Microsoft, like Google, is now a user-data driven company and they have already made loss/profit ratio analysis on this long before they released the price increase. They’re absolutely banking on people cancelling but making up the difference and then some from the people who stay.
For a thought experiment let’s consider how many subscribers they were reported to have in Feburary: 34 million. Let’s assume that everyone is paying for the highest tier to make the math easier. So current income would be 34 million user x $20 a month and thats $680 million a month. New income of 34 million users x $30 a month is $1.02 billion. The difference is $340 million a month. Let’s divide that by $30 a month. That gets us about 11,333,333 users. So they can hemorrhage over 11 million users and still break even. To make sure, let’s subtract 11 million users. That gives us 23 million users. 23 million users x $30 a month is $690 million a month, a cool $10 million a month above current profits.
For final context, 11 million users is roughly 32% of their entire subscriber count. They can afford to lose a third of the people subscribing and still make money.
The math doesn’t bode well for us who vote with our wallets.
One could imagine that conveniently, Microsoft’s online support pages and the amount of support staff were designed to only handle hundreds of thousands of cancelations at a time.
I’m not a licensed math surgeon, but I think your math is wildly optimistic in favor of Microsoft due to how the subscription totals are actually distributed per price tier.
I don’t doubt that they did a lot of math to figure out an acceptable level of churn for this change, I just don’t think it’s nearly as generous and wide as you’re calculating.
There probably is a very real churn limit that they’re trying to avoid, and my hunch is that there exists a breaking point that could be hit with an aggressive and sustained boycott / cancellation spree, but again, I’m not a math surgeon so I could be wrong. That’s just my gut feeling.
And it gets even better. Instead of up to 33% leaving, say 50% of that group convert to Premium instead of Ultimate. That isn’t any lost revenue since the price is going up to what Ultimate used to be. So that cushions their numbers even more.
Now factor in the cost savings from a lower server load and less staff to run the back end, and possibly the smaller licensing\use costs for the games available to play since less people would be accessing those games.
The same math is there too. They can afford to loose one third of new subscribers to get the same amount of money.
But their new customer acquisition cost wont get higher at the same pace and they get more valuable customers whose payback period will be shorter.
Also i dont think its relevant here, but less customers means less operating costs, so they will most likelly save some money on customer service and behind the scenes things like server upkeeps etc., but i dont think these make real difference here.
Also if for some reason things start to go bad they still have option to create “a budget version” for the people who see the normal subscrition as too expencive.
Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?
This is what he’s done throughout his career - the only thing that’s notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.
It’s entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn’t bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn’t even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.
Wozniak is probably the most famous example. He recognized the corrupting nature of money, decided he had enough, and stopped to live in comfort and occasionally work towards causes he finds important
Lots of people have done the same… But if they’re rich and still chasing after money? They’ll never stop
the wing commander series was famous for inflated development costs, freelancer was repeatedly delayed and eventually released like five years after it’s announcement, and since then… he’s been working on star citizen
Keep in mind Freelancer was released after Microsoft acquired Roberts’ company, kicked him out of a leadership role, and drastically slashed the scope.
Star Citizen is what happens when there is nobody above Roberts to say no, and now after years plenty of people under him with an interest in keeping the development churning.
I mean, some people called this back in fucking 2012, but the dreamers bought into his vision. He’s always been real great about vision and lofty ambitions, but shit on execution. He sells dreams, but doesn’t know how to finish anything. Every project he was attached to that executed on deliverables, was due to control being outside of his purview and accountability enforced.
I’ll believe HL:3 is real when it is for sale, purchased by me, and played in it’s entirety. And even then it might just be a particularly vivid delusion.
HL:3 is gaming’s dark matter. Until all other possibilities are definitively ruled out, it’s not HL:3.
120 and 4K are often claimed on console specs but are rarely achieved within games. At best it will be capable of that when playing Netflix or streaming.
They announced Metroid Prime 4 will be able to run at 1080p 120fps or 4K 60fps when docked. It doesn’t have the most impressive graphics or anything, but it sounds like they’re actually going to try doing it for a few games.
The real advantage of a 120 Hz screen is that you get a much more graceful degradation if you dip below your fps target for a bit. If you’re targeting 30 fps but drop to 25, it still feels pretty smooth on a high-refresh screen, whereas that’s appallingly clunky on a low-refresh one. A “poor man’s gsync”, if you will.
This is what a lot of people don’t understand. Higher refresh rate even with lower fps makes games feel more responsive. I can play 30 fps games much easier on a refresh rate higher than 60hz.
Or it’s actually running at 720p30 and being FSR/framegenned into a blurry shimmery mess. There’s no way Nintendo managed to cram a chip powerful enough to render its own Switch 1 games at true 4k120 into a tablet.
Or it’s actually running at 720p30 and being FSR/framegenned into a blurry shimmery mess. There’s no way Nintendo managed to cram a chip powerful enough to render its own Switch 1 games at true 1080p120 into a tablet.
And then, compare it to No Man’s Sky, who gave us lofty expectations, failed to deliver on launch, but actually kept with it despite no new revenue flowing into the game from existing buyers. And now we have something incredible. We have a universe that is unfathomably large. We have multiplayer, we have all sorts of events and quests. Freighters! You can piece together your own ships now.
I hope we can eventually build space stations or pilot Capital Ships. No Man’s Sky came out in 2016. In 8 years it has done far more than SC has done with far less of a budget.
Do I wish we could have everything that Roberts promised? Sure. But I also have a bridge to sell that you can at least walk over.
NMS certainly evolved a lot, but I wouldn’t call it incredible. Also, despite the game universe being absurdly large, you can see everything there is to see visiting less than 20 star systems
All the daily quicksilver quests are a fucking chore, too.
Also to be fair (and critical), while Sean lied to both Sony and us about the state of the game-
They also probably did have most of everything they promised at one point, then the Christmas Flood happened. That’s when the lies started and but those lies were likely more for Sony rather than us, as it’s entirely possible Sony would have outright cancelled the game if they’d known how much was actually lost in the flood.
Instead they released what they could in the time they had left then just kept plugging away at it post release.
The reporting I'm seeing puts it at 40 if you buy the console bundle. Which... I mean, why wouldn't you?
I'm not sure what the deal is with the physical version, I have to assume it's some collector's edition deal with an Amiibo or something. Can't imagine they straight up double the price if you want to buy the card in a box instead of bundled with the console. Waiting on official prices for all of it, in any case.
Here’s the link to the French store: store.nintendo.fr/fr/nintendo-switch-2 all regional stores have similar prices in their own currencies. No details on what’s inside the box.
Got it, thanks. Yeah, it seems it's a 10 euro extra for physical. I get why, those Switch carts were expensive, and it seems like they've moved to even more expensive, faster storage, but it REALLY sucks. Puts the "virtual card" stuff they announced in perspective.
It just seems crazier for MK specifically because... well, it's forty bucks with the bundle, and the bundle is digital-only. Makes physical 2x the cost, which is nuts.
They're really milking this launch on a number of avenues I'm not cool with, and I'm not sure the offering justifies it. Some of those current-gen ports looked rough.
The 10 FPS screenshare feature didn’t entice you? And like cmon, gamechat. Nothing else has gamechat. And you will never even have to use a mouse ever again cuz u can just take your joycon to work and scratch it over the desk.
Don't quote me, but I think they will ship a plastic guard to use for the mouse, just like the Lenovo Legion Go does. Don't knock it til you try it, it does work.
For the record, it's weird to see Nintendo stumble upon the incredible concepts of Kinect and Discord in the year of our lord 2025. But hey, every Nintendo console needs a gimmick you can proceed to ignore, and this one will at least be useful to... somebody? At least it's a gesture that online games aren't an afterthought anymore.
What I'm not sure about at all is the pricing model for games and backwards compatibility as it is. And while the hardware is perfectly acceptable for a modern handheld and very comparable to the current batch of PC handhelds it's the target for the next decade, presumably, so it's at best as outdated as the original Switch was while not being the only game in town to play some of those HD ports.
I don't think it's an underwhelming propostion at this point, and you can't deny the first party software on display. I don't think it's nearly as exciting as the first Switch, though. We'll see how it does with mainstream audiences, I suppose.
I really did love my Switch for the past many years but I thought the switch 2 looked underwhelming. You are right about the software though. Nintendo knows how to sell consoles with games and the hardware while not revolutionary does look good.
Yep, agreed. I mean, revolutionizing the entire concept of home consoles and starting an entire new hardware segment is a hard act to follow, I wasn't expecting to be blown away by an iteration on the same idea.
I seriously think the new big thing is gonna be steamOS or something very similar to it. That was kind of unthinkable 10 years ago but I believe we are gonna see a shift in the industry.
I don't know about that. Reception to most of this Direct seems to be positive, they have a literal 10x sales advantage and 150 million people already in the ecosystem.
I wouldn't be surprised if it sold a lot slower, but half as fast as the Switch 1 is still faster than the PS5 and much faster than the Steam Deck.
Will PC handhelds gain some ground? Maybe, I'm curious to see.
Oh yeah sure the deck isnt gonna be a real danger to nintendo anytime soon but steamOS as an operating system is doing great things for gaming on linux and other hardware developers might use it too. SteamOS or at least proton is gonna be bigger than the steamdeck.
But you know that’s not gonna be the only $80 game. The next Zelda and 3D Mario are guaranteed to be $80, too, because they know people will pay it. Just like TotK’s $70 price point.
Depends on the customer really, we do not live in times where everyone can buy food or even think about raising another family member. Mind the release sales of the switch 1 were pre covid.
This might flop due to 2-class conflict, although Id love to see the switch 2 to succeed
For a lot of people, tweaking hardware and screwing with software is as much or more of a hobby than playing games.
I’ve got about a dozen retro handhelds that are loaded with the same games but they’re all configured and modded differently simply for the love of tinkering. The time I’ve spent fooling around under the hood vs playtime is easily 50:1. But like… that’s what I buy them for.
You can tweak and (hard and soft) mod a Steam Deck as well.
… Your starting point is just more powerful hardware, and a much more permissive software system that basically begs you to do whatever you want to it, compared to a Switch.
I get that this level of modding if a Switch is an accomplishment, because it is more challenging… that the modding itself is what is enjoyable for many people.
But many other people enjoy a different proportion of ‘tinkering’ to ‘actually using it’. Or different kinds of tinkering.
Like… I have an OLED Deck. For me, running RPCS3 is… well, I could either dl the flatpak of it and configure it myself, or let Emu/RetroDeck take care of that, or switch over from SteamOS 3 to Bazzite, set up a distrobox instance of Fedora (what Bazzite is built off of), then just literally download all the source code and required libraries… and completely compile the entire emulator myself, on the Steam Deck itself.
I actually did this with O3DE and Godot a few times… a bit buggy, but hey, its a fun way for me to get more familiar with just… how compiling works, as well as the Fedora ecosystem… most of my previous experience with compiling/development is within Debian based distros.
You can literally develop a game, in Godot, or Unity, or many 2D only/mostly FOSS engines… on a Steam Deck.
As far as hard modding?
A year (or two?) back now… somebody figured out that you can actually take the SSD out of a Steam Deck, run the OS from the microSD card… add an adapter to the SSD slot, and then connect that to a full, PC grade eGPU with its own power supply… and this requires you to actually physically cut out (or I guess remove the entire) a part of the back exterior housing.
But, if you can do all this, you now have basically a hyper charged Steam Deck with waaay more rendering power you can basically use as a decently powerful desktop PC…
But, this only works with Windows (running off of the microSD card), and your Deck is… no longer really portable, unless you consider detaching the eGPU and SSD adapter thingy, putting the SSD back in, and put a standard backplate back on the thing… as an acceptable level of portability, lol.
Less … nearly insane … degrees of hardware modding are things like swapping out the joycons with halleffect sticks, custom body shells (the translucent atomic purple n64 style ones are quite popular, and the translucence actually helps a bit with heat dissipation),
…custom colored button and dpads… sort of … skin like wraps for the touchpads, or whole bodyshell… semi squishy grip style wraps that can help if you have larger, or injured hands/wrists…
…oh right, the LCD variants have some fairly popular entire screen replacements that give you a higher resolution than the native screen… not sure if anything like that exists for the OLED variants yet.
I think its awesome that someone modded a Switch this hard, I think its awesome the person I replied to loves their modded handhelds, and I am just sharing my own tales of modding and tinkering with the Deck to show what you can do with it as well, and how I angle my goals of modding a bit differently than the person I’m replying to, so its a better fit for me.
I did not at any point state that their approach to modding is any kind of wrong or inferior.
I have some duplicate consoles where they are modded different ways just for the fun of it. Some of these consoles I have never actually played a game on for more then 20min.
Exactly, on a steam deck a little software and firmware tinkering and you’re done. This is the good stuff, the stuff that shouldn’t work but you say “how about I do anyway”.
I have a bike like that, been messing with it for two years, have about 10 hours of drive time. Long since figured out I like tinkering with it more than riding it.
Speaking of the M-cpu Macs and RPCS3, I got the old PS3 Demon’s Souls to work pretty well on an M1 + 8GB RAM Mac last year. Pretty nice to be able to play a “PS3 exclusive” Souls game on a Mac considering the total lack of Souls titles available for MacOS.
It won’t. The switch it massively underclocked for battery life.
The nVidia shield tablet it’s based on regularly pushes 2ghz CPU/1ghz GPU. That tablet doesn’t have the cooling solution the Switch has either, it’s just got a crappy elongated heatspreader like M1 macbooks.
Just got my OLED. Really Love it. Haven’t gotten to switch emulation yet, but SNES and other old stuff works great. Bought some horror games because I only like those on controller setups from the couch, not in a computer chair. Loving it so far.
My favorite part is Decky, just customizing the hell out of it. Really fun and capable device for $500.
Playing BioShock for the first time, gone home, from the darkness, evoland, hollow knight, the messenger. All the side scrollers and games best for controllers. Puppet house is sick. Fire watch is next.
To someone that can upgrade a Nintendo switch to have 8GB of RAM, can install RPCS3 and play PS3 games on it, I would say: “Do whatever you want, you are a god amongst us. I am the peasant that lives the easy life with a SteamDeck”
But why, some say, the Switch? Why did they choose this as their goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 98 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
They choose to go to mod a Switch. They choose to mod a Switch in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…
Unity is B2B, they tried to change the deal retrospectively. That’s toxic to a business relationship, it’s not viable to do business with such a company because they may try to do it again.
I mean you definitely got a point, but don’t forget that there are long term consequences. The trust is completely gone (which is needed if you invest in this game engine and you will probably see the unity market share drop in the coming year.
I agree- hopefully we can remember long enough for it to really matter in the long term. Just wanted to bring attention to this cycle because it’s been happening a lot lately (Facebook, DnD, etc) and I think the companies are starting to copy eachother.
But don’t you think that pretty much this debacle resembles Reddit and by now most of the users are back to their platform, exactly what they wanted.
Only the nerds and some mods left their platform permanently but percentage wise the number is probably very low and now Reddit is probably earning even more than before. So it is a win win situation for them.
The big difference is Reddit isn’t taking a portion of their wages. It was purely moral outrage.
Things are different once money is involved.
Choosing an engine is a business decision for a lot of people and using a free alternative that isn’t quite as feature rich sure seems like the better option now.
Idk why everyone is like “well Reddit won and we’re just on Lemmy because we’re nerds and no one believes in FOSS anyway”. Yes, I get you, there’s currently not much consequence visible for the Reddit debacle. I genuinely think we’re in the middle of a slow and painful death to Reddit. A lot of big companies don’t implode, but they die slowly in front of their competition. Yeah, currently we only are a fraction of users compared to Reddit, but if people truly believe in Lemmy as the better platform, this will be competition.
Yeah, I’ve got so many more games than I have time to play them that there’s never a need to play full price for anything. I wishlist em and pick them up when they’re on sale less than £10
Yeah. I might break my rule for phantom liberty, it’s reduced to £17 at the mo. I’m enjoying cyberpunk so much I might make an exception here! But I’ve still got plenty in my backlog.
While I wouldn’t say it is crucial by any means, it is a fun piece of DLC. I put over 400 hours into Cyberpunk before I got the DLC though, so that may have been why I was okay with purchasing it! Either way, it does make me happy to see someone enjoying the game! :-]
Lately, I’ve only been buying indie games. I can’t justify dropping $70-$80 on one game and even when those games go on sale they’re usually $40-$50.
If you read reviews and do a little research you’ll find that there are actually a lot of really cool indie games and you can get multiple games for just a fraction of the cost of double or triple A games.
That’s just a computer. If you’ve heard about the steam deck, you can set up a pc to be basically the same but more powerful and permanently hooked up to a tv.
Yeah, I know that this is just a computer. From a skill point of view I have no problem to assemble it and set it up. The thing is I work in IT and spend the whole day on the computer. I do not want to administrate any system in my free time. That’s something I love about consoles. I’m aware they limit the possibilties, but they also low maintenance. I never actively installed system updates on my Xbox Series X, it is just done in the background. I turn it on and play. In worst case I need to install a game update. I have a store interface where I can buy and install games with pressing a few buttons. Inside the game, I do not need to play around with the graphic settings to find what runs best. If at all, I need to decide between graphics and performance mode. That’s what I love about consoles and do not want to have a gaming PC.
Consoles have obvious limitations, but they make it much easier if all you want to do is play.
I do not want to administrate any system in my free time.
Do you have a computer you use at home? How much time exactly do you think it takes to manage a personal computer?
I have a store interface where I can buy and install games with pressing a few buttons.
Seriously, look into a steam deck. The interface is very console-like and you can have it on a normal desktop if you want. Or don’t, you already seem pretty convinced that you only want a console.
I second this. The Steam Deck is the best console and a really cheap gaming PC at the same time. You can emulate and use it for other programs without needing to mod it like you would a console and even though it’s linux, it’s so easy to use. You don’t really need to use the desktop mode for much if you don’t want to, but it’s not bad at all. I’ve switched to Bazzite as my only OS for my main computer because of how much SteamOS has impressed me.
The majority of people playing don’t know the difference. I am shocked there won’t be a 60fps mode, i can’t remember the last time I’ve been forced to play at 30fps outside of playing older games locked to it.
Yeah, i know, for myself I didn’t really get to experience it until 2016 when I built myself a PC with mid range specs and then when I got the ps4 pro in like 2018. I say it’s one of those things where once you get to have it, you never wanna go back.
Yeah. I have a PS5 and I heard gta 6 won’t launch on PC right away, but then I heard it is coming to PC lol. So idk. I’m almost hitting 40 and playing on my couch and tv has been more fun lately. But sometimes I just know a game will run much better on my PC.
What I should do is put my current build into a super small box with an external PSU and just install steam os and hook it up to my tv
It’s not shocking, when you consider the level of graphical fidelity they’ll be pushing on screen.
The more detail you add, the lower the framerate, on any given hardware. They will be balancing “oh my God!” level graphics, with playable frame rates. The fact they’re shooting for such a relatively low frame rate, shows how hard they’re pushing the hardware.
For most people the further they sit away from a screen the less they are going to notice it. And console gamers play on a tv from the couch. Of course if you show them a 60fps version after they played in 30fps they will notice but most people don’t understand why that is and thus not care. Like how many people watch movies with motion smoothing on since they don’t see that it looks smoother than the movies in the cinema.
Rockstar can get away with this since the vast majority of GTA player will be mainstream casual gamers that only have fifa/madden and CoD in their gaming collection.
Yes, 30fps is fine, and expected even if you’re also expecting ultra realistic graphics. This expectation that people have of games being 60 fps and being stupid realistic is nonsense. You want realistic graphics and reflections when a game is first released, your gonna get 30 fps. And honestly, you can hardly tell the difference anyway.
Edit: Always expect the downvotes when I say this. The people in gaming subs, almost never understand how games are developed. Just demand without understanding the limitations of hardware and software.
None that I’ve ever seen. It takes a lot of work to get good graphics even for 60 fps, a lot of optimization, that depending on the type of game, might be very expensive and time consuming to do.
It’s a number that divides easily into 120, which mattered more for old TVs, and it’s far enough over the threshold to trick our minds into seeing a bunch of still frames as a moving thing.
That was my concern long ago when I entered the game.
The problem is, CIG have financially incentivised themselves, knowingly or not, to never finish the game.
Being alpha game means you can wipe everything again and again. And they do! One thing they do not touch, however, are ships purchased with real world money. And players do buy those ships in order to not start the game from scratch over and over again, and pay a lot for it, in hundreds and often thousands of dollars!
Upon release, on the other hand, no wipes are planned, and this means one thing: revenue will absolutely plummet as players just buy ships for in-game currency instead of actual cash. Releasing the game now is a suicide move, as CIG won’t be able to blatantly extort players for their money anymore.
Not to mention that they also incentivise players to spend real-world money by having their website have a secret club for whales (I think you need to spend either $1K or $5K in order to have the button appear) to spend even more money then they did to even gain access originally.
Edit: clarity and conciseness: added “originally” to the end of the last sentence.
Yes, if you spend over $1k on the game you gain access to beta-testing etc.
And the most scary part? Plenty of people do spend this much money - I know many Carrack owners, for example, and this ship costed, when I remember it, $1200. Yes, very real $1200 for an in-game ship, and there’s plenty of buyers.
Heck, I know a person in Ukraine - not a high-income country by any standards, GDP per capita sitting at ~$5000, vs ~$85000 in the US - who spent about $6000 on the game by hiding huge portion of his income from his family for years. And this is not an exceptional case.
So to compensate for a poor service that is epic game launcher you have to turn to oss solution maintained by the community thanklessly while still giving epic the 25% cut of your sale? I’d rather not give epic any money at all
As I previously said, I don’t advocate for buying from Epic. But if it happens that you have some games from their Store (for whatever reason, like ones you got for free) there are alternatives to their client.
You add the game in Heroic, and it has a menu option to add the game to Steam. There’s another setting that will do this automatically, once the game is installed.
Yeah, Star Citizen is the world’s most expensive tech demo, that is the picture book definition of scope creep. It’ll just keep getting more and more complicated, but never get to any kind of a “complete game” state.
I work as project manager, just spent the entire week fighting a client on a new project’s scope, because he wanted more things done by the team than what was agreed in the proposal.
Anytime I read about this game, I have to do breathing excercises in a corner to calm my anxiety.
The price increase is absurd. I cancelled too, because while I do play quite a bit, this level of corporate greed is completely unjustifiable to me. If rather watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch or YouTube and then buy them a year later on sale than pay this bloody much, eff that.
To be fair it‘s as absurd as it was inevitable. Gamepass was always meant as this temporary thing you can try out to play some new games until everyone jumps ship because of increased prices. It has been preached for years. No one could‘ve seriously thought this was a long term alternative to buying games or at least buying licenses to games on Steam. All online subscriptions are scams in the process.
Why watch playthroughs at all? Just wait till the games are on sale. And only a year isn’t that long, wait more and get better deals with more complete games. There’s nothing saying you need to hurry in any way, and several things saying it’s a good idea to wait. There are more than enough games available for anyone to not have to constantly claw at the newest releases.
“watch playthroughs of new games on Twitch of YouTube”
welcome to my life for the last couple of many years lol. Not that I’ve been boycotting per se, but I haven’t bought a new game in years cuz my laptop is over a decade old so the best I can play is minecraft, or just use my xbox one for battlefield 4. the corporate greed from the last decade has caused me to never buy this crap again. I love videogames so much, thank god for emulators.
I don’t need any trash EsaudiaA dishes out. People need to go play old/vintage games, get back to the roots, before games were nothing but meaningless cash grabs.
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