InvaderFromSpace

We are heading towards higher game prices, but companies are going to do things to 'hide' it to prevent backlash from customers. The path right now seems to be to charge an extra $30 for "early access" of a handful of days. That period will start stretching out soon to a week, then longer and longer, until it's just accepted that you have to pay that extra $30 to get the game.

Yeah, this was going to be the 5th biggest game in February:
Monster Hunter Wilds
Civ VII
Kingdom Come Deliverance II
Avowed

Ubisoft is trying to sell the company, and having their flagship franchise underperform will severely damage their value. It likely won't hit its sales expectations whenever it comes out, but February would have been brutal.

@Balaam_ Is that all on PC? I've played through Oblivion multiple times on console without ever having a game-breaking bug, and only minimal glitches. I've mostly played Bethesda games on console and always thought the complaints about bugs were overstated, but I'm curious if it has more to do with where you play.

As someone who doesn't currently have Gamepass, it sounds like the only change is the weekly console bonus going from 250 points a week to 150, which sucks. Pretty clear there is a continued effort to get people to switch to playing on PC from console.

I still have a decent backlog of purchased games I need to get through on my Series X, so that will be where my engagement with Xbox comes from. Any gaming I do on PC will be through Steam, which is universally better than the Xbox app. I also got a Switch recently, so I'll probably be doing an increasing amount of gaming on that (all those old school games on Switch Online are calling my name).

I'm heading home today from visiting family for the holidays. Managed to get a bit of time this week to finish The Messenger on Steam, so I'm planning to play through its DLC (Picnic Panic) this evening. Will hopefully get back to playing Middle-Earth: Shadow of War after that.

After it's out and done with, I'd love to know the story of what happened with Silksong. If I remember correctly, it was in the 2022 Xbox showcase, which was all games supposed to be out within 12 months. That means that it was planned to be out by July 2023. And here we are 18 months after that with no release in sight. Something wild had to have happened.

This was said at the same time that Phil said that Indiana Jones wasn't being ported to Playstation, and that they were only looking to port games that were over a year old. Everything that came out of that 'business update' was them flailing around in a panic. The more time goes by, the worse that whole thing looks.

I might be confusing myself here, since companies all have their own stupid 'financial years' that are different than calendar years. I'm reading this as Take-Two's financial year 2026 is from April 2025-March 2026, and would include GTA6, Borderlands 4, and Mafia? Because that is an awesome list of games to all be coming out within a year.

Voted for Borderlands in the poll

Old employees coming out and talking about what Gears 6 would have been feels like the next nail in the coffin of it ever happening. I was pretty sure there was no chance after the E-Day announcement, but this seals it up for sure.
E-Day launches on PlayStation (and Nintendo?) and if the remastered original trilogy ever happens, that goes too. But everything will just fade away as they go in a new direction.

Didn't eXtas1s say they were going to announce Forza Horizon going to Playstation this year? He seems to usually have good info about Gamepass, but his other rumors are way more hit or miss.

Also, Gears of War bailed on an ongoing storyline to pivot to a prequel, which is exactly what you would do to make it more accessible to a new (Playstation) audience.

Honestly, the month where the split would probably tell us the most was July, when College Football 25 came out. That led to a big uptick in sales since it was current gen only. Whatever that split was will probably be mirrored next year when GTA is about to come out.

@somnambulance Where are you getting the claim that it was profitable? I was under the impression that it sold very poorly. The only data I'm aware of is Insider Gaming listing 300,000 players 2 weeks after launch. For a game on a subscription service, that seems very low.

As a company, Ubisoft is as bloated as their games usually are. It's going to be painful and ugly, but they are going to have to trim a lot of staff and refocus. The only question is whether they do that themselves or sell to a new owner who does it.

Until this moment, I thought that Wuchang: Fallen Feathers was an upcoming DLC for Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty called Fallen Feathers...it's impossible to keep up with all this stuff man.

Beyond that, Eternal Strands looks like it could be cool.

@NEStalgia Honestly, the way they have handled World of Assassination has kinda soured me on the studio. I own the first 2 parts of the trilogy from when they were separate games, and I now can't get the rest without re-buying stuff that I already own. It's so wildly anti-consumer that it seems unbelievable.

Them planning this to be a trilogy makes me think we will see them pull this type of stuff again.

Has there been any word about if the new Like a Dragon game will be on Gamepass? The last spinoff was day one.

@themightyant I don't totally agree with the idea that people subscribing to Gamepass for CoD is an automatic win for Microsoft. A one month digital code for Ultimate is currently $16.99 on Amazon in the US (3 months codes are on sale at $45). I wonder how many people out there buy CoD day one and play it a ton, but are essentially done by around New Years Day. That would really only require 2 or 3 months of subscription. People who would normally pay $70 accessing the game for $30 or $45 through Gamepass then dropping and moving on would be a loss.

There is absolutely a risk that this backfires for Microsoft, we'll just have to see how it plays out.

So the guy who oversaw the terrible release of Forza Motorsport was promoted to this position...and retired within a year. Rare hasn't been a great example of releasing polished, on-time games either. Sea of Thieves had a poor launch, and Everwild has been in development forever.
I expect we continue to see Xbox games get delays and still release unfinished.

They have added 3 Activision games to Gamepass in the last year (they would argue 4, but one of them is a free to play game), and increased the price by $3 a month. So it's been a horrible deal for customers. And we've seen a noticeable drop off in Gamepass quality in the last 3 months or so.

I've been playing through all the Halo campaigns on the MCC. Finished Reach yesterday and started Halo 4. I've never played any of the 343 Halo campaigns, so I'm looking forward to it, despite the lower review scores it got compared to the original trilogy. My Gamepass subscription ends next weekend, so I've got to get through it this week.

@NeoRatt I doubt there is enough interest in the old games to financially justify full remakes. These remasters are probably relatively cheap and fast. If you want more modern Tomb Raider, you will have to go with the newer games.

Xbox struggling to outsell an 8 year old console is not good news. The Xbox Series won't even make it to year 8. Even the most loyal Xbox fans are calling for them to punt on the generation and release a new console after only 6 years.

I don't expect this until mid next year at best. It just came out on PC and they repeatedly talked about how they weren't working on console ports until that was done.

We are in this weird space where the developers have to give cryptic messages like this because there are several 'insiders' that basically operate as pro-Xbox propaganda outlets, saying anything they can to boost the brand ("It's coming!" "Everything from Square!"). So now a bunch of people have false expectations for a timeline of seeing XVI and VIIR when they aren't close.

This was the second month in a row with nothing for me. And a pretty bad month all around. They are now regularly including free to play games (Overwatch this month, Valorant last month) to make the lists look longer.
Maybe things turn around, but I don't expect October to have a bunch of stuff with CoD coming. November maybe?

I'm playing Harold Halibut on Gamepass. I finished playing Halo ODST last week and wanted to play something a little different before going through Reach and Halo 4. My Gamepass subscription ends in late October, but I think I have enough time to get through those 3 still.

@TheEstablishment You think they have added 10 million subscribers in the last 7 months? They added 9 million subscribers total from January 2022 to February of this year, and that included changing everyone from Gold to Gamepass Core to boost the numbers. They have readily admitted that subscription growth has stagnated.
I don't see there being millions of people with Firesticks that don't have a game console already rushing out to spend $20 a month to stream Gamepass.

The idea of taking several varied risks in the chance that something works is a reasonable business strategy as long as you also have enough stable business to maintain the money to support it. Xbox (and most other large entertainment companies) are moving away from any form of risk taking. We see it most clearly in movies already (sequels/franchises), but games are moving this way too, at least at the AAA level. It will just take longer to see it, since games take so much longer to make.

Anyway, I'm rooting for Tango and will gladly buy Hi-Fi Rush 2, just not on any system made by Xbox. I guess I need to look into what else Krafton makes, because if they are serious about taking creative risks, I'd like to keep an eye on those.

Started playing Cocoon on Gamepass yesterday. It's relatively short, so I should be able to finish it today or maybe tomorrow. Been good so far, no puzzles I haven't been able to figure out, and the world looks really cool.
After that, I'm going to start playing Halo: ODST either this weekend or next week.

They will have already sold the game to pretty much everybody who will buy it on PC and Xbox, so unless they can release it on PS/Switch there isn't much more money to be made. So if they want to continue working on the game, this feels like the only way to financially justify it. I suppose they could also try going the paid expansion route, but I don't know if that has long term viability.
Either way, I had a great time playing the base game earlier this year and need to get back into it to play the new content they added a couple months ago.

@InterceptorAlpha It's "corporate and support roles at Activision Blizzard" so nothing to do with hardware or R&D.
HR? Publishing? Customer service? Marketing? Probably mostly things like that

So, it appears to be pretty much every day one game from the last year isn't on Standard, and some first party games are longer than a year (Starfield). For third party day one games, will games that only come to Gamepass for 12 months just skip the Standard tier all together? I haven't seen this addressed anywhere.

Well, we have an example of this. Xbox released Hi-Fi Rush at $30, and that resulted in them shutting the studio down. The big publishers, of which Xbox is now the second biggest (behind Tencent), don't have an interest in this.

They don't want to make a game that costs $10 million that might double its budget. They think that is a waste of time. They want to make a game that costs $150 million that might make $1 billion. And the only way to get to that amount of revenue is a long-running live service with a bunch of microtransactions.

And so the trickle of games having issues getting on Xbox continues to get a little faster. It will be interesting to see if this starts to become a regular issue, since this is now 3 games in the last month.
Very disappointing that people here and on Twitter are rushing out to accuse the developers of lying in an attempt to defend Xbox.

I'm getting close to finishing Atomic Heart, should be able to get it done in time. The interior levels are solid, but the open world area is bad. It's so unenjoyable trying to get from place to place.

Bethesda has regularly put out best-in-the-industry DLC for their games for the last 25 years. I'd be shocked if this and any other future DLCs don't end up being the best parts of the game.

I'll say it again, no Xbox studio is targeting console specs. They don't care about it, so they are doing minimal optimization before release. They will do that when they are getting the PS5 port ready, so you can expect a 60FPS patch around the time they announce that.

Just as a reminder, the Beta was on Xbox, so they have actively decided to stop supporting the console and launch exclusively on Steam. Even Xbox first party is now skipping Xbox. They can spin it however they want, but this is just the start of what you can expect from a company that values its own console less than everything else.

I just hope Stoic survives the absolute disaster that this game release seems to have become. The Banner Saga was great, and I'd like to see more games like that from them. Whatever this ends of being doesn't look anything like that...

@Dimey Day four with Gamepass Ultimate
Day 100(?) on Playstation
Day 369* on Gamepass Standard
Never - Gamepass Core

• Maybe later, who knows? Certainly not the customers

So Phil is using MAUs to assure himself that everything is fine huh? Well, I'll tell you that this MAU will never spend another cent on Xbox. I'm not renewing my Gamepass when it ends in January, and I sure won't buy another game through any of their stores. Hope those engagement numbers seem worth it as your profit per user steadily drops.

I hope we see the reveal of the New Switch before the end of the year so I can decide if I want to jump on that.

Remember back in February when Phil made a big show saying that they were only porting games that had been out for over a year? Well, that didn't last a year either.

Also, think about this announcement at Gamescom. "Indiana Jones comes out this December - but for the people we really care about, it will be out early next year. Just wait a little longer, we'll have a special sale just for you guys!"

They are swamping their own release date announcement with porting news. The inability of their executive team to make intelligent decisions is staggering.

Square-Enix has said multiple times that they were going to finish the PC port before focusing on other console ports. There is no way the Xbox port comes before next year. Maybe they will use the same 'early next year' phrasing they used for Octopath Traveler II...which didn't come out until July

So, first off, this seems to be an isolated incident, and not a widespread issue with tons of developers. However, these guys posted about this back in February and got essentially the same response from Microsoft then, so I understand them not being interested in any offers of help now. This looks to have been a time (and money) sink for the developer and they now have no trust in the Xbox platform. Bummer all around.
Personally, I'm going to buy this game on Steam, it looks cool and has good reviews there.

I wasn't expecting Atomic Hearts to be leaving, but I guess it has been 1-1/2 years. I think if I set aside all all my other games I might be able to get through it in the next two weeks. It's going to be tough though.

After beating the Halo 3 campaign last week, I decided to take a quick break and play Botany Manor. It was short, so I finished it on Friday. Now I'm starting up Halo Wars

I just bought the trilogy in the sale right before this got announced for Gamepass, but I haven't played it yet. Since I don't have to worry about getting to it before it leaves, I keep pushing it down the backlog... 🤣

@abe_hikura There isn't a good path to getting Fallout London on colsole. Fallout London doesn't work with the current version of Fallout 4. To play it on Steam you have to download a 'downgrade' mod that reverts to an older patch of the game. The mod is free to download, so there is no financial reason for Bethesda to spend any time trying to get it to work.

As for Skyblivion, there is no way the Script Extender ever makes it onto console. That thing only works on Steam.
There are so many layers of modding going on to get to this point that it probably is actually easier to just create an actual remaster of Oblivion (which I really hope they are doing).

@InheritNegative Anything that is worthwhile will be ported. The only things that will stay exclusive are older games and failures like Redfall. Phil did an interview last year where he said great games won't make people buy Xboxes, so they have no incentive to keep anything exclusive. This idea is stupid on its face, but it gives us a look into their decision making.

I feel like it has to be either Starfield or Indiana Jones. It doesn't make sense to announce release dates for the rest of their games at Gamescom only to have that news get swamped by coverage of something like Forza going to PS.
But this is Xbox, and their ineptitude seems to know no bounds.

First off, this Jurassic Park slander must not be allowed to stand. The Lost World is still a solid movie, after that...not so much.

As for gaming, I'm playing through the campaign of Halo 3 in the Master Chief Collection. I gotta say, every moment of the Halo and Halo 2 campaigns were still burned into my memories even after all these years, but not so much for Halo 3.

So this means that these will never get a physical release on Xbox. I think people got too excited about the multiplatform announcement. Xbox will always be Square Enix's lowest priority, so all these games that have already released will take a very long time to come, if they even do. Anyone thinking FF XVI is going to show up around the time of the PC port is in for disappointment.