I am not a marketing expert, but when headlines pile up implicating that Microsoft doesn’t fully stand behind XBox anymore, no wonder the number for new customers tank. I wouldn’t “invest” in something that seems to be on the way out either.
Judging by how Sony is doing even though they clearly “won” with the PS5, it looks like consoles as we know them are not long for this world, and that seems to be the idea Microsoft is pivoting around.
Xbox should just go straight pc game setup for the living room. A mass produced windows (I know, blegh) pc with a pretty solid gpu and Xbox controllers. Basically the steam deck treatment for the living room.
That’s pretty much what the Xbox has been since the beginning. The original runs fucking directX and runs so similarly to PCs of the era under the hood that porting shit to it is famously easy. It’s why the homebrew scene for it was so mind bogglingly huge.
Numerous times at E3 when they had demo units of new consoles people saw that the debug menus meant for staff were some mangled form of the current (at the time) Windows OS.
Most modern game consoles don’t use much specialty hardware anymore. The OG Switch uses the nvidea shield CPU just downclocked, and can run android easily. Some emulators literally run better on the Switch through Android than as homebrew “native” apps.
Yes, but games were always “xbox” games. I straight up mean open for pretty much all PC games to run on. If a game dev makes their game work with an x box control scheme, you can play it.
Cars have cell radios now and transfer data about you using those.
I would imagine that as long as it can generate enough of a return for it to make financial sense, manufacturers of other devices might start doing so at some point.
Did you reply to the correct comment? I’m not sure what that has to do with mine?
Edit: oh, you mean we might not have a choice about it connecting soon? I hadn’t thought about that because that is not a current reality. But, that is a terrifyingly possible future
have they paid 2.4 million? Last time someone with supposedly that much funding got fucked over by Nintendo they have been sent to jail, and once they came out had to basically pay rent to nintendo for the rest of time.
The reason we didn’t hear anything of that, if I had to guess, is probably an NDA.
I mean, I loved DOS2 as well, but I definitely think BG3 is the better game. There’s a lot of replayability from the combat in DOS, but the story and characters in BG3 are on a whole different level. DOS2 does definitely rank in my top 5 CRPGs though (BG3, BG2, DOS2, DA:O, and probably NWN would be that full list)
I know a handful of people who thought it looked like an impending disaster and gave it a wishlist so they could see the early negative reviews pour in
Almost every AAA release has pulled the same trick for at least the last 10 years if not longer. Don’t announce the PC release until after the console release, that way some people buy the game twice.
Maybe AAA games just don’t need to be as large or sprawling. Release one full campaign with everything you need included in the price. Then if it does well offer dlc.
As the article points out, balder’s gate was early access for 3 years, sold at full price, and still has bugs. It’s not an exception to the rule, larian just delivered a good product that had good source material behind it.
I personally like the early access model. You get the choice to play the game now, as-is, or wait for the developers to call it finished. Last Epoch is a great example. In its current state, it is absolutely not finished. It still gave me hundreds of hours of entertainment, though, and I expect I’ll get hundreds more when I revisit it again when it’s officially launched.
The important caveat with EA is that the devs actually substantially expand on the early access experience. If they just spend a year or two doing minor bugfixes and then release the game it won’t go over super well. Especially if they reduced scope during early access. I’m thinking of something like Mount and Blade 2 Bannerlord, where the devs had described so many things they wanted to do with the game, but then didn’t realize many of those goals between when it went into EA and when it released.
it’s good enough so when I encounter glitches I simply laugh and move on.
some of the glitches I’ve encountered so far:
animated door(or wall) loop back to closed “frame” but the collision is already moved away so you can walk through the door(or wall)
ranged attack/spell sometimes doesn’t calculate the path correctly when you hover over the target, so you have to manually move yourself and try again. Some times the path blocked calculation is wrong and you could waste spells.(especially for big enough creatures)
animation glitches during conversation. or right after loading.(mostly on NPCs.)
some stuff looks reachable but due to path finding for char to “get it” it becomes unreachable. (sometimes can use mage hand to get around this if said stuff is light and not fragile.)
The only bug I’ve encountered which bothers me is the one where a PC (normally Laezel for me) gets stuck in cinematic mode and their controls get locked out until I reload.
There’s one huge bug in Act 2 where enemies in one really hard battle can shoot you through the floor. They know about it and working on it, but that one damn near killed two of my party members. There was no where you could position yourself where they couldn’t shoot to at you through the floor.
Today there is a update drop so hopefully it got fixed. I probably still have a couple region to clean up before Act2. (judging from the revealed map area. )
I still believe their naming conventions has destroyed the brand.
Grandma that wants to buy a toy for their kids can go to the store and buy the next PlayStation. Xbox… which one do they buy? They don’t, they buy the easy option.
The only thing I will concede is that being able to shorten Xbox One X to XbOX was clever. Naming it the Xbox One in the first place was mind numbingly stupid, though.
This is exactly what happened with my mom trying to buy a Christmas gift for my nephew. She knew he had an Xbox but had no clue which version it was so she didn’t know which version of a game to get. I told her to just buy an Xbox store gift card and call it a day, much easier than trying to figure out which version of the console he had. Didn’t want her to buy him a disc if he had the Series S.
This happened to me! I thought I was buying the newest gen. But then…games I was trying to buy were “not optimized for your console.”
I’m still not sure which one I have. I think I have the ONE S. But the games I’m looking to buy are “optimized for X|S series,” but…don’t work on my console. I’m moving to PlayStation soon.
Also, I have a feeling all that news a few months ago about how they’re gonna stop support for Xbox and may not continue to make games for it or will shut down the console division or whatever cannot have helped sales. I don’t remember the articles exactly. But the impression I was left with was Xbox was on its way out. Why would I buy another if they’re unsure of its future?
I have seen people very confused about which games will run on their system, though. Most are still cross compatible with XB1 and Series X, but some are Series X only now and the boxes aren’t marked clearly enough for some people to tell the difference.
That’s a good point that I hadn’t considered as I thought the sentiment was solely toward the console itself. It may be a blessing in disguise though as now grandma can just buy you a gift card if she’s unsure which version of game to buy, so that way you don’t wind up with some off-brand game you’ll never play.
Admittedly I don’t play on Xbox, but yeah their console naming is baffling to me and I honestly don’t know/can’t be bothered to figure it out. PlayStation is simple. Bigger numbers equal newer. Pro version? Just a modest step up but still clearly identifies as the same Gen.
When Xbox launched the One, I thought, “oh they’re going to reset the numbering convention. It’s awkward now but will be easier going forward.” Boy was I wrong.
On the other end there’s Nintendo, but the names are so different and distinct it’s easy enough to distinguish (except whatever the hell Wii U was).
Microsoft seems caught in the middle. They clearly didn’t want to be like PlayStation, but they don’t want to/can’t come up with unique names, so you get just a mouthful of nonsense letters and numbers.
Microsoft have sucked at naming things basically forever. Look at their windows versions. First they were numbered after the year release which made sense, they kind of break the trend with millennium edition but it’s still sort of worked because it came out in 2000. Was also a 2000 which confused things and then after that it just continued to go downhill.
95, 98, 2000 (presumably because they didn’t want to call it 00), XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 (because nine is evil for some reason), 11
There’s a rumor the next version is going to be called X, I assume because they haven’t really advanced as a company since the '90s and they still think that’s cool.
Keeps support for poorly coded programs working. In the old days, a quick and hacky way to determine which Windows version the system was on was to have the program check the OS name. If the name started with the characters “Windows 9” you knew it was either Win95 or Win98 and ran in one mode, but if it was something else it ran in the other mode. If the new OS was named Windows 9, then certain old programs would break when run on it. Yes, the people who would have coded that way are idiots, and sure, the number of people running those programs may be in the single digits, but Microsoft has been pretty serious about maintaining backwards compatibility, even if that means ever more cruft and jank.
The other reason is marketing. “See? It’s not anything like that awful Windows 8! We skipped all the way to 10 to demonstrate how different it is! Please come back!”
I used to have a black XBox sitting beneath the TV gathering dust. I think it is a One by the shape. As for the new ones I have no idea off the top of my head which is the best. I’ve seen some on sale in places, but the impulse buy isn’t there because I have no idea what I would be getting. I don’t own a PlayStation, but if I wanted one I know that 5 is the newest, and you can get the small slim one or the big Pro one.
“Playing card” company is a bit of an understatement. Nintendo was a grey market entertainment company - playing cards were banned in Japan, and a workaround was designing the cards with those beautiful drawings instead of suits. This is also why card companies were deeply associated with the Yakuza.
Nintendo also operated casinos and love hotels, with prostitutes. In fact, they did a lot of weird maneuvering during the launch of the Famicom to tip off the Yakuza, who wanted to keep their strong ties and get early access to the hardware.
There’s a whole book about how Nintendo and Sega had some crazy connections with the Yakuza and those shaped several projects in these companies.
If no one has heard of bombs then no one can know the title of the game, because otherwise they will see or hear the word bombs. But I’ve seen the title. Do I even know what a bomb is? I think I do… but do I? The paradox of the bomb knowledge will keep me up tonight.
Celebrity endorsement has never been a factor in how well a videogame does either way, regardless of level of star power or degree of involvement for the celebrity: Keanu Reeves playing a heavy hand (heh) in the story of Cyberpunk 2077 did little to stop the game’s initial bad press, and the main reason Baldur’s Gate 3 did well isn’t because JK Simmons is playing Kethric Thorm. (still, he had a great performance). Gameplay matters a lot more for a videogame.
It’s unsurprising then, that Oscar winning actor Will Smith’s involvement in a game in the oversaturated genre of zombie survival shooters did not become successful.
Plus, I don’t think paying celebrities to promote videos on their YouTube channel is an effective marketing strategy, mainly because nobody really watches any celebrities’ own YouTube channel, with the exception of Jack Black’s gaming channel, of course.
Yes, he did. But neither the main praise nor criticism of the game was not directed towards him but on the overall buginess and removal of RPG elements from the game.
Ok, what rpg element was removed? I just played it (without dlc), and it’s basically first person witcher 3 in cyberpunk setting, including all the faults. Basically true to type with CDPR.
They advertisd heavily on “complex branching storyline” and “every decision will have consequences” so the expectation was at the minimum a bigger Deus Ex Human Revolution, but then what they actually delivered is a worse GTA 5 with neon lights.
Right. But I just played it, and it has nothing to do with GTA. It’s literally witcher 3 in first person. Same level of branching, same slightly shallow rpg mechanics and shallow ish combat. It’s much more action, though and theoretically stealth is an option unlike witcher.
I wouldn’t hold it against Keanu personally because its clear he really cared and did gave a good performance but i feel like his involvement with cyberpunk ruined a lot of things that could have been.
No one will hold it against him personally, it’s not uncommon.
There are certain actors who performs great in every single movie they appear in, yet still have many of these movies flop. Many times, it’s out of the actor’s control.
CDPR effectively rewrote the campaign after Keanu Reeves told them that he’s game if CDPR wants to record more lines. I still remember the E3 demo where CDPR said that the campaign has been completed and they’re just in the polishing stages.
I have nearly 1000 hours in Baldur’s Gate 3 and JUST NOW learned that Jason Isaacs was the voice of Gortash… I did recognize JK Simmons but honestly wasn’t 100% sure it was him until the second or third time meeting him and finally looking it up on IMDB to confirm (and somehow still missed Jason Isaacs - I did learn about Matt Mercer’s role as Minsc which still blows my mind).
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