No, there won’t be another xbox. Phil Spencer is angling to get gamepass on nintendo and sony. But he’s going to have to force it through the courts and government legislation, much like epic is doing with mobile stores now.
It’s a play for the consumer’s money, and when the consumer has better options than the traditional console model, the console model breaks down. They’ve got at least one more Xbox in them, whether or not that next Xbox is just a PC with different branding.
The “better option” is subscription services where you own nothing and the bottom drops out of the industry, just like music and film. You can cheer for that if you want, but it is not in the interests of the consumer.
I wasn’t cheering for subscription services. I was cheering that this exclusivity model of walled gardens no longer makes economic sense, while open platforms are on the rise. Microsoft is hoping that their pivot will result in more subscribers to their subscription service, but all signs are pointing to them having a rough time of growing beyond where they stand now, for all sorts of reasons.
Yeah, they still haven’t fixed the slow ass scrolling performance in the client and have barely introduced any platform features to their store. It’s so bad.
Steam suspicously absent from this conversation, but I’m willing to be patient and see.
It’s a positive attitude for Spencer to take, but would have to see it in practice to be able to make judgment on if he really stands behind those words or if he is simply making a strategic business decision whose real motives are simply masked by these words.
The latter is par for the course for corporations, so we don’t have a lot to lean on in favor of him truly holding these values, sadly. One can hope, however, that miracles can and do happen.
That’s not where Valve makes their money from though. Their money primarily comes from store purchases, so anything to expand Steam’s reach is better for them. Plus, keeping Steam as relevant and ubiquitous as possible will in turn promote sales of the Steam Deck. The Xbox and Steam Deck cater to fundamentally different use cases anyways.
Valve are the only ones confident enough in their systems to do that. Valve’s mindset seems to be that trying to lock people in is a losing strategy, long term. Instead they are just making sure that their offerings are better than anything else available. If done right, it has all the advantages of locking people in, with none of the downsides. It also combines with the perceived openness, which gains you a lot of credit with the geek community.
Microsoft are too reliant on lock-in to risk opening it up.
What does Xbox even have that I couldn’t already play on my PC? Halo’s dead; there’s no reason to humor Xbox as a console anymore. Microsoft’s still-surviving exclusives are all mid; so really, why would I get one of these when I could just play on my PC, or pick up a Steam Deck to have access to my PC’s library?
Valve only makes the deck available in a handful of countries while Xbox hardware is available pretty much everywhere, so I’d say it’s natural to assume a hypothetical dexbox would too
Because Xbox deck wouldn’t be made by a tiny gambling company. It would be made by a massive corporation with footholds for tech already established in practically every country.
Leave it to microsoft to join the party years late with a product that completely misses the point of what makes the original to their copy actually popular
I don’t think this guy understands what innovation is. The Steam Deck and Wii aren’t particularly innovative. The Wii is a bit unusual, but pointer controls didn’t stick (though gyro controls have, in a minor way). The Steam Deck is just a regular handheld but with an x86 CPU.
I don’t think people are going to buy small consoles to play big games. And a powerful handheld is overkill to play small games. If people want to play small games, they use the phone they already have.
The handheld console sweet spot is slightly more powerful than the Switch. But the Switch’s selling power isn’t its hardware, but its library. Nintendo games have selling power. And even outside of that, the Switch has a surprisingly large library of third-party games like Skyrim and Doom. But if people really want a console that will do everything, they’ll get a Deck, because I know you won’t be able to do whatever you want on Microsoft’s handheld.
When the C-suite says “innovation” they tend to mean either “things other companies did that this company hasn’t done yet” or “obvious stuff that we should have done already but didn’t”.
This is cool but I miss being able to grind for skins. Playing events and earning a bunch of loot boxes just for playing was great. I’m not giving them any money.
Instead of having to pay for the game’s premium battle pass or unlock that new hero through dozens of hours of gameplay, Blizzard will make Venture and all future heroes available to free for all players when they launch.
Wow, Blizzard actually taking a factually negative change back. No further modifications, no further rework, just a straight rollback of something that was a bad idea to begin with. That’s really a sign of the times changing, that always felt like something that is strictly forbidden at Blizzard! 😮
The new hero Venture is so/so though, IMO. Yeah their movement ability is awesome, but that weapon is so boring. And they hype it up so much, but it is just Sigma’s primary fire, including the ability to fire around corners and all. Unavoidable with so many heroes and not nearly enough niches for all of them that things will get doubled and tripled up, but it’s still disappointing to see something copied&pasted so directly.
I played the hell out of OW1. They turned off OW1 servers and required my actual real phone number to continue to play on OW2. Wouldn’t even let me use a VIP number. There is no time in this universe where I will want Blizzard/Activision or its advertising partners to have my real phone number. No interest in OW2.
It's a good change for sure, but the cynic in me can't help but think they're doing this solely because they believe it'll make them more money this way.
The actual reason is to hide the fact they’re probably not gonna have much if any pve content soonish. That’s the whole ‘reason’ behind ow2. They just layed off a bunch of staff too.
I don't see the correlation between those and making new heroes free. Maybe as a way to douse the community flames.
I think it's simply because people want to play the new content. While some cave and buy the battlepass, it doesn't offset the losses of the grind and paywall that stops people from coming back and investing to begin with.
The actual reason is to hide the fact they’re probably not gonna have much if any pve content soonish
They literally out right said multiple times that PvE content is mostly shelved and to not expect anything. This isn’t some sort of secret they are keeping
polygon.com
Aktywne