Just consider what you’re up against - the first one was 7.49€ (the lowest I’ve seen) and I haven’t bought it yet simply because I have too many games to play for years now. I certainly won’t pay more than 10€ for the original or the sequel and I’d never pay MS for their shitty subscription.
I have different reasons I hate MS and Game Pass specifically, but I was never convinced by this argument.
It works on the argument of “We would like to stop offering direct purchase models, and require consumers to play by subscription.” But no one has done that. No one has really come close to doing that.
People argue the price will steadily go up; and that’s one of the reasons I don’t play Game Pass anymore. I knew that I wouldn’t maintain access to the games on there, which is why I bought the ones I wanted to keep playing - not very many.
They have started doing that though. No company is going to stop selling individual games. They are going to continue raising the prices, specially of games in high demand, to price out most people.
Same result for us. But they get the ideologue whales who keep buying individual games to virtue signal, and also get to exploit gamers. It’s a win win.
So this is basically an observation about raising prices. But I think there’s a misconception on social media that you have to be reading the news and on your soapbox to alert people to those things.
Pricing has always very readily affected people’s spending behavior. Not just people that follow gaming news, but people browsing GameStop for whatever’s new. We’ve even seen that - stats are showing people spent much less on games this year. Some people are even spending less through the option of going for a subscription rather than buying 8 games through the year. The publisher plan is certainly to tune up that cost with time, but personally, I don’t think that plan has a high chance of success.
And there’s a very worrying reality on the publisher side that gamers have many alternatives, especially as quality falls in these AAA products. You can imagine someone starved for a Soulslike might’ve spent $70 on generic copycat “Folly of the Dodgeroll 7”, if not for seeing Hollow Knight Silksong for $20 one shelf over.
So basically, I never hated the subscription model itself as a “weapon of capitalism”; just the constant attempts to shrinkflate as has been happening to most else.
I mean, you changed the topic onto the subject of pricing, which is the main thing driving sentiment that Microsoft is anti-consumer. There are other smaller gaming subscriptions out there, and I don’t call many of them anti-consumer.
That’s fair. Game Pass definitely has perks, but I get your point subscriptions are great for trying stuff out, not so much for long-term ownership. Prices creeping up makes it harder to justify, and like you said, actually buying the games you care about ends up being the safer move.
The oligopolies rarely buy out smaller companies and keep to promises, or let those companies do what they did best.
They buy them to control competition.
Not putting these titles on their service isn’t a tactic to control competition, but it is indicative of their lack of giving a shit about what they have hoarded.
I mean, a lot of the games on that spreadsheet (I would even guess more than 50%) contain licensed material, music, or other intellectual property that is not owned by Microsoft, ActiBlizz, or any of the subsidiary studios.
If someone was going to actually make a really list, those games should not be on the list that anyone would reasonably expect to come back, probably ever. It would require renegotiation of the licensed content with the license holder, if they are still easy to find, who would absolutely demand more money than originally agreed upon at the original game’s release (thereby making the effort immensely expensive), or it would require developers to alter the artistic vision and integrity of some of those games that they can, while others like “Bee Movie: The Game” would require so much reworking it would be better to make it an original game instead.
I mean, imagine if Square Enix decided to remaster Omikron: The Nomad Soul. They would have to either renegotiate the soundtrack license with David Bowie’s estate and the record label company that publisher the album, or they would have to destroy the legacy of the game by replacing the music with some other artist that would be guaranteed to be genuinely worse than David Bowie. Honestly, I am surprised but also overjoyed that Square Enix is still selling the game on Steam.
I can’t go that far. I can’t be upset at people for looking at deals and NOT thinking “but what about the companies?” Granted this hits differently as a field I love, but still, I get it.
Yeah. People very much forget how horrible most online multiplayer infrastructure was back in the early 2000s. Voice chat was a case where you used teamspeak/ventrillo for atrocious quality audio that optimally depended on using an actual phone line in conjunction or it just never worked. Messaging was basically xfire or AIM. And servers were generally listen servers that someone in your clan left running in the background when they forgot about it.
Live provided a messaging system people would actually use and tapped into MS infrastructure for voice chat that actually worked… which was great for playing with your friends and learning all new slurs when you had it on in a pub. Game servers themselves were still generally all listen servers but that changed over time.
These days? Discord has a LOT of problems but it actually works and is a much more universal platform. Server hosting infrastructure is such that there isn’t really a point in paying the platform for it. And EVERYTHING needs to be social media for people to not whinge so having a messaging system loses its value.
But also… have any of the consoles really pushed the online infrastructure as why you pay for premium? Okay, Nintendo have but they REALLY shouldn’t considering what they are offering. It is all about the IGC and has been since Sony got involved as part of the PSN hack.
Well, it got you a better experience than whatever it was Sony were doing at the time, which was a weird ethernet adapter, and seemingly every game reinventing the idea of how online should work.
I don’t think it ever needed to be charged for, it just needed to be designed.
I only ever paid for it once they started giving away games with it. Multiplayer alone wasn’t worth it to me.
Hosting servers isn’t free. Someone, somewhere, is paying for it. It’s easy to forget that that someone used to be advertisers via GameSpy for so many games. Now, on PC, you’re paying for it via digital purchases on the same store that hosts the servers.
It wasn’t always worth it back then, hence why it was supported with ads or a subscription. Did you ever patch your game back then? Even that was subsidized by ads; the devs didn’t host the patch files themselves in most cases. Live services, which are unfortunately all too often synonymous with online games, host their own servers, and you’re paying for them with microtransactions. If a game uses the platform’s matchmaking for peer to peer multiplayer, which was just about all of them on Xbox Live in its early days, then you’re using the servers your subscription was paying for. Even today, many still use these features. But you’re correct that the ones not using these features are still locked behind that subscription on consoles unless they’re free to play.
These days? I dont mind it. With the offering of the 3 games a month, it’s been fine. As someone who’s gotten old and barely plays anything, it’s nice only spending the yearly subscription and getting up to 36 games a year. Sure, not all are great, but there have been plenty of big games offered that let me play the big stuff I missed and probably still wouldn’t pay $20-$30 for.
A good example would be Alan Wake 2 this month. Really wanted to play it but couldn’t really bring myself to buy it.
Seems worse to me than humble choice which you don’t need to play online, so you can just buy the months you like to get 8 games in your library as opposed to it being tied to multiplayer.
Then there’s Epic which gives away games every month without having to spend any money and still retain multiplayer access.
I used to do humble years ago, then I remember something changed and the selections were never that good. It’s been a while since I found one worth buying. I also fo Epic every week. I have been for about 3 or 4 years now.
Dang, I missed that. Honestly, I haven’t looked much at humble in years. If thats what they are still pushing, then I will definitely start following again. Thanks for the heads up.
Really, I think multiplayer should be free (it’s not like multiplayer games don’t nickel and dime you on top of that anyway) and the game subscription peeled out of it. I’m only interested in the “free” games anyway.
Indeed, the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, with its Xbox Full Screen Experience, is essentially what the next Xbox will look like. It’s not dissimilar to the SteamOS interface and Big Picture Mode, which allows you to exit out into full Linux at will.
A big difference here, and something that it sounds like the FSE did not nail, is that SteamOS doesn’t just boot into Big Picture Mode; it intercepts how popups and game windows are drawn to the screen so that you never lose focus of the game window. It doesn’t force you to get out a keyboard or use the touch screen to enter a login password or PIN. It’s got those important considerations for the ways a game machine differs from any other personal computer. Microsoft, with all its wealth and the code base of Windows in its control, can make those same changes, but maybe they didn’t plan for it in their code base that now surely goes back almost 30 years at this point. Best of luck to those engineers.
New technology Microsoft is developing, alongside the “fixed” nature of the hardware, should eliminate a lot of the inconveniences that sometimes come with PC gaming. Things like compiling shaders, etc, shouldn’t be an issue on the new Xbox, for example.
I don’t know if it’s actually new technology, but what Valve does for the Steam Deck is to either handle this server side or to have people with a Steam Deck essentially upload their completed shaders back to the server to be distributed to everyone else’s Steam Deck, sort of like BitTorrent. This is what I expect Microsoft will do.
Right now, I’m told the current plan is for the next Xbox specifically to have no paywall for multiplayer.
It’s insane that they’ve kept that paywall for so long when it would be the easiest way to make their console more enticing than PlayStation, before they did this pivot of theirs. If the goal was Game Pass anyway, make online free and make that library on Game Pass attractive. The reason online is free on PC is because your store purchases are supporting the infrastructure that someone like Valve provides, and we crossed the threshold on consoles where digital purchases are the majority some time ago.
Where the Xbox Ally is disadvantaged, at least for Xbox console users, is the lack of the Xbox console library. There are more Xbox Play Anywhere (dual-license PC and console Xbox games) than ever, but most AAA publishers aren’t on board with this ecosystem just yet. Increasingly, though, it’ll become the default ecosystem for publishers, particularly if they want to support a PC gaming universe where they get 88% of the revenue rather than 70%.
This is a delusional paragraph in the wake of the Epic Games Store.
Things like compiling shaders, etc, shouldn’t be an issue on the new Xbox, for example.
From what I remember that’s exactly what MS is doing as well, xbox would let you download pre-compiled shaders for the ROG handheld. Though I don’t think you upload any of your own shaders since the xbox hardware is unified as opposed to steam having to support everybody on Linux
As far as I know, this same advantage isn’t granted to anything other than Steam Deck. On desktop, you often have a Vulkan shader step before the game boots that I rarely see on Deck. I could be wrong though.
it intercepts how popups and game windows are drawn to the screen so that you never lose focus of the game window
Huh? That is kind of just how window managers work. The game launches so it is on top. It may or may not be exclusive fullscreen these days. The game spawns up another window as part of a social media thing or because you typed /wiki jennah’s feet and then that is on top until you close it. That is, mostly, OS agnostic these days.
It doesn’t force you to get out a keyboard or use the touch screen to enter a login password or PIN
Big Picture 100% makes you do that if there is a text input. You can choose to use your controller to navigate the keyboard and… that is a love it or hate it. From a quick google, the asus equivalent (as of 2 years ago) is that you can switch your input to desktop mode to use the joysticks as a mouse. And while that is a step down from automagically “just working”… the fact that I know that it is steam+square kinda sums up just how automagic it is with Big Picture.
My understanding, heavily tainted by Dan Ryckert’s stupidity, is that the big problem the xbox decks have is the OS login window. Yes, Microsoft need to get off their fucking asses and make that work consistently. But Valve mostly bypasses that by having a shitty pin login. That is a “I left my SteamOS laptop on my bed and someone from a dorm down the hallway stole all my money” story away from being a debacle.
Background processes can spawn pop-ups, update reminders, notifications, etc. If you listen to Dan and Bakalar’s chat on the Bombcast, even with Bakalar on the proper FSE like he’s supposed to be, you’ll hear examples of the controller inputs just not working the way they’re supposed to, often because something else spawned on top of it. You can hear the same in this GameSpot review of the Xbox Ally X from Tamoor Hussain. And I can tell you from experience, this happens on desktop Linux distros on handhelds as well.
If you shut off most of your other apps (like fucking discord) you don’t have the popups from that.
As for OS level shenanigans? Steam Big Picture alone can’t stop the mess that is KDE (Wayland?) whinging that steam input looks like a remote desktop session as far as inputs are concerned (although I finally found the setting for that after like 55 hours of Pillars 1). SteamOS/Bazzite “solve” that by having a ridiculously stripped down mode… which is not dissimilar from what MS is arguing as their “gaming mode” that will probably still not work but is conceivably that.
To be clear. Fuck ASUS. Their ROG Armory Crate shit is god damned malware.
But for a “new xbox” that is the “PC with gaming mode” that MS have been alluding to over the past few months? That is effectively what Valve are doing with SteamOS (and same with the Bazzite devs).
If you’re fine with just Big Picture Mode rather than what SteamOS or Bazzite are doing at a lower level, more power to you, but for a lot of us, it makes a huge difference in the experience, and it sounds like Microsoft’s FSE hasn’t gotten all the way there yet.
I was more just pointing out that most (all?) of what you said is… not anything special. In fact, the big advantage seems to just be that SteamOS closes your windows for you rather than expecting you to care about going through your systray to see if you actually need banzai buddy running while you play WoW.
When Microsoft can’t do it on their FSE, it certainly feels special. But no, it’s a bit more than deciding to close something or not. Do you have a Steam Deck or a machine running Bazzite? In gaming mode, check out a game that has one of those stupid pre-launch launchers on it, like most of 2K’s games, and note how it handles that differently from a desktop OS.
Yes. I have a Steam Deck and an HTPC running bazzite. I am aware of what it does. I like what it does.
But what you are now describing is just defaulting all windows to launch in fullscreen. The rest is just the natural stack and focusing. if I double click Warframe in desktop and don’t immediately go off to do other stuff while it launches, it defaults to the launcher in focus. Just like if I launch it in big picture mode it defaults to the launcher in focus.
And you continue to assume that the asus xbox deck is the new xbox. Whereas this lines up with what MS have been saying since the last time they pivoted their entire division a few months back: the next xbox is what is going to do this and it is going to be heavily dependent on windows gaming mode. Which isn’t out yet.
Indeed, the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, with its Xbox Full Screen Experience, is essentially what the next Xbox will look like. It’s not dissimilar to the SteamOS interface and Big Picture Mode, which allows you to exit out into full Linux at will. Similarly, the Xbox Full Screen Experience will allow you to exit out to full Windows if you want to, and run competing stores like Steam, Epic Games Store, Microsoft’s own Battle.net, the Riot Client, and indeed anything else you want. Indeed, you could run Adobe CC or Microsoft Office on the next Xbox, if you so choose.
I’ll grant you that there’s room to interpret this paragraph another way, but it certainly reads to me as though this is it. It can get improvements between now and then for sure, but I think it’s out.
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