This kinda sucks to see. Less competition is a bad thing for everyone. Maybe it’s just me hanging onto every bit of nostalgia I have, but the Xbox generations were special.
I know that it can’t like…physically remove any of the good times I had with the systems over the years. But these consoles have been part of my life since 2001. So many friends and memories were created with these systems. In a way, it feels like your friend is dying, LOL. I know that’s extremely over dramatic, but like damn.
Some of the exclusives that came to the system were really special. It’s sad to see that over the past decade, there were really only a small handful of exclusives that were notable. Especially when early on we had some absolutely amazing stuff.
On a more serious note, I am extremely curious what this means going forward and how they will handle digital purchases a decade from now.
They’ll still make the Xbox consoles as long as they are selling. They’ll hopefully just ease off the “Exclusives” going forward.
It was a shitty way of trying to move consoles anyway.
Although they are late to the party, Sony is also trying to sell on PC and other storefronts. So my guess is that the console market isn’t treating either of them super well atm.
Microsoft needs to merge their ecosystems and make the Xbox a PC Game console for your tv. I shouldn’t own 2 different units that have Microsoft operating systems that can’t use the same software in 2025. Xboxes should be PCs that run Xbox games. Make a forked version of Windows that’s TV friendly and have the ability to “boot” into a version of Windows that users can run their own PC games on.
I understand how tricky that can be for piracy and whatnot, but there’s gotta be a better way by now. At the very least, Xbox should include Steam/Epic games integration.
Over the weekend, Spencer sat down for a lengthy interview with XboxEra in which he discussed his favorite games, talked about what various Xbox studios are working on, and dished on the industry at large. And he was also honest about Xbox no longer being part of any console war, as it shifts to selling Xbox games on other consoles, like PlayStation.
“I would love to make all of the money for all of the games that we ship, right? Like, obviously we make more on our own platform,” said Spencer. “It’s one of the reasons that investing in our own platform is important. But there are people, whether it’s their libraries on a PlayStation or Nintendo, whether it’s they like the controller better, they just like the games that are there.”
“I’m not trying to move them all over to Xbox anymore,” added Spencer.
Now, I don’t expect that to mean the sudden cessation of manufacturing of current Xbox hardware. I’m not entirely sure I believe that any of this means we won’t get another generation of the console at some point, either.
But I can see that happening. And everyone can already see how Microsoft has begun to pivot away from focusing on its console, has begun a far greater foray into cloud gaming through the Xbox Game Pass platform, and it has even begun moving away from the exclusivity we wrung our hands over months ago
I don’t think its as much as microsoft lost its just that all the consoles are the same, and pc and steam deck by extension plays all the games anyway for cheaper.
It’s likely more than half of adults in the US play video games. About 40% of those play some kind of shooter. There are 258 million adults in the US. That’s ~129 million gamers, and ~51 million “shooters”.
Out of 51 million, they think they can link one to a game and condemn the genre?
Not too much earlier; Wikipedia says the game was invented in 1986 by psychology student Dimitry Davidoff, a psychology student at Moscow State University.
In June 2006 a Rockingham school inquiry was launched after parents complained of the traumatic effects classroom Mafia was having on their fifth-grade children. Davidoff responded to the reports, saying that as a parent who had studied child psychology for 25 years, he felt that the game could “teach kids to distinguish right from wrong”, and that the positive message of being honest could overcome the negative effects of an “evil narrator” moderating the game as if it were a scary story.
If you enjoy the game you should check out The Traitors with its many international variants. I was surprised to read that the productions provide psychologists to help the contestants as it gets traumatic, but when I watched the first UK season there were a lot of people getting into emotional distress.
There have been a lot of people cast who really shouldn’t be on the show; it’s just a game!
The biggest difference of the TV show versus the home game is the home game just ends whenever all the killers are found. The TV show has to reach a set number of episodes, so there are mechanisms built-in to make sure there’s always at least one traitor up to the final episode.
I guess it depends which version you watch; I think the U.S. and Canada versions are 44 minutes without commercials, but yeah, it does have some filler. When someone’s actually good at the strategy it can be interesting hearing them talk through their plans.
This has been done over and over again to entice boomer parents to get their kids to stop playing video games. My parents didn’t let me buy any shooter games other than jet force gemini becuase they thought it was a exploration game…
It’s rock music. It’s “reefer madness”. Then it’s metal music with satanic messaging when played backwards. Now it’s video games. Same old blame game while never tackling the actual problems of lack of psych care, real societal pressures like financial difficulties, and more.
Especially in the era before just looking shit up on the internet when you hit a snag. I remember scouring levels in that looking for a path that I’d missed when I couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to go next.
Definitely a highlight of the N64 for me. It’s up there with the Zeldas in my book.
Boomers’ children are grown ass adults with their own kids now. Those parents are the ones who grew up playing games. This dumbass narrative doesn’t play anymore
Is it? Steam does it all the time. Afaik they only completely remove games (meaning you they get removed from your account), when they break some TOS stuff.
As for Blizzard themselves (since this article is about Warcraft 1&2), they still offer downloads for old titles. I can just download Warcraft 3 or Diablo 2 right now, even though they’re remastered, and the old versions not for sale anymore.
Yes, but if you already had it in your account you can still download it, which is the same thing GOG is doing, so not sure what all the fuzz is about.
Going forward, even if a game is no longer available for sale on GOG, as part of the GOG Preservation Program, it will continue to be maintained and updated by us, ensuring it remains compatible with modern and future systems.
Yes… But actually no. For these games, sure, they’re committed to update the dosbox, but for more modern games there’s nothing that can be done on GOG since if the binary breaks for windows lack of backwards compatibility, they’re done because they don’t have access to the code. This works for these games because they’re being emulated, so they can maintain them by extracting the ROM and updating the emulator.
IMO what Valve is doing is leaps ahead, Proton can be used to maintain even broken binaries by providing compatibility with older versions of binaries from Windows. Not to mention the runtime library shipped with Steam for native titles.
It’s always mind boggling to me how GOG does something which Steam is already doing (sometimes, like this, they do a worse job at it), yet they get all of the credit as if they’re revolutionizing the way the industry works. Allowing people to download a game they bought, even if delisted, is the standard, and Proton is a much better preservation tool than whatever GOG is doing behind the stages, because it’s open source and if Steam ever goes under it will continue to exist, whereas on GOG solution you depend on GOG for it to keep working.
Backward compatibility in Wine is generally superior to that of Windows, as newer versions of Windows can force users to upgrade legacy Windows applications, and may break unsupported software forever as there is nobody adjusting the program for the changes in the operating system
Valve’s has been financing the development of Proton (and wine), so their efforts are to improve an open source tool that can be used and enhanced by anyone, which among other things provides excellent compatibility. That is a much better commitment to preserving games than choosing a handful of titles and updating their compatibility layer when the old one breaks. In other words, GOG is choosing a couple of games to update their emulator periodically, Valve is financing the development of an emulator for old games. The two things are not even in the same league for how much they help preservation of old games as a whole.
As for the question of windows users, I don’t think wine runs on Windows natively, but I assume one could use WSL as a stepping stone. In any case GOG’s method also doesn’t address Linux or MacOS users, so I don’t see how bringing platform into the mix makes any difference.
I’m all for platform level comparability (one of my major gripes with xbox BC was that BC of original xbox and 360 titles was implemented per-title and while some were supported most of the library was left behind).
But from a pragmatic perspective my home PC has always been Windows and preservation efforts that allow me to run the games I know on the hardware I am running will mean more to me.
I support the principal and encourage the cross platform efforts but its unlikely to mean much to me personally until its bundled in with a plug and play solution like Batocera.
I’ve edited my initial comment to reflect that not everyone will share my priorities.
preservation efforts that allow me to run the games I know on the hardware I am running will mean more to me.
You mean software, your hardware is perfectly capable of running Linux+Wine. But again, this is a very personal response, my personal computer is Linux, therefore what GOG is doing means less to me by your own definition, which is why I don’t think it makes any sense to try to bring platform into the table. In fact, since apparently they’re responsible for the DOSBox version that a game uses, and there is a native version of DOSBox for Linux, this means that the decision of the game not being available on Linux is entirely on GOG.
Imagine Valve was financing an emulator, and GOG was compromising themselves to keep a binary updated with the latest version of that emulator whenever problems appeared on the old version, which of them is doing more for the preservation of games? The only difference is that the “emulator” Valve is financing is not the same as the one that GOG is using.
I’m not saying that there isn’t value in what GOG is doing just because it doesn’t affect me, but as is they can only help preserve DOS era games, so investing in DOSBox and hosting the ROMs would be a much more valuable approach (half of it they’re already doing, they do in fact host the ROMs, you just get 50 extra copies of DOSBox in the process). What I’m saying is that I don’t understand why everyone thinks they’re so great for doing what they’re doing, they could be investing in getting wine to run on windows which would be a much better effort for the preservation of games for your platform.
Sure, Valve deserves a lot of praise for their work, but do they offer offline installers for their games? That and (mostly) DRM-free experience makes GOG superior to me. It leads to smaller library and less new releases, of course.
Steam also offers DRM-free games, and they don’t hide them behind a closed installer. I don’t like installers since they’re yet another moving part that can break, e.g. an installer built for windows 95 might not work even though if you were to extract the game binary from it it would work, so having an installer could make a game less compatible.
The ideal form of distributing games is compressed folders, I recognize this is less user friendly, but it is the format that most preservation effort uses (e.g. zip of a ROM, instead of an installer that installs the emulator+ROM like what GOG is doing).
I’m also not shitting on GOG, I believe they’re a good company, although I’m not their target audience since they refuse to sell me games I can play on my Linux machine. I’m all in favor of DRM-free and wished they would be more strict about it, that could convince me to buy some stuff from them. I did bought games from them in the past until I grew tired of almost no game having Linux compatibility and them not offering an official client, plus I noticed that some games had DRM and that was the last straw for me, because of I’m going to be buying maybe DRM-d games, might as well do it while giving money to a company that cares about my use-case.
I think GOG should be praised for some of what they do, particularly by their anti-DRM stance (even though they’re not 100% behind it). But what annoys me is that people seem to praise them as if they were doing this amazing work that no one else is doing, when most of the stuff people get overly excited about is just a marketing move and Steam is usually doing much better work in that regard, but is usually cited as the bad guys by the people who drank the GOG Kool-aid.
It used to. I haven’t used it in years, and I’m no longer sure if it still exists or where to find it if it does, since the UI has changed a few times over the years; the last of which was less than a year ago and it really overhauled everything. But also, so many games can literally just be copied from their install directory and work on another machine without Steam or cracks. There’s no good way of knowing which ones without trying it, though. At least not to my knowledge.
If someone wanted to make a fast buck right now, I bet a game where you go hunt down CEO’s and virtually… you know, accomplish your mission goals on them, it would be wildly popular.
This is the same tired horse shit they’ve been peddling for decades.
The problem is the for profit healthcare system. The system is designed to turn blood into money. It needs to be torn down, then rebuilt as nationalized, socialized healthcare system for all. Everything profit seeking needs banned.
(Obviously this is satire. I furthermore still haven’t quite made peace with the fact that every single item on Daniel Rutter’s web site can now be considered “retro.”)
Violent crime has decreased since the 1990s as video games (including violent ones) have continued to grow in popularity. If anything, this establishes that violent video games prevent violent crime.
Sure, but they’ve only ever had correlational evidence to suggest video games cause violence. Their own correlational evidence does not support their conclusions, and that should be called out and ridiculed.
Hello! I played D&D first in nineteen-eighty-fucking-one and lived through the Satanic Panic. Have you seen Tom Hanks in his first big acting role? My parents sat me down in front of that. But I’m still playing D&D in a campaign right now, and my son plays as well. Aha, take that Satanic Panic!
It’s the same shit every decade. They just need something to blame violence on, because surely it can’t be gun culture.
Well, I was something like 13, and I remember it on TV. I lived in a rural area, where we got about 6 channels on an antenna tower. I watched what they watched.
I think they interviewed people in his circles, and I think a friend flippantly noticed it was kinda ironic that they played Among Us with someone who went on to actually assassinate someone, and now the media is twisting that into the standard “video games cause violence” bugbear.
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