I would say, Nintendo is "cleverer" than their peers, not necessarily that they're cleaner. Nintendo wrote the book on sketchy business before Silicon Valley was a thing. I never take anything they do at face value, albeit, Iwata was special, and his era marked a very different Nintendo.
Although I think we get divided into a camp where you think the current Nintendo generation is best ever and I think I'd count maybe 8 games that I feel are stand out games, while the rest became a soulless formulaic copy paste horror show indicating the point where Nintendo became a mobile developer. That's not to say that they have NO great games this gen, but I just don't get the hype.The catalogue on any other Nintendo system except the N64 seems so much more diverse and vibrant. I'd even take the Wii library which I thought I'd never say. And when the Switch launched I was 400% into it and thought it would be the best Nintendo ever. I ended up disappointed, and did not anticipate that.
That doesn't excuse Microsoft's own horror show, mind you. Or Sony's. But I can't say I have a great feeling about any of the big 3 this gen. Nintendo became a mobile dev, Microsoft half finishes everything and releases it 2 years late, and Sony just markets slop with so much budget people eventually believe it's good. But to me, Switch is the platform of choice for anybody that likes to paint everything in their home beige, and will argue that bisque does not count as beige.
Nintendo's selling better, and managing money better, that's one thing no one can take away from them. Of course it's also because they've perfected ensuring no value is on offer and every potential penny is extracted while also not looking like Dr. Evil while doing so to the masses.
@Ralizah I'd somewhat disagree or counter some of that.
Nintendo does maintain a consistent schedule of exclusives (except when they don't), however they do so by introducing a lot of very small "filler" projects, which are of a level of simplicity that would not pass on any other platform but theirs and mobile, due to their Disney-like fan cultivation, while also charging the same price as major releases for them. I.E. The Nintendo method there is not available to competitors.
Yes, Nintendo doesn't buy and close developers all the time -DIRECTLY, but the implication they simply never cancel projects or teams that suggests isn't true. As their "studios" are not studios but rather management power teams that lead an outside contract pool of development, they can shutter projects entirely, and the staff isn't "Nintendo" staff that gets left behind. EG the Metroid Prime 4 original team went SOMEWHERE when the project died. Alpha Dream "shut down" but as they were "independent" they just closed and weren't shut by Nintendo. Except they were basically only independent on paper. Nintendo's not as squeaky clean as their optics portray.
True about hardware prices, though a difference is Sony/MS generally subsidize hardware at launch and make thin margins, while Nintendo charges for profit from the start. Maybe a better strategy, may look better, but again, it's not altruism, it's that they started higher margin to begin with. And Nintendo is cautious with trends. They get led by the bubbles too, they just hold back a generation before doing it to let everyone else take the falls first and use the lessons so they don't have to.
And as above, NINTENDO isn't laying off hundreds or thousands becaus they never bothered hiring them to begin with. They third party contracted them so that when a project is cancelled, or even releases, "Nintendo" never lays everyone off. They end the contract. What the contractor does with the employees no longer needed, well, insert Reggie "Not my problem" GIF.
This shall net them an extra $8000 a year in margin, while also cutting sales of near-zero down under the rounding error of margin so we can just call it zero no. Amy should be proud. I did not think there was a way to sell even less consoles, but they're inventing ways where business school says they should not exist. Microsoft. Innovation.
At this point Microsoft and AMD should cut their losses and just send everyone that bought an Xbox Series a free 6700XT and a box of caramels.
The major redemption arc of Xbox this past decade has been Phil rebuilding Japanese relationships and starting to get Xbox on parity with PS with Japanese games, which makes up probably 75% of all games I play. This rapid transition from that Xbox to this new corporate Nadella-run Xbox just over a few months has turned Xbox into the exact same call of duty box I'd ignored for half of the last generation. We had to live through Jim turning PS into a loathsome product and now get to see Satya do the same to Xbox. I should not feel better about my freaking Meta device than my Xbox or Playstation, but here we are.
@x3King84 @PsBoxSwitchOwner Phil put on a good show at "e3"/SGF and I really thought maybe things were better than we thought and he's really still energized. Right now I'm thinking Phil "retires" Jan/Feb. And Sarah won't be far behind. Their jobs must be miserable now.
@themightyant I picture Amy slapping the ruler on her desk every time Phil or Sarah say anything that sounds like it would make Xbox a desirable product. I swear they just have the AI running the company now using only the instruction of "find the highest margin solution."
@Markatron84 You forgot: "Nobody else is buying our subscription" Raise the price!
@Fiendish-Beaver @Mustoe Yep. Matrick's corporate Windows Xbox one was a joke I laughed at and bought a PS4. Phil came in and turned Xbox around, and the semi-independent Xbox under him was the platform we all loved. The underdog made for us. Ever since the new year it's been crystal clear he's no longer running the show and we're back to the corporate Xbox, and the corporate Xbox just sucks. Always has. I always thought the day Phil leaves is the day the Xbox ride ends and suits take over, but I must say it happened sooner and more spectacularly than I'd imagined, with Phil being silenced but present instead of leaving. (yet.)
@HotGoomba Yeah, Nintendo gets a free pass too often for "nintendo doesn't have these kind of problems" and "Nintendo plans so perfectly and isn't closing studios" but it's not really true. Nintendo's setup is a little too shiny really, they avoid the problems by simply never having staff to begin with. Most of their "studios" consist of the core team/team leads/management-only. Then the actual work is all contracts to outside companies. Thus the work conditions, employee issues etc are never "Nintendo". And they never close studios because....they just expired a contract. Who knows what happens on the other side of that contract. They always smell like a rose.
@Jenkinss I see what you mean about sentiment vs sales, but still, back in December they couldn't give xsx away. Things seemed very opposite of good even before the PS5 announcement. And again I'm pretty sure the fact that the can't give away xsx is why they went with the PS5 plan. Clearly something went really wrong before that announcement. It's just the core fan conversation couldn't even pretend after that.
@HotGoomba true though Nintendo is almost entirely outsourced. Takehashi says if you include all their outsource they're about as big as Ubisoft. And Ubisoft is ginormous.
It's actually a pretty cool screwdriver, a rare practical use of gyros and accelerometers, twist motion left or right just once and it continues spinning at that speed, twist back and it slows, stops, reverses like a manual driver but then keeps going. Amazing little thing for quickly removing or inserting screws one handed.
@OldGamer999 Yeah, I think they're stuck in a multi-pronged hole. They're not really winning in console due to their own mistakes along the years, and it's a market that's shrinking, not growing, so I understand them not wanting to invest too heavily into it. Yet their subscription model depends on captive customers, and it's only going to be so popular on PC where there's Steam to compete with, mobile clearly has no interest, and I'm not convinced the cloud/TV market will be buying in in the kind of numbers they wanted because that market's mostly going to be very casual, and non-commital to recurring fees. Otherwise they'd own consoles. So their console base is really the only locked audience primed for gaming subscriptions. They're stuck with it even if they wish they weren't, unless they make a breakthrough in getting GP on PS/NSW, or (probably more likely) get bulk/wholesale contracts to get it bundled with cable packages, TV streaming packages etc (Xfinity including Game Pass, Netflix Ultra with Game Pass or something. I could see that being the ultimate future of Game Pass. And just like the Oprah Winfrey Network, you get to pay for it whether you want to or not because it's part of your streaming/cable bill. No Oprah? No football. So you have to buy Oprah. It would make sense operating like a tv network sub.
Beryllium: Clearly you do not understand marketing. Especially marketing expensive Rolex associated things to rich people seeking status without a lick of sense. See also: Apple.
@OldGamer999 Despite my pessimism on Xbox, I 100% guarantee there will be at lest ONE more generation of set top hardware (or Nintendo-style dockable hybrid but more powerful.)
Why? Because most of their GP subs still depend on it, and they need to maintain those numbers for investors and for further contract negotiation with streaming stick partners.
Also to assist in pushing Copilot AI into people's lives - it will guaranteed heavily leverage (read: Force it upon you at every single trigger pull whether you want it or not), because the whole company is bet on Copilot now, and nobody actually uses it or probably ever will.
So there will be another Xbox, worry not. Whether it will be a good console or not, or whether the brand will make the new box as popular as Copilot itself or not, is another matter.
All 3 suck: I think some of it is the state of the tech business. Or business in general. Or investment banking. Or something. Did you see Logitech's CEO propose with a straight face the "forever mouse" that will carry a subscription to make it profitable because it will be such excessive design, while she compared it to a Rolex? There is some sort of mental health issue that has spread among corporate CEOs. They all have suffered brain damage of some sort. Maybe there was a Russian attack at the last Bilderberg conference that released a nerve gas to make them all go mad? Who in their right mind would buy a MOUSE that comes with a subscription monthly to use your MOUSE?! Even an exotic top of the line gaming mouse is like $150 tops. Me and @HonestHick are two of the most obsessive input device connoisseurs on earth. I would not buy a $10/mo mouse or controller even if the thing were made out of solid Beryllium and the sticks worked on a psychic interface.
@RentedPanda "Looking forward to the eventual release of Fable: The Story of Xbox Project Planning"
But when will Game Pass Standard subscribers get to play it?
@OldGamer999 I figure they're either thinking there's no use having the quarter to themselves if they could save that to be able to interfere with Sony's big games marketing, or they're thinking CoD is going to sell soooooooooo many consoles and subs, can't have everything up next to CoD because they don't understand their own market. Or Indy isn't delayed, in which case I can kind of see CoD+Indy not wanting to stack it with Avowed so all the GP releases happen at once and cannibalize the marketing. It COULD be a sensible decision. We just don't trust them to make those so we assume it's not.
@PsBoxSwitchOwner I mean, they did say it would launch on The World's Most Powerful Console, didn't they? Not their fault if that's the PS5 Pro. Gotta keep the promise!
@GuyinPA75 Cloud cloud cloud was almost fine. The problem is his single track mind switched to AI AI AI, and then it became "local AI, local AI, local AI." The tech doesn't even have a known demand or use case yet, just theoretical "if IA becomes local corporations that don't allow cloud AI due to confidentiality issues will use AI."
In his single focus on AI/local AI and hoping it's ahead of the curve, he forgot about everything else including cloud, on top of it, which is why Azure is shrinking despite being the actual backbone of OpenAI!
Call of Duty Call of Duty Call of Duty Call of Duty?
Just making sure I have this right.
In fairness to MS, Nintendo held Pikmin 4 for like 6 years just to get the optimum release timing, and they do that regularly, so it's not like it's an uncommon thing in the business, but, MS coming off "xbox has no games (yet) (again)" and finally having a heavy release schedule coming up, that just feels dumb.
Strategically for them it makes sense, Sony's got nothing either, and MS needs to reserve their games for when Sony starts releasing something that isn't Concord which will mostly compete with Redfall for player base. But the whole generation from MS has been waiting for tomorrow. Meanwhile Sony was basically the same but with better optics because they had a few late PS4 games to release in PS5's window, and moneyhatted some Square stuff.
The real problem here is what little sales Series was going to have this holiday evaporates without any of their big games, unless Indy will release on time and will carry the holiday (and Call of Duty, Call of Duty, Call of Duty, which will still sell better on PS anyway.)
@Jenkinss Wait...when was Xbox firing on all cylinders in December? They couldn't sell the Series X for $350 bundled with Diablo IV. Which is, I'm, pretty sure why they started putting games on PS5 to begin with. As much grief as I give Xbox for their behavior, the market was pretty loud and clear: "
We won't even take these things for a burrito and a pack of gum." And I doubt the wider market that makes up most of their customer base even heard of he whole PS5 debacle.
I'm not saying that's helped or that the conversation of those "in the know" didn't change, but I think the platform's problems were well entrenched before that, which is what led to that to begin with. If it was selling well in December, I doubt the PS5 thing would have happened, or at least wouldn't have happened when it did, the way it did.
TBH I think the downward trend started after Redfall. Phil's dejected "we lost the console war" interview IMO was stark. Internally I think it already was a write-off at that point.
Edit: What's really amazing is that Meta Quest is actually growing faster than Xbox while Xbox shrinks and Quest 3 is outperforming expectations. Imagine the day when a VR-only platform starts outperforming a legacy console. Well, at least Microsoft has Flight Sim and Skyrim VR. Things are looking up.
@InterceptorAlpha My Switch's bulging battery solved the whole screen glue problem. Comes right off on its own, lol!
Cortana: ROFL! What as been seen can not be unseen. I still can not believe the "butt controller" is an honest to goodness Microsoft controller, even if it is Deadpool.
Gyros: I have a freaking screwdriver with a gyro. Nintendo was doing gyros when CRTs were still the norm. I can not comprehend how Xbox could be so disconnected they would not have gyros. They can make a refrigerator but not put a gyro in their controller.
@InterceptorAlpha Hardware has upfront costs, R&D, supply chain, things that eat at the opex. Software is just profits minus the umbrella operating budget. He doesn't hate hardware as much as he's just a finance guy and just hates any line that inclines at more than a 30 degree angle.
@OldGamer999 Nintendo's not actually a particularly large company, they just act like one because they're a monopoly in their own market and have cash reserves that are the envy of any company that's not one of the silicone valley big 10. IDK what their profit percentage looks like, but it's very likely to be extremely large. Their low operating expenses are laughable, their staff size is minimal (everything they do is outsourced), and they were managing to pull a slight profit when WiiU was catastrophically burning. There's a trick MS and Sony couldn't even dream of. PS5 "historic success" margin isn't much better than Nintendo's WiiU era margin. And they did it without fortnite money back then.
@abe_hikura You're reading too much into it - it's empty corporate rhetoric to touch on the keywords investors are looking to hear.
"What we love and always loved about gaming which is Xbox" (Which conveniently ignores Microsofts entire gaming presence and history prior to Xbox, and just gives a cursory nod to "we've been doing gaming stuff for a while" in simple digestible words investors can connect in their heads) - it's just pretend acknowledgement of recent history to get to the main talking point which is PC and mobile.
Given that PC was their FIRST gaming stronghold before sabotaging that to go Xbox before sabotaging that to go cloud before sabotaging that to go SwitchStation, his statement actually reveals a total disconnect from and unfamiliarity with Microsoft's entire history in the gaming market. Just empty rhetoric to glue together paragraphs to get to what investors want to hear.
Although if really parsing words we get to: "now we have both the content and the ability to access all the traditional high-scale platforms "
ABILITY TO ACCESS all the traditional high scale platforms. Not control over. Not compete as. Not lead in. No, the ability to ACCESS those platforms including console. He did not say who's platform. But, I think that would, again, be reading too much into his words because they're ultimately meant to be empty filler words to get to the meat of "expanding mobile and PC gaming presence." The rest is just decoration on that sentence.
Plus the talk of "sockets" which has got to be the weirdest use of corporate metaphor speak I've ever heard.
@BIG3 Yeah, I think it's premature to say if next gen will be last gen or not, it probably depends a lot on how well it sales, how they manage to blunder it or not, where cloud tech and even just mobile hardware, or even just laptops go over the next decade, and where subscriptions end up going in terms of growth outside the console and paid online, so it's as much 50/50 to them as it is to us at this point. But I've thought it's been pretty clearly telegraphed and not even hidden since January that Series XS is a dead parrot and they're in "transition" to next gen the same way Awkward Reggie and Bobby Kotick were playing with Skylanders action figures during the WiiU's last E3. As a Series X and PSVR2 owner, I feel like this entire generation has been one giant transition from X1PS4 to XYPS6. The PS5/XSX started winding down for next gen January 2021.
@OldGamer999 Yeah, the single digit margins coming out is when Jim "retired", Totoki apologized to investors, they shut down studios, killed the GaaS games, and doubled down on console+PC lol. Things aren't rosy at PS. But in their case they have solid revenue, their biggest problem is that Jim was spending all their revenue like a drunk sailor in a house of pleasure.
@GuyinPA75 In his own words from various interviews he's always afraid of "missing the next big thing" and therefore chases after it to try to get ahead of it. A wholly reactionary way of trying to be a visionary. And also he's still having Gates whisper in his ear what to do...... not exactly a proven strategy.
But he's bolstered by investors that love love love the money he's pulling in, from their perspective he's better than great, and it's of no conern to them that he's selling their long term stability to grab investment windfalls today. Investors never care about tomorrow, they only care about today.
@Grumblevolcano Yeah, definitely agreed. And I can't think of one single reason why the Series would not have gyros. I 100% expected Xbox would "finally" have gyros this gen. It was a given. How they managed to fail at the gates on that I will never understand.
@HonestHick "Holding back for next gen" that's kind of a metaphor for the whole generation, really.
@sixrings I'm not sure buying ABK to get CoD and rule the console and streaming gaming world was also a good reason to raise prices twice and kill subscriber growth or any reason to buy an Xbox. I'm not sure that there's really any good strategic reason to do much of anything they do regardless of what their strategy is, assuming there is one...
Normally a CEO saying something is still a priority is reassuring, but in the case of Nadella, it's more like Lucy telling Charlie Brown she really won't pull the football away this time, honest.
It's kind of like that time he told important people there won't be any price increases due to Call of Duty right before they raised prices and said it's because Call of Duty.
Nothing this man says is worth the bandwidth used to repeat it. He makes up whatever sounds good at the moment regardless of if it's true. He's playing investors, of course, too. Though he didn't say much of value here, with vagaries about covering all platforms starting with console, but somehow also thinks they had console covered just fine before ABK. Corporate not understanding their market position may be a huge part of their problem.
Also, where is Phil? Should not head of Xbox/Microsoft Gaming be the one talking about the future of the product? Why is the corporate CEO the only source of this information? I'm starting to picture Phil in a closet, bound, with duct tape over his mouth.
@Zenszulu That's exactly it. Whenever the sales are low, they give up, regroup, let it fizzle, and plan to reboot next launch to fix it.
@Jenkinss Indirectly. They've listed only a few older games for PS5, plus Doom, it's not like so far a plethora of games have gone to PS5. While many assume it means eventually everything goes to PS5, nobody knows that, and right now that isn't necessarily true. It's not the existence of their PS5 strategy that harmed them. It's their lack of communication, lack of clarity, endless equivocation when pressed for one that broke it. The fact they let the uncertainty and rumors dictate the conversation without stepping in has given the media version of the PS5 dump its own legs and life that then drove people away along with their various other problems and miscommunications while also killing favorite studios, removing familiar faces, and replacing them with Activision heads. Though when I look back, they'd half tried to recover from the PS5 blunder and it kind of worked, people were soothed again after that. It's the culling of Tango and Arkane that really changed the mood. They took the one big hit that defined the future of Game Pass and the console, HiFi Rush, and declared it a catastrophic failure worth disposing everyone involved, after just previously praising it as their high water mark indicating nothing they say carries any weight. I think that's the point where people started wondering what even is Game Pass and Xbox? up to then they were just signaling they didn't know what to do with consoles. It was then they indicated they just don't know what they're doing with anything at all.
TL;DR Their problem is the same problem they've had for 20 years. It's not that they step on rakes, it's that they run the weed wacker whilst naked on a honey farm.
@jumpin_jeeps Yeah, MS problem isn't "the games" really. Yeah they released a console way too soon because they had to because Sony was, and it looks horrible. But if they stayed the course and kept messaging how great it was for playing 3rd party, they'd have stayed in the game. They took their eye off the ball and stopped promoting their own product, even bashed it publicly just to get ABK through, and they changed the image of their own product to negative. PS5 hasn't been doing much of anything either, and if it weren't for VR mine would have gathered rediculous dust - it's not very different from XB minus some paid exclusives here and there. But the mood of the future is so much better there.
@PhileasFragg Yes and no. I think whats happening to Xbox is the same thing that's been happening to Windows, Azure, everything in MS. Nadella's so single mindedly focused on maximizing their exposure to the AI bubble, the massive investor influx and immediate return at peak bubble, he's culling everything that can be culled to funnel those resources into more AI returns. I.E. the bad stuff is happening precisely to add fuel to that out of control growth wildfire. Having to actually make returns across myriad products due to investor disinterest might actually make them cut less.
@Steel76 I think the problem, and it's Sonys point too, is the PC power user market is small though and overlaps console market so little that doesn't matter. Console is powered by the casual masses. If the PC power users make up enough of the console never to kill it, console is hosed anyway.
Hulst thinks ps games on PC will make people buy consoles for sequels. I don't really see it playing out that way. PC players will wait for the better version. And it's not like pc players will buy their third party games on the consoles even if they do, and if they don't, there's no point selling them a console anyway, that's where the money is.
Ms has an opposite issue. Microsoft game studios was a PC publisher before Xbox even existed. They destroyed and cannibalized that pc publishing in order to push Xbox and lock exclusives to it. So they're kind of rebuilding what they had and broke before.
@HonestHick And what a share button it is! But I wouldn't know. Because I use elite 2. Which is still an Xbox one controller....
Dual sense really isn't bad. The battery sucks badly, the parallel sticks will always be wrong, but I could live with that, but the tension is awful. Oh and the flat mushy face buttons are meh.
There's some switch/PC/mobile controllers that are seriously nice. Literally a copy of Elite V2 but with mechanical click facebuttons, Hall sticks and triggers etc. they don't work on ps or Xbox, but do work on switch. First party controllers are nice but they're starting to slip behind the Chinese companies. Though the Chinese companies just copied their mold....
@HonestHick modern is a stretch. It's got tech in it 😂
I still can't believe we don't have force feedback sticks. Microsoft made force feedback sticks for flight games in the 90s before Xbox. And now Sony has force feedback useless triggers and Microsoft has.... This. And nobody has ff sticks still!
Then again they can't get these to stop breaking even without motors!
@Romans12 That's the kind of nightmare with sony I'd fear most. It's pretty bleak when the focus of the console companies is just trying to turn their customers into whales and extract as much value from them as possible rather than trying to grow at this point. I guess if I'm going to be exploited, I'd rather be exploited by Nvidia? I mean the leather jacket is kinda cool I guess.
@101Force The AI chip bubble will pop. Businesses aren't going to keep shoveling money into short term instantly replaced AI hardware, and the AI cloud providers will need to show a return to their over enthusiastic investors and turn up short, and the expansions will grind to a crawl. AMD is well diversified and can shift gears whatever way the winds blow. Sure, half their sales are AI. But half aren't. NVidia OTOH is in deeper doo doo when it pops. They go all in on one thing and ignore the rest.
@GamingFan4Lyf Yeah, Intel has its advantages, AMD has its advantages. For a gaming PC, unless one specifically needs Intel's advantages I think AMD's longer term upgradability on a given mobo just makes a lot more sense. Though that only matters if your mobo has PCIE5 obviously as future GPUs will need it. For production PCs it doesn't matter, you'll need new IO before you need more powerful CPUs. (and CPUs aren't actualy getting much more powerful, Intel 14th gen is kind if 13.5th gen. ALL tech hardware is in a mess right now.
The double L2 cache of the X3Ds is really incomparable for gaming, they bench worse than a standard CPU as they have to run cooler, lower boost clocks, less cores at high speeds, but the cache makes up for it in gaming where that's the main bottleneck. Intel will have a 3D cache part coming soon, but I still think if you don't need intel they're less ideal for gaming (streamers however need Intel because the x3ds don't handle all the video encoding simultaneous with the game very well.)
It's always the waiting game though. Whatever you buy, whenever you buy it, you could have had something better if you waited just that bit longer! That's the frustrating part of PC.
@SleeplessKnight "Who will fill the void" I think it's a 1-2 combination that will mostly mean mobile. I think Apple, Amazon, other mobile-centric vendors will push mobile as the future of gaming harder and harder. Even MS for that matter. An xbox controller, an iPhone and a dongle....that's the future that will happen. I think gaming is just going mostly to mobile long term, even before cloud. ON the "premium" side, Steam deck, Ally, etc I think portends the future, followed by laptops, of PC really absorbing more of the "premium" console market. "Premium consoles" wanted to become low end PCs. Now they did. Now they'll struggle to compete with actual PCs. And mobile. Current phones are quite a bit more powerful than Switch...the line between "mobile" and "console" was already blurred by Nintendo's success. Xbox One and PS4 literally ran a tablet CPU.
@Ricky-Spanish They sold Series X for $349.99 with Diablo IV bundled at Christmas, and that was before the PS5 port announcements, and they still didn't move. They really damaged the brand.
@sonicbooming I agree, I think they're done trying to compete in Sony's "red ocean" and want to try a turn going head to head against Nintendo's market instead. Worked out well for Kinekt so I expect great things!
@OldGamer999 I mean a PC is just a really BIG hardware console. It can sit under your TV. Literally. It's not like PS5 wasn't pushing the size in that direction anyway.
And it will still harangue you to sign up for Game Pass, just like the good old days!
@GuyinPA75 FWIW, while Souls stans will gatekeep their superiority of rising to the challenge of accomplishment in a video game, and how letting anyone do it easier would diminish their accomplishment and make them feel like they wasted their time to the ends of the earth, it's worth considering Elden Ring and all Souls games (barring Bloodborne and Demons Souls) considerable sales on Steam and Epic and remembering that easy, and even invincibility mods exist on PC...........not everyone played through the challenge..... the gatekeeping is already meaningless outside people's heads. Sadly I think the fights could be fun if you'd just respawn INTO the fight rather than slog your way back into it again. The "difficulty" really isn't difficulty. Nioh? That's difficulty. Fromsoft isn't difficulty, It's a lack of functional checkpointing of progress. If the "difficulty" is generated not by the chanllenge but just by testing your endurance of wasting time between repeats of the challenge, it's not hard, it's just frustrating design that strokes some people's egoes. It set out to emulate the challenge of the NES era. Well...that was mostly bad design too... But it's built its fan base. Like Ghosts n Goblins. Which was designed mostly to eat quarters.
To be TOTALLY fair to Nintendo, I think the breakable weapon system could be considered an extension of the way the Master Sword always weakened whenever you took a hit (no beam shooting, etc.) And I get how the design of the weapons system was supposed to compel your to keep the loop up, but I also found it annoying, and mostly it led to me hoarding all my weapons, rarely using the good ones, thus slogging through fights with weak weapons so I didn't use up the good ones, and then trying to use the master sword for everything, then just running in circles killing time while it recharged. It's not a design that worked for me, however, I adore it compared to my contempt for TotK. The first zelda game I can say I can't actually stand and didn't bother finishing since Zelda II. And I'd rather play Zelda II. Between ACNH, ToTK and now the new one Nintendo is leaning REALLY hard into "make everything into Minecraft/Fortnite, because kids like building stuff." To be fair the game was clever and innovative, and I think with VR controls where you could actually use your hands to assemble things instead of tring to line them up with analog sticks and shaking them to separate them, it may have been a great game. I'm sure the inevitable Virtual Boy 2 gets a $90 remake of TotK and it will be amazing.
TotK REALLY jumped the shark with it's obsessive crafing and materials gathering. Similar to ACNH. Which I also don't like while I love love love ACNL.
I mean of course ABK is driving their software sales growth, they simply added an entire publisher's existing revenue to their own. How could that not be massive growth?
@Kezelpaso "unless their strategy changes again."
You're being sarcastic, right? They give the big wheel a spin once a quarter to see what the new strategy will be.
@sixrings Friendly reminder: $69B was spent to purchase King to get Candy Crush and a heavy footprint in to the massively lucrative mobile market their main competitors in Apple, Google, Amazon are already in. Activision and CoD were dead weight that came along with the purchase. Basically they only cared about getting mobile market share. The rest of gaming can take a long walk off a short pier. They got what they came for. The rest can be dumped.
@GamingFan4Lyf (Said in creepily over-calming synthesized AI voice): Welcome back.......
Nintendo will never do PC. I think they'll go Apple App store at some point, but never PC. Doesn't mesh with their market.
x3d chips can't directly compare to non-x3d chips and the R9 x3d won't be out for a while. Intel will have their x3d competitor though. Plus an AM5 now means you can upgrade through at least 2027 (AMD committed to minimum that long for AM5 which is amazing.) Especially important if NPUs become importand and MS is DEFINITELY going to push it for their games.
NV50...rumors are all over the place, but it's a sure bet the only NV50s out in 2024 will be 5090 and MAYBE 5080, and some rumors say even 5090 is pushed to 2025 now. 5070, definitely not 2024.
And remember availability will be near zero at launch like with consoles. And price is unknown, but probably more expensive.
@Titntin I read your post and my main take away is that if you eliminate the Xbox store your PC experience suddenly gets much better lol
@PhileasFragg If OpenAI goes belly up (ding dong the witch is dead!), with the billions invested in them, Microsoft will simply insert the extra cash and buy them to obtain their AI tech as proprietary. (Aww, sheet, here we go again.)
The Tulip Mania that is AI has derailed everything tech. From allocation of silicon, to altered business plans to everything else, Xbox is suffering partly from it but it's a branch on the larger tech limb, where the allocation of EVERYTHING into AI to cash in while the cash is hot has set everything not AI back 15 years, while generating tons of useless dead end efforts just to secure investment capital. It's like a worse version of the 1999/2000 dot com bubble.
@101Force "Whatever Microsoft is planning, I hope they don't leave people who bought into the hardware component of their ecosystem feeling overlooked or discarded."
You wrote that comment in 2019 right?
@__jamiie I think a big part of the problem this gen is, despite a strong start, once they started the ABK lawsuits the goal of the company became singularly focused on securing ABK. That meant pleading their case to governments. That meant going out of their way to make sure Xbox was NOT successful, so they could play the victim card to governments. Which became a self fulfilling prophecy because once they got out of court and got ABK secured, what they had left was a failed console that was not successful because they went out of their way to make sure it wasn't.
@OldGamer999 I considered the PS5 route briefly but then shortly after realized an Xbox-less Playstion would be a living nightmare even more than being an Xbox customer now. Sony gets Nintendo-ugly unchecked. Between this and PSVR2....PC's the only way forward for me...back to the future!
In fairness Nintendo plummeted as they sunset Switch, and Sony's not picking up numbers that you'd think they would with both competitors in a deep slump, and are in fact dropping as well. The entire console market seems to be deteriorating rapidly, and both Sony and Xbox have flubbed this generation hard enough to cause damage to the console market overall. I don't think mobile, or PCs or technology or even the economy sunk this generation and maybe the future of consoles as a product. I think Microsoft and Sony did that by themselves. With help from the large publishers.
But seriously, go figure, Xbox sends mixed signals about their hardware support, their strategy, their studio support, their long term pricing, cuts brand marketing, and has no new major games for 2024 up to now....can't imagine why their consoles aren't selling, their sub isn't growing, and their "software revenue" gains all come from the fact that they bought a different company that always made a lot of money selling software.
They really need to think about Xbox's identity. If the consoles are sinking and the sub is stalling...what exactly does Xbox have other than a big PC and Playstation publisher? We keep hearing how it's all about cloud. But that stalled TOO.
Mismanagement Simulator (MS 2024) is the Game Pass killer exclusive.
@Mustoe I have a wired 360 controller around somewhere, but the wireless ones I have a whole BOX of drifting sticks for those things! 360 controllers were the OG drift nightmare
@Mustoe @Tintin I still think Xbox sells at least one more generation of hardware. They still need a physical box that has Game Pass on it, and if they kill the box, and the paid online, their GP numbers will catastrophically drop. So the box needs to exist for a long while even if it's just to keep the GP subscriber base stable. Even if the box is a Surface PC with an Xbox logo on it.
IDK if they were always after the casual market. I'm not sure they were ever after ANY particular market which is half their identity crisis. The OGXB was clearly all about hardcore and the windows gaming element that wasn't committed to PC. 360 started the same, then with Kinekt went hard to chasing Wii casual. Then with 1 decided to go ultra casual with TV sports, but then went back to hardcore, and now they want people who stream Miss Maisel. There's not an actual pattern to who they've been targeting. PS meanwhile went from mainstream gamer teens to hardcore, to a specifically cultivated sony-only audience, to....hyper-casual fortnite players and an ever disappointed hardcore.
Xbox is a mess, but console overall is a mess, too. Too much ambition, too much overestimation of market growth, and too long a lag time before seeing the blown bridge ahead on the tracks after jamming the throttle in full ahead and throwing all the coal in the boiler.
@lacerz The only thing worse than being an Xbox customer in 2024 is being a Nintendo or Sony customer in a year after Xbox isn't around...
It would feel wrong playing Xbox with a controller more transparent than their hardware strategy.
"From hereon out, Xbox controller will use a smaller and lighter box, where "single-use plastics have been removed from the packaging and the traditional paper manual has been replaced with a QR code for a digital quick start guide." We can't moan at that!"
I love this....."We've found ways to cut more costs from production and distribution - let's spin it as being environmentalist and use it as a marketing point!" Amazes me how every time a company cuts their costs the public cheers "yay environment!" They're not being environmentalists, you dodos, they're being cheap, maximizing margins, and selling it with feel-good spin. When your next console is delivered in a crumpled paper lunch bag that still smells of fried onions, please praise the Sun Goddess.
While I don't need a paper manual for a controller, I'm sick of "scan the QR code" for a manual. When I'm setting up a motherboard, I'd like a book with the pinouts and BIOS settings rather than holding a phone in one hand and trying to scroll and pinch zoom a PDF rendering the pin layout 2 inches offset, while trying to wire it with the other. There's a time and a place to be "green" and interfering with the usability of a product is not one of them. Great way to maximize investor return though.
@Scummbuddy Because when we all play together we all win(TM). And look at the Sea of Thieves sales on PS5. LOOK AT THEM!
@GuyinPA75 ROFLMAO That is the absolute best description of a Soulsborne battle I have ever read! Well done! That really does characterize the whole "it does not respect your time" aspect that infuriates me so. Elden isn't quite as dire as prior as classic Soulsborne. It's still Fromsoft, but it's not as...obtuse?
Also, I now need to play the game with a Billy Gibbons mod. It needs to replace Torrent with the Eliminator or no buy. And naturally the only weapon is an axe.
@Tintin Elden Ring being open world does allow a more traditional RPG grind, for sure, but @GuyInPA is actually pretty spot on for most other Soulsborne games and its clones. Demons Souls is painful. The difficulty is really false, it's stupid mechanics, memorizing exact timing sequences, and wearing you down by attrition of repeating annoying sequences repeatedly more than "difficult." Elden ring does more or less just let you hulk smash through it with grinding, which is exactly why a lot of the Soulsborne purists were already revolting against how "easy" the game was.
IDK, I'm in GuyinPA's campe regarding Soulsborne overall, but Elden Ring has a "something special" that feels more like a Zelda 1 remake than even BotW did.
Once I get my PCVR rig set up I intend to try the Luke Ross VR mod. This game in VR would be an amazingly breathtaking experience. Though I've heard that it can get even veterans with VR legs of steel a bit green with all that dodge rolling. That definitely sounds like another chance for you to grind to level 400!
@mcdreamer I still say that's a sort of one track mind among a particular fan base of a particular element that's kind of ballooned into a rigidly dedicated market. The people that enjoy that aspect of it are enjoying it, yes, but I'd kind of liken that to if the people that like to speed run BotW entirely as shirtless Link decided that's the only way to play the game and it wouldn't be fun unless forced to play the game that way as though there's nothing else worth enjoying in the game, and that shirtless link as a mandated always-on play style is an arbitrary road block to enjoying anything else in the game.
There's a lot in these games that a lot of people that don't like throwing themselves against that brick wall "for the challenge" could enjoy, people who's reflexes are not at the same level as others etc. I know the argument becomes "not everything needs to be for everyone" which is true, but locking everything else about the games behind the (faux) "difficulty" is just an unnecessary restriction that accomplishes nothing in the game other than letting people feel superior for doing it as though it's something more useful than playing a video game.
Now, PERSONALLY, I don't find the games especially "difficult", I find them obnoxiously time wasting and therefore infuriatingly frustrating, by making you repeat things you've already done rather than respawn right at the challenge you failed, and nothing infuriates me and turns me off a game more than that. That, too would be aided by an "easy" mode, not because the challenge itself is frustrating but because I'd be able to escape that frustration. Not a challenging game per-se, but I like the way FFXIV does it, you die on a boss, it asks if you want to try again on normal, easy or very easy. I'll throw myself at normal for a while, but if it's clear that I just don't have the right equipment or the mechanics of that particular boss are obnoxious for playing as a particular class (black mage main - ouch.) I'll throw it in easy after enough failures for that one fight just to end the frustration and move on. And unlike Fromsoft games that's one where "skipping" challenges without learning the skills could negatively impact other players if you don't actually know what you're doing, once you get to high end trials.
@HonestHick I'm amazed they didn't tap into their #1 in Mexico status to name the sequel without referencing the numeral 2. They could have called it the Xbox Deuce.
Series is a terrible name because they already had Xbox S and Xbox X. Yes it's One vs Series. But Xbox Series X and S sounds identical to Xbox X and S last Gen. It's even still the white one and the black one.
Comments 6,665
Re: Microsoft Announces Xbox Series X|S Price Increase For Japan
@x3King84 Japan is the trial market, we'll see how it goes there.
Re: Xbox First-Party RPG Avowed Reportedly Delayed Until Early 2025
I would say, Nintendo is "cleverer" than their peers, not necessarily that they're cleaner. Nintendo wrote the book on sketchy business before Silicon Valley was a thing. I never take anything they do at face value, albeit, Iwata was special, and his era marked a very different Nintendo.
Although I think we get divided into a camp where you think the current Nintendo generation is best ever and I think I'd count maybe 8 games that I feel are stand out games, while the rest became a soulless formulaic copy paste horror show indicating the point where Nintendo became a mobile developer. That's not to say that they have NO great games this gen, but I just don't get the hype.The catalogue on any other Nintendo system except the N64 seems so much more diverse and vibrant. I'd even take the Wii library which I thought I'd never say. And when the Switch launched I was 400% into it and thought it would be the best Nintendo ever. I ended up disappointed, and did not anticipate that.
That doesn't excuse Microsoft's own horror show, mind you. Or Sony's. But I can't say I have a great feeling about any of the big 3 this gen. Nintendo became a mobile dev, Microsoft half finishes everything and releases it 2 years late, and Sony just markets slop with so much budget people eventually believe it's good. But to me, Switch is the platform of choice for anybody that likes to paint everything in their home beige, and will argue that bisque does not count as beige.
Nintendo's selling better, and managing money better, that's one thing no one can take away from them. Of course it's also because they've perfected ensuring no value is on offer and every potential penny is extracted while also not looking like Dr. Evil while doing so to the masses.
Re: Xbox First-Party RPG Avowed Reportedly Delayed Until Early 2025
@Ralizah I'd somewhat disagree or counter some of that.
Nintendo does maintain a consistent schedule of exclusives (except when they don't), however they do so by introducing a lot of very small "filler" projects, which are of a level of simplicity that would not pass on any other platform but theirs and mobile, due to their Disney-like fan cultivation, while also charging the same price as major releases for them. I.E. The Nintendo method there is not available to competitors.
Yes, Nintendo doesn't buy and close developers all the time -DIRECTLY, but the implication they simply never cancel projects or teams that suggests isn't true. As their "studios" are not studios but rather management power teams that lead an outside contract pool of development, they can shutter projects entirely, and the staff isn't "Nintendo" staff that gets left behind. EG the Metroid Prime 4 original team went SOMEWHERE when the project died. Alpha Dream "shut down" but as they were "independent" they just closed and weren't shut by Nintendo. Except they were basically only independent on paper. Nintendo's not as squeaky clean as their optics portray.
True about hardware prices, though a difference is Sony/MS generally subsidize hardware at launch and make thin margins, while Nintendo charges for profit from the start. Maybe a better strategy, may look better, but again, it's not altruism, it's that they started higher margin to begin with. And Nintendo is cautious with trends. They get led by the bubbles too, they just hold back a generation before doing it to let everyone else take the falls first and use the lessons so they don't have to.
And as above, NINTENDO isn't laying off hundreds or thousands becaus they never bothered hiring them to begin with. They third party contracted them so that when a project is cancelled, or even releases, "Nintendo" never lays everyone off. They end the contract. What the contractor does with the employees no longer needed, well, insert Reggie "Not my problem" GIF.
Re: Microsoft Announces Xbox Series X|S Price Increase For Japan
Wow. Just wow. Just....oh my !%#^#-ing wow.
This shall net them an extra $8000 a year in margin, while also cutting sales of near-zero down under the rounding error of margin so we can just call it zero no. Amy should be proud. I did not think there was a way to sell even less consoles, but they're inventing ways where business school says they should not exist. Microsoft. Innovation.
At this point Microsoft and AMD should cut their losses and just send everyone that bought an Xbox Series a free 6700XT and a box of caramels.
The major redemption arc of Xbox this past decade has been Phil rebuilding Japanese relationships and starting to get Xbox on parity with PS with Japanese games, which makes up probably 75% of all games I play. This rapid transition from that Xbox to this new corporate Nadella-run Xbox just over a few months has turned Xbox into the exact same call of duty box I'd ignored for half of the last generation. We had to live through Jim turning PS into a loathsome product and now get to see Satya do the same to Xbox. I should not feel better about my freaking Meta device than my Xbox or Playstation, but here we are.
@x3King84 @PsBoxSwitchOwner Phil put on a good show at "e3"/SGF and I really thought maybe things were better than we thought and he's really still energized. Right now I'm thinking Phil "retires" Jan/Feb. And Sarah won't be far behind. Their jobs must be miserable now.
@themightyant I picture Amy slapping the ruler on her desk every time Phil or Sarah say anything that sounds like it would make Xbox a desirable product. I swear they just have the AI running the company now using only the instruction of "find the highest margin solution."
@Markatron84 You forgot: "Nobody else is buying our subscription"
Raise the price!
Re: Xbox Exec 'Recommends' Tuning Into Gamescom Opening Night Live Later This Month
@Fiendish-Beaver @Mustoe Yep. Matrick's corporate Windows Xbox one was a joke I laughed at and bought a PS4. Phil came in and turned Xbox around, and the semi-independent Xbox under him was the platform we all loved. The underdog made for us. Ever since the new year it's been crystal clear he's no longer running the show and we're back to the corporate Xbox, and the corporate Xbox just sucks. Always has. I always thought the day Phil leaves is the day the Xbox ride ends and suits take over, but I must say it happened sooner and more spectacularly than I'd imagined, with Phil being silenced but present instead of leaving. (yet.)
Re: Xbox First-Party RPG Avowed Reportedly Delayed Until Early 2025
@HotGoomba Yeah, Nintendo gets a free pass too often for "nintendo doesn't have these kind of problems" and "Nintendo plans so perfectly and isn't closing studios" but it's not really true. Nintendo's setup is a little too shiny really, they avoid the problems by simply never having staff to begin with. Most of their "studios" consist of the core team/team leads/management-only. Then the actual work is all contracts to outside companies. Thus the work conditions, employee issues etc are never "Nintendo". And they never close studios because....they just expired a contract. Who knows what happens on the other side of that contract. They always smell like a rose.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@Jenkinss I see what you mean about sentiment vs sales, but still, back in December they couldn't give xsx away. Things seemed very opposite of good even before the PS5 announcement. And again I'm pretty sure the fact that the can't give away xsx is why they went with the PS5 plan. Clearly something went really wrong before that announcement. It's just the core fan conversation couldn't even pretend after that.
Re: Microsoft CEO Reassures Investors That Xbox Is Focused On Console, PC And Mobile
@IOI and Hololens, and Windows Mixed Reality...
Re: Xbox First-Party RPG Avowed Reportedly Delayed Until Early 2025
@HotGoomba true though Nintendo is almost entirely outsourced. Takehashi says if you include all their outsource they're about as big as Ubisoft. And Ubisoft is ginormous.
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@InterceptorAlpha 😂
It's actually a pretty cool screwdriver, a rare practical use of gyros and accelerometers, twist motion left or right just once and it continues spinning at that speed, twist back and it slows, stops, reverses like a manual driver but then keeps going. Amazing little thing for quickly removing or inserting screws one handed.
Re: Xbox First-Party RPG Avowed Reportedly Delayed Until Early 2025
@armondo36 I think Square-Enix holds that record.
@OldGamer999 Yeah, I think they're stuck in a multi-pronged hole. They're not really winning in console due to their own mistakes along the years, and it's a market that's shrinking, not growing, so I understand them not wanting to invest too heavily into it. Yet their subscription model depends on captive customers, and it's only going to be so popular on PC where there's Steam to compete with, mobile clearly has no interest, and I'm not convinced the cloud/TV market will be buying in in the kind of numbers they wanted because that market's mostly going to be very casual, and non-commital to recurring fees. Otherwise they'd own consoles. So their console base is really the only locked audience primed for gaming subscriptions. They're stuck with it even if they wish they weren't, unless they make a breakthrough in getting GP on PS/NSW, or (probably more likely) get bulk/wholesale contracts to get it bundled with cable packages, TV streaming packages etc (Xfinity including Game Pass, Netflix Ultra with Game Pass or something. I could see that being the ultimate future of Game Pass. And just like the Oprah Winfrey Network, you get to pay for it whether you want to or not because it's part of your streaming/cable bill. No Oprah? No football. So you have to buy Oprah. It would make sense operating like a tv network sub.
Beryllium: Clearly you do not understand marketing. Especially marketing expensive Rolex associated things to rich people seeking status without a lick of sense. See also: Apple.
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@HonestHick I still have an honest to goodness Wavebird!
Re: Xbox First-Party RPG Avowed Reportedly Delayed Until Early 2025
@OldGamer999 Despite my pessimism on Xbox, I 100% guarantee there will be at lest ONE more generation of set top hardware (or Nintendo-style dockable hybrid but more powerful.)
Why? Because most of their GP subs still depend on it, and they need to maintain those numbers for investors and for further contract negotiation with streaming stick partners.
Also to assist in pushing Copilot AI into people's lives - it will guaranteed heavily leverage (read: Force it upon you at every single trigger pull whether you want it or not), because the whole company is bet on Copilot now, and nobody actually uses it or probably ever will.
So there will be another Xbox, worry not. Whether it will be a good console or not, or whether the brand will make the new box as popular as Copilot itself or not, is another matter.
All 3 suck: I think some of it is the state of the tech business. Or business in general. Or investment banking. Or something. Did you see Logitech's CEO propose with a straight face the "forever mouse" that will carry a subscription to make it profitable because it will be such excessive design, while she compared it to a Rolex? There is some sort of mental health issue that has spread among corporate CEOs. They all have suffered brain damage of some sort. Maybe there was a Russian attack at the last Bilderberg conference that released a nerve gas to make them all go mad? Who in their right mind would buy a MOUSE that comes with a subscription monthly to use your MOUSE?! Even an exotic top of the line gaming mouse is like $150 tops. Me and @HonestHick are two of the most obsessive input device connoisseurs on earth. I would not buy a $10/mo mouse or controller even if the thing were made out of solid Beryllium and the sticks worked on a psychic interface.
Re: PowerWash Simulator's Next Crossover Teased As Free Summer Update Arrives On Xbox
@Vordus LOL, that's probably the best description!
Re: Xbox First-Party RPG Avowed Reportedly Delayed Until Early 2025
@RentedPanda "Looking forward to the eventual release of Fable: The Story of Xbox Project Planning"
But when will Game Pass Standard subscribers get to play it?
@OldGamer999 I figure they're either thinking there's no use having the quarter to themselves if they could save that to be able to interfere with Sony's big games marketing, or they're thinking CoD is going to sell soooooooooo many consoles and subs, can't have everything up next to CoD because they don't understand their own market. Or Indy isn't delayed, in which case I can kind of see CoD+Indy not wanting to stack it with Avowed so all the GP releases happen at once and cannibalize the marketing. It COULD be a sensible decision. We just don't trust them to make those so we assume it's not.
@PsBoxSwitchOwner I mean, they did say it would launch on The World's Most Powerful Console, didn't they? Not their fault if that's the PS5 Pro. Gotta keep the promise!
Re: Microsoft CEO Reassures Investors That Xbox Is Focused On Console, PC And Mobile
@GuyinPA75 Cloud cloud cloud was almost fine. The problem is his single track mind switched to AI AI AI, and then it became "local AI, local AI, local AI." The tech doesn't even have a known demand or use case yet, just theoretical "if IA becomes local corporations that don't allow cloud AI due to confidentiality issues will use AI."
In his single focus on AI/local AI and hoping it's ahead of the curve, he forgot about everything else including cloud, on top of it, which is why Azure is shrinking despite being the actual backbone of OpenAI!
Re: Xbox First-Party RPG Avowed Reportedly Delayed Until Early 2025
@armondo36 Come on, that's not fair, Windows 95 was CLEARLY targeted for a 1996 release from the beginning.
Re: Xbox First-Party RPG Avowed Reportedly Delayed Until Early 2025
So, the reason for the delay is......
Call of Duty
Call of Duty
Call of Duty
Call of Duty?
Just making sure I have this right.
In fairness to MS, Nintendo held Pikmin 4 for like 6 years just to get the optimum release timing, and they do that regularly, so it's not like it's an uncommon thing in the business, but, MS coming off "xbox has no games (yet) (again)" and finally having a heavy release schedule coming up, that just feels dumb.
Strategically for them it makes sense, Sony's got nothing either, and MS needs to reserve their games for when Sony starts releasing something that isn't Concord which will mostly compete with Redfall for player base. But the whole generation from MS has been waiting for tomorrow. Meanwhile Sony was basically the same but with better optics because they had a few late PS4 games to release in PS5's window, and moneyhatted some Square stuff.
The real problem here is what little sales Series was going to have this holiday evaporates without any of their big games, unless Indy will release on time and will carry the holiday (and Call of Duty, Call of Duty, Call of Duty, which will still sell better on PS anyway.)
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@Jenkinss Wait...when was Xbox firing on all cylinders in December? They couldn't sell the Series X for $350 bundled with Diablo IV. Which is, I'm, pretty sure why they started putting games on PS5 to begin with. As much grief as I give Xbox for their behavior, the market was pretty loud and clear: "
We won't even take these things for a burrito and a pack of gum." And I doubt the wider market that makes up most of their customer base even heard of he whole PS5 debacle.
I'm not saying that's helped or that the conversation of those "in the know" didn't change, but I think the platform's problems were well entrenched before that, which is what led to that to begin with. If it was selling well in December, I doubt the PS5 thing would have happened, or at least wouldn't have happened when it did, the way it did.
TBH I think the downward trend started after Redfall. Phil's dejected "we lost the console war" interview IMO was stark. Internally I think it already was a write-off at that point.
Edit: What's really amazing is that Meta Quest is actually growing faster than Xbox while Xbox shrinks and Quest 3 is outperforming expectations. Imagine the day when a VR-only platform starts outperforming a legacy console. Well, at least Microsoft has Flight Sim and Skyrim VR. Things are looking up.
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@InterceptorAlpha My Switch's bulging battery solved the whole screen glue problem. Comes right off on its own, lol!
Cortana: ROFL! What as been seen can not be unseen. I still can not believe the "butt controller" is an honest to goodness Microsoft controller, even if it is Deadpool.
Gyros: I have a freaking screwdriver with a gyro. Nintendo was doing gyros when CRTs were still the norm. I can not comprehend how Xbox could be so disconnected they would not have gyros. They can make a refrigerator but not put a gyro in their controller.
Re: Microsoft CEO Reassures Investors That Xbox Is Focused On Console, PC And Mobile
@InterceptorAlpha Hardware has upfront costs, R&D, supply chain, things that eat at the opex. Software is just profits minus the umbrella operating budget. He doesn't hate hardware as much as he's just a finance guy and just hates any line that inclines at more than a 30 degree angle.
@OldGamer999 Nintendo's not actually a particularly large company, they just act like one because they're a monopoly in their own market and have cash reserves that are the envy of any company that's not one of the silicone valley big 10. IDK what their profit percentage looks like, but it's very likely to be extremely large. Their low operating expenses are laughable, their staff size is minimal (everything they do is outsourced), and they were managing to pull a slight profit when WiiU was catastrophically burning. There's a trick MS and Sony couldn't even dream of. PS5 "historic success" margin isn't much better than Nintendo's WiiU era margin. And they did it without fortnite money back then.
Re: Microsoft CEO Reassures Investors That Xbox Is Focused On Console, PC And Mobile
@abe_hikura You're reading too much into it - it's empty corporate rhetoric to touch on the keywords investors are looking to hear.
"What we love and always loved about gaming which is Xbox" (Which conveniently ignores Microsofts entire gaming presence and history prior to Xbox, and just gives a cursory nod to "we've been doing gaming stuff for a while" in simple digestible words investors can connect in their heads) - it's just pretend acknowledgement of recent history to get to the main talking point which is PC and mobile.
Given that PC was their FIRST gaming stronghold before sabotaging that to go Xbox before sabotaging that to go cloud before sabotaging that to go SwitchStation, his statement actually reveals a total disconnect from and unfamiliarity with Microsoft's entire history in the gaming market. Just empty rhetoric to glue together paragraphs to get to what investors want to hear.
Although if really parsing words we get to: "now we have both the content and the ability to access all the traditional high-scale platforms "
ABILITY TO ACCESS all the traditional high scale platforms. Not control over. Not compete as. Not lead in. No, the ability to ACCESS those platforms including console. He did not say who's platform. But, I think that would, again, be reading too much into his words because they're ultimately meant to be empty filler words to get to the meat of "expanding mobile and PC gaming presence." The rest is just decoration on that sentence.
Plus the talk of "sockets" which has got to be the weirdest use of corporate metaphor speak I've ever heard.
@BIG3 Yeah, I think it's premature to say if next gen will be last gen or not, it probably depends a lot on how well it sales, how they manage to blunder it or not, where cloud tech and even just mobile hardware, or even just laptops go over the next decade, and where subscriptions end up going in terms of growth outside the console and paid online, so it's as much 50/50 to them as it is to us at this point. But I've thought it's been pretty clearly telegraphed and not even hidden since January that Series XS is a dead parrot and they're in "transition" to next gen the same way Awkward Reggie and Bobby Kotick were playing with Skylanders action figures during the WiiU's last E3. As a Series X and PSVR2 owner, I feel like this entire generation has been one giant transition from X1PS4 to XYPS6. The PS5/XSX started winding down for next gen January 2021.
Re: Microsoft CEO Reassures Investors That Xbox Is Focused On Console, PC And Mobile
@OldGamer999 Yeah, the single digit margins coming out is when Jim "retired", Totoki apologized to investors, they shut down studios, killed the GaaS games, and doubled down on console+PC lol. Things aren't rosy at PS. But in their case they have solid revenue, their biggest problem is that Jim was spending all their revenue like a drunk sailor in a house of pleasure.
Re: PowerWash Simulator's Next Crossover Teased As Free Summer Update Arrives On Xbox
The success of this game to pop culture status absolutely confuses and delights me.
Re: Xbox Details Plans For Gamescom 2024, Including Daily Livestreams This Month
@somnambulance "No specific mention of Indiana Jones?"
Might be saving it for the September PlayStation Showcase......
(I kid, I kid! Probably...)
Re: Microsoft CEO Reassures Investors That Xbox Is Focused On Console, PC And Mobile
@GuyinPA75 In his own words from various interviews he's always afraid of "missing the next big thing" and therefore chases after it to try to get ahead of it. A wholly reactionary way of trying to be a visionary. And also he's still having Gates whisper in his ear what to do...... not exactly a proven strategy.
But he's bolstered by investors that love love love the money he's pulling in, from their perspective he's better than great, and it's of no conern to them that he's selling their long term stability to grab investment windfalls today. Investors never care about tomorrow, they only care about today.
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@Grumblevolcano Yeah, definitely agreed. And I can't think of one single reason why the Series would not have gyros. I 100% expected Xbox would "finally" have gyros this gen. It was a given. How they managed to fail at the gates on that I will never understand.
@HonestHick "Holding back for next gen" that's kind of a metaphor for the whole generation, really.
Re: Activision Blizzard Continues To Drive Massive Uptick In Revenue For Xbox
@sixrings I'm not sure buying ABK to get CoD and rule the console and streaming gaming world was also a good reason to raise prices twice and kill subscriber growth or any reason to buy an Xbox. I'm not sure that there's really any good strategic reason to do much of anything they do regardless of what their strategy is, assuming there is one...
Re: Microsoft CEO Reassures Investors That Xbox Is Focused On Console, PC And Mobile
Satya's discovered sockets. This is promising.
Normally a CEO saying something is still a priority is reassuring, but in the case of Nadella, it's more like Lucy telling Charlie Brown she really won't pull the football away this time, honest.
It's kind of like that time he told important people there won't be any price increases due to Call of Duty right before they raised prices and said it's because Call of Duty.
Nothing this man says is worth the bandwidth used to repeat it. He makes up whatever sounds good at the moment regardless of if it's true. He's playing investors, of course, too. Though he didn't say much of value here, with vagaries about covering all platforms starting with console, but somehow also thinks they had console covered just fine before ABK. Corporate not understanding their market position may be a huge part of their problem.
Also, where is Phil? Should not head of Xbox/Microsoft Gaming be the one talking about the future of the product? Why is the corporate CEO the only source of this information? I'm starting to picture Phil in a closet, bound, with duct tape over his mouth.
@Zenszulu That's exactly it. Whenever the sales are low, they give up, regroup, let it fizzle, and plan to reboot next launch to fix it.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@Jenkinss Indirectly. They've listed only a few older games for PS5, plus Doom, it's not like so far a plethora of games have gone to PS5. While many assume it means eventually everything goes to PS5, nobody knows that, and right now that isn't necessarily true. It's not the existence of their PS5 strategy that harmed them. It's their lack of communication, lack of clarity, endless equivocation when pressed for one that broke it. The fact they let the uncertainty and rumors dictate the conversation without stepping in has given the media version of the PS5 dump its own legs and life that then drove people away along with their various other problems and miscommunications while also killing favorite studios, removing familiar faces, and replacing them with Activision heads. Though when I look back, they'd half tried to recover from the PS5 blunder and it kind of worked, people were soothed again after that. It's the culling of Tango and Arkane that really changed the mood. They took the one big hit that defined the future of Game Pass and the console, HiFi Rush, and declared it a catastrophic failure worth disposing everyone involved, after just previously praising it as their high water mark indicating nothing they say carries any weight. I think that's the point where people started wondering what even is Game Pass and Xbox? up to then they were just signaling they didn't know what to do with consoles. It was then they indicated they just don't know what they're doing with anything at all.
TL;DR Their problem is the same problem they've had for 20 years. It's not that they step on rakes, it's that they run the weed wacker whilst naked on a honey farm.
@jumpin_jeeps Yeah, MS problem isn't "the games" really. Yeah they released a console way too soon because they had to because Sony was, and it looks horrible. But if they stayed the course and kept messaging how great it was for playing 3rd party, they'd have stayed in the game. They took their eye off the ball and stopped promoting their own product, even bashed it publicly just to get ABK through, and they changed the image of their own product to negative. PS5 hasn't been doing much of anything either, and if it weren't for VR mine would have gathered rediculous dust - it's not very different from XB minus some paid exclusives here and there. But the mood of the future is so much better there.
@PhileasFragg Yes and no. I think whats happening to Xbox is the same thing that's been happening to Windows, Azure, everything in MS. Nadella's so single mindedly focused on maximizing their exposure to the AI bubble, the massive investor influx and immediate return at peak bubble, he's culling everything that can be culled to funnel those resources into more AI returns. I.E. the bad stuff is happening precisely to add fuel to that out of control growth wildfire. Having to actually make returns across myriad products due to investor disinterest might actually make them cut less.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@PsBoxSwitchOwner Microsoft Gaming Game Pass Ultimate for Games.
Has a nice ring to it, really.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@Steel76 I think the problem, and it's Sonys point too, is the PC power user market is small though and overlaps console market so little that doesn't matter. Console is powered by the casual masses. If the PC power users make up enough of the console never to kill it, console is hosed anyway.
Hulst thinks ps games on PC will make people buy consoles for sequels. I don't really see it playing out that way. PC players will wait for the better version. And it's not like pc players will buy their third party games on the consoles even if they do, and if they don't, there's no point selling them a console anyway, that's where the money is.
Ms has an opposite issue. Microsoft game studios was a PC publisher before
Xbox even existed. They destroyed and cannibalized that pc publishing in order to push Xbox and lock exclusives to it. So they're kind of rebuilding what they had and broke before.
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@HonestHick And what a share button it is! But I wouldn't know. Because I use elite 2. Which is still an Xbox one controller....
Dual sense really isn't bad. The battery sucks badly, the parallel sticks will always be wrong, but I could live with that, but the tension is awful. Oh and the flat mushy face buttons are meh.
There's some switch/PC/mobile controllers that are seriously nice. Literally a copy of Elite V2 but with mechanical click facebuttons, Hall sticks and triggers etc. they don't work on ps or Xbox, but do work on switch. First party controllers are nice but they're starting to slip behind the Chinese companies. Though the Chinese companies just copied their mold....
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@HonestHick modern is a stretch. It's got tech in it 😂
I still can't believe we don't have force feedback sticks. Microsoft made force feedback sticks for flight games in the 90s before Xbox. And now Sony has force feedback useless triggers and Microsoft has.... This. And nobody has ff sticks still!
Then again they can't get these to stop breaking even without motors!
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@InterceptorAlpha That's incredible work, you really could be selling those mods. They look OEM!
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@Romans12 That's the kind of nightmare with sony I'd fear most. It's pretty bleak when the focus of the console companies is just trying to turn their customers into whales and extract as much value from them as possible rather than trying to grow at this point. I guess if I'm going to be exploited, I'd rather be exploited by Nvidia? I mean the leather jacket is kinda cool I guess.
@OldGamer999 Whoops, yeah, 59.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@101Force The AI chip bubble will pop. Businesses aren't going to keep shoveling money into short term instantly replaced AI hardware, and the AI cloud providers will need to show a return to their over enthusiastic investors and turn up short, and the expansions will grind to a crawl. AMD is well diversified and can shift gears whatever way the winds blow. Sure, half their sales are AI. But half aren't. NVidia OTOH is in deeper doo doo when it pops. They go all in on one thing and ignore the rest.
Re: Activision Blizzard Continues To Drive Massive Uptick In Revenue For Xbox
@GamingFan4Lyf Yeah, Intel has its advantages, AMD has its advantages. For a gaming PC, unless one specifically needs Intel's advantages I think AMD's longer term upgradability on a given mobo just makes a lot more sense. Though that only matters if your mobo has PCIE5 obviously as future GPUs will need it. For production PCs it doesn't matter, you'll need new IO before you need more powerful CPUs. (and CPUs aren't actualy getting much more powerful, Intel 14th gen is kind if 13.5th gen. ALL tech hardware is in a mess right now.
The double L2 cache of the X3Ds is really incomparable for gaming, they bench worse than a standard CPU as they have to run cooler, lower boost clocks, less cores at high speeds, but the cache makes up for it in gaming where that's the main bottleneck. Intel will have a 3D cache part coming soon, but I still think if you don't need intel they're less ideal for gaming (streamers however need Intel because the x3ds don't handle all the video encoding simultaneous with the game very well.)
It's always the waiting game though. Whatever you buy, whenever you buy it, you could have had something better if you waited just that bit longer! That's the frustrating part of PC.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@OldGamer999 And totally agree with #58. That's a spot on assessment.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@SleeplessKnight "Who will fill the void" I think it's a 1-2 combination that will mostly mean mobile. I think Apple, Amazon, other mobile-centric vendors will push mobile as the future of gaming harder and harder. Even MS for that matter. An xbox controller, an iPhone and a dongle....that's the future that will happen. I think gaming is just going mostly to mobile long term, even before cloud. ON the "premium" side, Steam deck, Ally, etc I think portends the future, followed by laptops, of PC really absorbing more of the "premium" console market. "Premium consoles" wanted to become low end PCs. Now they did. Now they'll struggle to compete with actual PCs. And mobile. Current phones are quite a bit more powerful than Switch...the line between "mobile" and "console" was already blurred by Nintendo's success. Xbox One and PS4 literally ran a tablet CPU.
@Ricky-Spanish They sold Series X for $349.99 with Diablo IV bundled at Christmas, and that was before the PS5 port announcements, and they still didn't move. They really damaged the brand.
@sonicbooming I agree, I think they're done trying to compete in Sony's "red ocean" and want to try a turn going head to head against Nintendo's market instead. Worked out well for Kinekt so I expect great things!
@OldGamer999 I mean a PC is just a really BIG hardware console. It can sit under your TV. Literally. It's not like PS5 wasn't pushing the size in that direction anyway.
And it will still harangue you to sign up for Game Pass, just like the good old days!
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@PsBoxSwitchOwner LOL this is the correct answer.
Or better yet, build controllers with Hall effect sticks and triggers so they don't fall apart and need to be replaced all the time.
Especially your $150-200 premium controller.
Though I guess there's 1 billion new Amazon Video customers that need Xbox controllers....
@InterceptorAlpha It always comes back to Nintendo strategy, doesn't it....
Re: Elden Ring Patch Makes Sweeping Changes To Difficulty Balance On Xbox
@GuyinPA75 FWIW, while Souls stans will gatekeep their superiority of rising to the challenge of accomplishment in a video game, and how letting anyone do it easier would diminish their accomplishment and make them feel like they wasted their time to the ends of the earth, it's worth considering Elden Ring and all Souls games (barring Bloodborne and Demons Souls) considerable sales on Steam and Epic and remembering that easy, and even invincibility mods exist on PC...........not everyone played through the challenge..... the gatekeeping is already meaningless outside people's heads. Sadly I think the fights could be fun if you'd just respawn INTO the fight rather than slog your way back into it again. The "difficulty" really isn't difficulty. Nioh? That's difficulty. Fromsoft isn't difficulty, It's a lack of functional checkpointing of progress. If the "difficulty" is generated not by the chanllenge but just by testing your endurance of wasting time between repeats of the challenge, it's not hard, it's just frustrating design that strokes some people's egoes. It set out to emulate the challenge of the NES era. Well...that was mostly bad design too... But it's built its fan base. Like Ghosts n Goblins. Which was designed mostly to eat quarters.
To be TOTALLY fair to Nintendo, I think the breakable weapon system could be considered an extension of the way the Master Sword always weakened whenever you took a hit (no beam shooting, etc.) And I get how the design of the weapons system was supposed to compel your to keep the loop up, but I also found it annoying, and mostly it led to me hoarding all my weapons, rarely using the good ones, thus slogging through fights with weak weapons so I didn't use up the good ones, and then trying to use the master sword for everything, then just running in circles killing time while it recharged. It's not a design that worked for me, however, I adore it compared to my contempt for TotK. The first zelda game I can say I can't actually stand and didn't bother finishing since Zelda II. And I'd rather play Zelda II. Between ACNH, ToTK and now the new one Nintendo is leaning REALLY hard into "make everything into Minecraft/Fortnite, because kids like building stuff." To be fair the game was clever and innovative, and I think with VR controls where you could actually use your hands to assemble things instead of tring to line them up with analog sticks and shaking them to separate them, it may have been a great game. I'm sure the inevitable Virtual Boy 2 gets a $90 remake of TotK and it will be amazing.
TotK REALLY jumped the shark with it's obsessive crafing and materials gathering. Similar to ACNH. Which I also don't like while I love love love ACNL.
Re: Activision Blizzard Continues To Drive Massive Uptick In Revenue For Xbox
I mean of course ABK is driving their software sales growth, they simply added an entire publisher's existing revenue to their own. How could that not be massive growth?
@Kezelpaso "unless their strategy changes again."
You're being sarcastic, right? They give the big wheel a spin once a quarter to see what the new strategy will be.
@sixrings Friendly reminder: $69B was spent to purchase King to get Candy Crush and a heavy footprint in to the massively lucrative mobile market their main competitors in Apple, Google, Amazon are already in. Activision and CoD were dead weight that came along with the purchase. Basically they only cared about getting mobile market share. The rest of gaming can take a long walk off a short pier. They got what they came for. The rest can be dumped.
@GamingFan4Lyf (Said in creepily over-calming synthesized AI voice): Welcome back.......
Nintendo will never do PC. I think they'll go Apple App store at some point, but never PC. Doesn't mesh with their market.
x3d chips can't directly compare to non-x3d chips and the R9 x3d won't be out for a while. Intel will have their x3d competitor though. Plus an AM5 now means you can upgrade through at least 2027 (AMD committed to minimum that long for AM5 which is amazing.) Especially important if NPUs become importand and MS is DEFINITELY going to push it for their games.
NV50...rumors are all over the place, but it's a sure bet the only NV50s out in 2024 will be 5090 and MAYBE 5080, and some rumors say even 5090 is pushed to 2025 now. 5070, definitely not 2024.
And remember availability will be near zero at launch like with consoles. And price is unknown, but probably more expensive.
@Titntin I read your post and my main take away is that if you eliminate the Xbox store your PC experience suddenly gets much better lol
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@PhileasFragg If OpenAI goes belly up (ding dong the witch is dead!), with the billions invested in them, Microsoft will simply insert the extra cash and buy them to obtain their AI tech as proprietary. (Aww, sheet, here we go again.)
The Tulip Mania that is AI has derailed everything tech. From allocation of silicon, to altered business plans to everything else, Xbox is suffering partly from it but it's a branch on the larger tech limb, where the allocation of EVERYTHING into AI to cash in while the cash is hot has set everything not AI back 15 years, while generating tons of useless dead end efforts just to secure investment capital. It's like a worse version of the 1999/2000 dot com bubble.
@101Force "Whatever Microsoft is planning, I hope they don't leave people who bought into the hardware component of their ecosystem feeling overlooked or discarded."
You wrote that comment in 2019 right?
@__jamiie I think a big part of the problem this gen is, despite a strong start, once they started the ABK lawsuits the goal of the company became singularly focused on securing ABK. That meant pleading their case to governments. That meant going out of their way to make sure Xbox was NOT successful, so they could play the victim card to governments. Which became a self fulfilling prophecy because once they got out of court and got ABK secured, what they had left was a failed console that was not successful because they went out of their way to make sure it wasn't.
@OldGamer999 I considered the PS5 route briefly but then shortly after realized an Xbox-less Playstion would be a living nightmare even more than being an Xbox customer now. Sony gets Nintendo-ugly unchecked. Between this and PSVR2....PC's the only way forward for me...back to the future!
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
In fairness Nintendo plummeted as they sunset Switch, and Sony's not picking up numbers that you'd think they would with both competitors in a deep slump, and are in fact dropping as well. The entire console market seems to be deteriorating rapidly, and both Sony and Xbox have flubbed this generation hard enough to cause damage to the console market overall. I don't think mobile, or PCs or technology or even the economy sunk this generation and maybe the future of consoles as a product. I think Microsoft and Sony did that by themselves. With help from the large publishers.
But seriously, go figure, Xbox sends mixed signals about their hardware support, their strategy, their studio support, their long term pricing, cuts brand marketing, and has no new major games for 2024 up to now....can't imagine why their consoles aren't selling, their sub isn't growing, and their "software revenue" gains all come from the fact that they bought a different company that always made a lot of money selling software.
They really need to think about Xbox's identity. If the consoles are sinking and the sub is stalling...what exactly does Xbox have other than a big PC and Playstation publisher? We keep hearing how it's all about cloud. But that stalled TOO.
Mismanagement Simulator (MS 2024) is the Game Pass killer exclusive.
@Mustoe I have a wired 360 controller around somewhere, but the wireless ones I have a whole BOX of drifting sticks for those things! 360 controllers were the OG drift nightmare
@Mustoe @Tintin I still think Xbox sells at least one more generation of hardware. They still need a physical box that has Game Pass on it, and if they kill the box, and the paid online, their GP numbers will catastrophically drop. So the box needs to exist for a long while even if it's just to keep the GP subscriber base stable. Even if the box is a Surface PC with an Xbox logo on it.
IDK if they were always after the casual market. I'm not sure they were ever after ANY particular market which is half their identity crisis. The OGXB was clearly all about hardcore and the windows gaming element that wasn't committed to PC. 360 started the same, then with Kinekt went hard to chasing Wii casual. Then with 1 decided to go ultra casual with TV sports, but then went back to hardcore, and now they want people who stream Miss Maisel. There's not an actual pattern to who they've been targeting. PS meanwhile went from mainstream gamer teens to hardcore, to a specifically cultivated sony-only audience, to....hyper-casual fortnite players and an ever disappointed hardcore.
Xbox is a mess, but console overall is a mess, too. Too much ambition, too much overestimation of market growth, and too long a lag time before seeing the blown bridge ahead on the tracks after jamming the throttle in full ahead and throwing all the coal in the boiler.
@lacerz The only thing worse than being an Xbox customer in 2024 is being a Nintendo or Sony customer in a year after Xbox isn't around...
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
It would feel wrong playing Xbox with a controller more transparent than their hardware strategy.
"From hereon out, Xbox controller will use a smaller and lighter box, where "single-use plastics have been removed from the packaging and the traditional paper manual has been replaced with a QR code for a digital quick start guide." We can't moan at that!"
I love this....."We've found ways to cut more costs from production and distribution - let's spin it as being environmentalist and use it as a marketing point!" Amazes me how every time a company cuts their costs the public cheers "yay environment!" They're not being environmentalists, you dodos, they're being cheap, maximizing margins, and selling it with feel-good spin. When your next console is delivered in a crumpled paper lunch bag that still smells of fried onions, please praise the Sun Goddess.
While I don't need a paper manual for a controller, I'm sick of "scan the QR code" for a manual. When I'm setting up a motherboard, I'd like a book with the pinouts and BIOS settings rather than holding a phone in one hand and trying to scroll and pinch zoom a PDF rendering the pin layout 2 inches offset, while trying to wire it with the other. There's a time and a place to be "green" and interfering with the usability of a product is not one of them. Great way to maximize investor return though.
@Scummbuddy Because when we all play together we all win(TM). And look at the Sea of Thieves sales on PS5. LOOK AT THEM!
Re: Elden Ring Patch Makes Sweeping Changes To Difficulty Balance On Xbox
@GuyinPA75 ROFLMAO That is the absolute best description of a Soulsborne battle I have ever read! Well done! That really does characterize the whole "it does not respect your time" aspect that infuriates me so. Elden isn't quite as dire as prior as classic Soulsborne. It's still Fromsoft, but it's not as...obtuse?
Also, I now need to play the game with a Billy Gibbons mod. It needs to replace Torrent with the Eliminator or no buy. And naturally the only weapon is an axe.
@Tintin Elden Ring being open world does allow a more traditional RPG grind, for sure, but @GuyInPA is actually pretty spot on for most other Soulsborne games and its clones. Demons Souls is painful. The difficulty is really false, it's stupid mechanics, memorizing exact timing sequences, and wearing you down by attrition of repeating annoying sequences repeatedly more than "difficult." Elden ring does more or less just let you hulk smash through it with grinding, which is exactly why a lot of the Soulsborne purists were already revolting against how "easy" the game was.
IDK, I'm in GuyinPA's campe regarding Soulsborne overall, but Elden Ring has a "something special" that feels more like a Zelda 1 remake than even BotW did.
Once I get my PCVR rig set up I intend to try the Luke Ross VR mod. This game in VR would be an amazingly breathtaking experience. Though I've heard that it can get even veterans with VR legs of steel a bit green with all that dodge rolling. That definitely sounds like another chance for you to grind to level 400!
Re: Elden Ring Patch Makes Sweeping Changes To Difficulty Balance On Xbox
@mcdreamer I still say that's a sort of one track mind among a particular fan base of a particular element that's kind of ballooned into a rigidly dedicated market. The people that enjoy that aspect of it are enjoying it, yes, but I'd kind of liken that to if the people that like to speed run BotW entirely as shirtless Link decided that's the only way to play the game and it wouldn't be fun unless forced to play the game that way as though there's nothing else worth enjoying in the game, and that shirtless link as a mandated always-on play style is an arbitrary road block to enjoying anything else in the game.
There's a lot in these games that a lot of people that don't like throwing themselves against that brick wall "for the challenge" could enjoy, people who's reflexes are not at the same level as others etc. I know the argument becomes "not everything needs to be for everyone" which is true, but locking everything else about the games behind the (faux) "difficulty" is just an unnecessary restriction that accomplishes nothing in the game other than letting people feel superior for doing it as though it's something more useful than playing a video game.
Now, PERSONALLY, I don't find the games especially "difficult", I find them obnoxiously time wasting and therefore infuriatingly frustrating, by making you repeat things you've already done rather than respawn right at the challenge you failed, and nothing infuriates me and turns me off a game more than that. That, too would be aided by an "easy" mode, not because the challenge itself is frustrating but because I'd be able to escape that frustration. Not a challenging game per-se, but I like the way FFXIV does it, you die on a boss, it asks if you want to try again on normal, easy or very easy. I'll throw myself at normal for a while, but if it's clear that I just don't have the right equipment or the mechanics of that particular boss are obnoxious for playing as a particular class (black mage main - ouch.) I'll throw it in easy after enough failures for that one fight just to end the frustration and move on. And unlike Fromsoft games that's one where "skipping" challenges without learning the skills could negatively impact other players if you don't actually know what you're doing, once you get to high end trials.
Re: Four Years Later, People Are Still Getting Confused By Xbox's 'Horrible' Console Names
@HonestHick
Xbox
Xbox 360
Xbox Deuce
Xbox Deuce X
Xbox Deus X Machina
Xbox 10
Xbox 365
Simple!
Re: Four Years Later, People Are Still Getting Confused By Xbox's 'Horrible' Console Names
@HonestHick I'm amazed they didn't tap into their #1 in Mexico status to name the sequel without referencing the numeral 2. They could have called it the Xbox Deuce.
Series is a terrible name because they already had Xbox S and Xbox X. Yes it's One vs Series. But Xbox Series X and S sounds identical to Xbox X and S last Gen. It's even still the white one and the black one.