I would be extremely surprised if at least one upgraded model of the Xbox doesn’t ship with a disc drive. It would completely alienate a section of their user-base that want a more powerful box and care about owning physical media. They also made this mistake before with the Xbox One - which Spencer himself has mentioned as a key reason why there’s such a gap in sales volume between XBS/X and PS5 - so to make the same mistake again would be doubly confusing.
Edit: just seen this story corroborated by multiple outlets, so this may well be the real deal. And if so, super disappointing and fucking duuuumb. As the Xbox Series X OG console becomes more and more the outlier, what are the chances that publishers will just stop producing discs for retail completely? So basically, really piss off your early adopters. I own a Series S at the moment, but I’m more likely to just switch to PS5 Pro model when it comes round instead of stick with the Xbox Series consoles.
The ActiBlizz merger needs to be shot down and Microsoft Games needs to be forced to split off from Microsoft. This tactic of “Make all the money in one sector, then use that unlimited money to invade another sector, force small businesses out by operating at a loss, and then enshittifying the entire sector to a state worse than it was originally” has to stop - across all sectors.
If you can’t survive in your own sector on your own merits without money from Daddy Corpo, you deserve to die.
I also hate that Spencer talks like “sitting on a big pile of cash” instead of gambling it on the market is fucking stupid. Classic “NOW NOW NOW” American capitalism.
I also hate that Spencer talks like “sitting on a big pile of cash” instead of gambling it on the market is fucking stupid.
If you're sitting on cash, you're guaranteed to lose money to inflation. If you invest it wisely, you have a good chance of beating inflation. Even in personal finance, it's very stupid to sit on a big pile of cash; everything above and beyond an emergency fund or savings for a short-term goal should be invested.
I’m assuming that “big pile of cash” is their emergency fund - Spencer implies as much when he says that it serves as an impediment to buying them out.
There's some use for an emergency fund, but since businesses this size have steady streams of revenue, they usually only want to sit on tons of cash when they can't find anything better to invest it in. Microsoft went on acquisition sprees, but other companies might buy back shares to return that excess cash to investors.
Honestly even the idea of an emergency fund, I mean accounting dorks say things like “save six months salary in an accessible, liquid form”.
Does anybody really do that? I mean for a middle-class well-educated dual-income household that’s probably close to 100k, which we were all recently reminded the limit for bank account insurance.
If you own your home doesn’t it make more sense to have a secured line of credit set for emergencies and then ride as close to the wire as you feel comfortable?
Your emergency fund is usually recommended to be 3-6 months of expenses, not salary...though I guess for plenty of people, even at high salaries, that may be the same number, but then you'll never have savings anyway. Really your emergency fund is for however much risk you can tolerate, like if you end up unemployed for 3-6 months, but your emergency fund is for things other than just unemployment, like sudden medical expenses or replacing a water heater. If you're comfortable with a line of credit on your home being your emergency fund, go for it. There's some risk to that, but there's different kinds of risk to everything.
Yes, because otherwise how the fuck can I afford to move apartments when my landlord raises the price by a thousand dollars a month. But also I have no assets so it’s my entire savings and I can’t put it anywhere because I need it within a year.
So yeah some of us are fucked and the idea that a middle class household would make 100k in 6 months means you have no touch on reality for real wages for lots of people.
Sorry, forgot this was an international community. $100k CAD. So $75k USD. We’ve the same 100k bank-insurance limit here, but its $100k CAD.
Either way, I know plenty of people who make near $200k of household income and are still fucked because they didn’t get into the housing market in time before the door slammed shut (average home in Greater Toronto is now well north of a $million, even with our stupid-expensive interest rates). Like, teachers and realtors make $90k CAD after a few years of experience these days, but that doesn’t accomplish much when rent keeps jumping and nobody can afford to buy. Basically the only reason everybody isn’t eating cat-food is they’re either in a pre-rent-deregulation unit or they bought before it all hit the fan.
Also, side-note: the traditional concept of “middle class” is not the modern expansive definition of “basically everybody who doesn’t own either a private jet or live in a cardboard box”. That is, somebody who pays rent and has a job that doesn’t require grad-school used to be considered “working class”. It’s just that for some dumb reason we all collectively decided that “working class” was something to be embarrassed about.
I get called a Sony fanboy for calling out Microsoft for being terrible for gaming. I haven’t owned a Nintendo device since N64, but I have nothing bad to say about them. They make great games.
It’s weird calling for one mega corp to be split up while supporting another mega corp that owns more than the first. Everyone needs a reality check if they think any mega corp doesn’t want the same thing.
In the context of gaming, Sony and Microsoft couldn’t be more different. I can get over Sony’s terrible store backend or refund policies. I know how they work, how to avoid pitfalls, etc. at the end of the day, they make the better games that I like to play and have shown over the course of thirty years to support gaming first.
Sony and Nintendo are both terrible, hypocritical companies in their own right. That by no means absolves Microsoft of being who they are, and the pro-consumer tactic Xbox has employed for the past 5 or 6 years is definitely a calculated move and the result of them falling hard after the Don Mattrick era, but to say that Microsoft (and by that I assume you mean Xbox) is terrible for gaming is a bad take. The gaming landscape is better because Xbox exists. Competition and choice empower the consumer. If you think Sony wouldn’t be an even shittier company without the competition Xbox provides, you really don’t understand how these avaricious corporate conglomerates operate.
Funny thing being that the only reason SONY is in gaming was to screw Nintendo. They had a hardware partnership that fell apart because SONY was putting the thumbscrews to Nintendo over revenue sharing. Nintendo said, you’re not the only one who can provide what we need, and dumped them. PlayStation was the direct result.
That’s a incredibly biased way of saying a business deal feel through, Nintendo went to a competitor, and Sony decided to prove Nintendo made the wrong choice and stay in the market
This humiliating turnabout enraged Sony president Norio Ohga, but though it seemed sudden from the outside, problems had been boiling between the two companies for some time. The main issue was an agreement over how revenue would be collected – Sony had proposed to take care of money made from CD sales while Nintendo would collect from cartridge sales, and suggested that royalties would be figured out later. “Nintendo went bananas, frankly, and said that we were stepping on its toll booth and that it was totally unacceptable,” explains Chris Deering, who at the time worked at Sony-owned Columbia Pictures but would go on to head the PlayStation business in Europe. “They just couldn’t agree and it all fell apart.” - web.archive.org/web/…/making-playstation/
Nintendo broke their contract with Sony. I think it’s obvious that they messed that one up. What could have been right? Competition is good.
No no… it’s the part that Sony owns a headphone company, and a TV company, and their first product was a rice cooker.
The point was that they enter a space using funds from one of their other arms to strongarm away competition and become a conglomerate that owns and operates a huge percentage of people’s lives and product purchases leaving almost no breathing room for other companies to ever enter.
It’s not about refund policy or their games it’s about the subsidized products they can only afford by min/maxing other economic spaces they control
Nintendo was founded in the 1800s as a playing card company. To some extend every manufacturer started with something else. You’re misrepresenting my point. Sony entered the market and competed based on actual merit. They have grown their own in-house talent, in-house IPs, and technology just like Nintendo. Microsoft almost threw in the towel in 2013. There recent moves scream Embrace, Extend, Extinguish where they don’t have to worry about pesky things like making good games, but can force gamers to pay them monthly for whatever they feel like putting out, or just let third parties do the work and use their power to force them into whatever pricing Microsoft wants. People thinking GamePass is great should brush up on their history of what Microsoft does when they get the upper hand. I say this as a someone who uses a ton of Microsoft Products outside of gaming.
Microsoft Games needs to be forced to split off from Microsoft.
That would mean Minecraft could actually be released for more than Android and Windows again. That game was on every platform then Bedrock came out and it’s on 2. They even said Mac and Linux versions were coming after release and it’s been years. A C++ version of the game is ideal. It runs faster, it plays better, they also integrated a marketplace and overall I like bedrock but they only did it to keep a monopoly on gaming.
That said, Game Pass is uniquely tied to Windows at this point and has very little ability to have the same protections on Mac or Linux. Windows is the only OS that can hard lock you away from your files. For better or worse. Game Pass is a neat system but also has major downfalls.
Too bad it doesnt actually have a gyro. I’m one of those gyro aiming weirdos. I like the ergo of the Xbox controllers better but I mostly use a dualsense because of this feature.
How would they plan to do that? Foreign investment in Japanese companies is heavily regulated, much more than it is regulated in the Americas or Europe.
I know these Chucklehead Executive Officers only exist to enrich the companies they run and by extension, themselves, but they all seem to fail to understand that running a company is not just merge and acquire. Of course that is what capitalism wants, but there is room for there to be more than five Big Names in Gaming, and a MSFT-owned Nintendo would not be what it is today. You don’t become an innovator by buying the innovative companies.
Yes, Nintendo’s hardware has gradually fallen “behind the times” (if you look at raw power, generationally) but guess what? A majority of people are still willing to play Mario, Zelda, and many more quality first-party titles on potatoes as long as the games are fun.
Nintendo has taken risks and made some weird crap over the years, but that is exactly what makes them different from the other two. I don’t think we would have had Nintendo Switch today without the wild consumer success of the Wii and then the massive pendulum swing of the WiiU (which was tethered to the home just like that new PS5 Portal display controller). They came to market with an R&D Wii 1.5 prototype that flopped, but that sent them right back to the drawing board to rethink it, creating the Switch, which effectively merged their console and handheld divisions.
I am not a betting person, but if I was, I would be placing my chips on the card company-turned beloved video game creator that turns 134 this week, and not the American conglomerate that thinks the entire future of gaming is subscriptions and microtransactions on the third place console.
Nintendo does have a lot of issues, but they’re clearly a company that still puts a lot of love into their games and products. I hope they keep on making great games, and maybe they’ll even make better hardware some day. Even if they don’t, not every system has to offer the latest and greatest to be fun and successful. Nintendo proved that time and time again.
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">and even newlines are preserved and long lines are perfectly soft-wrapped, isn't it useful?
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</span><span style="color:#323232;">> empty lines should have '>' if they're part of quote
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This is a quote. whole paragraph is still a quote with a single ‘>’ and even newlines are preserved and long lines are perfectly soft-wrapped, isn’t it useful?
empty lines should have ‘>’ if they’re part of quote
this is a separate quote, because line above doesn’t have ‘>’
Yep arrogant Sony from the PS3 era is 100% back under Jim Ryan’s control. Absolute shame after what Shawn Layden, Andrew House and Shu built up through the PS4 generation.
Edit: Hours after I said this, Jim Ryan has stepped down as CEO…
Reading comments it sounds like there is more to this. GamingHeads sounds pretty shady, not completing orders, bad support, etc. Also this open letter is pretty unprofessional.
I’m not a big Sony fan but this seems like it isn’t necessarily an example where Sony is the asshole!
They're trying to weasel out of paying refunds, as if it makes any difference who told them to do what. They have to issue refunds for merchandise not delivered and then sue Sony for damages.
If it were me I’d just tell them they have the choice between refunding me or me issuing a charge back since they didn’t deliver the product, I know which is preferable to them…
It’s really none of the customers problem why you can’t deliver, unless they are somehow being difficult, you are obligated to make the customer whole on the transaction which is a contract.
If they took care of me I’d happily email Sony and tell them they are being dicks (in a brutal but classy way), but these guys are probably cut off for a reason.
From what I’m reading, it’s Sony cutting ties with a s* company.
In the open letter they also ask to contact Sony to get refunds, which is not at all how it works. And GamingHeads should be the one giving refunds. They then manage with Sony.
From comments I can read on the website and reddit, it seems that statues were taking a very long time to ship (5 years).
Tho destroying ready to ship products isn’t great either.
resetera.com
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