Microsoft is getting a bad rep because they don’t want to let the Series S go. They are not handling these problems very well. The Series X should be the “cheap” platform and they should have a “Pro”, called Series XS (pronounced excess, you are welcome Microsoft), so they are the platform that people want and not the platform that’s holding back games.
The problem is the Series S sold a lot, last I read it was about two thirds of their user base. Microsoft also want to push platform independence using X Cloud, which solves their Series S issues, but with the feature parity requirement in the Series X and S, they keep hitting this issue.
That’s a very bad business strategy, it should be one or the other, X Cloud or in Console parity. The parity being the weak one. I would like to know the defense arguments for this strategy.
The thing is, if a game releases on Series X without any bonus bells and whistles like (pick one) 4K, 60fps, or ray tracing, it’s kind of failed the move to next gen. If it then cannot scale any of those things back for the Series S, then it’s failed at designing scalability.
The new consoles do not exist to serve programmer inefficiency.
Do developers still make different games for different consoles? I thought the Xbox X was just a stronger Xbox One. Does MS disable these high quality graphics options in the menus?
Xbox has a packaged release system designed for that. Since the Series S isn’t really meant to go over 1080p, developers are encouraged to only include smaller versions of textures since anything too detailed would be wasted.
PS5, by contrast, tends to have simplified video settings panels so gamers can prioritize what they want - be that raytracing, 4K, or 60fps. Often, just having the extra power doesn’t necessarily matter if the game is coded against taking advantage of it. (I think Bloodborne is infamous for this - it hasn’t gotten an update, so even on PS5, everyone must play it locked at 30fps).
Similar to how the PS5 had “8K” on the box; it’s only technically capable of that for the sake of videos, but most games tend to go a bit smaller resolution for practical rendering.
I mean…I think yes, at some point a marketing department made that claim, which is unfortunate because that’s ultimately far from reality and most people know it. The claims made of the Series X and PS5 are also usually exaggerated, because most salespeople can get away with prefixing any claim with the words “up to”.
I read that it has nothing to do with the hardware, and is in fact because of Sony having an exclusive deal to release only on their platform the first few months.
I second this. I’m planning to start switching my devices from Windows to Linux in a couple of weeks due to good experience I’ve had with the Steam Deck
I can -sort of- understand cancelling games that have been in development hell but it's insane than they cancelled the Perfect Dark remake. It looked very far along when they showed it last year.
Anytime I see super-smooth transition animations in a demo, or even just gameplay mechanics that seem to work out way too conveniently, it tells me it’s an animated “pre-viz” demo of the game they want to make. That’s kind of the impression I got from Perfect Dark.
I think eat they’re saying is that those type of demos are less a representation of the current state of the game development and more a bespoke product to represent what they hope to eventually make, which in fact likely took time away from developing the actual game
At some point, it will only be worth it, if you either finish games at an alarming rate, or play so many different games, that buying them separately would make no sense
I think if you’re playing 1 new release game every month or two, you’re getting the value. I’m enjoying Avowed and Doom the Dark ages recently, but I’m very glad I didn’t pay for Doom.
Xbox has kind of been on a roll lately with the games they’ve added.
Indeed. I think the last 6 months have been great value for PC game pass. Of course it goes against the OP/thread sentiment that Xbox is ripping everyone off.
I buy on steam/key resellers at heavy discount most of the time, but game pass allows me to play new release games that are in the “looks interesting, but I’m not dropping full price to try this out” category of games.
But right now it is 20 bucks a month. Even at 30, that is “worth it” if you play two or three newly released games a year and random library games beyond that.
The issue is if people have multiple consoles or are in the PC space and also have access to steam sales and bundles and the like.
It’d be pretty sick if after seeing the massive success bg3 was and how they were wildly off with their prediction, Microsoft pushes an order for pillars of eternity 3.
While I’m in this bizzaro world where Microsoft makes good decisions, I’d also like a Ferrari.
I know the first game didn’t, by the time I played the sequel (though I didn’t enjoy that one nearly as much as the first) I did recall it being an option.
Yeah I agree with you on thinking of it as a new game fly. The problem I have is MS’s plan is to make gamers comfortable with only renting games by making it cheap then when there is no other option. They jack up the price.
I still haven’t seen the “no other option” scenario as so many claim. You could say $80 price tags do that, but if all prices are going up, that doesn’t track so much.
They also discount games if you buy them while you have game pass. So there’s some encouragement to try a game, find you want to keep it, and pay for a permanent copy should it be removed from GP (or the player decides to stop the GP subscription).
Still, I’m done with them because they’re done with talented studios, and are active participants in the Palestinian genocide.
It’s more the trend of i have seen in the tech space of a deal too good to be true. A tech company taking a loss to gain marketshare and drive out competition on price or flat out buy them then when they have cornered the market drive up the price for insane profits and customers have no choice because you effectively become the platform.
The video game market is extremely hard to “corner”. It can happen for professional software like document processing, image editing, etc, but far too many startups are interested in making games, and there’s multiple digital stores to sell them. Minecraft and Factorio even sold off their own websites. Clair Obscur recently outsold a lot of big publisher efforts, and definitely didn’t need Game Pass’s visibility.
They can corner one particular audience like Call of Duty, but can only push so many expectations on them before those gamers consider other games. They tried it with Fallout, complete with subscription, and it was massively unpopular.
There are not much possibilities to legally own games left. Physical releases are nearly full gone on PC (physical boxes only containing Steam Keys), and even on Consoles they become less and less common (or turned into something like the Switch 2 Game cards). On the digital release front only GOG comes to mind as as store where one could say that one owns the game after purchase and download. Everything else only sell licenses that can be revoked or removed any moment.
I feel like, though it doesn’t come up much, we should conceptually separate “owning the game” from “having a physical edition”. Some games give you a disc, but barely offer ownership (remember CD keys?) while other games are only sold digitally, but are ultra-permissive with what you do with them.
I get the sense many indie companies would like to give people as much control as possible, but also can’t afford printing box sets.
Hot take: gamepass is preferable to a digital storefront. Any game you “buy” digitally is only somewhat less temporary than gamepass. At least gamepass doesn’t fool you into thinking you own the games you’re playing
Buy physical. If you’re buying digital, only buy from GOG. Pirate everything you can, and seed that shit forever
I agree on GoG, buying physical only gets you the broken unpatched game they shipped. Steam i feel okay with since they are a private company and not all their games are DRMed and it’s clearly marked if they are.
While I am impressed that No Man’s Sky pulled a 180 in the end and I doubt they’ll repeat the same mistakes with this, a dose of some skeptism is always healthy.
Also, doesn’t hurt to check what the thing looks like at release–we just had The Day Before pull the ol’ switcharoo on people, after all–and how it plays when it’s out before making a purchase (looking right at Cyberpunk the game vs Cyberpunk the game that was pitched to people, here…no amount of “it’s better now” is gonna bring the game that was hyped up before release/used “Work in Progress” as a shield to life. Not without a complete rework. Could also apply to the above The Day Before too). By all means, believe that the devs learned, I really hope they did, cuz as a Fantasy junkie, this looks like something I’d really enjoy…but also be at least a little cautious in what you’re gonna throw money at
Fair enough. Just like Cyberpunk tho, they’ll never be able to give people the game they were hyping NMS to be. Unlike Cyberpunk, IMO anyways, it does get closer to it tho (and i give it brownie points because 1) they used the money they made and put it back into the game to fix their mistakes and gave these “expansions” to players for free, and 2) they never tried to downplay anything like CDPR did. They knew they messed up, admitted to it, and fixed it. None of this “oh, the game launched better than people make it out to be. It was just a cool thing to hate Cyberpunk” thing)
The program has been reducing the amount of points you could earn for a while now. It very well may be just moving the points you can earn in the rewards app to an Xbox app but I can see those points disappearing at some point.
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