Sobering thoughts from a former Xbox partner.
Moon Studios CEO Thomas Mahler took part in Reset XBOX.
Last week, Asha Sharma shared a letter about XBOX Reset, revealing that the division only generated an ‘accountability’ margin of 3%. In the last 24 hours, rumors spread that several Xbox Game Studios would be closing.
Mahler had a unique perspective, as XBOX published Moon Studios’ Ori and the Blind Forest And Ori and the Will of the Wisps. On Twitter, he said this:
It’s heartbreaking to see what’s happening on Xbox right now.
A lot of great people have been impacted, and I don’t want to trivialize that. But if I’m honest, this feels like it’s been happening for a long time and I’m not sure this will be the end of it. This may just be the start of bigger changes across the industry.
Mahler believes Xbox’s main struggle will be finding the right developer and lead team to achieve consistent and lasting success. He stated that they made Ori the next Xbox mascot to fill that role.
Ultimately, Mahler believes the Xbox needs this reset. He thinks Asha needs to follow Steve Jobs’ playbook of Apple in 1997 to recreate that success.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
