My friend group enjoyed Splitgate 1 but we just bounced off Splitgate 2. It just wasn’t fun. Portals seemed to be an afterthought, rather than fundamental to the gameplay. Also the maps we played seemed to be tighter and less arena based.
Still not sure why they decided to do ‘2’ rather than continuing to iterate on the first one really.
I recall them saying that their tech stack in the first game couldn’t handle the influx of players that they got at their peak, and that’s what led them to start with a rewrite.
I think the reason you pivot to 2 is always because execs say that they didn’t monetize enough early enough and it’s best to just try again with the week 1 sales peak because they’re short sighted idiots. Splitgate 1 was a game worth revisiting for months, but 2 isn’t going to hold your attention for a weekend.
When splitgate 1 launched its problem was a lack of polish. They polished it up and made an incredible live service game with terrible cosmetics. Then they gave up on all of that to make call of duty but sometimes there are walls to portal through. Now they are giving up on that and taking it all down. They need to hire an art director to rework it from the ground up and have splitgate 2 be splitgate 1 v2.0
I guess Partners in Time would be when the time travel was discovered! Conveniently explains child Pauline as well, I suppose. Well, the “how,” but not the “why.”
I remember when they did that with Breath of the Wild. Link literally has a WiiU gamepad that you can’t use on the WiiU. You can only use it as a main monitor.
If I had to take a wild guess, it’s higher-ups sacking employees to get a quick payday.
Microsoft keeps buying up dev teams, promising games, and then prevents games from releasing. I have been questioning their desire to make future consoles, to be honest. It seems like they’re trying to focus on gamepass and maneuvering out of the console market. Especially with their new handheld being made by a different company.
Microsoft is quickly becoming the worst company in gaming, which is saying something when you have the likes of Nintendo and EA. They bought up a bunch of quality companies making good games just to fire everyone and shut them down so their crappy flagship titles have no competition. Companies want to kill and destroy all games old, new, and even hypothetical so that their glorified slot machines get the spotlight. This is the beginning of the end for mainstream gaming. (Indie gaming is going strong though).
MORE SOULS ON THE ALTER OF THE AI GOD, you know, just a few more and it shall burst forth from the machine and solve all our problems.
Just keeeeeeep pouring resources and capital on to the fire, any day now. Don’t worry about the climate or housing prices, the inevitable AI god will solve all that, surely. All the ruined lives and destroyed careers will be worth it, promise.
But Blackbird’s cancellation was particularly shocking because it had blown away executives at Xbox just a few months ago. During the demonstration in March, Spencer was enjoying the game so much that Matt Booty, the head of Xbox Game Studios, had to pull the controller away so they could keep the meeting going, according to two people who were in the room.
This is a game that even Spencer was enjoying and then they just cancelled it. I have no word.
I will play the devil advocate here, but a mmo in this economy ? Very little chance to succeed event if it’s good. I’m not saying canceling it was a good call, we will never know. But I can understand that being blow away is maybe not even enough for a live service to be good.
Of course they compete even if they are the same company. For a game to be profitable it need to attract consumers if you take it from another of your product that not good. Even more reason to shut it down imo. Why bother create a new IP a new community and risking to loose big, when you can put resources on your other product that already have that.
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
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’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.
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
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.
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