@JayJ Unfortunately it's a different regulatory body for utilities and insurance separately. And they're mostly made up of revolving doors of the very executives of the very oligopolies - CFO of Allstate one year, PUC comissioner the next year, then CFO of State Farm a few years later...... No conflicts of interest there at all, nooooo......
FTC only has purview if one of them goes to buy another. But of course in those businesses one only buys another after the one is in bankruptcy protection and needs a buyer to float anyway.
TL;DR Everything's f-d up beyond repair, and while we wait for the inevitable and necessary nuclear armageddon required to fix it, we're going to fight tooth and nail to the brutal end for ethics and fairness in our video games we used to kill everyone in imaginary worlds to make us feel better so we don't have to do it IRL
@x3King84 I feel like it doesn't take much skill for the rumors to be right, if there's a way for MS to damage their brand, they'll find it. If there's not a way, they'll create one that didn't exist before.
The really sad thing is they make a good product and then don't support it, don't market it, and then don't seem to care, they just let it float out there half alive and consider it good enough while they focus on something else. MS always seems to make a great product, but then lets it wither on the vine until it's forgotten. Zune, Winphone, they always have a good platform they just let dry out.
And it's made all the worse that PS is the alternative where the popularity isn't because it's a great product, but simply because it's already popular and manages to not become a bad product.
@somnambulance Very much like the Sega cycle where there were 3 back to back consoles. People lost faith that the purchase had any lasting power and just waited "for the next one." Nerds are used to "buy a new thing every few years." COnsumers and parents especially have the outlook of "I want the new XStationBox" "But you just got one 2 years ago!"
If you're going to sell dedicated games appliances, it had better well last a while.
We won't be able to determine how long the 9th generation will last until after it launches.
Until then I really like the new SSD I got for my Xbox Two, and my PS4 Pro Plus (White Edition) is really neato! Wonder what the PS4 Pro Plus (White Edition) (Rev. 2 2024 Edition) will be like?
@Fiendish-Beaver The problem with Xbox is that every time they wet their own bed, instead of trying to clean it up, they just go silent, ride out the market and then attempt to reboot the brand with a new hardware launch. Whereupon they soon after soil the clean sheets again and repeat the cycle. To be fair, though, Nintendo did the exact same thing with WiiU and it somehow became a resounding success. I still don't know how Nintendo went from "unwanted and rejected" to "hot ticket item" between Switch and WiiU, while selling the EXACT same games on them. I think most of it stems from the slick marketing of calling it a "hybrid console". People bought into a "new concept", while "Super Game Boy Advance with HDMI out" would not have flown off the shelves as much.
@Daleaf The problem is we've capped out. For 40 years gaming has been about selling leaps forward in graphics and density. We've now hit the ceiling where games are real-time rendered Pixar movies, and some are proper CGI with near-photorealism. There's no where left to go except more perfect lighting, more perfect shadows, more perfect surface interactions. Tiny things that aren't really perceptible to the consumer other than when comparing something new to something old. There's nowhere left to go to wow people, we're already at the state of "pretty close to live action photography" and you cant' get "more" impressive than "looks real." There's VR, but that's still a long way from being mainstream, if it ever is. That's really the only place left to go. And the leaps of wow still exist there.
The only thing I'll give MS here is that, while they're quite clueless in refusing to actually market their products as though they learned nothing from WiiU, I'll grant them that Sony's got it equally wrong. They seem to spend more money marketing things than making things, and their "brand" is built more on their piles of money being used to brainwash people into blindly buying their brand than actually putting everything into their products, then making the consumer pay more to fund it. (300M for Spiderman 2 was not just money spent making the game.....the $10 price hike paid for more marketing.)
There's really got to be a happy medium between hoping "if you build it they will come" from MS and "Pay everyone to believe they have to have it now. Build it later. Then send the buyers the invoice for the marketing." of Sony. They're both opposite sides of the same coin.
@Ralizah I really don't know how people who are so clueless about their market can somehow mange to make so much money. I really don't understand how their brains process information over there.
@OldGamer999 If you haven't yet just do a deep dive on the media poopstorm around Windows Copilot Recall. It's not intentionally. They're really just this incompetent. In every division. Even their most important one. I do not understand how they're rich.
@HonestHick 30 million core....yeah...and that's a problem. The casuals have mostly gone in other directions. Mobile. PC - I don't mean 4090 supertowers, I mean thin light laptops that play indies fine. That was the bulk of console sales. Gone. So it's just the core left. And they keep trying to just extract more and more money to make the economics work, and that can't last.
The problem with cloud is the economics are even worse than consoles. It's "cheap" now. But it needs MASSIVE numbers to work, and much higher pricing. Selling people streaming for $20/mo for now sounds hard to pushto casuals. When it hits the real prices of $89.99/mo for medium, $120.00/mo for high.....it's not going to fly. Unlesss they get those "billion" gamers.
The thing with game size is I suspect that most of the cost for for the game is sunk into the core content. So increasing the size with all that bloat costs little to add, and is why they do it, to increase the "value" because the core part already cost more than budget. I.e. trimming the fat probably won't bring their production costs down all that much. OTOH getting rid of -king fruit physics and paying attention to exact shadow casting from eyelashes might.
Ironically I'm going the other way. Huge fan of many many games, but especially with an interest in VR, I'm looking at worlds to get lost in and those are huge. Skyrim with 150 mods, Fo4 with the same, Flight sims, racing sims, NMS, Elite Dangerous, etc etc....not too many games to pick from but they're games you could spend years playing and not have hit all the content. (Or payed for it, DCS World combat sim has like $1400 of DLC available You buy each plane and map and carrier separately. But it's understandable because it's a true sim. To fly it you basically have to learn how to operate the real world vehicle. Every single switch in the cockpit functions properly, etc, so reading the real manual of the real vehicle is almost mandatory....so I can see why one plane is $50. It's cheaper that 14.3 million the real one costs.
Problem with console profitability is it's coming at the cost of just forever raising prices on the remaining customers. Eventually they push too far, to either make it unaffordable to too many, or to become too close to superior alternatives in PC.
Worldwide windows outage? Wow I've been using MS stuff all day and didn't even know there was an issue other than last night Xbox app saying Xbox stuff was down (but worked for me luckily.) Did the full windows updates and everything on 2 machines today!
But why would Windows itself BSOD from that? I definitely haven't seen on on several machines...that may be something else. Or something tied to your corporate security?
Was waiting for this and this time, I'm glad to see it happened. FTC is 100% right here. MS lied point blank to regulators faces that they were not going to raise prices for this, and then pivoted the moment the teacher wasn't watching and did precisely that. They didn't even give it a year to PRETEND it wasn't related. Didn't even try to create plausible deniability. They just pivoted and did it right there. And not just a $1 increase, but 25% on ultimate, 50% on lowest tier, all ONE YEAR, immediately after saying to regulators they wouldn't.
I still believe this will bite them. Not Xbox. The next time MS finds themselves in front of FTC trying to buy some AI tech or cloud provider. This is an entire ammo crate to use against anything they say.
@HonestHick It's both. Those games are a different market. It wasn't the market of single play games that switched to playing Fortnite, it's people that would have never played single play games that at least play Fortnite. It's more of a social media platform than a video game. It didn't replace "traditional games", it replaced mall rats hanging out near 5-7-9, and as there's a lot more mall rats than Final Fantasy nerds, the industry started caring only about their revenue. And at least they keep the digital food court from looking deserted.
But that's not the core issue, it's just masking it. The problem is MOST console sales were never to FF nerds, most console sales were to ultra casuals that buy two games ever, probably some puzzle game, or a sports game, or the like. Consoles were never about us even if the companies thought they were. Consoles were about the "non-gamers" that bought them for a game or two.
Those customers exited console gaming entirely. They never wanted a console they just wanted a Tetris thing and something with this years team on it. Without them console numbers would plummet, and publishers would panic. The social media players kind of replaced them, so numbers look stable, and those guys are more profitable, only because of whales.
Where the new crisis is is that for ALL of those markets we're getting to the point where hardware they already have can play the kinds of games they want to play, AND that hardware can then bring software to new markets much easier, because it's already there.
It's also cost. The most popular games are popular because they have one thing in common: They're free. In a world where the most popular things everyone else is doing cost....nothing.....who would buy an expensive box to play expensive games on them? The industry keeps telling us it costs too much, people keep saying games need to keep up with inflation........and they're all ignoring that the games everyone plays are free. THere's a reason everyone's playing them (except GTA, GTA people are special...very very special...) A $5 console and $1 games are still expensive compared to the most popular games. Yes, the whales pump in cash at 100x the rate purchasers do, but those games would collapse if all the free riders vanished.
The real problem for consoles is that in the world of modern general purpose computing hardware, you just don't need a console to accomplish the goal for all the non-enthusiast market anymore. Consoles managed to stay relevant by pushing bleeding edge graphics all the time, but that era is ending as the games to do that cost too much to make.
The market for dedicated games won't go away entirely, but then it gets split between those seeking budget (console) and those seeking performance (PC enthusiast), so the market then starts dividing itself. And as that happens the hardware subsidy razor and blades model fails. And if console has to keep raising prices to mach the falling demand, it'll continue to reduce demand by either pushing people down onto phones/laptops, or pushing them up into PC ("It's not THAT much more!")
But if the console industry is revolving around those few games, the console is obsoleting itself. Subsidized hardware can't thrive on being an onramp to a handful of games that already run on hardware everyone already has.
@OldGamer999 Switch is a special case. It had no right to sell as well as it did, but the idea of portable gaming with HD graphics took the world by storm early and the momentum kept rolling. They'll hold onto that because Nintendo handhelds are Nintendo handhelds, but it will get challenging for Nintendo because if people's phones and laptops can kind of do the same things as a $350-400 switch 2.....will people choose to save money and use what they've got?
@GamingFan4Lyf @WhiteRabbit @JonBoyJ I don't disagree with you guys about PC being more expensive overall, people are lying when they say it's not, but at the same time that price is highly exaggerated. $3k will buy you an enthusiast class 4090 rig. Equivalent of a "Titan" back in the day or equivalent before that of doing 2 cards in SLI/Crossfire. Normal players just ignored that. You don't need an enthusiast class 4090 rig to compete with a flipping Series X and PS5. A 3060 slightly bests a Series X and PS5 and they're like $200. That 4090 rig will likely be relatively competitive to a PS6 bought 2-3 years early.
For a single-platform gamer, obviously console is like half the price. For a multiple-platform gamer though, the cost of both PS+XB+HDDs+subscriptions is easily more than a PC that outperforms either of them. You can best a Series X for $1300-1500 handily. You can equal a Series X for about $850-1150 depending on how you shop. Is it more expensive? Yes. Is it more performant? Yes (those console CPUs are garbage.) Is it a viable alternative for Consumer Bob that buys a console plugs it in? No. But it's not as extremely priced as perceived either.
Consoles at launch are a great bargain compared to their PC equivalents, but after a few years once you get into mid-gen the PC parts come down more favorably again, while the consoles, now, don't come down in price. And that doesn't discuss "pro" models that bring the console up to $1100+ on its own over the generation anyway. If it exists. Which it may not.
And the next consoles are absolutely going to be more expensive. Sony supposedly wanted to do 600 this generation but backed down after XSX was priced. Phil point blank said the subsidy on hardware is over, it doesn't work anymore and to expect maybe higher prices. They were losing $200 on each XSX AFAIK. Realistically? Next gen we're looking at $1200-1400 minimum to own both consoles. Plus additional HDDs for each, plus subscriptions (that keep jumping in price.) And maybe pro models that jack that up to double or more.
We're in a time gap here where PC parts are based on 2024 pricing. The consoles are based on 2019-2020 pre-inflationary pricing. They're itching to catch up, and when they do, it's going to be sticker shock in the console space, and those PC parts will start looking more appealing again. Even the Nvidia ones.
@Vaako007 It depends on region. US, UK, Western Europe, formerly Japan were huge console territories. But they're the only ones. Huge chunks of the world including and especially China are pretty much 100% PC from the start. The consoles kind of have a built in legacy market from "1980s first world countries" but it clouds the real adoption elsewhere.
The flip side of why "console is dying" though, is that the market is going in a direction where average hardware with integrated graphics is "good enough" for the kinds of games most players are actually playing these days. Those new Snapdragon laptops were demo'ed running BG3 at 30fps. Sounds kind of decent as a console on a thin and light mini laptop.
I see the market kind of splitting where buying NO special hardware other than what they already have for normal life (laptop, desktop, phone, ipad whatever) is more than good enough to play most of the games they'd want to play so the casual console market withers, as average tech catches up to where console has been for decades. And then the enthusiast market looking to pay premium for more than what consoles ever offered on "gaming rigs." "Consoles" have been subsidized for 30 years by people that want to play Just Dance and Madden so that Nerdz can play Halo. The numbers crash as those people exit because their normal hardware plays that kind of thing fine.
That leaves a shrinking slice of market for dedicated consoles that are neither "already on your table for no additional cost" nor high performance like a custom rig. A market still exists, but if it keeps shrinking due to overlap with hardware people already have, at some point it stops sustaining itself. My Legion Z1 extreme runs FFXIV at 720p with FSR to 1600x1200 at 60fps. FF7R at 40-45fps. God of War 2018 at 60fps. Starfield at LFMAOLOLNOPE. Neither a "demanding" nor an "easy to drive" game. If I can do that on a handheld with "enthusiast" chip, we're getting close to the time where basically any laptop can run most normal games not designed to push hardware. Then do we need consoles still?
No, the casuals are never going to build E-ATX supertower rigs with RGB's beaming from every oriface with water cooling and a $1000 GPU that weighs more than a cinderblock and be "PC GAMER" nerds. But the point is they don't need to. The casuals can flip open their Acer eBlahBlahBlah 1000 notebook, install steam or go to the Xbox app and download Vampire Surviver just fine without spending hardware money or nerding out. Little Kitty Big City doesn't need 24gb VRAM with 340mm radiators hanging from the top. For the people that want to play Hellblade at 4k, there's big rigs for them to nerd out on.
I said it in the push thread, but gaming has been pricing itself out of most markets. $500 consoles soon to be $600, 700. $70 games when even $60 was a lot. >$1000 GPUs. Subscriptions, services galore. And the games to match the hardware cost so much to make they can't make profits on making games to the size market that can afford the hardware/subs at a price they're willing to pay. It went from being a mainstream activity for everyone and anyone to have a box to play some games under their TV to this pricy hobby for dedicated hobbyists. Of course market will shrink. They didn't define the target price of the target market, they just built whatever seemed impressive and expected people would pay it. Meanwhile phones and PCs that everyone has are getting more and more capable of running games that aren't pushing hardware for the sake of pushing hardware.
@Pabpictu That's a big part of it where consoles once had their own media ecosystem, retail floor space, trading culture, grab a disc/cart, put it in the slot, play the game, that was designed for the hardware.
Now console games are mostly just ports of games designed for PC, with all the problems of PC games baked in, and migrated everyone over to the same digital ecosystem, patches, versions, now performance settings. The modern consoles groomed gamers for the wold of PC, and now can't figure out why people migrate to PC after.
@HonestHick Honestly I think it's a depressing condemnation of the state of the player base on consoles if the whole console ecosystem pretty much depends on a mediocre cringey game like GTA for it's entire sales cycle. If console is down to being all about GTA and Fortnite....it's definitely a....particular....market
@x3King84 Following Xbox is like being a cat and chasing the laser. You just frantically jump from place to place to wherever the red dot moved, and every time you do, it's not there and it jumped somewhere else, and you end up looking pretty unintelligent in the process.
Though I still can't imagine on what planet they actually think selling a $20 subscription to stream 1080p games with high compression to the kind of people why buy Fire Sticks is actually going to be the move that takes them to new heights of market leadership in gaming. Bundling it with Prime Video at a discount? That would grow numbers. $20/mo to the kind of person that never thought to buy a console before? No.
I think next E3/SGF, Devolver Digital should just stick a camera in the Xbox boardroom. I'll be just as zany and satirical as all their other shows and cost them absolutely nothing.
@rustyduck @CutchuSlow It's just 8 hours for a single session, not 8 hours per day total. You can reconnect as many times a day as you want. Seems to be less about limiting play time and more about keeping people from hogging the servers idling and keeping other people from connecting. Like in MMOs and the very "social hangout" games like Fortnite that are more social media platform than video game where people will just hang out on the server all day. Can't imagine anybody actually PLAYING more than 8 hours non-stop with zero breaks other than the kids they find dead in internet cafes in Korea that are addicted to DOTA when their kidneys explode.
For just $80 + 240/yr + Prime membership, you, too, can enjoy the thrill of fuzzy compressed 720p-1080p medium latency gaming in nearly Xbox Series S quality!
I can see the appeal. GP subs are going to reach 1 billion gamers easy!
@themightyant Not at $20 a month it's not. Even Apple couldn't convince their acolytes to pay $10/mo for unlimited ad-free iOS games. If Apple couldn't get Apple faithful to part with $10 on an Apple, Microsoft sure as heck isn't going to get Amazon streamers to pay $20. The PRODUCT could do it. But, like PSVR2 and the (ironically technologically superior) Stadia, the price killed it before it launched.
@Mustoe "Still believe Microsoft have its sights set on traditional console hardware?"
You know how they are. After this fails to move the subscriber needle (and at the price, I believe it will fail to meet expectations by a long shot, it's priced completely wrong for the intended market) then they'll try fawning over the consoles again briefly. Then they'll move onto something else again.
@rustyduck Yeah. Xbox may or may end up being ok long term if it goes the branded PC route, might even be good, but it's going to be an unpleasant roller coaster until we find out either way. Only options are sink or swim with the ship, jumping PS6 and hoping Sony doesn't ram the knife into your back if MS washes ashore. Or the streaming/rentals. Or just pony up for the real 40xx rig.
For me I think I'm kind of stuck having to go with the full rig, it's the "real" Xbox at this point, and for me, VR matters, and Sony's screwed up as bad as Xbox has on that front, so there's pretty much only one path.
I also like playing with kerosene and matches near large piles of money.
@rustyduck fwiw it's not a limit of 8 hours per day, it's a limit of an 8 hours continuous session. You can reconnect for another 8 hours if you get kicked out as much as you want, you just have to wait for any queue time again. I think it's meant to make sure "no lifers" don't prevent the queue from moving.
However it's actually 4080 rigs not 4090. Last time I looked it was 3090s so I assumed they upgraded to 4090, but apparently only 4080. Tbf though 4080 is still a decent upgrade from 3090 so it's still more value for the same money than it was. It's also only 200 a year if you buy 6mo increments. And 4080 is still a $1k card and at 200 that's still 6 years to pay for just the gpu that would be 2 generations obsolete in 6 years so still actually surprisingly great value of only because modern gpus are such poor value. Sad a deal at it appears it's actually bargain rental at the ridiculous prices of their cards, and that's still excluding the rest of the PC. A similar PC would be $400/year in 6 year installments. And you'd probably upgrade by then so goodbye wallet. (I personally still prefer hardware if course but....)
@101Force I didn't vote but I imagine most voters are voting on experience with the streaming service itself, which should be the same on fire stick (hopefully it's not WORSE than on PC and console!) I'm sure most of us subscribe to ultimate and have experience with cloud.
@CutchuSlow The Xbox app is hilarious. Some days the remote play button for console just disappears entirely. It freezes often when streaming too forcing a reboot at least on my legion too. And then there's the windows store 10 allowed devices that's different from the ms account 10 devices but hidden and if you log in to a pc the first time when it's full, is almost impossible to get to to recognize your licenses ever. It's horridly broken and always will be.
@AverageGamer "wait, you're wrong, Xbox fecked it all up way sooner than you said!" 😂
That's just depressing. I really can't comprehend how they make decisions. Everything they do is about maximizing that days revenue and never about actually building brands and products.
The quest support is hilarious. Who buys a vr headset to stream low quality pancake games on a blurry giant screen. I really don't understand why it exists. Meanwhile Meta has their own sub for 30% of the price for their actual vr catalogue.... Or just use virtual desktop/airlink and stream from a better provider that actually uses the quests resolution.... 🤣
@OldGamer999 Yeah I mean the irony is everyone says that the console doesn't matter because it's not the biggest part of Xbox but on reality console is still the only good part. Cloud is the worst in the business, PC store is empty, GP is stagnant. The console is actually pretty good relatively still, but suffering from their lack of focus.
@IOI Yep exactly that. Though 2022 was when they ignored console to focus only on cloud, downplaying the console and insisting the future is it's cloud. Then when they started abk is when they also abandoned cloud.
They want to be in every industry and as a result end up in none..
@OldGamer999 Yeah and it's not JUST Xbox. I think the corporate strategy right now is that anything that doesn't make as much money as AI and doesn't spur investment like AI simply doesn't matter.
Largely I think they're running scared that someone else's AI will obsolete them as a whole and trying to stay ahead of it while actually causing the real damage themselves.
@OldGamer999 LOL nope.... They definitely MARKETED cloud the hardest, they were at the front of marketing of the whole idea...and then they basically abandoned it. Abandoned their own streaming stick. And now sold it to an Amazon partnership while still leaving it in mothballs.
Back in 2022 they were really doing well. The launched the Series X hardware blades, performance was good, wait times were low, usually. Cloud was looking up. They were going to sell their streaming stick. They were hyping pending features for cloud.
Then around the time they started the ABK negotiations behind the scenes, they cancelled the streaming stick, they stopped expanding cloud much (remember the hearings saying UK only had cloud capacity for like 100k people?) the wait times increased, they doubled server capacity by splitting the series X blades into running 2-3 Series S instances instead, the stream quality stayed at 1080p forever with what appears to be very low bitrate streams, while even freaking Sony managed to jump to 4k after their early poor showing of PSNow. Xbox may well be the very WORST streaming service out there other than the really small outfits that Nintendo likes to use for things like Control.
Cloud streaming isn't a joke. Game Pass Ultimate Cloud is. It feels like an abandoned product left in alpha from 2 years ago. Why they're now decided to push it through Amazon like it's their best foot forward I have no idea, unless Amazon approached them and said "we reaaaally wanna push gaming on our hardware, can we include you, also, here's a Tomb raider deal for 2026."
So Microsoft is in gaming. They have a console they kind of half support. They have a cloud service they pushed over their console for a year that they less than half support. They have a PC storefront that's missing most of the games sold in the industry.
I honestly don't know what they actually have that's complete? Nothing as far as I can tell. They now have mobile, how much you wanna bet the mobile store is broken and incomplete for years until people forget about it?
Standard MS. Introduce a product. Hype what it will someday be. Then abandon it partway through and move onto something else, leaving the previous product lingering until it dies, or becomes a ubiquitous necessity on its own.
Nadella is a plague. He's abandoned the entire company behind the bet with AI replacing everything. Even Azure is suffering next to AWS.
@OldGamer999 Other streaming is better. It's only Xbox streaming that's that bad. Which is just shocking as they've been pushing cloud the hardest but have the worst product to offer. Sony and Nvidia's streaming is leagues better. Stadia was leagues better. It's not the cloud sucks. It's just Xbox streaming that sucks. It was briefly good years ago. But like the console itself, they don't seem to actually care about their streaming anymore, they've cut every possible corner, while their competitors improved. I don't get MS. They operate like they're going bankrupt all the time while their cap keeps rising. It's like Kmart in the 90's. They'd rather invest in other companies than their own and then can't figure out why they're losing.
@MikeOrator Absolutely right. Everyone is tying cloud to the most expensive tier, when it should be the cheapest tier. If you're trying to get casuals with a fire stick for TV to try out some core gaming, locking it behind a $20/mo sub is not the right way to do that. What they need more than anything is to get it BUNDLED with a provider or TV service. Disney Plus, Comcast cable....put it in front of people as part of something else.
FFS, Microsoft. You have a >$1T market cap. Why are you STILL behaving like a Kickstarter company with virtually every consumer product you ever have?
How can you possibly be surpassed by 10 year backward Sony, and fake-it-till-you-make-it Nvidia? F--ing HOW?
Build the product. THEN sell it. It's not difficult. Why are you signing deals with Amazon for mass distribution BEFORE actually building the infrastructure? Did you run out of money? Did your underwater datacenters run out of power before the sharks broke through?
Cloud could be great. Amazon stick could be great. Not perfect but great. But no, they short change the Xbox servers, split the X servers into multiple S sessions, restrict the output to 1080p, then sell it mass market. It's like they try to get it wrong.
@rustyduck The difference with GeForce Now, is for $240 a year you're renting a 4090 that costs $1600-2300 market price, in the cloud. They're letting you play your owned games on their 4090 for $240 a year. That's actually not bad because it would take 6 years of subscribing at that rate to pay for even the cheapest 4090, and by then the 5090 and probably 6090 will be out, the fans on your 4090 would probably go bad, and that doesn't even consider the cost of the rest of the rig to support it.
So bad as it sounds, compared to building a 4090 rig, they're offering a decent deal at $240 a year to rent the hardware, if the stream works well for you. Renting that hardware in the cloud is thus SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than buying it. You're also not using the 500-950W to power it (full rig not just GPU) for 6 years which probably pays for a year of sub in some territories.
Game pass lets you rent a fuzzy streamed Series S.....for the same price.....It used to be better before it was worse. When they launched X servers you got X rendering. Then they doubled capacity by splitting each X server into 2 S's.
GFN actually is significantly valuable for what it offers where it works well.
@101Force I think your comment needs to be tattooed on the forehead of every single individual that may possibly pass anywhere near Wall Street.
The entire business world seems to not understand their metrics and seems entirely unaware of this phenomenon. Somehow they haven't figure out that their costs went up 35%, their prices went up 40%, but they did not grant 40% pay increases to their employees across the board.....and that probably explains their numbers.
Bottom line is unless everyone in the us is making 40% more than than they were for the same job in 2019, everyone has radically less buying power. And go figure, virtually NO ONE has gained anywhere close to that much, nor will they.
Somehow the financial geniuses the lord over us have yet to solve that simple math problem. I do wonder what their vaunted graduate degrees from ivy league schools provided by the connections their daddies had taught them.
It makes sense, and definitely introduces a shakeup in the game sales model that's, honestly, hurting badly. On one hand advertising is probably better than "pay to win" predatory models. On the other hand the whole concept is going back to the future, where gaming turns into 1990's broadcast radio and TV, and I expect even paying customers (or high paying customers) won't escape the ads without "upgrading" to a to-exist extreme priced version, as the trend on streaming TV has been that providers don't actually want you to pay, because the advertising is worth more than all but the highest tier subs.
Remember when US cable television's big claim to fame was "ad free" vs broadcast? Then somewhere along the line you started paying $150 a month and getting more ads than broadcast? Yeah....
I can see it introducing gaming to a new market, which is exactly what they've been trying to do, and arguably what gaming needs more than anything. However, I can also see the entire ecosystem becoming miserable as a result for the existing market as "gaming as you know it' transforms into an ad sponsored "content" platform.
The other problem with this is that the subs work when what you're paying for is a holistic package. Jacking prices because they decided to include one particular huge game that many subscribers might have less than zero interest in just crushes the value of the package.
@Dodoo The problem is MS isn't doing it in small increments. Spotify raised my price after 2 or 3 years....by one dollar. Tidal reduced my price by $9. YT Red/Premium/Whatever raised it by $2 after several years.
Meanwhile MS jacked the price 25% in a single year. Forgetting JND is the problem here. 25% should have taken 5 years. Not 1.
The problem we have now is by all indications they're in a phase where they don't know how to make the numbers get where they want and it's clear they're going to keep messing with the pricing and tiers and services and value for an indefinite period of time, so have no long term understanding of what the service will be. Making your sub this "lets see what it is next month" plan isn't a great strategy for a sub.
Honestly, I was looking over Quest 3 software the other day and noticed they have a subscription service themselves.....$8/mo or $60 a year. If into VR, that kinda seems like a better buy than GP right now.
@Jenkinss actually now that I think about it more. It was Halo. The Challenger-esqe launch of Halo Infinite is the day Series X burned up in reentry. Within months they ignored it and focused on cloud (mobile)
You're right, I can't math. I'm American. 🤣 Stupid January always changing the year like an Xbox executive...
Yeah it was Sept 2020 to January 202-2! That the one year they we're hyping console. It was 2022 that they abandoned most mentions of anything console and were all about cloud cloud cloud.
It was the year after that that abk happened.
Regardless of how you name years in inferior calendar systems to the superior NESian calendar where years have 15 months, they started ignoring series xa little over a year past launch and turned entirely toward cloud before abk when they also started ignoring cloud too.
@Jenkinss I agree on most of that history, except they started ignoring the new Xbox about 14 months into launch when they pivoted hard to cloud being the only thing they talked about. Series was the future from September 2020 to January 2021. The rest of 2021 was all cloud only cloud everything new was all for cloud and touch controls for mobile. Did you know that a third of gp subscribers use only touch controls? Did you know that, console players? Did you? You who bought that scalped Xbox for $1200? Did you? 2021 was when they forgot series x exists. Before they had to tell the courts how bad their console sells and how nobody ever uses cloud anyway.
I think the real problem is they weren't actually lying to the court by the time they got there because they already spent a year selling cloud services that STILL don't exist.
@Moby As @Fiendish-Beaver said, right now console is GP, GP is console. It's not what MS wanted but it's what they have right now. About half of GP subs are console, and losing console subscribers would mean losing half the service membership. That's a no go. They can't make up those losses when they also have stalled on uptake outside console. Amazon will be a bump but not enough to both replace consoles AND grow past them. The good news of that is that it's why Ms really can't simply exit consoles. They really need to keep selling them to keep the gp numbers stable even if the console sells poorly. The bad is that they're going to keep experimenting wildly to find any way out of the quicksand and it's always the customers that'll be caught up the the turbulence.
It's not just game pass, gaming subscriptions just aren't growing much for anyone. Even Apple. The market just doesn't want them for whatever reason. But Ms desperation means being a customer gives you whiplash as the violently swing from one strategy to another without warning on hopes of finding the way out. And tbh it's only barely better on ps as they're more ambivalent than desperate.
@Jenkinss That may have been the turning point, but the problem was that the holiday sales crisis happened as a direct response to the years of neglect of the console from chasing mobile and only mobile. 2 years ago they'd have been sold out in less than 5 minutes at that price. And scalpers would have been selling them for double list price for a week. The fact that no one, not even scalpers could have cared less by this holiday is the result of the past 3 years the platform being so ignored and mistreated that the entire public lost any and all interest in it BEFORE the holiday.
It was a self fulfilling prophecy. MS declared Xbox doomed (or at least trivial and unimportant compared to the gold mine of mobile) years ago, ignored Xbox, chased mobile, then after years of that tried to give out Xboxes with Happy Meals and people couldn't even be bothered. I don't think Xbox was fighting a winnable battle, because Microsoft was busy getting the white flags embroidered in gold filigree since December 2020. They COULD have won, had they been allowed to arrive at the battlefield before it was converted into a minimall.
If they properly ran the platform from 2021-2023 demand would have been there. The lack of demand is a result of everything that happened from 2021 to 2023. We all had shiny new Xboxes and all we heard about was the future of cloud cloud cloud. They stopped talking about our Xboxes. And yet it wasn't the goal because that talk of cloud all but disappeared. And was replaced with abk. if you didn't actively follow xbox, you didn't know it existed.
Agree totally about Phil and Sara's demeanor. Although there's one other aspect of this, much as it all lines up is - it's not just Xbox. And it's not just the sales disaster or even mobile. This transformation seems to be going on across the whole of MS as well. As soon as Nadella went on the AI warpath he's had it consume everything - they've been downsizing Azure itself (!), they've flipped off Intel and AMD, they're forcing disasters into Windows, and flipping off the press, with even the AI leads having that same deer in headlights pose as Phil and Sarah. A lot of this is about Xbox, but some of it I think isn't all about Xbox, MS itself is undergoing some sort of internal Nadella lead metamorphosis from a caterpillar into a balrog.
At this point the choice comes down to if it's better to play in Sony's monopoly or Nvidias.
@HarmanSmith Yeah Sarah Bond mentioned the app store in that (awkward) interview months ago, so it's definitely on the near-term plans.
I still don't know how they have a plan to actually make it successful though. Why would users go out of their way to use a store other than the App Store they're already familiar with unless there's significant incentive to do so? And anyone that pays enough attention to MS gaming to know that the app store exists at all will also know all about MS's bait and switch tendencies and will probably just shrug and go back to Apple....which is why they were using Apple products to begin with....
@Jenkinss I agree, but also disagree about one key point: The decade of failure. We all know Matrick imploded the Xbox that was in 2013. But, it was on a very steady trajectory of rebuilding all the way up through the Series launch. It was selling well, it was selling out, it was catching up. What put them on the point there are on now is a mix of 1 - they launched a year or two too early to keep up with PS5, they weren't ready yet, games weren't ready yet. 2 - within a year of launch they suddenly pivoted away from paying attention to console and putting ALL focus on CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD, which as you said, was really all about MOBILE MOBILE MOBILE. Then 3 - As soon as ABK happened internally, all talk of cloud vanished completely, and the focus was abk abk abk which was really about mobile mobile mobile.
The REAL timeline as I see it is that Nadella gave Phil leave to rebuild Xbox back in 2014, they were doing ok with that, but by the time they launched the Series, the internal thinking shifted entirley, for corporate reasons, on how to get into the mobile pie. First with cloud, then with king. They were already done thinking about the console by late 2020 and actively ignored it and let it rot.
I do foresee a wave of stupidity killing even their publishing arm from here though. I think they will be so singularly focused on mobile and the endless money pit it represents, they will bank on that being a great windfall even if they have no solid footing in it. Nadella has made MS rich, not through great business plans but through smartly investing the money they ALREADY had in OTHER companies that turn profits. He's a stock broker sitting in the boardroom. Not a tech leader. He's a one-track-mind buffoon of a leader who latches onto one single concept with a death grip, and will focus on nothing except that one single concept, and will ride it into the volcano or until he sees something shinier from the corner of his eye. It's not just Xbox, it's the whole of MS he's doing that with.
Xbox used to be a gaming platform, until it took an entire of quiver of arrows to the knee. From it's own quiver. Using its own bow. And a crossbow. And a sawed-off Remington. And an MP40. And a steak knife. And a toothpick.
This should be a question on standardized aptitude testing.
"You're in charge of a large subscription service for entertainment content. For years your subscription numbers have failed to meet expectations. Shareholders are seeking strategies to meet projected growth. Will you:
A) Reduce prices to encourage new subscribership B) Run a marketing campaign with promotional pricing to raise awareness of the product and convince new potential customers to test the product C) Add additional package options that remove the main feature and tell no one what it includes D) Raise prices E) Remove incentives and rewards programs to discourage customer retention F) Announce that the included content will be part of competing company's offerings. G) Promise C, D, E, and F will not happen to allay customer concerns. H) A, B, and G I) C, D, E, F and G
Anyone who provides the correct answer, I, gets a full scholarship to the Harvard MBA undergraduate and post-graduate program from Microsoft Corporation. This kid smells like success and the milk that's been in the Xbox fridge since it launched.
@x3King84 I don't think they're "exiting" hardware, even in the UK, or even in Japan for that matter. Just as they don't have a strategy to succeed in console, I also don't think they have a strategy (yet anyway) to exit either. I think for now they'll keep kind of bumbling around always seeming directionless but present waiting to find the next big thing. The handheld is pretty certain to happen. And I'm sure there's at least one more generational console run (now if the sales collapse further on that next console, then it may really be the end.)
It just doesn't make for a pleasant user experience, and they definitely had so much more potential to make it great a few years back.
Some have said they're focusing on what makes money and cutting what doesn't, but, are they?
They just told us this week that Game Pass does not make enough money. They've been telling investors that GP does not meet growth expectations they outline. We know consoles haven't sold well outside NA and certain areas. If this rumor is true, it means they won't bother spending to promote the console on 2 continents that make up a large chunk of gaming. We know half the GP sales are on consoles, and the consoles aren't selling in most regions. Some have said it's about cloud, while cloud expansion has stalled, and during the ABK trials they admitted cloud is very unused and in the case of the UK has very little capacity at all. It's unlikely to be much different elsewhere. They abandoned their own cloud device. Meanwhile they're selling GP on Amazon's streaming device now, while running pretty light on capacity in general. That should be an indication of how popular they expect it to be.
So how exactly does a company that has cited massive growth as their objective focus on "where the money is" by raising prices on their under-performing sub simultaneously with releasing it to a new market (Amazon), cutting marketing of the console, that accounts for 50% of subs, in major markets, and focusing on "cloud" products that by their own admission they have low supply of and little demand for?
Cutting marketing costs (do they have any???) in non-existent markets isn't a bad idea. If it goes along with a strategy to increase market penetration for the product elsewhere. A console can't exist in America alone. But even if we were to consider that they were getting rid of console hardware, and focusing on where they succeed, it would still make no sense, as that would result in a drop of half their subscriptions, while adjusting prices to slow adoption from elsewhere.
One could say they want to just be a PC publisher, but, then, the Windows Store for games is mostly empty and misses most of the biggest titles and they seem to have no intention of fixing that.
I don't think they have a strategy to grow the console. And I also don't think they have a strategy to exit console and promote other services instead. I think they really just don't have a strategy. They got mobile which is all they really cared about as it's worth 1000% more than the rest. And they'll just keep bumbling through console and PC half-hearted as an also-ran. Then they'll complain they missed more targets to investors.
It's, again, not even that they lost to Sony. Sony's doing worse now than they were last gen, too. XB's customers aren't just leaving for competitors, they're just leaving the market. The market depended on mass casuals, but the casuals went to mobile. Sony's strategy is just soak the enthusiasts that remain dry. MS's strategy was find the casuals again. Neither seems to be a great strategy. And the top selling games are all from 10 years ago. In a lot of ways I think we're living the damage of last gen. Sony running away in wrong directions with the whole market while MS and Nintendo were out of the game licking their wounds broke the market in irreparable ways that only show up years later.
@shred5 Yeah, that's the other ridiculous thing. I don't even know the story of how AMD lost their fabs. And even Intel mostly just contracts TSMC for most of their chips, not even sure what their fabs even make now. How exactly did we end up with basically 4 companies that design chips, but only one company in Taiwan that actually makes them?
We talk about gaming being broken but I think gaming is a symptom. The whole tech industry is broken.
@OldGamer999 "Ford used to be amazing" yeah, back when the Atari was new. Went to pot in the 80s when the whole government designed Euro compact plastic car craze happened and the steel boats died. Same with gm. Japanese companies have ruled ever since. Didn't know the UK didn't get that memo like 35 years ago 😂
Problem with us companies is somewhere along the line "new" business thinking from the MBAs took over and three companies are run by activist investors and wall street maneuvering. Its not about the products anymore it's about the quarter. It's about liquidating every asset they have for instant return and acquiring new assets to liquidate. It's not symbiotic with consumers now but parasitic.
@Vaako007 " People need to get over the entitlement of cheap games that are nearly free on subsidized gamepass"
People are "entitled" to it because Microsoft told them that's why they should choose their console from the start, then changes it constantly. If a hotel advertises included breakfast and then you find out it's been downgraded to a Pop Tart on your pillow, then includes a surcharge for it, you may not trust that hotel again.
@shred5 Is infuriating they're now the largest market cap in Earth, even bigger than Microsoft and Apple. All on the AI chips. And Jensen already said they're not a graphics company but an accelerated computing company and the graphics thing was just "a strategic thing" Honestly graphics counts for so little of their revenue these days I doubt they even come crawling back again. They don't care anymore.
The problem is that even at their obscene prices, amd just follows in lock step, and at the same price point, Nvidia still ends up the better value because and at the same price point they're usually faster, cooler, and less power other than 4k raster with no rt. Intel is the last best hope for sane pricing and that's just a depressing comment.
Fake news. They never marketed the console in ANY region, so how could they stop, let alone only in certain areas? The only way they could market less is to market for PlayStation and Nintendo, which they in fact already do....
@PsBoxSwitchOwner Oh yeah, is been clear for a while that Phil isn't in control anymore, he's just a mouthpiece. He did really really good in that one interview and even had me convinced maybe he was back in control, but, then this what went right back on what he said. He's definitely not in control. And you can see the same exact kind of response from Bond that the AI engineers had when grilled by press over Recall. These uncomfortable scripted replies all have the same authors regardless of department.
If Phil were onboard all this he'd be the first out front defending it.
@PsBoxSwitchOwner That's exactly it! Sony basically went full PS3 launch this gen. MS could have swooped in and played "good cop" and taken the whole bag. And instead they went random other directions chasing bigger markets and let Sony have the whole pot without even trying. If they just dug in and said "$60 games, GP day 1, no price increases on subs till next gen" and they would have owned this generation. It's just bewildering watching how they took their almost 1:1 vs PS Series launch and just ignored it to go chase mobile during the key growth years. The moment the console was out of the gate they just pivoted to 100% cloud for mobile, then pivoted right from that to ABK. And now they have ABK and have no idea what they actually want.
I now believe their delays in clarifications are because they're letting the internet design their policy. They don't know what to do or what the product is so they'll watch the rumors and comments and craft the policy based on that.
We're probably 2 years out from new hardware, and we're still waiting for launch year to complete for Xbox, meanwhile Sony basically just gave up and sells accessories for their Fortnite box, and somehow MS messed up so bad that actually looks like the good platform.
I kind of feel like even before ABK, MS wasn't really happy with the consoles. Phil told Nadella they have to go 100% into it if they should keep xbox (console) - but it seems like we went through the refresh/pro of X1, and then the Series just kind of limped out with no real direction for it planned, and the corporate strategy just wanted to find a way to make "real" money from gaming, and not the piddly revenue that console gaming generates (and I don't even mean Sony's share, because we now know Sony doesn't really make much money on gaming either at their high costs and low margins.)
You KNOW Gaming's all effed up when Nvidia's Kilobuck video cards start looking like the smart buy.
@shred5 Agree with all your points on the industry at large, MS getting lost, and Sony pricing themselves out and getting lost as well. Although on the PC side it's not entirely sunnier, where Nvidia is almost a defacto monopoly on GPUs and we've seen prices reach the stratosphere and Nvidia pretty much telling everyone, including mfr partners to #dealwithit. $700 XX80 cards became $1200 XX80 cards. We'll ignore XX90, that's a different product half in a different market, sort of replacing dual card SLI, and competing in the professional/productivity market. But $600, 800, 1000 (formerly 1200) normal cards....and it'll only go up because Jensen declared that GPUs should cost more than consoles.
Meanwhile devs can't make a profit on games that push said hardware. The whole industry priced itself out of practicality.
Though I also think nearly EVERYBODY gets Microsoft (corp, not Xbox's) strategy wrong. The obsession with cloud was NEVER about cloud. It was about a backdoor in the the massive money pile that is mobile gaming. Cloud was their way to get their games on mobile and tap the bigger market. It's also why the push for cloud vanished the moment ABK talks started. They were getting King. They were getting mobile. They didn't need cloud anymore.
And with MS corp pushing their synergy onto Xbox I can 99% guarantee you exactly where they will get lost next gen already: They're going to make the next Xbox entirely about pushing AI/Copilot into the experience, and possibly their Qualcomm partnership. I gua-ran-tee you.
Comments 6,665
Re: FTC Calls Out Xbox's New 'Degraded' Game Pass Tier & Price Increases
@JayJ Unfortunately it's a different regulatory body for utilities and insurance separately. And they're mostly made up of revolving doors of the very executives of the very oligopolies - CFO of Allstate one year, PUC comissioner the next year, then CFO of State Farm a few years later...... No conflicts of interest there at all, nooooo......
FTC only has purview if one of them goes to buy another. But of course in those businesses one only buys another after the one is in bankruptcy protection and needs a buyer to float anyway.
TL;DR Everything's f-d up beyond repair, and while we wait for the inevitable and necessary nuclear armageddon required to fix it, we're going to fight tooth and nail to the brutal end for ethics and fairness in our video games we used to kill everyone in imaginary worlds to make us feel better so we don't have to do it IRL
Re: Sony PlayStation 'Regrettably Outspends Us', Says Xbox EMEA Marketing Boss
@x3King84 I feel like it doesn't take much skill for the rumors to be right, if there's a way for MS to damage their brand, they'll find it. If there's not a way, they'll create one that didn't exist before.
The really sad thing is they make a good product and then don't support it, don't market it, and then don't seem to care, they just let it float out there half alive and consider it good enough while they focus on something else. MS always seems to make a great product, but then lets it wither on the vine until it's forgotten. Zune, Winphone, they always have a good platform they just let dry out.
And it's made all the worse that PS is the alternative where the popularity isn't because it's a great product, but simply because it's already popular and manages to not become a bad product.
Re: Talking Point: Do You Think This Generation Will Be A Short One?
@somnambulance Very much like the Sega cycle where there were 3 back to back consoles. People lost faith that the purchase had any lasting power and just waited "for the next one." Nerds are used to "buy a new thing every few years." COnsumers and parents especially have the outlook of "I want the new XStationBox" "But you just got one 2 years ago!"
If you're going to sell dedicated games appliances, it had better well last a while.
Re: Talking Point: Do You Think This Generation Will Be A Short One?
We won't be able to determine how long the 9th generation will last until after it launches.
Until then I really like the new SSD I got for my Xbox Two, and my PS4 Pro Plus (White Edition) is really neato! Wonder what the PS4 Pro Plus (White Edition) (Rev. 2 2024 Edition) will be like?
@Fiendish-Beaver The problem with Xbox is that every time they wet their own bed, instead of trying to clean it up, they just go silent, ride out the market and then attempt to reboot the brand with a new hardware launch. Whereupon they soon after soil the clean sheets again and repeat the cycle. To be fair, though, Nintendo did the exact same thing with WiiU and it somehow became a resounding success. I still don't know how Nintendo went from "unwanted and rejected" to "hot ticket item" between Switch and WiiU, while selling the EXACT same games on them. I think most of it stems from the slick marketing of calling it a "hybrid console". People bought into a "new concept", while "Super Game Boy Advance with HDMI out" would not have flown off the shelves as much.
@Daleaf The problem is we've capped out. For 40 years gaming has been about selling leaps forward in graphics and density. We've now hit the ceiling where games are real-time rendered Pixar movies, and some are proper CGI with near-photorealism. There's no where left to go except more perfect lighting, more perfect shadows, more perfect surface interactions. Tiny things that aren't really perceptible to the consumer other than when comparing something new to something old. There's nowhere left to go to wow people, we're already at the state of "pretty close to live action photography" and you cant' get "more" impressive than "looks real." There's VR, but that's still a long way from being mainstream, if it ever is. That's really the only place left to go. And the leaps of wow still exist there.
Re: Sony PlayStation 'Regrettably Outspends Us', Says Xbox EMEA Marketing Boss
The only thing I'll give MS here is that, while they're quite clueless in refusing to actually market their products as though they learned nothing from WiiU, I'll grant them that Sony's got it equally wrong. They seem to spend more money marketing things than making things, and their "brand" is built more on their piles of money being used to brainwash people into blindly buying their brand than actually putting everything into their products, then making the consumer pay more to fund it. (300M for Spiderman 2 was not just money spent making the game.....the $10 price hike paid for more marketing.)
There's really got to be a happy medium between hoping "if you build it they will come" from MS and "Pay everyone to believe they have to have it now. Build it later. Then send the buyers the invoice for the marketing." of Sony. They're both opposite sides of the same coin.
@Ralizah I really don't know how people who are so clueless about their market can somehow mange to make so much money. I really don't understand how their brains process information over there.
@OldGamer999 If you haven't yet just do a deep dive on the media poopstorm around Windows Copilot Recall. It's not intentionally. They're really just this incompetent. In every division. Even their most important one. I do not understand how they're rich.
Re: Xbox Series X|S Console Sales Down A Third In Europe With 'Weaker Software Lineup' In 2024
@HonestHick 30 million core....yeah...and that's a problem. The casuals have mostly gone in other directions. Mobile. PC - I don't mean 4090 supertowers, I mean thin light laptops that play indies fine. That was the bulk of console sales. Gone. So it's just the core left. And they keep trying to just extract more and more money to make the economics work, and that can't last.
The problem with cloud is the economics are even worse than consoles. It's "cheap" now. But it needs MASSIVE numbers to work, and much higher pricing. Selling people streaming for $20/mo for now sounds hard to pushto casuals. When it hits the real prices of $89.99/mo for medium, $120.00/mo for high.....it's not going to fly. Unlesss they get those "billion" gamers.
The thing with game size is I suspect that most of the cost for for the game is sunk into the core content. So increasing the size with all that bloat costs little to add, and is why they do it, to increase the "value" because the core part already cost more than budget. I.e. trimming the fat probably won't bring their production costs down all that much. OTOH getting rid of -king fruit physics and paying attention to exact shadow casting from eyelashes might.
Ironically I'm going the other way. Huge fan of many many games, but especially with an interest in VR, I'm looking at worlds to get lost in and those are huge. Skyrim with 150 mods, Fo4 with the same, Flight sims, racing sims, NMS, Elite Dangerous, etc etc....not too many games to pick from but they're games you could spend years playing and not have hit all the content. (Or payed for it, DCS World combat sim has like $1400 of DLC available You buy each plane and map and carrier separately. But it's understandable because it's a true sim. To fly it you basically have to learn how to operate the real world vehicle. Every single switch in the cockpit functions properly, etc, so reading the real manual of the real vehicle is almost mandatory....so I can see why one plane is $50. It's cheaper that 14.3 million the real one costs.
Problem with console profitability is it's coming at the cost of just forever raising prices on the remaining customers. Eventually they push too far, to either make it unaffordable to too many, or to become too close to superior alternatives in PC.
Worldwide windows outage? Wow I've been using MS stuff all day and didn't even know there was an issue other than last night Xbox app saying Xbox stuff was down (but worked for me luckily.) Did the full windows updates and everything on 2 machines today!
But why would Windows itself BSOD from that? I definitely haven't seen on on several machines...that may be something else. Or something tied to your corporate security?
Re: Sony PlayStation 'Regrettably Outspends Us', Says Xbox EMEA Marketing Boss
So they can find $70B to buy ABK, but they can't afford some ad space during the olympics?
Maybe they should ask Copilot how to do it.
Re: FTC Calls Out Xbox's New 'Degraded' Game Pass Tier & Price Increases
Was waiting for this and this time, I'm glad to see it happened. FTC is 100% right here. MS lied point blank to regulators faces that they were not going to raise prices for this, and then pivoted the moment the teacher wasn't watching and did precisely that. They didn't even give it a year to PRETEND it wasn't related. Didn't even try to create plausible deniability. They just pivoted and did it right there. And not just a $1 increase, but 25% on ultimate, 50% on lowest tier, all ONE YEAR, immediately after saying to regulators they wouldn't.
I still believe this will bite them. Not Xbox. The next time MS finds themselves in front of FTC trying to buy some AI tech or cloud provider. This is an entire ammo crate to use against anything they say.
Re: Halo TV Show Cancelled By Paramount+ After Two Seasons
This show is the '93 Super Mario Bros. Movie for a new generation.
@themightyant " You can’t have 2 seasons of buildup to get to Halo in a Halo TV show."
But we had 7 seasons of buildup to get to Halo on Xbox.....
Re: Xbox Series X|S Console Sales Down A Third In Europe With 'Weaker Software Lineup' In 2024
@HonestHick It's both. Those games are a different market. It wasn't the market of single play games that switched to playing Fortnite, it's people that would have never played single play games that at least play Fortnite. It's more of a social media platform than a video game. It didn't replace "traditional games", it replaced mall rats hanging out near 5-7-9, and as there's a lot more mall rats than Final Fantasy nerds, the industry started caring only about their revenue. And at least they keep the digital food court from looking deserted.
But that's not the core issue, it's just masking it. The problem is MOST console sales were never to FF nerds, most console sales were to ultra casuals that buy two games ever, probably some puzzle game, or a sports game, or the like. Consoles were never about us even if the companies thought they were. Consoles were about the "non-gamers" that bought them for a game or two.
Those customers exited console gaming entirely. They never wanted a console they just wanted a Tetris thing and something with this years team on it. Without them console numbers would plummet, and publishers would panic. The social media players kind of replaced them, so numbers look stable, and those guys are more profitable, only because of whales.
Where the new crisis is is that for ALL of those markets we're getting to the point where hardware they already have can play the kinds of games they want to play, AND that hardware can then bring software to new markets much easier, because it's already there.
It's also cost. The most popular games are popular because they have one thing in common: They're free. In a world where the most popular things everyone else is doing cost....nothing.....who would buy an expensive box to play expensive games on them? The industry keeps telling us it costs too much, people keep saying games need to keep up with inflation........and they're all ignoring that the games everyone plays are free. THere's a reason everyone's playing them (except GTA, GTA people are special...very very special...) A $5 console and $1 games are still expensive compared to the most popular games. Yes, the whales pump in cash at 100x the rate purchasers do, but those games would collapse if all the free riders vanished.
The real problem for consoles is that in the world of modern general purpose computing hardware, you just don't need a console to accomplish the goal for all the non-enthusiast market anymore. Consoles managed to stay relevant by pushing bleeding edge graphics all the time, but that era is ending as the games to do that cost too much to make.
The market for dedicated games won't go away entirely, but then it gets split between those seeking budget (console) and those seeking performance (PC enthusiast), so the market then starts dividing itself. And as that happens the hardware subsidy razor and blades model fails. And if console has to keep raising prices to mach the falling demand, it'll continue to reduce demand by either pushing people down onto phones/laptops, or pushing them up into PC ("It's not THAT much more!")
But if the console industry is revolving around those few games, the console is obsoleting itself. Subsidized hardware can't thrive on being an onramp to a handful of games that already run on hardware everyone already has.
Re: Xbox Series X|S Console Sales Down A Third In Europe With 'Weaker Software Lineup' In 2024
@OldGamer999 Switch is a special case. It had no right to sell as well as it did, but the idea of portable gaming with HD graphics took the world by storm early and the momentum kept rolling. They'll hold onto that because Nintendo handhelds are Nintendo handhelds, but it will get challenging for Nintendo because if people's phones and laptops can kind of do the same things as a $350-400 switch 2.....will people choose to save money and use what they've got?
@GamingFan4Lyf @WhiteRabbit @JonBoyJ I don't disagree with you guys about PC being more expensive overall, people are lying when they say it's not, but at the same time that price is highly exaggerated. $3k will buy you an enthusiast class 4090 rig. Equivalent of a "Titan" back in the day or equivalent before that of doing 2 cards in SLI/Crossfire. Normal players just ignored that. You don't need an enthusiast class 4090 rig to compete with a flipping Series X and PS5. A 3060 slightly bests a Series X and PS5 and they're like $200. That 4090 rig will likely be relatively competitive to a PS6 bought 2-3 years early.
For a single-platform gamer, obviously console is like half the price. For a multiple-platform gamer though, the cost of both PS+XB+HDDs+subscriptions is easily more than a PC that outperforms either of them. You can best a Series X for $1300-1500 handily. You can equal a Series X for about $850-1150 depending on how you shop. Is it more expensive? Yes. Is it more performant? Yes (those console CPUs are garbage.) Is it a viable alternative for Consumer Bob that buys a console plugs it in? No. But it's not as extremely priced as perceived either.
Consoles at launch are a great bargain compared to their PC equivalents, but after a few years once you get into mid-gen the PC parts come down more favorably again, while the consoles, now, don't come down in price. And that doesn't discuss "pro" models that bring the console up to $1100+ on its own over the generation anyway. If it exists. Which it may not.
And the next consoles are absolutely going to be more expensive. Sony supposedly wanted to do 600 this generation but backed down after XSX was priced. Phil point blank said the subsidy on hardware is over, it doesn't work anymore and to expect maybe higher prices. They were losing $200 on each XSX AFAIK. Realistically? Next gen we're looking at $1200-1400 minimum to own both consoles. Plus additional HDDs for each, plus subscriptions (that keep jumping in price.) And maybe pro models that jack that up to double or more.
We're in a time gap here where PC parts are based on 2024 pricing. The consoles are based on 2019-2020 pre-inflationary pricing. They're itching to catch up, and when they do, it's going to be sticker shock in the console space, and those PC parts will start looking more appealing again. Even the Nvidia ones.
Re: Xbox Series X|S Console Sales Down A Third In Europe With 'Weaker Software Lineup' In 2024
@Vaako007 It depends on region. US, UK, Western Europe, formerly Japan were huge console territories. But they're the only ones. Huge chunks of the world including and especially China are pretty much 100% PC from the start. The consoles kind of have a built in legacy market from "1980s first world countries" but it clouds the real adoption elsewhere.
The flip side of why "console is dying" though, is that the market is going in a direction where average hardware with integrated graphics is "good enough" for the kinds of games most players are actually playing these days. Those new Snapdragon laptops were demo'ed running BG3 at 30fps. Sounds kind of decent as a console on a thin and light mini laptop.
I see the market kind of splitting where buying NO special hardware other than what they already have for normal life (laptop, desktop, phone, ipad whatever) is more than good enough to play most of the games they'd want to play so the casual console market withers, as average tech catches up to where console has been for decades. And then the enthusiast market looking to pay premium for more than what consoles ever offered on "gaming rigs." "Consoles" have been subsidized for 30 years by people that want to play Just Dance and Madden so that Nerdz can play Halo. The numbers crash as those people exit because their normal hardware plays that kind of thing fine.
That leaves a shrinking slice of market for dedicated consoles that are neither "already on your table for no additional cost" nor high performance like a custom rig. A market still exists, but if it keeps shrinking due to overlap with hardware people already have, at some point it stops sustaining itself. My Legion Z1 extreme runs FFXIV at 720p with FSR to 1600x1200 at 60fps. FF7R at 40-45fps. God of War 2018 at 60fps. Starfield at LFMAOLOLNOPE. Neither a "demanding" nor an "easy to drive" game. If I can do that on a handheld with "enthusiast" chip, we're getting close to the time where basically any laptop can run most normal games not designed to push hardware. Then do we need consoles still?
No, the casuals are never going to build E-ATX supertower rigs with RGB's beaming from every oriface with water cooling and a $1000 GPU that weighs more than a cinderblock and be "PC GAMER" nerds. But the point is they don't need to. The casuals can flip open their Acer eBlahBlahBlah 1000 notebook, install steam or go to the Xbox app and download Vampire Surviver just fine without spending hardware money or nerding out. Little Kitty Big City doesn't need 24gb VRAM with 340mm radiators hanging from the top. For the people that want to play Hellblade at 4k, there's big rigs for them to nerd out on.
Re: Xbox Series X|S Console Sales Down A Third In Europe With 'Weaker Software Lineup' In 2024
I said it in the push thread, but gaming has been pricing itself out of most markets. $500 consoles soon to be $600, 700. $70 games when even $60 was a lot. >$1000 GPUs. Subscriptions, services galore. And the games to match the hardware cost so much to make they can't make profits on making games to the size market that can afford the hardware/subs at a price they're willing to pay. It went from being a mainstream activity for everyone and anyone to have a box to play some games under their TV to this pricy hobby for dedicated hobbyists. Of course market will shrink. They didn't define the target price of the target market, they just built whatever seemed impressive and expected people would pay it. Meanwhile phones and PCs that everyone has are getting more and more capable of running games that aren't pushing hardware for the sake of pushing hardware.
@Pabpictu That's a big part of it where consoles once had their own media ecosystem, retail floor space, trading culture, grab a disc/cart, put it in the slot, play the game, that was designed for the hardware.
Now console games are mostly just ports of games designed for PC, with all the problems of PC games baked in, and migrated everyone over to the same digital ecosystem, patches, versions, now performance settings. The modern consoles groomed gamers for the wold of PC, and now can't figure out why people migrate to PC after.
@HonestHick Honestly I think it's a depressing condemnation of the state of the player base on consoles if the whole console ecosystem pretty much depends on a mediocre cringey game like GTA for it's entire sales cycle. If console is down to being all about GTA and Fortnite....it's definitely a....particular....market
Re: Xbox Adds Nvidia GeForce Now Integration To Its Game Pages
Expensive, but this kind of salvages the cloud use of game pass because Microsofts own streaming is kinda bad.
Every game should now have 2 buttons
*Play instantlyish on Xbox Cloud
*Play instantly on a good platform.
@Decimateh yeah,It's a PC gaming cloud sub (RTX 4080 rig or 4060 rig), so it's the PC version of Game Pass included here.
Re: Xbox Gaming On Amazon's Fire Stick Is Getting Mixed Feedback So Far
@x3King84 Following Xbox is like being a cat and chasing the laser. You just frantically jump from place to place to wherever the red dot moved, and every time you do, it's not there and it jumped somewhere else, and you end up looking pretty unintelligent in the process.
Though I still can't imagine on what planet they actually think selling a $20 subscription to stream 1080p games with high compression to the kind of people why buy Fire Sticks is actually going to be the move that takes them to new heights of market leadership in gaming. Bundling it with Prime Video at a discount? That would grow numbers. $20/mo to the kind of person that never thought to buy a console before? No.
I think next E3/SGF, Devolver Digital should just stick a camera in the Xbox boardroom. I'll be just as zany and satirical as all their other shows and cost them absolutely nothing.
@rustyduck @CutchuSlow It's just 8 hours for a single session, not 8 hours per day total. You can reconnect as many times a day as you want. Seems to be less about limiting play time and more about keeping people from hogging the servers idling and keeping other people from connecting. Like in MMOs and the very "social hangout" games like Fortnite that are more social media platform than video game where people will just hang out on the server all day. Can't imagine anybody actually PLAYING more than 8 hours non-stop with zero breaks other than the kids they find dead in internet cafes in Korea that are addicted to DOTA when their kidneys explode.
Re: Yes, Xbox Has Made A New Controller With Deadpool's Booty On The Back
So many jokes.
So many.
Re: Amazon Now Selling Fire Stick, Xbox Controller & Game Pass Ultimate Bundle
For just $80 + 240/yr + Prime membership, you, too, can enjoy the thrill of fuzzy compressed 720p-1080p medium latency gaming in nearly Xbox Series S quality!
I can see the appeal. GP subs are going to reach 1 billion gamers easy!
@themightyant Not at $20 a month it's not. Even Apple couldn't convince their acolytes to pay $10/mo for unlimited ad-free iOS games. If Apple couldn't get Apple faithful to part with $10 on an Apple, Microsoft sure as heck isn't going to get Amazon streamers to pay $20. The PRODUCT could do it. But, like PSVR2 and the (ironically technologically superior) Stadia, the price killed it before it launched.
@Mustoe "Still believe Microsoft have its sights set on traditional console hardware?"
You know how they are. After this fails to move the subscriber needle (and at the price, I believe it will fail to meet expectations by a long shot, it's priced completely wrong for the intended market) then they'll try fawning over the consoles again briefly. Then they'll move onto something else again.
Re: Amazon Prime Day 2024 - Best Deals On Xbox Consoles, Games, Accessories, Game Pass And More
Forget the sales, Ryan has a new portrait and since when is he not 12? We need a Talking Point for this.
Re: Xbox Confirms Next Three Game Pass Titles, Teases 'Another Update' Coming Soon
@Ricky-Spanish INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE
Re: Xbox Gaming On Amazon's Fire Stick Is Getting Mixed Feedback So Far
@rustyduck Yeah. Xbox may or may end up being ok long term if it goes the branded PC route, might even be good, but it's going to be an unpleasant roller coaster until we find out either way. Only options are sink or swim with the ship, jumping PS6 and hoping Sony doesn't ram the knife into your back if MS washes ashore. Or the streaming/rentals. Or just pony up for the real 40xx rig.
For me I think I'm kind of stuck having to go with the full rig, it's the "real" Xbox at this point, and for me, VR matters, and Sony's screwed up as bad as Xbox has on that front, so there's pretty much only one path.
I also like playing with kerosene and matches near large piles of money.
Re: Xbox Gaming On Amazon's Fire Stick Is Getting Mixed Feedback So Far
@rustyduck fwiw it's not a limit of 8 hours per day, it's a limit of an 8 hours continuous session. You can reconnect for another 8 hours if you get kicked out as much as you want, you just have to wait for any queue time again. I think it's meant to make sure "no lifers" don't prevent the queue from moving.
However it's actually 4080 rigs not 4090. Last time I looked it was 3090s so I assumed they upgraded to 4090, but apparently only 4080. Tbf though 4080 is still a decent upgrade from 3090 so it's still more value for the same money than it was. It's also only 200 a year if you buy 6mo increments. And 4080 is still a $1k card and at 200 that's still 6 years to pay for just the gpu that would be 2 generations obsolete in 6 years so still actually surprisingly great value of only because modern gpus are such poor value. Sad a deal at it appears it's actually bargain rental at the ridiculous prices of their cards, and that's still excluding the rest of the PC. A similar PC would be $400/year in 6 year installments. And you'd probably upgrade by then so goodbye wallet. (I personally still prefer hardware if course but....)
Re: Xbox Gaming On Amazon's Fire Stick Is Getting Mixed Feedback So Far
@101Force I didn't vote but I imagine most voters are voting on experience with the streaming service itself, which should be the same on fire stick (hopefully it's not WORSE than on PC and console!) I'm sure most of us subscribe to ultimate and have experience with cloud.
@CutchuSlow The Xbox app is hilarious. Some days the remote play button for console just disappears entirely. It freezes often when streaming too forcing a reboot at least on my legion too. And then there's the windows store 10 allowed devices that's different from the ms account 10 devices but hidden and if you log in to a pc the first time when it's full, is almost impossible to get to to recognize your licenses ever. It's horridly broken and always will be.
@AverageGamer "wait, you're wrong, Xbox fecked it all up way sooner than you said!" 😂
That's just depressing. I really can't comprehend how they make decisions. Everything they do is about maximizing that days revenue and never about actually building brands and products.
The quest support is hilarious. Who buys a vr headset to stream low quality pancake games on a blurry giant screen. I really don't understand why it exists. Meanwhile Meta has their own sub for 30% of the price for their actual vr catalogue.... Or just use virtual desktop/airlink and stream from a better provider that actually uses the quests resolution.... 🤣
Re: Xbox Gaming On Amazon's Fire Stick Is Getting Mixed Feedback So Far
@OldGamer999 Yeah I mean the irony is everyone says that the console doesn't matter because it's not the biggest part of Xbox but on reality console is still the only good part. Cloud is the worst in the business, PC store is empty, GP is stagnant. The console is actually pretty good relatively still, but suffering from their lack of focus.
Re: Xbox Gaming On Amazon's Fire Stick Is Getting Mixed Feedback So Far
@IOI Yep exactly that. Though 2022 was when they ignored console to focus only on cloud, downplaying the console and insisting the future is it's cloud. Then when they started abk is when they also abandoned cloud.
They want to be in every industry and as a result end up in none..
Except venture capital.
Re: Xbox Gaming On Amazon's Fire Stick Is Getting Mixed Feedback So Far
@OldGamer999 Yeah and it's not JUST Xbox. I think the corporate strategy right now is that anything that doesn't make as much money as AI and doesn't spur investment like AI simply doesn't matter.
Largely I think they're running scared that someone else's AI will obsolete them as a whole and trying to stay ahead of it while actually causing the real damage themselves.
Re: Xbox Gaming On Amazon's Fire Stick Is Getting Mixed Feedback So Far
@OldGamer999 LOL nope.... They definitely MARKETED cloud the hardest, they were at the front of marketing of the whole idea...and then they basically abandoned it. Abandoned their own streaming stick. And now sold it to an Amazon partnership while still leaving it in mothballs.
Back in 2022 they were really doing well. The launched the Series X hardware blades, performance was good, wait times were low, usually. Cloud was looking up. They were going to sell their streaming stick. They were hyping pending features for cloud.
Then around the time they started the ABK negotiations behind the scenes, they cancelled the streaming stick, they stopped expanding cloud much (remember the hearings saying UK only had cloud capacity for like 100k people?) the wait times increased, they doubled server capacity by splitting the series X blades into running 2-3 Series S instances instead, the stream quality stayed at 1080p forever with what appears to be very low bitrate streams, while even freaking Sony managed to jump to 4k after their early poor showing of PSNow. Xbox may well be the very WORST streaming service out there other than the really small outfits that Nintendo likes to use for things like Control.
Cloud streaming isn't a joke. Game Pass Ultimate Cloud is. It feels like an abandoned product left in alpha from 2 years ago. Why they're now decided to push it through Amazon like it's their best foot forward I have no idea, unless Amazon approached them and said "we reaaaally wanna push gaming on our hardware, can we include you, also, here's a Tomb raider deal for 2026."
So Microsoft is in gaming. They have a console they kind of half support. They have a cloud service they pushed over their console for a year that they less than half support. They have a PC storefront that's missing most of the games sold in the industry.
I honestly don't know what they actually have that's complete? Nothing as far as I can tell. They now have mobile, how much you wanna bet the mobile store is broken and incomplete for years until people forget about it?
Standard MS. Introduce a product. Hype what it will someday be. Then abandon it partway through and move onto something else, leaving the previous product lingering until it dies, or becomes a ubiquitous necessity on its own.
Nadella is a plague. He's abandoned the entire company behind the bet with AI replacing everything. Even Azure is suffering next to AWS.
Re: Xbox Gaming On Amazon's Fire Stick Is Getting Mixed Feedback So Far
@MikeOrator Exactly!
@OldGamer999 Other streaming is better. It's only Xbox streaming that's that bad. Which is just shocking as they've been pushing cloud the hardest but have the worst product to offer. Sony and Nvidia's streaming is leagues better. Stadia was leagues better. It's not the cloud sucks. It's just Xbox streaming that sucks. It was briefly good years ago. But like the console itself, they don't seem to actually care about their streaming anymore, they've cut every possible corner, while their competitors improved. I don't get MS. They operate like they're going bankrupt all the time while their cap keeps rising. It's like Kmart in the 90's. They'd rather invest in other companies than their own and then can't figure out why they're losing.
Re: Xbox Gaming On Amazon's Fire Stick Is Getting Mixed Feedback So Far
@MikeOrator Absolutely right. Everyone is tying cloud to the most expensive tier, when it should be the cheapest tier. If you're trying to get casuals with a fire stick for TV to try out some core gaming, locking it behind a $20/mo sub is not the right way to do that. What they need more than anything is to get it BUNDLED with a provider or TV service. Disney Plus, Comcast cable....put it in front of people as part of something else.
Re: Xbox Gaming On Amazon's Fire Stick Is Getting Mixed Feedback So Far
FFS, Microsoft. You have a >$1T market cap. Why are you STILL behaving like a Kickstarter company with virtually every consumer product you ever have?
How can you possibly be surpassed by 10 year backward Sony, and fake-it-till-you-make-it Nvidia? F--ing HOW?
Build the product. THEN sell it. It's not difficult. Why are you signing deals with Amazon for mass distribution BEFORE actually building the infrastructure? Did you run out of money? Did your underwater datacenters run out of power before the sharks broke through?
Cloud could be great. Amazon stick could be great. Not perfect but great. But no, they short change the Xbox servers, split the X servers into multiple S sessions, restrict the output to 1080p, then sell it mass market. It's like they try to get it wrong.
@rustyduck The difference with GeForce Now, is for $240 a year you're renting a 4090 that costs $1600-2300 market price, in the cloud. They're letting you play your owned games on their 4090 for $240 a year. That's actually not bad because it would take 6 years of subscribing at that rate to pay for even the cheapest 4090, and by then the 5090 and probably 6090 will be out, the fans on your 4090 would probably go bad, and that doesn't even consider the cost of the rest of the rig to support it.
So bad as it sounds, compared to building a 4090 rig, they're offering a decent deal at $240 a year to rent the hardware, if the stream works well for you. Renting that hardware in the cloud is thus SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than buying it. You're also not using the 500-950W to power it (full rig not just GPU) for 6 years which probably pays for a year of sub in some territories.
Game pass lets you rent a fuzzy streamed Series S.....for the same price.....It used to be better before it was worse. When they launched X servers you got X rendering. Then they doubled capacity by splitting each X server into 2 S's.
GFN actually is significantly valuable for what it offers where it works well.
Re: Analysts Claim Xbox Game Pass Price Hikes Were 'Inevitable', And That An Ad-Tier Could Be Next
@101Force I think your comment needs to be tattooed on the forehead of every single individual that may possibly pass anywhere near Wall Street.
The entire business world seems to not understand their metrics and seems entirely unaware of this phenomenon. Somehow they haven't figure out that their costs went up 35%, their prices went up 40%, but they did not grant 40% pay increases to their employees across the board.....and that probably explains their numbers.
Bottom line is unless everyone in the us is making 40% more than than they were for the same job in 2019, everyone has radically less buying power. And go figure, virtually NO ONE has gained anywhere close to that much, nor will they.
Somehow the financial geniuses the lord over us have yet to solve that simple math problem. I do wonder what their vaunted graduate degrees from ivy league schools provided by the connections their daddies had taught them.
Re: Analysts Claim Xbox Game Pass Price Hikes Were 'Inevitable', And That An Ad-Tier Could Be Next
It makes sense, and definitely introduces a shakeup in the game sales model that's, honestly, hurting badly. On one hand advertising is probably better than "pay to win" predatory models. On the other hand the whole concept is going back to the future, where gaming turns into 1990's broadcast radio and TV, and I expect even paying customers (or high paying customers) won't escape the ads without "upgrading" to a to-exist extreme priced version, as the trend on streaming TV has been that providers don't actually want you to pay, because the advertising is worth more than all but the highest tier subs.
Remember when US cable television's big claim to fame was "ad free" vs broadcast? Then somewhere along the line you started paying $150 a month and getting more ads than broadcast? Yeah....
I can see it introducing gaming to a new market, which is exactly what they've been trying to do, and arguably what gaming needs more than anything. However, I can also see the entire ecosystem becoming miserable as a result for the existing market as "gaming as you know it' transforms into an ad sponsored "content" platform.
The other problem with this is that the subs work when what you're paying for is a holistic package. Jacking prices because they decided to include one particular huge game that many subscribers might have less than zero interest in just crushes the value of the package.
@Dodoo The problem is MS isn't doing it in small increments. Spotify raised my price after 2 or 3 years....by one dollar. Tidal reduced my price by $9. YT Red/Premium/Whatever raised it by $2 after several years.
Meanwhile MS jacked the price 25% in a single year. Forgetting JND is the problem here. 25% should have taken 5 years. Not 1.
The problem we have now is by all indications they're in a phase where they don't know how to make the numbers get where they want and it's clear they're going to keep messing with the pricing and tiers and services and value for an indefinite period of time, so have no long term understanding of what the service will be. Making your sub this "lets see what it is next month" plan isn't a great strategy for a sub.
Honestly, I was looking over Quest 3 software the other day and noticed they have a subscription service themselves.....$8/mo or $60 a year. If into VR, that kinda seems like a better buy than GP right now.
Re: Microsoft Rewards Is Making Big Changes Relating To Xbox Game Pass
@Jenkinss actually now that I think about it more. It was Halo. The Challenger-esqe launch of Halo Infinite is the day Series X burned up in reentry. Within months they ignored it and focused on cloud (mobile)
Re: Talking Point: If You Had To Limit Yourself To Three Xbox Games, What Would They Be?
"if you had to limit yourself to just 3 Xbox games"
This is just paid market research for Xbox Game Pass Standard isn't it? 😂
Re: Microsoft Rewards Is Making Big Changes Relating To Xbox Game Pass
You're right, I can't math. I'm American. 🤣 Stupid January always changing the year like an Xbox executive...
Yeah it was Sept 2020 to January 202-2! That the one year they we're hyping console. It was 2022 that they abandoned most mentions of anything console and were all about cloud cloud cloud.
It was the year after that that abk happened.
Regardless of how you name years in inferior calendar systems to the superior NESian calendar where years have 15 months, they started ignoring series xa little over a year past launch and turned entirely toward cloud before abk when they also started ignoring cloud too.
Re: Microsoft Rewards Is Making Big Changes Relating To Xbox Game Pass
@Jenkinss I agree on most of that history, except they started ignoring the new Xbox about 14 months into launch when they pivoted hard to cloud being the only thing they talked about. Series was the future from September 2020 to January 2021. The rest of 2021 was all cloud only cloud everything new was all for cloud and touch controls for mobile. Did you know that a third of gp subscribers use only touch controls? Did you know that, console players? Did you? You who bought that scalped Xbox for $1200? Did you? 2021 was when they forgot series x exists. Before they had to tell the courts how bad their console sells and how nobody ever uses cloud anyway.
I think the real problem is they weren't actually lying to the court by the time they got there because they already spent a year selling cloud services that STILL don't exist.
Re: 'Tipster' Suggests Xbox Will Stop Marketing Consoles In Certain Markets
@Moby As @Fiendish-Beaver said, right now console is GP, GP is console. It's not what MS wanted but it's what they have right now. About half of GP subs are console, and losing console subscribers would mean losing half the service membership. That's a no go. They can't make up those losses when they also have stalled on uptake outside console. Amazon will be a bump but not enough to both replace consoles AND grow past them. The good news of that is that it's why Ms really can't simply exit consoles. They really need to keep selling them to keep the gp numbers stable even if the console sells poorly. The bad is that they're going to keep experimenting wildly to find any way out of the quicksand and it's always the customers that'll be caught up the the turbulence.
It's not just game pass, gaming subscriptions just aren't growing much for anyone. Even Apple. The market just doesn't want them for whatever reason. But Ms desperation means being a customer gives you whiplash as the violently swing from one strategy to another without warning on hopes of finding the way out. And tbh it's only barely better on ps as they're more ambivalent than desperate.
Re: Microsoft Rewards Is Making Big Changes Relating To Xbox Game Pass
@Jenkinss That may have been the turning point, but the problem was that the holiday sales crisis happened as a direct response to the years of neglect of the console from chasing mobile and only mobile. 2 years ago they'd have been sold out in less than 5 minutes at that price. And scalpers would have been selling them for double list price for a week. The fact that no one, not even scalpers could have cared less by this holiday is the result of the past 3 years the platform being so ignored and mistreated that the entire public lost any and all interest in it BEFORE the holiday.
It was a self fulfilling prophecy. MS declared Xbox doomed (or at least trivial and unimportant compared to the gold mine of mobile) years ago, ignored Xbox, chased mobile, then after years of that tried to give out Xboxes with Happy Meals and people couldn't even be bothered. I don't think Xbox was fighting a winnable battle, because Microsoft was busy getting the white flags embroidered in gold filigree since December 2020. They COULD have won, had they been allowed to arrive at the battlefield before it was converted into a minimall.
If they properly ran the platform from 2021-2023 demand would have been there. The lack of demand is a result of everything that happened from 2021 to 2023. We all had shiny new Xboxes and all we heard about was the future of cloud cloud cloud. They stopped talking about our Xboxes. And yet it wasn't the goal because that talk of cloud all but disappeared. And was replaced with abk. if you didn't actively follow xbox, you didn't know it existed.
Agree totally about Phil and Sara's demeanor. Although there's one other aspect of this, much as it all lines up is - it's not just Xbox. And it's not just the sales disaster or even mobile. This transformation seems to be going on across the whole of MS as well. As soon as Nadella went on the AI warpath he's had it consume everything - they've been downsizing Azure itself (!), they've flipped off Intel and AMD, they're forcing disasters into Windows, and flipping off the press, with even the AI leads having that same deer in headlights pose as Phil and Sarah. A lot of this is about Xbox, but some of it I think isn't all about Xbox, MS itself is undergoing some sort of internal Nadella lead metamorphosis from a caterpillar into a balrog.
At this point the choice comes down to if it's better to play in Sony's monopoly or Nvidias.
Re: Microsoft Rewards Is Making Big Changes Relating To Xbox Game Pass
@HarmanSmith Yeah Sarah Bond mentioned the app store in that (awkward) interview months ago, so it's definitely on the near-term plans.
I still don't know how they have a plan to actually make it successful though. Why would users go out of their way to use a store other than the App Store they're already familiar with unless there's significant incentive to do so? And anyone that pays enough attention to MS gaming to know that the app store exists at all will also know all about MS's bait and switch tendencies and will probably just shrug and go back to Apple....which is why they were using Apple products to begin with....
Re: Microsoft Rewards Is Making Big Changes Relating To Xbox Game Pass
@Jenkinss I agree, but also disagree about one key point: The decade of failure. We all know Matrick imploded the Xbox that was in 2013. But, it was on a very steady trajectory of rebuilding all the way up through the Series launch. It was selling well, it was selling out, it was catching up. What put them on the point there are on now is a mix of 1 - they launched a year or two too early to keep up with PS5, they weren't ready yet, games weren't ready yet. 2 - within a year of launch they suddenly pivoted away from paying attention to console and putting ALL focus on CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD, which as you said, was really all about MOBILE MOBILE MOBILE. Then 3 - As soon as ABK happened internally, all talk of cloud vanished completely, and the focus was abk abk abk which was really about mobile mobile mobile.
The REAL timeline as I see it is that Nadella gave Phil leave to rebuild Xbox back in 2014, they were doing ok with that, but by the time they launched the Series, the internal thinking shifted entirley, for corporate reasons, on how to get into the mobile pie. First with cloud, then with king. They were already done thinking about the console by late 2020 and actively ignored it and let it rot.
I do foresee a wave of stupidity killing even their publishing arm from here though. I think they will be so singularly focused on mobile and the endless money pit it represents, they will bank on that being a great windfall even if they have no solid footing in it. Nadella has made MS rich, not through great business plans but through smartly investing the money they ALREADY had in OTHER companies that turn profits. He's a stock broker sitting in the boardroom. Not a tech leader. He's a one-track-mind buffoon of a leader who latches onto one single concept with a death grip, and will focus on nothing except that one single concept, and will ride it into the volcano or until he sees something shinier from the corner of his eye. It's not just Xbox, it's the whole of MS he's doing that with.
Re: Microsoft Rewards Is Making Big Changes Relating To Xbox Game Pass
Xbox used to be a gaming platform, until it took an entire of quiver of arrows to the knee. From it's own quiver. Using its own bow. And a crossbow. And a sawed-off Remington. And an MP40. And a steak knife. And a toothpick.
This should be a question on standardized aptitude testing.
"You're in charge of a large subscription service for entertainment content. For years your subscription numbers have failed to meet expectations. Shareholders are seeking strategies to meet projected growth. Will you:
A) Reduce prices to encourage new subscribership
B) Run a marketing campaign with promotional pricing to raise awareness of the product and convince new potential customers to test the product
C) Add additional package options that remove the main feature and tell no one what it includes
D) Raise prices
E) Remove incentives and rewards programs to discourage customer retention
F) Announce that the included content will be part of competing company's offerings.
G) Promise C, D, E, and F will not happen to allay customer concerns.
H) A, B, and G
I) C, D, E, F and G
Anyone who provides the correct answer, I, gets a full scholarship to the Harvard MBA undergraduate and post-graduate program from Microsoft Corporation. This kid smells like success and the milk that's been in the Xbox fridge since it launched.
Re: 'Tipster' Suggests Xbox Will Stop Marketing Consoles In Certain Markets
@x3King84 I don't think they're "exiting" hardware, even in the UK, or even in Japan for that matter. Just as they don't have a strategy to succeed in console, I also don't think they have a strategy (yet anyway) to exit either. I think for now they'll keep kind of bumbling around always seeming directionless but present waiting to find the next big thing. The handheld is pretty certain to happen. And I'm sure there's at least one more generational console run (now if the sales collapse further on that next console, then it may really be the end.)
It just doesn't make for a pleasant user experience, and they definitely had so much more potential to make it great a few years back.
Re: 'Tipster' Suggests Xbox Will Stop Marketing Consoles In Certain Markets
Some have said they're focusing on what makes money and cutting what doesn't, but, are they?
They just told us this week that Game Pass does not make enough money. They've been telling investors that GP does not meet growth expectations they outline. We know consoles haven't sold well outside NA and certain areas. If this rumor is true, it means they won't bother spending to promote the console on 2 continents that make up a large chunk of gaming. We know half the GP sales are on consoles, and the consoles aren't selling in most regions. Some have said it's about cloud, while cloud expansion has stalled, and during the ABK trials they admitted cloud is very unused and in the case of the UK has very little capacity at all. It's unlikely to be much different elsewhere. They abandoned their own cloud device. Meanwhile they're selling GP on Amazon's streaming device now, while running pretty light on capacity in general. That should be an indication of how popular they expect it to be.
So how exactly does a company that has cited massive growth as their objective focus on "where the money is" by raising prices on their under-performing sub simultaneously with releasing it to a new market (Amazon), cutting marketing of the console, that accounts for 50% of subs, in major markets, and focusing on "cloud" products that by their own admission they have low supply of and little demand for?
Cutting marketing costs (do they have any???) in non-existent markets isn't a bad idea. If it goes along with a strategy to increase market penetration for the product elsewhere. A console can't exist in America alone. But even if we were to consider that they were getting rid of console hardware, and focusing on where they succeed, it would still make no sense, as that would result in a drop of half their subscriptions, while adjusting prices to slow adoption from elsewhere.
One could say they want to just be a PC publisher, but, then, the Windows Store for games is mostly empty and misses most of the biggest titles and they seem to have no intention of fixing that.
I don't think they have a strategy to grow the console. And I also don't think they have a strategy to exit console and promote other services instead. I think they really just don't have a strategy. They got mobile which is all they really cared about as it's worth 1000% more than the rest. And they'll just keep bumbling through console and PC half-hearted as an also-ran. Then they'll complain they missed more targets to investors.
It's, again, not even that they lost to Sony. Sony's doing worse now than they were last gen, too. XB's customers aren't just leaving for competitors, they're just leaving the market. The market depended on mass casuals, but the casuals went to mobile. Sony's strategy is just soak the enthusiasts that remain dry. MS's strategy was find the casuals again. Neither seems to be a great strategy. And the top selling games are all from 10 years ago. In a lot of ways I think we're living the damage of last gen. Sony running away in wrong directions with the whole market while MS and Nintendo were out of the game licking their wounds broke the market in irreparable ways that only show up years later.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@shred5 Yeah, that's the other ridiculous thing. I don't even know the story of how AMD lost their fabs. And even Intel mostly just contracts TSMC for most of their chips, not even sure what their fabs even make now. How exactly did we end up with basically 4 companies that design chips, but only one company in Taiwan that actually makes them?
We talk about gaming being broken but I think gaming is a symptom. The whole tech industry is broken.
Re: Rumour: Day One Releases Delayed On A 'Case-By-Case Basis' For Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
@OldGamer999 "Ford used to be amazing" yeah, back when the Atari was new. Went to pot in the 80s when the whole government designed Euro compact plastic car craze happened and the steel boats died. Same with gm. Japanese companies have ruled ever since. Didn't know the UK didn't get that memo like 35 years ago 😂
Problem with us companies is somewhere along the line "new" business thinking from the MBAs took over and three companies are run by activist investors and wall street maneuvering. Its not about the products anymore it's about the quarter. It's about liquidating every asset they have for instant return and acquiring new assets to liquidate. It's not symbiotic with consumers now but parasitic.
@Vaako007 " People need to get over the entitlement of cheap games that are nearly free on subsidized gamepass"
People are "entitled" to it because Microsoft told them that's why they should choose their console from the start, then changes it constantly. If a hotel advertises included breakfast and then you find out it's been downgraded to a Pop Tart on your pillow, then includes a surcharge for it, you may not trust that hotel again.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@shred5 Is infuriating they're now the largest market cap in Earth, even bigger than Microsoft and Apple. All on the AI chips. And Jensen already said they're not a graphics company but an accelerated computing company and the graphics thing was just "a strategic thing" Honestly graphics counts for so little of their revenue these days I doubt they even come crawling back again. They don't care anymore.
The problem is that even at their obscene prices, amd just follows in lock step, and at the same price point, Nvidia still ends up the better value because and at the same price point they're usually faster, cooler, and less power other than 4k raster with no rt. Intel is the last best hope for sane pricing and that's just a depressing comment.
Re: 'Tipster' Suggests Xbox Will Stop Marketing Consoles In Certain Markets
Fake news. They never marketed the console in ANY region, so how could they stop, let alone only in certain areas? The only way they could market less is to market for PlayStation and Nintendo, which they in fact already do....
Re: Rumour: Day One Releases Delayed On A 'Case-By-Case Basis' For Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
@PsBoxSwitchOwner We changed our mind and we're still right.
-America
Re: Rumour: Day One Releases Delayed On A 'Case-By-Case Basis' For Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
@PsBoxSwitchOwner Oh yeah, is been clear for a while that Phil isn't in control anymore, he's just a mouthpiece. He did really really good in that one interview and even had me convinced maybe he was back in control, but, then this what went right back on what he said. He's definitely not in control. And you can see the same exact kind of response from Bond that the AI engineers had when grilled by press over Recall. These uncomfortable scripted replies all have the same authors regardless of department.
If Phil were onboard all this he'd be the first out front defending it.
Re: Rumour: Day One Releases Delayed On A 'Case-By-Case Basis' For Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
@PsBoxSwitchOwner That's exactly it! Sony basically went full PS3 launch this gen. MS could have swooped in and played "good cop" and taken the whole bag. And instead they went random other directions chasing bigger markets and let Sony have the whole pot without even trying. If they just dug in and said "$60 games, GP day 1, no price increases on subs till next gen" and they would have owned this generation. It's just bewildering watching how they took their almost 1:1 vs PS Series launch and just ignored it to go chase mobile during the key growth years. The moment the console was out of the gate they just pivoted to 100% cloud for mobile, then pivoted right from that to ABK. And now they have ABK and have no idea what they actually want.
I now believe their delays in clarifications are because they're letting the internet design their policy. They don't know what to do or what the product is so they'll watch the rumors and comments and craft the policy based on that.
We're probably 2 years out from new hardware, and we're still waiting for launch year to complete for Xbox, meanwhile Sony basically just gave up and sells accessories for their Fortnite box, and somehow MS messed up so bad that actually looks like the good platform.
I kind of feel like even before ABK, MS wasn't really happy with the consoles. Phil told Nadella they have to go 100% into it if they should keep xbox (console) - but it seems like we went through the refresh/pro of X1, and then the Series just kind of limped out with no real direction for it planned, and the corporate strategy just wanted to find a way to make "real" money from gaming, and not the piddly revenue that console gaming generates (and I don't even mean Sony's share, because we now know Sony doesn't really make much money on gaming either at their high costs and low margins.)
You KNOW Gaming's all effed up when Nvidia's Kilobuck video cards start looking like the smart buy.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@shred5 Agree with all your points on the industry at large, MS getting lost, and Sony pricing themselves out and getting lost as well. Although on the PC side it's not entirely sunnier, where Nvidia is almost a defacto monopoly on GPUs and we've seen prices reach the stratosphere and Nvidia pretty much telling everyone, including mfr partners to #dealwithit. $700 XX80 cards became $1200 XX80 cards. We'll ignore XX90, that's a different product half in a different market, sort of replacing dual card SLI, and competing in the professional/productivity market. But $600, 800, 1000 (formerly 1200) normal cards....and it'll only go up because Jensen declared that GPUs should cost more than consoles.
Meanwhile devs can't make a profit on games that push said hardware. The whole industry priced itself out of practicality.
Though I also think nearly EVERYBODY gets Microsoft (corp, not Xbox's) strategy wrong. The obsession with cloud was NEVER about cloud. It was about a backdoor in the the massive money pile that is mobile gaming. Cloud was their way to get their games on mobile and tap the bigger market. It's also why the push for cloud vanished the moment ABK talks started. They were getting King. They were getting mobile. They didn't need cloud anymore.
And with MS corp pushing their synergy onto Xbox I can 99% guarantee you exactly where they will get lost next gen already: They're going to make the next Xbox entirely about pushing AI/Copilot into the experience, and possibly their Qualcomm partnership. I gua-ran-tee you.