Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

@FullbringIchigo (I think it'd be better for us to continue our conversation here rather than taking up all the space in that other thread)

I've been doing great! I feel like leaving PushSquare was the best decision I've made because I've been at that site for so long now that I wasn't growing as a person anymore. I kept behaving in a poor manner and I realised that I needed a fresh start in order to become the person that I wanted to be. This site has definitely helped me towards that goal. But as a result, I don't feel like I can ever go back to PushSquare because that's my past, you know? I want to leave behind my past and focus on my future, which is here on PureXbox.

Not to mention that Microsoft has been making so many great moves in recent years compared to Sony that I'm leaning more towards making them my primary brand for this generation. So I think I made the right call to move to this site so I can also focus more on Xbox news.

@LtSarge yeah i get that plus the community here, while smaller tends to be a lot more civil than how Push Square got and as i still go back every now and then to see news seems to still be quite volital

As for me depending on how long it takes to get a Series X the PS5 might end up being my main system this gen as i already have that but you know me, I alway get all the systems and try to be balanced with my games over the platforms

@LtSarge @FullbringIchigo Good to see you too again. I haven't been on Push Square for awhile now. I still pop in with a comment here and there once in awhile but honestly I don't even check the site anymore then once a month or even more. Just something about that place changed over the last year or so (so did Nintendolife by that's another story) and it's just not the same place anymore. People are alot ruder and the fanboyism is out of hand their. Honestly since I retired there doesn't even seem to be a mod there anymore. Anyway I don't want to derail this thread so hit me up guys in the chit chat thread if this site has one. It's good seeing familar faces.

@Tasuki Good to see you as well! Hope you've been doing well.

I still read PushSquare and NintendoLife articles and yeah I've definitely noticed an increase in hostility in the comment sections, especially at PushSquare. It certainly doesn't help that neither Sony nor Nintendo is doing too hot now in terms of boosting the morale among their users. Nintendo is barely producing any new games and Sony keeps getting negative press. People are sure to be affected mentally by this. Look at this community in comparison. Even though it's smaller and therefore more civil, team spirit is at a much higher level because of all the moves Microsoft has been making. It's sure to make people a lot more positive and excited on the site.

Hey @Tasuki nice to hear from you again haow you been?

@LtSarge yeah that's true XB seems to be saying all the right stuff lately but Nintendo and Sony are still doing really well too even if they both need to work on their PR strategy

One thing is for certain it's going to interesting this gen to be sure

@LtSarge @FullbringIchigo I have been doing good and I hope you too are doing well. I was lucky enough to snag me a Series X a few months ago, got it from Walmart.com and been catching up on Xbox games that I missed last gen. Still plan on getting a PS5 at some point but nothing new interested me and I played all the big hitters from last gen, Spiderman, Horizon etc.

As far as Push Square and NL go yeah I chock up all the negativity going on right now there to faustration of the user base not happy. It was like way over here back in the early days of Xbox One. That and it seems the Mod teams there are very light.

Didn't see a goodbye thread (yes I did search for one), so I will post my post here.

So I won't be around here much in the coming days maybe months. Early Friday morning I was woken up by my house on fire. Luckily all occupants humans, and animal made it out safely which is great but the house on first inspection is looking like a total lost and will have to be demolished and rebuilt which I am told can take 6 to 8 months minimal. Right now I am staying in a hotel for a few days till I discuss a more permanent housing solution with my insurance, possibly a rental till my house is rebuilt.

In way with that said I have alot of stuff to do now so, I more then likely will be very sporadic on here till things get back to a sense of normalcy. But just in case I am gone for awhile, take care everyone and I hope to return someday.

@Tasuki glad that you are okay! Sorry about the loss, can't imagine how that would feel waking up to a fire.

Take care!

I know this is such a first world problem but I really wish I could pin more groups to the home screen. I know the argument against it is that I can just go into "My games and apps" and look at them all there but it would just be nice to put all games into groups by either series, publisher, format or whatever I choose (I have a very specific filing system for everything where I organise stuff into categories that are most recognisable to me with more miscellaneous stuff going into more generic categories. It works for me but I don't think it would make much sense to anyone else lol.) And just have all those groups on the home screen for me to peruse.

The other downside to going into my games and apps to look at groups is that when you are on the groups tab and you scroll through groups with a lot of games, there are multiple lines you have to scroll through. Whereas on the home screen, you just scroll through the pinned groups themselves.

So yeah, I just want to be able to pin more than 16 things to the home screen basically! As it stands I have to shuffle games into (occasionally massive) groups with which I'm not really happy with the categorisations of as a compromise to get everything on the home screen.

Sorry for the bit of a moan there 😅

I'm just gutted about Sean Lock today, such a funny geezer and watching clips of him on youtube (among other comedians) has kept me sane and more or less happy for the last year and a half. It was really like he wasn't even off the tele for me over the last 12 months considering how much he featured in clips I'd watch on YouTube. But yeah just gutted

I only bought Fifteen Stories High on DVD just the other day so I could watch it all again this weekend. I don't think I can now, it'll just make me too sad.

Any other fans of Sean Lock out there?

Oh no, my tiny monkey gamer pic from the 360 era has been made large 🙈😭. I might have to change it now that the novelty of having a tiny monkey is no longer there. Boooo

@themightyant Continuing this on the forum because it's too long to post in the comments. And this is the TL;DR version!

Oh gawd, anything with titles like that makes me want to kill things. Hopey dreamey feel good faff, grounded in statistics about a better world written by ideologues supporting their hypotheses for social experiments with cherry picked data and blanket statistics that reduce the human experience to a number, so long as the biggest number wins.

Emperically, life in the Americas show tremendous statistical progress as a result of the French-Indian War and the Trail of Tears. The statistics can't be denied! Now, declare that in the Navajo Nation and see how long it takes to be buried alive in the desert. I'll keep a stopwatch ready.

I'm certainly not going to derail into a conversation about the proponents of globalization or the reliance on cherry picked one sided statistics to prove the "progress" produced by it because children in Bongo Bongo now have shoes and running water while the decadent Westerners dismantle their gilded lives and become stratified rich & poor classes like the rest of the world. We're not really talking about changes in places that weren't going to be buying Xboxes anyway (but thanks to said progress there's now an elite tier of citizens in those places buying Xboxes who can build whole sub-civilizations lording it over the children that merely celebrate now having shoes... Besides, we know they're all buying Playstations anyway, like proper image-conscious egotists.) But that glosses over the negative aspects, even if it's "globally net positive" of such shifts. A great example of the effect of economies, markets, prices, and availability of resources limited by nature and global shifts in where those resources are allocated would be to research the market for hongmu (African rosewood.) It's now a banned material. Why? Because the new Chinese middle class loves now being able to buy trad hongmu furniture. And now they can afford it. Of course only a portion of the immensely sized Chinese population is enough to deplete all rosewood from the world. So the only solution? Ban the trade of rosewood entirely, since making it unreasonably expensive still didn't work. A normal material used for many things worldwide, now can't exist, or at least exists only in domestic locations that can grow it locally in small quantity, because one oversized population that gained wealth can deplete all of it almost instantly. And then they started buying cocobolo and other similar woods, so those had to get banned too. There's no free ride. It's robbing Peter to pay Paul. It's just shifting things from one group to another, raising the competition and increasing the number of people left out, even if it's the same percentage of the whole as before.

But we're not talking about ending world hunger and all the children of the world holding hands and singing in harmony. We're talking about SSD prices. And we know the little biters in Bongo Bongo will be starved to death to build SSDs for $20 and die on the factory floor so that the newly minted six figure club around the world can buy them for $400 and make the investors tremendous money to blow on Versace bags, $1000 Iphones, and Ferraris, which are selling faster than ever, while the middle finds they can no longer afford computer storage expansion they were able to easily afford a decade ago.

I've written about it before here and PS, but the most enlightening read, and I don't believe it's public currently, and it's where my "thirds" came from, was a study (not a feel good socio-economic ideological book with supporting one sided "data" on the theoretical joys of globalization) but a hard study on cause and effect in the US retail market, by a UK firm, to analyze the nature and origins of the "retail apocalypse". It's a few years old now, and I it was meant specifically for the industry.

The common narrative is that "millennials have different shopping habits than prior generations", "millennials want instragramable experiences in the 'experience economy' rather than durable goods" so the market changed when millennials replaced the older population in the market. That's what we're always told is the nature of the "retail apocalypse". But the study found a much different result. They found instead that age had almost nothing to do with it. They found that in those roughly three banded thirds of the economic spectrum, things had changed dramatically, but among each age group, millennials of a given group among those economic tiers spent effectively the same as their parents. The difference wasn't age, it was that fewer among that age group had real buying power, so they just aren't represented in that market. The "experience economy spending" of what "millennials want" is in fact what "high income millennials" want, as they're the only ones represented in the market. And as tends to be the case, they also tend to be the children of high income older populations.

They found that the recovery after the 2008 crash was extremely uneven, as I noted above, the top third has gained tremendous buying power, with rapidly rising income. With roughly static expenses, that income is nearly all discretionary. The middle has rolled back, rapidly rising costs, and mostly static wages ("raises" don't always apply, and where they do they're tied to "cost of living" and "inflation" which doesn't actually reflect the costs of living but is an esoteric calculation from the GDP and the market price of corn. No joke.) Rising healthcare, insurance, transportation, housing, food, energy, etc prices has driven the disposable income of that middle third to all time lows, and disturbingly shows a steady rollback. The same rising costs have done even worse to the bottom third that now has insufficient income to even pay for the essentials, with discretionary income out of the question.

The actual retail economy, which we're told is showing modest gains and increases overall, was not, as the study found, what it appears. What it really found is that two thirds of the market now have reduced participation in the retail economy. The top third spends so much they compensate for the losses from the other two thirds, and then spend so much more it shows actual growth. But all the growth, and even plugging the losses, are all coming from the top third. A new gilded society.

That has a worse add-on effect. It means most of the demand in the retail economy is for ever more premium luxury goods to satisfy this wealthy tier of buyers. Formerly "middle of the road" products are no longer selling (because their customer base can't afford it), so those stores, products, and brands vanish, while high luxury items thrive as the market buying is the market for high luxury. It shifts the entire market (supply and demand) toward existing primarily to facilitate those high luxury goods. As a result, goods, stores, and services in the "middle" are unsustainable and vanish, and all that remains is luxury, and most of the consumer economy revolves around entirely satisfying the top third of society which is now more separated than ever from the rest of society, existing in a bubble, even if it's a larger group by number than before. An unstable and highly distorted market. One very prone to collapse. And when you look at the underlying state of the retail economy, which is really what, for better or worse, underpins the state of society itself in the west, and especially the US, it unmasks a never talked about in mainstream media image of a very very unstable state of the current society. The real economy exists to serve the top third of society. The other two thirds are barely participants in the economy, and nearly all retail economic activity exists to facilitate luxury for that top third. We've effectively gone baroque. Not sure if you like reading history as much as ideological books, but you might remember that tends not to end well. At all.

So back to video games, we see this trend of prices going up and up and up. And there are more and more worldwide newly minted top third customers willing to pay that, and more, for their luxury video games. Sell $1000 Xboxes, and $120 games with $600 HDDs, there's enough "top third" people worldwide willing to pay that, that you can show growth and tremendous profits. And that's exactly what Sony's been pushing on. Even Nintendo. Not so much Xb honestly, these SSDs are the outlier. But the rising population that gives numbers for that, and the fact that a lot of that growth is from booming markets of newly minted rich more than from the traditional markets in the west, it hides the fact that games, along with a lot of goods, are rapidly shifting away from the mainstream, and are becoming something no longer affordable to the middle market that used to be its mainstay. But F2P mobile games are! Which....is the single biggest actual video game market.... (Sometimes its the obvious things nobody sees.) Because in quantity, there are enough of that top third worldwide to buy in growing numbers the market looks "healthy" because it hides the fact when numerically compared to past years that an even greater mass of a lower market that used to buy no longer does.

As I said, I think that's where xCloud, Apple Arcade, Luna, Stadia, etc are going to become a bigger deal, faster, than people think. Those of us on these forums are either the top third crowd, or the people that are so deep into our gaming hobby we'd sell our appendages (or the appendages of others, not judging. Lots of children in Bongo Bongo after all.... ) to stay in the game, basically without exception. But to the 2/3 of (US society, can't say what the split is outside the US), that no longer can really afford it, cloud Subscriptions are easily going to become the mainstay of how people access video games.

Since the time of that study it's easy to observe a rapid acceleration of those trends. And with the pandemic it's a whole new level. Keep in mind grocery has seen the largest price jump since the 1960s. Roughly 20% increased price on grocery food. 30% on restaurant. Considering most people restaurant dine often because the new faster paced society where nobody tends the home means no time for cooking. We can just split that 50/50 and say 25% food cost increase. 25%. Just on food. That fully breaks the bottom 1/3, crushes the middle. Food takes a big portion of ones total income in general, and it's now 25% more. Add in housing, insurance, other expenses, rising taxes (as that top third gentrifies everything, costs associated with everything including taxes goes up!), energy at an 80-year high(!) and if you could afford a $300 HDD easily 10 years ago, you sure as heck can't afford a $400 now. Affording a $250 one is going to be sketchy in reality... But for each middle-earner that used to buy $300 HDDs and now can't afford $250 HDDs, there's 1.5 six-figure earners that would pay $600, even if there's now 4 middle-earners that can't. So the market looks "healthy" if you don't delve deeply into the numbers. The seams unravel in horrific ways if you do. And the picture it paints is of a true split society. "The K-shaped" economy it has been called (credit to someone on PS who tipped me to that after a similar discussion, I do not recall whom.) The end result is something that looks like the late 19th century.

So no, cute statements like "average consumers are willing to buy more expensive things now" couldn't possibly be farther from reality. Quite the opposite is true. Business is interested only in growing profits. So long as world population grows and the luxury market grows in sync, they can keep growing profits by selling higher luxury. But that doesn't represent the total market, or the average consumer, but an ever more detached luxury bubble, even if that bubble grows in size without growing in proportion.

@NEStalgia Honestly I was 99% tempted to go 100% ***** and just respond.

"Good Talk"

It's been an intense and long week and the little evil joy that would have given would have at least bought the briefest of smiles.

But the 1% of me has won over. I'll read through properly and send a brief reply at some stage over the weekend. For now it's EOP on a Friday here in Blighty and I have a date with several pints at the pub.

8bitdo have a wired sn30 pad coming out that looks like it's actually compatible with Xbox consoles. Sounds good and I might actually get it so I can up my D-Pad games on Xbox (currently I buy d pad heavy games on PS4 instead)

https://www.8bitdo.com/pro2-wired-controller-for-xbox/

Not sure if this got covered on the site? @FraserG

I might have missed it if it did

It's a shame it's wired but I always thought the wireless cloud only Xbox 8bitdo pad was a bit stupid because it didn't work on an actual Xbox

@ralphdibny you don't like the dpad on the Xbox controller? It works quite well for me with no missed inputs that I can remember

@Balta666 nah not really tbh. I am talking about the Xbox one d pad, I've not tried the Series disc shaped d pad thing.

It's fully functional, I haven't had any missed inputs or anything. It's just a bit small, clicky and awkwardly placed for me. it's fine for the sort of games where they serve specific functions like changing weapons or inventory items but not great for games where movement is D-Pad controlled.

Things I would play on PS4 over Xbox include Tony Hawk's and Crash Bandicoot. Stuff like the original resident evils and Ori would control better for me with a PS4 d pad but I've made do with the Xbox one.

I got a multiplat arcade stick for fighting games but it's a shame the adapter to make other controllers work on Xbox is so expensive. A similar adapter to make other controllers work on Switch and PS4 is relatively cheap by comparison.

But yeah, might pick up this new 8bitdo pad at a lower price and solve all my d pad woes!

@ralphdibny I've got the regular SNES-style SN30 wireless and the d-pad is really good - I use it mostly on XCloud and Switch as the d-pad (d-buttons?) on the joy-cons are awful. Shame it's not actually compatible with XBox as it would be fine as a second/backup controller or for D-Pad controlled games. I think the layout of the Xbox controller is more suited to using the analogue stick - I find it way more comfortable than using a PlayStation controller in that regard. I do like the D-Pad on the Series Controller - feels really good, but it's really clicky. To the point I feel like it's going to be annoying to anyone else in the room if I'm using it as the main control method in a game.

@dmcc0 oh nice! I actually randomly came across the wired Xbox version because I was thinking of getting a Sn30 pro 2 (though they don't currently seem to be available in the UK) as a catch all controller for emulation. I weren't really sure how comfortable they'd be seeing as the pro versions have handles, it's a bit weird imagining a SNES pad with handles tbh!!

The D-Disc certainly looks like an interesting concept. I can see how it works but i think I'll be skeptical about it until I've tried it!

Clickiness (and HD rumble) is actually one of the problems with the Switch too, I can't play it in bed or it will probably wake my partner up. I'm not sure if I mind the separated D-buttons though. I certainly think for some games that a traditional d pad is much better.

@ralphdibny or anyone else, have you played Crash Team Racing on xbox? I've played it on my Switch, but when I play it on my brother's xbox one, I thought shoulder buttons were too uncomfortable to drift & boost with. I've played a bunch of Forza and a few other games on my brother's xbox one, and I've always liked the xbox one controllers for 5 years, but Crash Team Racing, I struggle with pushing both shoulder buttons for drift boosting in CTR. Anyone else have this issue? Mabye my hands are at an ergonomic disadvatage. I don't know, but I've been wondering this for a while.

@WoomyNNYes long time no speak! How's it going??

I've actually only played it on PS4. I think the DS4 was good for it because of the prominent D-Pad but I never really thought about the shoulder buttons. I think when I was playing it regularly, I did have periods where the sharpish corners around L1 and R1 were cutting into my fingers a bit but I either got used to it or adjusted my hand position a bit. Or I achieved Zen state and no longer struggled to hit the buttons at the right timings 😅

I'm not sure if I'd even considered playing it on Xbox due to the D-Pad and also that I wouldn't be able to unlock everything now that the time limited stuff would be lost to me on a new platform. I guess it uses the Bumpers rather than the Triggers for drifting on Xbox too, whereas Forza uses Triggers for acceleration and braking and the bumpers are less prominent. I can't even think what the bumpers are used for in Forza off the top of my head

Not sure if you use the D-Pad but maybe it's because the distance between D-Pad and LB is larger on Xbox controllers? I'm definitely considering that wired SN30 moreso now that you've mentioned CTR, even if it's not something I'd play on Xbox now that I've had my fill of it on PS. I think I'd be less apprehensive to try some other games on Xbox though (it is a very small portion of games though, I do find the Xbox pad perfectly fine for 90% of the games I've played on it and it's probably the main console I play on at the moment)