The X is trying to compete in a premium space, long with the PS5. The X falls short of the PS5 in almost every category that a premium consumer cares about, and I don’t think premium consumers are interested in value-oriented subscriptions like GamePass.
The S is competing with… Well definitely not the Switch. I wouldn’t say the Steam Deck either. It was competing to an extent with the PS4 and Xbox One, but not anymore. The S has kind of been left in its own market, so this news makes sense.
Maybe the Switch 2 will have some overlap in that market, but assuming it’s a hybrid handheld it might still be differentiated enough to leave the S on it’s own. Sony has been working on lowering the cost of the PS5 but I can’t see that getting anywhere near S territory. So unless something else drops I don’t see the S having competition any time soon.
The S is a stellar emulation box that doesn’t need to be jailbroken. It’s a hell of a lot easier to configure than a custom Linux distro like RetroPie and the hardware packs a punch. I don’t own one, but I’d be more likely to buy a series S than a PS5 or series X.
That’s about using emulators in retail mode which nobody with half a brain thought was gonna stick around. You pay $20 to unlock developer mode and do all your emulation stuff in there. Retail is for playing actual xbox games.
When you’re talking about a premium market in particular, I think most high-end consumers who care about the aesthetics of their living room would prefer the official, matching Dualsense charger/stand over Microsoft’s charging kit.
The exclusives are huge, especially factoring in backwards-compatibility. Xbox is undoubtedly a better value if you already have a library of older Xbox games or you are shopping used. But if you divide consumers up into Budget, Value, and Premium tiers, I don’t think the Premium tier consumers care about playing games that old. The PS4 had way more big-budget AAA exclusives than the Xbox One did, so I think PlayStation has the advantage there.
Weirdly, I think there’s some dissonance with this around disc drives. I would think premium consumers would care less about physical media: they aren’t buying used games and probably have concerns for the aesthetic of storing physical media. I personally prefer physical media, but I consider myself a value consumer who has no qualms buying used and can handle a little bit of clutter. So I think disc drive versions are valued less by the premium segment, but costs more to manufacture. So I think that boosts the sales of the diaclsss PS5. Premium consumers aren’t interested in the Series S at all though, so if they do go Xbox they just get the X and don’t use the drive. I kind of wonder how the market will react if the rumors of Sony selling an external drive end up true.
I'm unsure of these "premium" consumers caring about proprietary vs non-proprietary storage. Or caring about VR in the context of consoles instead of PCs. Or that the charger stand being a concern when the PS5 looks like it does.
It makes sense. It may suprise a lot of people on here but their biggest market is not the people who demand 4k 60FPS in all games and will riot if they don’t get it. Their main market is kids playing FIFA and Minecraft and other casual gamers who just enjoy fun games at a reasonable budget. For that they really got it right with the Series S.
Nintendo understanding this market is a big part of how they’ve been outselling MS and Sony in the Wii and Switch generations despite being behind on hardware power.
While I agree with you, the fact that no game has released in the past 10 years without major patches and updates means what’s on that physical media is useless
It’s an absurd value. I have two that I just use as media centers and the house. You can also travel with it very easily. About the same size as my switch one you put a travel case on it.
Well sure, but you said you just use them as media centers. Unless you count games as media too. But for just viewing streaming services there are cheaper options.
I own a Series X, but I also own a 4k TV. So, for me, it made sense to spend the extra $$$ and get a console that could truly utilize my TV’s capabilities. If I had a 1080p TV, I probably would have gone with the Series S.
I’ve been waiting for a game that will be worth it, that I can only play on a new console, and so far I haven’t seen one. I’m closer to upgrading my graphics card than getting a new console at this point.
I would argue that the Steam Deck's emulation capabilities surpass the Xbox. It might not play the latest games at amazing quality and performance, but it covers a wide breadth of games, far wider than what Xbox supports.
Compete in terms of value, not price. The series S gets you Xbox’s current gen game library and a selection of 360 games, and if you’re willing to use dev mode a powerful emulation suite. Deck gets a huge percentage of Steam’s 20-year catalog as one-click installs, most other PC games that don’t use anticheat as slightly more involved installs, every PC game if you want to install windows, and also a powerful emulation suite. Plus it’s a dockable handheld instead of something that needs a monitor and controller.
The series S has better media apps and can be woken up from the couch, though.
the steam deck is also just a regular ol’ PC so you can use it for non-gaming stuff like making a lil’ drawing on the go, or plug in some peripherals and just… use it like an honestly pretty okay performance desktop.
I mean, I would rather have a Steam Deck too, but then we're getting into how much people value openness versus price, and that's definitely not a constant; some people aren't going to care much about openness.
That said, if I were trying to compare Valve's offering and Microsoft's offering, I'd probably compare a desktop PC running Steam to the XBox, as they're more-physically-comparable in terms of what they can do; the Series S doesn't have one having to pay for mobility. If one were comparing to a mobile console, then sure, the Deck is a legit comparison.
I still would say that the XBox Series S is going to be cheaper on the low end, though, than a desktop PC. You can get a $279 PC that can play games and a comparable controller, but I'd bet that it'd be more-limited than a Series S.
That being said, Microsoft sells the XBox at a loss, and then makes it back by jacking up the price of games:
As VGC points out, Wright was also asked if there's ever been a profit generated from an Xbox console sale, which she confirmed has never happened. To put that in context, Microsoft has been selling Xbox consoles for nearly 20 years now, including the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and now the Xbox Series X and Series S. In all that time, every single console sale cost Microsoft money.
The reason game consoles end up being profitable is through a combination of software, service, and accessory sales, but it's still surprising to find Microsoft has never achieved hardware profitability. Analyst Daniel Ahmad confirmed that the PS4 eventually became profitable for Sony and that Nintendo developed the Switch to be profitable quickly, so Microsoft is the odd one out.
We know that consumers weight the up-front price of hardware disproportionately -- that's why you have companies selling cell phones at a loss, locking them to their network, and then making the money back in increased subscription fees. I assume that that's to try to take advantage of that phenomenon.
If you wanted to compare the full price that you pay over the lifetime of the console, one would probably need to account for the increased game price on consoles and how many games someone would buy.
Now, all that being said, I don't have a Series S or a Series X, and I'm not arguing that someone should buy them. I have a Linux PC for gaming precisely because I do value openness, so in terms of which system I'd rather have, you're preaching to the choir. I'm just saying that I don't think that I'd agree with the above statement that the Deck is as cheap as the Series S.
It becomes even more confusing when you think about the fact that the Xbox One is not the Xbox 1, which was just the Xbox. And that the Xbox One X, the souped up version of the Xbox One, can be abbreviated as the XBOX, which again, is not the original Xbox.
Not really. If you were going to buy an xbox, you would either just buy the cheaper version, the more expensive version assuming its just better, or look up the difference.
That game was such a bummer. The first game was tons of fun but the sequel missed the mark in pretty much every respect. Even things that shouldn’t have been impacted by all the rewrites and cut content, like combat, were a letdown.
I think the fact that the first game was such a masterpiece is part of why I rate the second one so poorly. The first game does everything so much better that it’s hard to believe it’s 7 years older. The camera work in the cutscenes, the physics, the inclusion of firearms, the fact that you, Crane, and the game itself all give a shit about the story.
Contrast that with DL2’s bethesda-ass cutscenes, the zombie animations taking priority over physics, the lack of firearms, and the fact that the game doesn’t give a shit about anything in its own story. I played the whole game with the objective of wanting to save my sister, and in the end I blew up the city for her, and Aiden just dips? He just fucks off not caring that his sister is… dead? The game never even makes says what happened to her! Aiden just came in, ruined the place, and leaves!
I totally agree. I’ve played through DL1 like 5 times and that’s something I rarely do once with games released in the last decade or so. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish one play through of DL2.
You find Waltz, who it turns out is Mia’s dad and Aiden’s father figure. He starts a process of launching rockets to destroy the city or something, I can’t remember and it doesn’t really matter. After you do a boss fight with him, a very frail and maybe dying Mia walks out of a door and says “stop fighting guys,” and suddenly you and Waltz are besties. Y’all are like “oh shit, the rockets are gonna destroy the city but we’re friends now!” You have to choose between letting your actual bestie Lawan sacrifice herself to blow up the rockets in the bunker, or save her and let the rockets launch, destroying the city.
Side note, remember Hakon? That fucker that betrayed you and then tried to kill you like three times? If you didn’t murder his ass the first chance you got, he comes in for a heel-face turn and blows up the rockets himself, saving Lawan and the city. That’s an ending I just found out about, because on my playthrough I spent a few extra grenades making sure his dumb Judas ass was actually dead.
You might be wondering, what happens to Mia after the ordeal with the rockets? Good question! The game literally goes from “save the city and let Lawan die or destroy the city and let Lawan live” to Aiden fucking off into the wilderness. I was so goddamn pissed when I found out that the WHOLE REASON AIDEN CAME TO THE CITY was left as a loose end. Maybe the DLC ties it up. I’m certainly never gonna find out.
Haha I like the descriptions a lot. Unfortunately the plot was so forgettable that I barely remember who any of those people are. I think I had just met Lawan shortly before I stopped playing.
I know I’ve finished Dying Light 2, but I don’t remember much about it.
I remember the insane amount of copy paste in the maps. Oh another roof with the half fenced in area with the same backpacks. Or the exact same ramp again.
In Dying Light 1, traveling at night was terrifying.
Being pursued by… whatever those were, looking back with your flashlight, just trying to gtfo.
In the second, it’s mostly just annoying. Shoot the same screaming zombie that’s basically dropped every 150m in a square grid.
There were different endings, which really only hinged on one or two choices that you make way early in the game and pretty much nothing else you did really mattered in the end.
Also, Alyx was there, but she spoke like Ahsoka and didn’t have a crowbar.
I used to sneak in to E3 in the 2000s when it was industry only. It was always a blast. But I also think this style of show is done for in general. I really like the Nintendo Directs and it seems like other companies have figured out how to do their own version. I also like that we get news throughout the year instead of in May.
I played 10hrs and refunded. (Thank god for Steam)
I feel like im in Truman Show. I see how shallow the game is. Everything is a facade. They try to mask the issues of their old game engine and people (streamers and reviewers) just eat it up. Im watching streams where they run into game breaking bugs several times but still praise the game like they have a script to follow.
I mean, they straight up said that 90% of planets will be empty.
As far as spreading out the handcrafted content goes, in my 60 hours it’s been pretty good, but I also deliberately stick primarily to actual quests, only dipping into random exploration and proc-gen mission board quests like bounties and cargo delivery on occasion. I was initally worried that the handcrafted stuff would be limited to the three major cities, but there’s plenty of other towns and locations out there. I think there’s like three small towns just in the Sol system. It feels like every other system has one or two big handcrafted locations or questlines. I came across stuff like a resort town, a small assortment of settlers I had to negotiate a mutual defense pact for, an abandoned zero-g casino space station, a mercenary bar/motel with the absolute motherload of contraband (and a free ship), just to name a few.
The side and faction quests also are almost entirely handcrafted locations and not just clearing out enemies in generic locations like half the stuff in FO4 was. All the proc-gen quests have been relegated to Mission Boards, so every quest you get from an NPC will be an actual quest, although I had to do one single proc-gen mission to join one of the factions.
Also I’m surprised you saw that many game breaking bugs on streams, because it’s actually a very stable release. There’s some of the usual Creation Engine physics stuff, or an NPC might stand on a table or something, but I haven’t really encountered all that many bugs.
The last drop was when I realized that it’s not as open and “huge scale” as people seem to think it is. It’s kind of “fake open” if that makes sense. You cannot get into your ship and fly 800m east to your mission. If you click on your mission marker and click travel, a new instance is loaded and your mission is not there. You have to go back and run those 800m.
You really don’t even need a ship honestly, you just fast travel everywhere.
I’ll probably get it once the price goes down to 30-40 bucks or so.
100 was waaaay too much for this shallow game.
You actually do need a ship for fast travel, and you can travel distance in space (thousands of meters) to other ships or space stations in space, but yeah you can’t travel to other planets manually, but why would you want to, the scale of the cosmos is just too big. People who were expecting seamless travel between planets and systems have never played Bethesda game before.
Why would it have to take hours?
You already spend hours jogging on the empty planet surface in Starfield, because you cannot use your ship to fly 800m east to your mission marker.
I can see a lot of bad new standards develop from this, but i also recognise it gets more than just early review copies out rhe door before the majority buys the game making it a tactic bad games cant do and will reward good games to cash in. Still. Lots of potential bad stuff is intertwined with these same points
My concern is when I'm seeing streamers play games like Starfield and run into a ton of bugs, often game-breaking ones, but then go and praise the game to high heaven.
I just want a basement level of proper standards, that's all I'm asking for.
have you seen what happens if you say you didn’t like it? you’re told you’re a troll, you’re negative, you “just don’t get it”, or they take your criticism and then act like the only alternative is the complete and total opposite of that and try and pull a ‘gotcha’
on one hand I would obviously LOVE for reviews (across the board, not just in gaming) to be realistic and not all be 7+/10 but I also understand why they don’t to an extent
I worry that this also has a rose tinted glasses effect on early user reviews. The only people leaving reviews for the first few days are going to be the people already invested enough to pay extra for early access, and they may be more willing to overlook issues with the game.
That's precisely what I'm seeing with streams of the game. There's so many bugs and just bizarre design decisions, especially with the opening hour or so, but the streamers then claim it's a perfect game with no problems.
A significant amount of the bugs do seem to be based on how long you've been playing and how far into the game you've gotten. The farther you get, the more bugs start appearing.
Glad there’s a fix for that first one at least. That’s too bad, but it does seem to be very specific - if it’s prevalent outside one system then it’s definitely a huge issue though (and it’s big already).
For the second thread, I’m not really seeing any specific bugs outside of 2, it’s mostly just complaints about performance. I have over 1 day in save time so I’d have expected to have seen some of them by now I guess lol.
The only one through these threads I can corroborate is an NPC once turned around and faced the wrong way during conversation. Otherwise it’s simply been minor script delays - someone leave from an elevator that’s still closed so they run in super speed, or there’s a small delay when seating/conversing and the audio desyncs for one line before it’s back to normal. Once an NPC starting clipping into the air one step at a time, but then they reached the ceiling and it stopped.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the game honestly. Oh, one other bug I’ve seen that I’ve seen mentioned is a quest on random planets where we are to place a gas sensor on gas spews. Well, I’ve found gas spews but no quest icons appear. Others said there’s ways to make it pop up when they’re seen though.
Compared to my launch week 2077 which was also very bug free both Starfield and it seems to have a reputation that people want it to suck? The games have shortcomings, absolutely but have they realistically negatively affect my gameplay experience? So far for both games, they have not.
That said, if I’d dealt with that ship bug I’d have gone crazy! So I’m not at all trying to dismiss the bugs, but rather am just generally more confused as to why my 2077 experience was prisitine and my friends was a bug fest. Do we get different distributions of the game or something!?
I wonder how long it takes for some of those people to transfer to a more embittered relationship with Bethesda over it? Assuming any of them have that “I’m staring at a title screen realizing I haven’t actually had fun playing the game in weeks but the dopamine loop of the ‘loot, kill, craft’ system had me deluded into thinking I was enjoying myself. Like a social media doom-scroller or something” moment.
You used to be able to literally brick your build (get to a point where it’s impossible to progress any further) in Bethesda games. I’m sure that’s changed now, but that paranoia lingers.
I haven’t bought a triple a game on release in ten or fifteen years. For this one enough of my friends were already playing it for several days by the time I got it that it’s hard to see it as “early” (certainly not patient, either, but it’s fun to cheat on a diet now and then). And I’m really not finding it buggy particularly, no more than any non-aaa title would be shortly after launch. I hate to be overly kind to Bethesda but it’s really not worth the hate the net is leveling at it
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