We want to express our sincere appreciation to all of our viewers and fans of Inside Xbox, and remain committed to providing our members with access to high-quality news and information via the console, social media channels and Xbox.com. We will be leveraging third-party news and video content available through a variety of existing and future partners, and supplementing this content with select first-party offerings. However, day-to-day news content and weekly programming currently offered though Inside Xbox will cease production in the United States. This includes shows like Major’s Minute, Featured Videos and Insider Moves packaged under the Inside Xbox brand.
This has been known in the US for a week or so but the EU team was still deciding. Last night it was announced that Xbox EU would also be stopping production of Inside Xbox content.
Fans of the service are getting very angry with Microsoft about this. In the UK the Inside Xbox content was always fun and obviously made by those who loved what they did. Microsoft say they are doing this as a cost cutting measure. They will now only take free content to stream on the Xbox from 3rd parties (i.e. trailers for new games, adverts, IGN vids etc.). Just reading the comments in Major Nelson's blog its obvious that the Xbox Live community is incensed by this. They're looking at their Gold subscriptions and wondering just where that money is now going. We don't see any reduced Arcade prices, or if we do they're not advertised and our dashboards are dominated by ads instead of the content we wish to access or have bought and now Inside Xbox has disappeared completely. If Microsoft cites falling views as part of the reasons for choosing to axe it to save money we can point squarely at the latest dashboard update which hid the Inside Xbox area to a small button, and even once you were in there it was confusing to navigate.
Curse you Micro$oft.
