While this is bad for the market, it’s also entirely expected.
Xbox have been producing sub-par hardware with names no one can remember and barely any exclusives, it was only a matter of time.
To other Europeans : do you know anyone who owns an Xbox ? I’ve only ever had one single friend in middle school who had a 360. I’ve never seen any other model outside of an electronics store.
Their current gen is hamstrung by the existence of the Series S, and the utter lack of features in their controllers (no gyroscope or any motion sensors ? No advanced rumble ? No touchpad ?). No one who is serious about controller gaming buys an Xbox controller, especially because of the lack of gyro.
Their dedication to digital-only and pushing the games pass also alienates anyone who wishes to play physical games and/or offline.
OTOH I only have a PS5 because of Sony’s marketing budget, lol (non-slim version included with a Sony phone on contract, so technically also a way for them to clear stock, lmao)
But yeah, I don’t know any people with a recent Xbox here in Sweden. In the original Xbox era and the 360 era I think they had a big lead here, but after that I’ve seen much more Sony represented.
In the uk I remember the 360 being huge and nobody having a ps3, but now I’m not sure I know a single person who bought an xb1 or whatever the current one is called.
360 was a big hit because everyone wanted to play halo. Honestly outside of that I don’t think there was any other exclusives. At least none that I can remember
It also launched a year or two before the ps3 and I feel like it was significantly cheaper. Xbox Live also seemed to be huge despite the cost, probably some network effect in action. I remember Gears of War being another big name they had.
To other Europeans : do you know anyone who owns an Xbox ? I’ve only ever had one single friend in middle school who had a 360. I’ve never seen any other model outside of an electronics store.
Barely, lol. Knew 1 person who had an og Xbox and 1 who had a 360. Newer than that, nope.
X360 launched a full year before PS3, seemed great compared to the ancient PS2. Had a rough start with the red ring of death, but it recovered and did very well. X360 sales were higher for most of the generation but PS3 eventually beat them by a small margin for the final count.
I bought an Xbox Series controller and I was shocked by how shitty it is, especially compared to the wired 360 controller I had for years. Bought a DualSense and it’s so much better in every way.
this is surprising to me i think the series controller is the best controller ever made. well i have a starfield one its slightly smaller and has a fun texture on the back
Overpriced, battery not included, haptics suck compared to DualSense, face buttons get stuck sometimes (it’s clean), the cheap rubber coating started wearing and peeling after the first month of light use, triggers are squeaky and too stiff, drops bluetooth connection randomly, you need a stupid overpriced dongle for lower latency, and I just prefer the symmetrical PlayStation layout, never understood the offset sticks.
Yeah, they think the Internet will get so quick that people will just stream every game from the cloud from any device and they want to be the leader of that.
@kandoh@simple i would rather say they are aiming for full control over the product ;) How dare you used a bug in our game to your advantage -> we block your acces to the game and of course to continous rising prices , cause there is no second hand deals ... let's hope that steam and gog will be really long available an people still buy games even it's much more expensive already ...
It’ll also save them from flops. They’ll be able to stick a game at the top of the front page and say it got 20 million streams like Netflix does with its shitty movies.
I’ve watched a video of hers before. My takeaway was that Microsoft is a heavily bloated company that suffocates internal development but with the OG Xbox and early 360, they were like a side bet that didn’t have a great deal of oversight from MS Windows/Office/Server mega money eyes.
They didn’t have a great deal of internal dev studios but they were really good at identifying third party exclusives to pursue and early on managed them and the few studios they did fully acquire well. It worked well for the first Xbox and first half 360. It differentiated the Xbox/360 from Nintendo and Playstation
Then I guess success led to changes in leadership aimed at growth and using Xbox as a platform to push more MS services and they lost the focus and ability to identify and secure great third party exclusives. That coupled with not having internal game dev teams in numbers and experience like Nintendo and Sony meant if they didn’t hit with their living room smart device dominance ambition, they’d just have a worse PlayStation. That’s what they ended up with with the XOne - a worse PS4. Then it happened again with the XSX because of lack of execution with their internal studios. An XSX just became a PS5-lite library-wise
Why should they be focused on it? Xbox is now just a slimmed down Windows pc. You can play the exact same games on a pc, with access to the same storefront.
Microsoft’s original plan was to own the living room the way they own the office space. Not just gaming, but all your movies, TV, shopping, etc. could be done through the XBox.
Kinect was a particularly big jump in that regard. There were demos of AR-type stuff where you could see yourself wearing clothes you might want to buy. You could move around and the clothes on screen would move with your body. There’s some promo videos of that, but nothing concrete ever came of it.
Now they have slagging sales for two generations, and a AAA industry that struggles to make a real hit and is laying off a lot of people. They can’t even hold onto the core gaming market much less get their tendrils into the rest of the living room. They then release a handheld that’s basically an upgrade of an existing handheld that wasn’t selling very well, but now with XBox branding.
Is this a problem for the rest of us? No, not really. There’s plenty of alternatives, and we don’t need to care. Is this the result the money people at Microsoft envisioned when they started this ~25 years ago? No, not at all.
The end goal of all of that is to sell software. If they can do that without supporting a massive pipeline for selling custom hardware, that makes sense.
For wanting to own the living room, they never tried particularly hard. PS3 was a damned successful blueray player. They just needed to give you a nice, curated experience and ease of use. There were literally people buying PS3’s because they were cheaper than blueray players at the time
Yeah, Sony is just better at this. They’re really good at taking advantage of their competitors’ mistakes.
We forget a lot now, but the opening of the PS3/Xbox 360 era looked like Microsoft was winning. Sales looked good for them, Blu-ray be damned. Then the Red Ring of Death hits. In some ways, Microsoft has yet to recover from that. Sony held their face just above the toilet water ever since.
Yeah, just like PS2 and the DVD player built in. Being able to play movies up in my bedroom as an 11 year old was amazing. It was also the most cost effective way to buy something that could play DVDs and the cutting edge games at the time. There’s a reason why the PS2 remains the best selling console of all time
I’m all for Asus handheld becoming the future of Windows for consumer. Have little interest now in keeping it as a personal PC. Linux is the way now thanks to them force feeding Copilot and screen grabber.
Well too fucking bad, cause Halo is the only thing they’re good at. They should have sucked it up and kept iterating on Halo 3. That game was peak Xbox.
Part of the problem might be that I literally have no idea what their current console is called? Whoever was in charge of naming the last threeish xbox consoles should be fired out of a cannon
Yeah, totally agree on this. If you put the last two names in front of me and asked which was newer, I’d have no idea. The new one has multiple versions too so it makes it more confusing.
They had all that free marketting from people assuming the third one would be the 720 and they ditched it in favor of calling it the Xbox One, which everyone was already using for the name of the first Xbox. Still baffled by that one.
I can’t think of a single company worse at naming products and services than Microsoft. They have an abysmal track record. Some examples off the top of my head, all of which make web searches near-impossible:
They renamed Office 365 to just “365” (and then “365 Copilot”). The mind boggles.
They named their light extensible code editor “Visual Studio Code”, despite the fact that they had a long-established IDE (for code) called “Visual Studio”.
They called their application framework “the .NET framework”.
They called the replacement framework “.NET Core”, and after a few major versions, changed to calling it “.NET”, but it’s totally distinct from the .NET framework.
They called their ninth major desktop operating system “Windows 7”, then followed up with “Windows 8” and… “Windows 10”.
Their native web app replacement for Outlook is called “New Outlook”.
They recently renamed their Remote Desktop app “Windows App”. I have no words.
One would almost think they are having a laugh, but no it’s for real (I don’t think are intentionally trying to come up with such comically stupid naming policies).
Yeah, sometimes I wonder if they do these bad names for the free publicity of people complaining about them. But then there’s plenty examples where the name isn’t just clunky, but rather actively confusing for potential users…
Teams (New) is the next version of teams except I literally don’t know what they’ve done because I can’t see any difference.
New Teams appears to be a totally different project except again it looks identical but the calendar is different, they’ve actually managed to make the calendar worse, which is impressive since it was pretty goddamn unusable to start with.
I don’t understand why they have two development strands going on simultaneously.
My favorite is still Microsoft Zune… Which was a music store, music subscription service, a desktop app, and a physical media player.
It’s like they want their stuff to literally be unsearchable on the internet. Renaming Remote Desktop to Windows App is a prime example of this. Good luck trying to search for that and get what you want.
You all have no idea the idiocy of their naming and the confusion it causes with their business software: Microsoft Dynamics - This is an array of business software. Some of it is the same core platform with different features but many of the applications are acquisitions and run on different back-end platforms.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer relationship Management). They originally named their software to be the name of what it actually does. Not a bad idea so when people searched for that name, results would point to their software eventually. This is their Salesforce competitor.
After building market and name recognition and gaining market space, they renamed it to Dynamics Customer Engagement (CE). Then soon after split the product into modules or sub-products and called them: Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Field Service (which was a module acquired by Microsoft but was originally called field one sky), Dynamics 365 Project Operations (which was originally called Project Service Automation).
They had MDM (Microsoft Dynamics Marketing) which was an email marketing platform. This MDM is not to be confused with MDM (Mobile data management) but was actually just the first iteration of their marketing tool. They re-wrote it from scratch and called it “Dynamics Marketing”. They then re-wrote it a third time (they are in the process of finishing the re-write) and it is now called “Microsoft Dynamics Customer Insights and Journey’s”. A name that just rolls right off the tongue.
Accounting Software Microsoft GP - This was a Microsoft software acquisition of accounting software called “GP”. Microsoft has been the steward of this project for a very long time but it is currently being phased out and is in end-of-life. Microsoft SL - Another acquisition. Accounting software called Solomon. Microsoft still sells and support this software. It serves a particular niche. Microsoft F&BO - This is a complicated one so I am just going to map out the names of what it was and what it has become but this is Microsoft’s SAP/Oracle competitor for large organizations: Axapta -> Dynamics AX -> Dynamics Finance and Operations (F&O) -> Dynamics Finance and Operations and Supply Chain -> Dynamics Finance and Business Operations (F&BO) Microsoft BC - Microsoft Business Central was originally acquired by Microsoft as “Navision”. They renamed it Microsoft NAV and more recently re-wrote and re-named it to Microsoft Business Central (BC).
Long post but they really just suck at names and rename things constantly. From the business side, I think it’s intentional as it causes people to re-evaluate the software without any baggage from the name.
Microsoft suck at naming things in general. It’s a problem across every single branch of the business, people keep calling Office 365 0365 because Microsoft insists on calling it O365 and people think that’s a zero. Also the name makes no sense anyway, why not call it Microsoft Office Online?
Then we have Microsoft Azure, except they renamed that to Entra despite the fact that both names are stupid. Then of course there is the entirety of the Windows OS lineup.
Entra isn’t Azure. Entra ID is what they renamed Azure Active Directory to. But not always; there’s also Azure Active Directory B2C (yes, that’s the fully expanded name). And various other Azure-branded things that may or may not belong together.
Microsoft are spectacularly bad at naming things.
It’s a miracle they haven’t renamed Windows 11 to “360 365” or “Live 6.5” or “Active-DOS Series X” or something.
Don’t know what you mean. Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X all make perfect sense and leave zero grounds for confusion at all
What are you talking about you can buy the PC for less than the price of a PS5 and it will be better than the PS5. The advantage of gaming consoles has always been that it’s plug and play. You just turn it on and there you go.
Sony aren’t going to create a revolutionary GPU that’s only available in the PS6. They might try and charge $1,000 for it but they will always be other options. Where do you think they get their components from? They don’t have their own fab.
Look, I am still using a GTX 1080 Ti (GOATED GPU btw, best dollar per performance value probably ever) because GPUs are too expensive. $700 USD for a low-mid tier card, or $1000+ for a card that should (and usually does) give good lasting value. I don’t see where anyone is buying a PC for less than $500 and it has better performance than a PS5, but I suppose it is possible this is a result of Price Discrimination, since I am in California.
NVidia is showing what PlayStation will look like when it feels there is actually zero competition. Xbox, so long as its hardware exists, is a constant threat to PlayStation keeping a lot of things in check. Once Xbox completely disappears, PlayStation will have no competition. Then Sony can set the prices however they want and nobody can do anything about it except pay up, or don’t.
I built my SO gaming rig for about 550 bucks. 5600x ryzen and rx580. Idk if it’s “more powerful” than a console or not but it plays games fine. Yes I know the 580 is dated and only pci3.0 vs board supporting 4.0, but she didn’t have money to spend. I have a 6600xt I got used for a hair over 200 when GPU prices were nuts and it plays all I ask it to at 1080p. You CERTAINLY don’t need to shell out 500 on a GPU that’s ridiculous. I will never understand the dick waving in the PC community about needing the best greatest top of the line and latest hardware to be able to game, when u can spend half the money to get 85% of the performance or something. I am confident for the cost of a PS5 u can rival PS5 performance in a PC build, and even if it’s not “better” the difference in cost of games is enough that a couple game purchases puts you into another class of GPU anyways!
AMD cards are so much cheaper right now, it makes a big difference. Second hand market cuts prices in half too. Places do certified refurbished as well.
I 100% agree with prices having bloated over the last decade. The first card I bought was a 380 for $80, but $700 for a mid-low tier card is an extreme exaggeration
Nah, I’ll just keep gaming on a cheap Linux PC and fuck ever buying a console again. Honestly at this point a 5 year old GPU gives you access to 99% of all games ever made, why spend so much to play 4 shitty ‘AAAA’ games a year?
Yeah I absolutely do not care about that. I also won’t bother to get a 4k TV until I get some banger clearance deal or something because it does not fucking matter. I grew up on tube tvs dude, anything that isn’t fuzzy is golden. Most of what I’m playing is either indie or ancient, and seeing giant pixels in perfect clarity does nothing to improve the experience.
There was an old HP touchsmart that my partner had laying around. It’s terrible. Pentium Processor, standard HDD, with no dedicated graphics so running much of anything on it is out. No wireless AC, so it has to be a 2.4ghz network, and I don’t have a hardwire in the bedroom. So I just threw Mint on it installed RustDesk because I didn’t have a wireless mouse and keyboard or anywhere to put them if I had them. About a week into realizing it had some troubles playing larger movies (even mp4s from the machine no matter the player) I moved to 720. I couldn’t tell the difference between 720p and 1080p from across the room on a 22" screen anyways. Now all the streams work fine. Starting to realize the last time I bought a monitor was 2009. Anyways, 4K on my TV in the living looks great, but it really isn’t needed for standard enjoyment. Especially if I’m only half ass paying attention.
PS XBOX and Nintendo are all in the same market, along with Steam, Epic, GOG, etc. The video gaming market. MS will probably still sell an “XBOX”, it just won’t be locked down to the XBOX game store anymore. This is a win for everyone.
Yes it has a higher initial cost, but it will be lower in the long run. Finance that shit through Klarna or some shit and you’ll still come out on top.
"And here's the thing — maybe it will work," she added. "Xbox has a deep portfolio. [Oblivion Remastered] was obviously a huge success, and they can continue to outsource that work to external companies and make a lot of money releasing their older games — older games from an era when Xbox knew how to build them."
Shots fired. Despite Microsoft constantly claiming Xbox is here to stay and they're working on the next console, it's very clear they're trying to transition off hardware back into Windows so they don't lose that too since Linux is dominating the handheld market. Even if they do make a new console, theyll put as much effort into it as the Xbox One.
the xbone was the last console I bought. Soured the pot so bad on what I enjoyed about console gaming. I already had a PC, but still enjoyed the couch casual sessions that seemingly don’t exist, and haven’t for over a decade
I’ve just had my gaming PC hooked up to my living room TV for the last several years. I have a lower power desktop on my room for anything that isn’t gaming. I can’t imagine buying one of the modern consoles just for their limitations alone.
Plus I just wait a few years and 95% of the explained make their way to PC anyway.
Microsoft is trying to make Xbox into Windows: Where 3rd parties make the hardware and then license the platform from Microsoft. It’s a vastly more profitable model. Especially if they get all those end users signed up for a subscription service.
The problem is that the world thinks of “Xbox” as a console (and a specific kind of controller). To pull this off Microsoft is going to have to re-brand Xbox entirely by making people think of it more like a game-specific app store that runs on Windows and special handheld hardware. It won’t be easy.
There’s a bigger problem with this plan though: No real coordination with the Windows OS team. Windows on handhelds sucks. The past twenty fucking years of Windows development has been almost entirely focused on improving enterprise features with very little attention paid to end users or gaming.
Growth in Windows gaming has come despite Microsoft’s investments. Not because of them. In fact, I’d argue that if it weren’t for Steam, Windows—as a gaming platform—would be a fraction of what it is today.
Don’t get me wrong, though! I love this new Xbox roadmap! Windows gaming has been holding back Linux desktop adoption for far too long. The latest benchmarks that show games on SteamOS vastly outperforming the new Xbox-branded handhelds pretty clearly demonstrates all that bashing of Windows by Linux nerds was deeply accurate.
It turns out that Linux on the desktop really is superior! 🤣
So basically they’re trying to do what Trip Hawkins did with the 3DO in 1993. In order for that to work, you’re going to have to convince people to pay PC hardware prices first. Two issues:
Third party manufacturers aren’t going to sell at a loss,
Sony will continue to sell their consoles at a loss, which means everyone will just buy their consoles instead.
The problem at this point is not so much that they don’t have games - they have released plenty in the past few years and most have been received positively.
The problem is that they released those games too late, and by that point, the ship had already sailed. After a streak of disappointing years with the XOne, they needed strong titles to pair up with XSeries. Instead, they released jack shit for an entire year, and after that the disappointment just grew further with the likes of Halo Infinite, Starfield and the weird vampire game nobody asked for.
By that point, everyone already got themselves a PS5, a Switch, a gaming PC or a handheld device. Xbox needed to show their fans they believed in their mission and were capable of delivering strong titles on their platform, but everyone saw their releases and said “Meh”.
The strong titles eventually came, but by that point they had already decided to port them over to the competition to offset the cost, and everyone saw the writing was on the wall for the platform.
Spencer can go on stage spewing whatever bullshit he wants, but nobody outside of the most diehard Xbox fans believe that the platform has a future - and it’s very hard to convince people to invest on your platform when it’s not certain how many more years it will be supported, and whether your store will remain accessible or shut down a few years down the line.
I know people hate the idea of console exclusivity, but without it, that’s what really killed the Xbox for me. I’ve got a gaming PC and a PS5 (not Pro), and I could afford an Xbox Series X if I really wanted to. I simply don’t know of any games on the platform that I want and can’t get somewhere else.
And that’s not coming from a reflexive Microsoft hater. I had an OG Xbox (and loved the old Duke controller), 360, and One S. I just barely played the latter.
It’s too expensive to make those kinds of exclusives anymore, which means they take longer to make, which means there are fewer of them. Sony can’t make enough PlayStation exclusives to justify me buying a PlayStation anymore, so I don’t buy one, so they put them on PC too, so there’s even less reason for me to have a PlayStation. Console exclusives are on their way out of fashion.
It doesn't help that the One S is an underpowered cheapo console, but that MS demands that all Xbox games must run on the One S with a pretty high FPS. You had major developers delaying or cancelling their Xbox release because they couldn't get it to work on the One S.
With the rise of game streaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna I predict that the console market is basically over. I honestly don’t expect Microsoft to release another console and if Sony does it’s almost certain to be the last. Nintendo may stick with it longer since they just released the Switch2 but they seem to be prepping for it with the digital key thing.
It sucks for the players but it makes fiscal sense for the Publishers and Console Makers (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) if there is an industry wide pivot to game streaming where players are required to pay every month. I know that some games don’t lend themselves well to this, yet, but it’s blatantly obvious (at least to me) that this is where the industry is headed.
We’ve already reached the end of “Console Exclusive” games and I think what comes next is “Streaming Platform Exclusive” games. I think what comes after that is the Publishers establishing their own Streaming Platforms for their own games.
This is precisely what has happened with the rest of the entertainment industry and there’s no reason I can see for gaming, which is a subset of that same industry, to do anything else now that the streaming technology exists.
Steam and GOG will end up pushed out of the market or they will also become Streaming Platforms, just ones that cater to a different set of players.
Streaming has plateaued, and I don’t see anyone overcoming that plateau. The console market is coming to an end, but the transition is to PC gaming, not streaming, and we can measure that.
I can’t see streaming games being anything other than a niche market. It puts the burden onto the streamer, in order to be competitive they look after constantly be upgrading their offering, they will have to have multiple server centres around the world, they will always be beholden to crappy ISPs who just don’t upgrade their infrastructure.
With local hardware you shortcut all of that, upgrading of your hardware is done by the user so they’re not going to complain if it’s out of date, you don’t have to have any server centres, and the ISP issues either don’t matter for single player games that were massively reduced for multiplayer games, now they don’t actually have to send video over the connection. .
This has been explicitly attempted 3 times already, and that really didn’t work out well for anybody who tried it.
Epic Games Store still resorts to bribing people with free games to keep their monthly active user numbers up, hemorrhaging money to attract users who are rarely interested in anything more than freebies.
EA and Ubisoft tried to forgo Steam releases in favor of their own stores and launchers in an attempt to keep 100% of the revenue. They eventually relented, releasing their games on Steam again. Even Blizzard joined in, adding Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 to Steam.
And Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone Steam by releasing games through the Windows app store just ended up with Valve funneling considerable resources into helping Linux and WINE become a viable alternative to Windows for gaming.
Unless Valve enshittifies or legal shenanigans ensue, they’re pretty unlikely to be pushed out of the market. No single game or game series is good enough to capture the entire market of Steam users and permanently drive them to alternative platforms. On top of that, Steam has a huge following of users who are loyal to the company, which is both insane and insanely hard to compete against.
or they will also become Streaming Platforms
Maybe, maybe not. I don’t see it happening, though. Valve makes money hand over fist from digital sales alone, and they have more to lose in pissing off their customers by selling subscriptions than they have to gain by selling subscriptions.
I am concerned about GOG and PC hardware prices, though.
GOG being pushed out of the market. They’re one of the only stores that actually give you ownership of your games, and they don’t have the same indomitable foothold that Steam does.
It would be all too easy for Microsoft to strangle one of their key markets by taking a loss on sales and offering publishers 150% sales price in exchange for exclusive distribution of 90s and 2000s era PC games or console ports.
The good thing about GOG is that you don’t have to trust them, since there’s no ecosystem lock-in like other stores have. If you continue to shop there, it’s only in your favor, and they’ve got a better shot at sticking around. They’re currently leaning into the concerns that more and more of us have about preservation, so that appears to be a market worth money, and hopefully they’re right. Microsoft is not in the business of loss leading right now, so I’m not super concerned about that kind of threat, and if they were going to try to squeeze out a competitor, they’d be going after Steam, not GOG.
I just assumed they hired the same person that was previously in charge of naming Street Fighter games from Capcom. I was sure the next Xbox would be named something like Xbox X 360 Series X Alpha Championship Edition with Hyper Fighting
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Aktywne