a world where the actual output and platform's actual value proposition is what sees its success. This sort of 'win press conferences' approach to leadership is why you get a situation like RedFall. Anyone who went and played the game knew the state it was in, and would've known that this thing needed a lot of more time in the oven. There was simply no need to announce it when they did, much less release it, and yet the only reason this happened was because they wanted to win that E3 press cycle, and they wanted to show that the Bethesda acquisition was already playing towards their goals.
That is a terrible way to manage a portfolio or a platform. When all you focus on is winning the newscycle, don't be surprised when the lack of care towards the actual portfolio and platform manifests in missed targets and poor shipped software quality. And its not even like this was a new thing - you can literally trace this back to when Phil Spencer took control of the first party portfolio. I can say, without question, that the best thing for their competitors that Microsoft ever did was putting Phil Spencer in charge. The fact that he used actual marketing budget from Xbox to launch a astroturf-led PR campaign amongst gaming communities to create the folksy persona we have all grown accustomed too is just the typical sociopathy you can expect to see from the exec/corporate class of most mega corporations.
