The last Xbox I had was the 360 so take this with a grain of salt, but they made the choice between XBone and PS5 so simple for me by making all XBox titles playable on PC. As someone who would entertain buying both consoles, I never found a compelling argument to bother.
As far as I can tell, every game that’s listed as XBox exclusive on Google is available on PC Game Pass. I played Forza, Halo Infinite, Flight Sim, Sea of Thieves, Starfield, Ori, etc.
That’s a good question! I know there is some cross play, but I think there are many titles that don’t have it. If you play multiplayer with friends who also have Xboxes, that’s probably a good argument to get one.
I have two kids. Both prefer pc or switch for exclusives. They haven’t touched the PlayStation or Xbox in months if not years. I don’t even think they know how to turn them on.
The case I see is like this: Many publishers increasingly argue that they don’t have a strong monetization plan for big epic singleplayer games unless they have a dozen forms of microtransactions. For Sony, the monetization plan for God of War is the PlayStation 5 - and all of the residual purchases that come after someone owns one. 80% of those purchases will be of games that are on both Xbox and Playstation - but went to the latter because God of War and Spiderman are awesome. With that in mind, the teams making those games can sorta just aim for awards, not perfect profitability.
Out of curiosity, I googled exclusives for Xbox series exclusives. They’ve got things like Forza Horizon 5, sunset overdrive and Ori. Like, sure, but you can’t say proudly that your console is being held aloft by 4+ year old titles when the competition is releasing banger after banger!
They just missed the mark. You can spend billions on R&D and marketing for a new console, billions on buying up game studios to make new games, but if your games suck on launch, people won’t play on your console.
What XBox has done this generation is borderline suicide.
Yes exactly. A large number of their older titles exist on other platforms like the Switch and of course, the PC, where gamepass lets people play those titles for a very affordable price.
All the more reason then to make games like Starfield and Halo infinite the absolute best games they could be
I just bought an RGH3 hacked 360 off etsy today after the Xbox live closure. Actually pretty siked to go back and play some of the 360 games I missed back then that have been stuck on that console generation.
I started dropping off after every time I started to boot my Xbox it just was just ads upon ads trying to sell me stuff and not gettin me into the games faster.
Oh crap. That just PlayStation’s going to do it too. Right now I get ads at the bottom and games at the top so I can at least jump straight into a game. Assuming I don’t boot straight into one because I went to rest mode in it.
I use mine primarily for media and occasionally play online with friends. They killed gold, and reverted to game pass core, so now I have to pay $10/month to play games I own. They are deleting my purchased games, ea archived an active account for inactivity when I had playtime in the calendar year. There is no new IP, they shut down studios, and raised prices, locked us into a shitty platform and started monitoring and monetizing their paid users.
I’m getting rid of my xbox when the ps5pro comes out. the fact that the Xbox just keeps regressing in features (I can’t plug in a USB microphone wtf???) and rising costs of game pass just pushed me back to Playstation.
I was disappointed to find out that my PS5 doesn’t support Bluetooth headsets. You’ve gotta get one of the Sony ones I guess. The controller looks like it has an RCA port for analogue headphones and a built in mic, so it might fit your use case but I was pissed when it wouldn’t let me use my wireless bone conduction headset instead of the earbuds on the PSVR2. I usually just use my TV speakers because earbuds never stay in my ears properly, but it would be nice to be able to play without worrying about the volume being too loud for others, like late at night.
My Baseless Prediction, i.e. if I ran Xbox, what I would do given their situation:
Microsoft will sunset the Xbox as a console but focus on creating a dual boot mode for Windows similar to the Steam Deck and Big Picture Mode. Probably called “Xbox Mode” or something similarly unoriginal but evocative. This streamlined mode will greatly reduce system overhead and be controller-centric, and it will have an emulation layer to support all Xbox ecosystem games along with backward compatibility. On certain form factors it will be the default boot mode, and supporting this they will release two new Windows PC form factors: a living room box and a handheld. Other PC manufacturers will be able to jump on the wagon as well. I doubt they will in any way define reference performance profiles akin to a console “generation” but they may have some kind of guidance regarding how graphics should scale seamlessly between TV/monitor and handheld form factors to allow for a Switch-like docking experience.
Somebody was showing off an AI technique to de-interlace old videos. This is a problem that is notoriously difficult to solve algorithmically you either end up with blurs or you end up with crossfade.
I mean technically yeah. But it might also mean some meeting-in-the-middle on what PC/console even means. It’s probably push PC fanning even more toward being console, with the benefits of more consistency and less cheating, but the downside of being less flexible and more crowded with console players. Probably also a bigger push for buying PC games through the Microsoft store when possible.
Xbox is dead as a console, but will live on as Game Pass on PC, Smart TVs, Portable, and an eventual ARM puck you bring with you.
The industry is going to be in a weird place where Sony and Nintendo are the only first parties and hardware vendors. Its too costly for an upstart, they can just focus on the PC.
I think this is a good point. Heavy gamers are going PC. More flexibility and more ways for them to play. That leaves casual gamers, which previously might buy a console, but it’d eventually collect dust. New game streaming services serve them better.
Well once upon a time a console was a small fraction of the cost of a PC and the experience was put game in, turn console on, play game. Sure a console had a fraction of the computing power of a contemporary desktop but typically they had hardware specifically for graphics and sound and games were usually coded very efficiently for the specific hardware often directly in assembly.
That hasn’t been the case for a good long while now. Consoles and their games receive updates just like PCs do. Yes the purchase price of a PC and its associated hardware is probably does still cost more than a console…until a few months of paying for those subscriptions go by. Console hardware is now very closely related to PC hardware. So the value proposition is for the price of a low-end gaming PC you get a lower-middle class gaming PC with a 90% less useful operating system, recurring costs and worsened versions of games.
Meanwhile Valve says “Yeah we made using a normal gaming PC on the living room TV work pretty well a WHILE ago. Also, you know the Nintendo Switch? Well we’ve built a full fat gaming laptop into a similar form factor of portable device. It’s an x86 PC, it runs PC games natively. It runs Linux, you can get to a desktop, hook it up to a keyboard and mouse and you can do spreadsheets and run CAD on it for all we care.” And it’s been such a big success that several competing products have been hastily pushed out that run off-the-shelf Windows and none of them are as good.
It’s mobile gaming too. Phones are eating their lunch on the small games. PCs are doing it on big games. And it’s their own restrictive rules that caused it.
hHs that even ever been so much as rumored? There were leaks from various suppliers hinting at the Deck and Switch long before they were in develop. It’s possible I missed something, or possible they just haven’t leaked anything, but so far I don’t have a reason to think they would be trying to enter that space.
Microsoft seems to be abandoning that space. The Windows phone died ages ago, and the Surface seems to be languishing.
Operating System. Would it be windows? There are already plenty of handhelds that run windows, and usually the biggest problem people have with them is that windows sucks for that application and they replace the OS. Would they have a custom OS like the Xbox? What would it bring to the table that Steam LS doesn’t? Valve already put in a ton of work to get Steam OS as good as it is- would Xbox/Microsoft do that too? If it just uses Steam OS, what does the hardware bring that differentiates it from the Deck?
Software. I don’t know what the unit cost of a Deck is, but I’m guessing it’s pretty close to the sales price. The Deck does not need to be a profit center for Valve as long as it drives software sales on Steam. The Microsoft store has already failed- would an Xbox store on such a device manage to be profitable? Would it be locked down and incompatible with Steam? Maybe they could partner with Epic to compete? I’m just having a hard time seeing Xbox/Microsoft enter that business model.
What might be more likely is something like the Portal or G-Cloud. An ARM-based, lightweight product designed to be used for cloud gaming with GamePass. Maaaaaybe some local streaming from your PC or Xbox too. Even with that they would be competing against other products and pretty much every smartphone and tablet. There might be room to move some units, but similar to Sony I don’t see that being huge.
Keep in mind that the products that exist already don’t have the OS developer behind them, Microsoft could do exactly like Steam and have a gaming ready UI based on the Xbox UI and plain old Windows 11 running in the background (tweaked to better fit the portable PC setup).
Considering that Xbox sell less and less, that the Xbox is basically a locked down PC at this point, that people go crazy for portable PCs and that they can actually replace a console… I mean, it would make a lot of sense. They already have a hardware division as well so…
True, but I’m not sure how closely Xbox works with the rest of Microsoft. As far as I know you have never been able to put Windows on an Xbox or Xbox System Software on a PC officially. In contrast, the PS2 and PS3 had official Linux support (which Sony tried to remove from. The PS3 for security concerns and got sued for).
Microsoft has a hardware division yes, but barely. It’s basically just Xbox, which is failing, and the Surface, which is also failing. They already lost the Mobile market. They seem content to have their laptop and desktop focus just be getting Microsoft software on other hardware.
I kind of get the impression that’s the direction they are moving. They simply haven’t done well in hardware, and their more successful business areas are the ones that are putting Microsoft software onto 3rd party hardware.
I’m still not convinced GamePass is really going to work, but Xbox and Microsoft seem to be. And while I don’t like subscriptions in general, GamePass definitely surpasses any competitor. So rather than roll out new hardware, I think they are moving towards putting GamePass on the Switch 2 and PS5 or PS6. Microsoft has instructions published for getting Xbox Cloud Gaming working on the Deck. I think they want that on the handhelds from AYA, AYN, Asus, Logitech, GPD, and everything else.
They might want to make Windows a viable option for those handhelds, but… They also might not. That would be a huge amount of work for them to compete with Steam. And we’ve seen how unpopular Windows 11 has been. They’ve been downsizing the teams working on Windows for years and focusing more on Edge and AI. I get the impression they just want the Xbox division to lower costs and become profitable at this point.
You’ve read those gamepass on steamdeck instructions?
I’m sure there exists someone who wants to do that but seems more like wishful thinking.
I also thought it was interesting that they can’t create their own flatpack to supply for Edge, although I would never put a microsoft product on a linux station myself.
I bought the newest console to play the most recent Halo. It truly sucked
The first Bethesda exclusive game was Starfield. It truly sucked
The recent focus has been towards online multiplayer and GAAS. Toxic games and toxic service models.
The ads are insane. Sometimes I’ll turn the console on to a full screen ad about Diablo or Game Pass I have to acknowledge before actually using the console. Beyond that there is designated space on the home menu for 3 different banner ads.
Just my opinions as someone that’s enjoyed that xbox brand since the first one, and stuck with it out of convenience and from making friends on the network there. Next “console” is a proper gaming computer
The last console other than the switch that I owned was the PS3. I loved that UI. A buddy was like “let’s play some Halo” and I loved halo 1 and 2 but the rest just don’t do it for me. Once he booted up his Xbox and I was driving the UI trying to launch the game I just wanted to hurl. Such a garbage UI. Littered with ads etc.
No idea what PS5 UI looks like but they’re just PCs with a custom UI at this point so I’ll stick with my PC.
I’ve grown a bit tired of the Xbox experience as well with some of what you’ve mentioned. I also don’t play every single game that comes out, just a select few with whatever free time I do have. I want to get away from online gameing if I can, though I’m not against it my preferences are just shifting so I want to gravitate more to single player games and currently I’m considering the next Switch console (Switch 2?) and just play all the first party games Nintendo is known for, Zelda, Mario, Starfox, etc and all their retro games that’ll be on the online store. I could get lost for years with that content. Really excited to possibly have that option for myself in the future. Just thought I’d share a different perspective.
I was a heavy Xbox user up until last year when they redesigned the Xbox home screen.
Instead of being able to pin multiple groups of custom apps/games wherever you want, you now only get one group pinned about halfway down the page past several rows of ads. There are generally at least 5 separate rows of ads on the homescreen at all times.
I have a series x (also had an original, 360, and one), and will 100% not be buying another console from Microsoft. The joy of using my expensive console was ruined by ads.
I need to finish Elden Ring, after which my Xbox will be used as a steaming device for videos from my PC or Kodi exclusively.
Edit - upon checking it looks like you can actually pin 2 custom groups. But there are also really 14 rows of ads, not 5, so…
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