@HarmanSmith Absolutely agree all around. And yeah, actually the Windows Store as a whole is just dreadful. Play Anywhere could have been the killer feature, but it's so barren. Most publishers games don't support it. Some, like Square seem to randomly have some games (DQXI, Octopath, Balan (lol)) that support it, and others (anything FF) that don't. And many publishers/major games (Bamco/From/Elden Ring) that don't exist on the Windows store even to buy Windows only games. The whole thing feels incomplete. I ended up buying a few MS games on Steam for my Ally/Legion because of that mess....it's a pity.
It really was set up to be a great platform, but took so many wrong turns at so many key points. Though, to be fair to Xbox management, I think things really started going wrong when MS corporate decided what they really wanted was mobile. For a critical year of the Series X they focused on nothing but cloud to try to get GP into mobile hands to get part of mobile gaming instead of on the console. And then few the two years after that they focused on nothing but ABK to get King instead of the console. Then this year they remembered the console exists and seem to be bent on exploiting console customers to pay for the transition to mobile.
@PsBoxSwitchOwner Ironically it was......Activision.....that was the first to raise to $70. Followed by 2K. But it was Sony that normalized it.
What really irritates me is MS's constant changing positions. They took a public stance that they believed in the $60 game. People believed that strategy. Then when they actually released games they switched to $70. And oh what a game to do it on.
@HonestHick MS has always made better hardware than software. It's weird. They're a software company but their software is terrible. They actually make fantastic hardware and always have, but nobody ever buys it because they have no marketing talent. I can't think of any generation of MS hardware going back to the 90's and the original scroll wheel, a Microsoft creation, and those indestructible mice, that was anything short of excellent. But it was accompanied by Windows 95.....
The only thing you can count on with MS is whenever they have a great thing going, which is often, they'll destroy it as fast as possible.
@GuyinPA75 Absolutely, Nadella has been a disaster. Gates was bad. Ballmer seemed worse. Nadella has been a disaster. Yes, Wall street loves him. Financial mags love him. Investors love him. But he's trading the company's stability for short term investor love. And worse, he's a compulsive liar. I comes naturally to him. It's always been his MO to say things that sound good, and come across 100% genuine and sincere, then do the exact opposite moments later. Were he not a corporate finance guy he'd probably be behind bars.
That's a huge part of it but I think only one part of it. They needed more games to keep the subs appealing, and they absolutely could have bought in studios to keep that need up and manage the service. And less than ironically, studios like Tango making smaller viral hits to give the service shots of relevance were a huge key to doing so.
The problem isn't so much that they didn't plan for GP. The problem isn't that they bought studios. The problem is WHO they bought and why. They didn't buy ABK to get content to fit into Game Pass to better sustain subscription numbers. And ABK being overwhelmingly financially tied up in generating one single game annually was a very costly purchase, that served almost no value to sustaining the GP service.
What went wrong is they bought ABK, a MASSIVE money sink into a single game that doesn't really help their sub, because the only real goal was to tap into the mobile gaming market that's worth 50x what all of Xbox is worth, and King was up for sale. So they bought King to get MICROSOFT (not Xbox) into the mobile gaming revenue cut to better level their playing field with rival APPLE (not Sony), on a quarterly earnings level. Having to absorb Activision and CoD is a side effect generated by doing so, and if doing so undermines the entire fundamental business stability of Game Pass and collapses it, doesn't matter, MSFT now tapped a key revenue stream controlled by AAPL, and it only cost them Game Pass to do it.
That's the subtext everyone misses. We're quick to blame Xbox for messing up, and they have, but that's only part of what happened. The real story is that Xbox was offered as sacrifice and Xbox's customers as collateral in order to buy King to tap into a market Apple controlled and MS was missing out. If Game Pass were the business plan, ABK would not have been their acquisition. It's a bad fit for GP, and as we see, fundamentally breaks the model. But that wasn't the goal. Mobile was the goal, and Microsoft got it. If it broke Game Pass and the console business so be it. It's worth more.
@Fiendish-Beaver Because a product and service needs a policy. If there is not an actual policy, what exactly is anyone buying? Game Pass until now had a policy. An assortment of games, with all Microsoft published titles on the service day one. Ultimate has a policy. An assortment of games selected monthly, with all Microsoft published titles on the service day one.
Standard has no policy. "Some games, and maybe some Microsoft ones, maybe not, not day one, probably, but eventually, maybe, maybe not, not sure when, or what ones. Sign here." An open ended policy is basically a loot box. You pay your money and see if you get a good pack. It doesn't even state the odds.
So, yes, they need to define it by outright saying EVERYTHING and making it a policy. or saying NOT everything and defining what that means. It's not a service if they're making up what the service is on a monthly basis, and it's not a mistake if they're being intentionally vague and cagey about defining it.
We know what ultimate includes and can decide the value of that. Nobody actually knows what Standard includes for $15/mo. And MS's policy is to have no policy and decide by whim what it will include based on tarot cards and quarterly outlooks. With that I think adding this tier makes the whole of Game Pass look worse than if they'd just raised the price and not added a tier. A price increase for the second time in a year is bad. Adding a service offering that refuses to say what it actually includes to make the price of the real product look more valuable is worse. It comes across as a situation where marketing said "we need to make a new tier to make Ultimate and the discontinuation of Console look better" and then they ran with that to groom the market without defining what that product will even be.
Imagine starting employment at Microsoft with a contract that says "I'll determine which tasks and obligations I'll carry out later, on a case by case basis."
Imagine EA signing an Xbox platform deal to sell EA Sports titles on Xbox for the next 5 years with terms that say "we'll determine what your revenue split will be later, on a case by case basis." Not going to happen. So why should consumers think this is normal? We've been trained to believe businesses have contract rights but consumers should accept what they're given, that's why.
At a simply high level, Xbox is mostly offering a platform of uncertainty, doubt, and ever changing terms. They need to define a policy of what Xbox products and services offer, and stick to the policy. I said it the other day but Xbox is operating like a Kickstarter company. Everything is by the seat of their pants, fly by night, check the metrics in the morning and redefine the product again until they find something that works. Except that model barely works for Kickstarters, and it sure doesn't work for the #2 market cap on Earth. They're not treating customers as customers, they're treating customers as voluntary market research subjects.
One interesting side effect of this is I think it's actually going to bite them later, in places much more important than Xbox. FTC had it in for them before. But now one of their key promises that they won't raise prices due to the merger, they've gone back on, not just once, but twice. The next time MS finds themselves in antitrust court, and they absolutely will, they've now provided ammunition to use against them. All to be petty and maximize the quarterly.
Wait so does that mean you no longer get new games Day One at GAME? Did they say when you can get those games at GAME? 6 months later? 12 months later? Is it all games or is it on a case by case basis?
That's the whole problem with xbox as a product and a brand right now. Nobody can tell you what you're actually buying and why you should buy it, because even MS doesn't know, and they refuse to commit to anything, preferring to define it as a vague undefined product that will never have a permanent shape, instead redefining it's shape to fit the moment continuously.
If Xbox was an Ebay listing it would be a blurry picture of a controller where you can't quite make out how many buttons it has. This seller does not accept returns.
For a service-based product to be successful, the consumer needs to have a solid idea of what the service provides and reasonable confidence it will continue to provide it and a reasonable expectation it will continue to carry roughly the same costs and value over the long duration.
Throwing your weight around and exploiting customers is what you do when you control the market and know your customers don't have much alternative. It's not what you do when you're publicly stating you're stagnating and missing all your targets.
This isn't Microsoft adjusting for Xbox's needs. This is Microsoft corporate leadership having no understanding of subscriptions and services beyond Office 365 where everybody must buy it and nobody has a choice.
This is the same company that keeps trying to make operating systems a monthly subscription.
@Spider-Kev It's simpler than that and includes old products. It's: Core: Hostage ransom to play online with a slick new name.
Standard: The Decoy.
Ultimate: Game Pass plus other garbage nobody asked for for one high price.
PC: The thing we've been calling Game Pass for a decade, only available on platforms we care about.
@themightyant Yeah, there it is again, case by case basis. Everything is case by case since Bethesda was bought. A fancy way of saying "We have no policy, we have no direction, we won't even tell you what you're paying for, you'll find out after we decide it, now fork it over."
@OldGamer999 Wait, wait....WHAT?! Features, subscriptions, switching them off....WHAT?! Cars with "No subscriptions?" What? Seriously, WTF? I have no idea what you're talking about and all I'm thinking is I have no idea what this is but if I ever hear anything like that I'll just smash windows and take what I want. Does that make me a real American now?
@Jenkinss what means of torment do you imagine for us the next few years?
Sony abandoning VR had largely pushed me into planning a PC migration anyway along with Xbox chaos, but I admit after the showcase I briefly thought it was maybe the wrong plan.... Nope, is a good plan.
@Utena-mobile It's a good analogy because we'll keep getting routinely effed the whole time.
@somnambulance Yeah that's exactly it. The lying. The fact that now anything they say is meaningless because they'll just directly lie to you shamelessly. No product or promise means anything because they keep proving they don't make good on their statements. That's the real killer.
@Nexozi That's a reduction. It's the parade of carefully worded half promises, reversals, empty and hollow statements, one after another. The customer-foucsed reason It's not "GP went up $2" It's "GP went up 25% in one year with no reason to believe this is the last increase within the next year, all while Phil and Sarah said no price increases or tiers were happening, demonstrating, again, their words carry no value."
Beyond that, Xbox is basically jumping up and down screaming into a megaphone that they see PC as their primary platform - between how they're treating GP PC vs console, their game release states (30fps on console, then updated later, etc.) Why would it be weird for people to consider jumping to PC after this news that pretty much announces MS encouraging jumping to PC (again?) My perspective is that in MS's view PC is their main platform, Xbox "exists" for those looking for a cheaper route.
And that's not necessarily a wrong route. I was PCMR back when Xbox OG came out and many PC gamers were livid with MS for destroying PC gaming by forcing their console onto everything, publishers, branding, controls, console-exclusives, ending PC series and studios (RIP Ensemble) etc, so it's fair if MS wants to focus on being a PC publisher with console being a weird adventure on the side. It's what they used to be until console briefly sidetracked them. Though MS's lack of interest in console leaves the console market in a dire place in Sony's hands mostly alone.
In my case it's the double whammy of all this plus Playstation abandoning PSVR2 pushing PCVR as the only viable path for a VR customer that kind of makes both platforms pushing me that direction. Ironically one of the flagship titles for PCVR is......MS Flight Sim.
@Medic_alert We thought we were having a joke when we drew up our annual Xbox Showcase bingo cards, until Microsoft started issuing us Cease and Desist letters.
@carlos82 @GuyinPA75 That stupidity is what has infected the C suites of most of the gaming industry. The belief that "mobile gamers" are "gamers" and it's all one big happy market rather than recognizing that they are two distinct markets. If these guys were the executives in charge of a theater company they'd look at McDonald's commercials and decide the market reach potential is the same as Macbeth because both feature watching actors perform and the names are similar.
@MikeOrator Haha, glad you're not regretting it over this. It helps when you thought it was more to begin with!
@GamingFan4Lyf Yeah, excluding Zen5 as it's JUST announced basically, 300-350 basically buys top-end CPUs. And if on AM5, AMD committed to at least 2027 to make new CPUs for it, so you can get at least one more major upgrade from a board if, say, NPUs become critical for gaming over the next 3 years, and you get into DDR5. Intel's a bit tighter since they only do 2 years on a socket so upgrading just the CPU is almost non-existent. AM5 boards are still pretty pricy if you want to make sure it has PCIE5, but IMO it's worth it, because that guarantees the next 2 gens at least of GPUs work with it, and also nvme5 SSDs for the inevitable faster-than-PS5-storage needs next gen, but it's a debate of pay more now for future proofing, or go cheap and replace board later.
Just don't forget the hundred bucks for Windows. Satya needs your tithe no matter what way you go
Realistically a PS5 XSX is a 3060 equivalent. Realistically a 3060 outclasses current consoles a bit. 4060 even more so. The consoles aren't THAT beefy. And basically any CPU you can buy will run circles around the lousy APUs in these things. If you're not going for 4k ultra RT 120fps, the cheap cards really still shine. And remember the real cost of an XSX with decent storage is, what $650? More? I'm factoring in a 2TB drive in the PC pricing. I think if you want a "better than current console" and fairly overspec future proofed PC you can get away with $1300-1600 if you keep the GPU "a little better than current console" and upgrade later and don't need to "rip the consoles a new one" out of the gate. $1300-1600 sounds like a lot, but an XSX + PS5, plus extra 1TB HD each, plus the subscriptions to each.....is actually more expensive. Then you just throw an extra grand in it and rip the consoles a new one anyway.
I think someone really needs to reassess the value of a Harvard MBA. Product seems faulty.
@MikeOrator Man I feel kind of guilty encouraging you into this mess. You should have seen it back in the glory days when Xbox was a golden city, before the Darkness fell.
How much do you think they'll charge us to buy tickets to watch the next time Sarah Bond has to answer questions about these changes? "Uhh...uhmm..well...uhh....moments...we like moments...and every day is made of moments...and we're there....all those moments....and...uhh....we're taking screenshots of your banking passwords in those moments too....and...uhh...so we believe charging more makes this more valuable...uhh...for our investors....game pass has a lot more value now that it has tiers...and call of duty is day one...for some customers....soo...uhhm....our next hardware will be such a technological leap.....the technology...what do we mean by technology leap?....we don't know yet...we'll know later....and don't worry about pricing...we'll get to that....later....uhh....help?"
@PsBoxSwitchOwner @Ricky-Spanish Exactly. I said it yesterday, and I'll say it again. The Xbox community/customer relationship was a contract based on trust. Phil told us in plain language the plan, the goal, the strategy, we liked the offering and bought on. That contract has been shattered now that repeated promises are hollow and broken as soon as they're said, and very word they say must be parsed for it's real hidden meaning like talking to a lawyer or slimy salesman. Once that trust is broken the contract falls apart. If we don't trust the platform or the promises of where it's going, the platform loses cohesion.
@Fiendish-Beaver @Kezelpaso The fact that they're being deliberately vague tells us just how hard they're trying to deceive. Not a good look. But the one thing I think is clear, to me, is that day one games are not coming to standard, period.
@GamingFan4Lyf Yeah it sounds like your timeline is a whole lot like mine actually. I think that's exactly when I built my last gaming rig as well, and spent like $3k on it, and was looking over my shoulder at $400 consoles thinking "why am I doing this?" Felt like I was wasting infinite money and then spending more time making it work.
I think PC remains expensive, and possibly much more expensive than console in terms of hardware. OTOH games discount better, are cheaper at launch, and GP is almost half the price if sticking with it. That's something. Long run you still spend a lot more I think on PC, but the problem is with console nickel and diming as it is, the gap is closing that in the end, it's still cheaper on console, but if you compare how MUCH cheapr it really is total vs how much worse an experience you have, IDK if it's worth it if it's a major hobby.
Using the little ROG Ally, not the Z1 Extreme, just the regular Z1, and I can coax most non-blockbuster games to get 45-60fps where I can't even do that with most games on PS5/XSX where shadow detail is forced on me, framerate be darned....there's more life in those PC parts than console, even where games are poorly optimized. The console performance this gen is just flat out poor.
When I figure, $500 for Xbox, $500 for PS5, another probably $600+ for PS5 Pro to make it almost acceptable. Next gen probably 600-700 for each console...under-speced as always, then probably another pro? Yeah, a $1600 4090 + another $1200 PC compoents + probably another $1800 7090 + another $350 CPU in a few years.....it's still more expensive. But at $250 a year for GP (or over 300 by then)....how much more expensive is it really? At the current price 4 years of Game Pass buys you a 4080 FE/Ventus/Windforce/Trinity. With the backlogs we have....that 4080 is a lot more valuable. You can pick up those XGS games when they hit $30 on Steam (unless MS gates them to Windows Store only which would be hilarious, pathetic, and on-brand.)
Also totally agreed on "most" Sony games but probably not Astrobot. If I go full headfirst into PC again, Astrobot may end up being my last PS purchase. ALTHOUGH, I also suspect that it will sell terribly and then end up ported to PC where it will also sell terribly, just like Sackboy. Nerdz are interested in the game. The mass PS market I suspect is not, and the mass PC market I know is not. At least the PC version I can rig VorpX up to run it in VR lol.
@GamingFan4Lyf I think if you don't mind stepping down to 1080p/30 with DLSS scaling and framegen, it might end up ok, or at least often ok. But then if you need say DirectX 13 support by then, you're SoL. Or, with a 4080 with 16GB VRAM if 24GB starts to become normal and 6090 has 48GB you might start feeling it etc. It's one of those hard to predict things.
My gut feeling says you can probably run a GPU DESKTOP mind you, if it doesn't break, for a decade, these days, if you don't mind dropping down to low internal resolutions and lots of gfx settings off. Which is really console like anyway. But where you'll end up in trouble eventually might be VRAM, DX version requirements etc where you just hit a brick wall. or it may not happen.
Then again I can guarantee you the next PSXbox will be $600 minimum but more likely 700. Phil hinted at subsidy ending. PS wanted 600 last gen. So if you figure, this gen console plus next gen console, excluding mid gens, it's $1200 for 2 gens of ONE brand consoles anway....is 2 GPUs much worse? And you can upgrade your CPU too especially if AM5 in that time. That's better than "PRO" models offer if you want.
Pricier? Yes, still probably pricier. Maybe. But I'd be more wary of the cards just breaking in that time. Stuff happens. Cards run hot. Fan bearings don't last forever. Though for a whole laptop that change is more painful and what laptop really lasts a decade or more? Something breaks somewhere.
All that being said, I, too, Am looking into the PC conversion full speed at this point. I dipped my toes in with Legion/Ally and love it. Used to be PCMR for over a decade back in the day. Seems like this is the right time to cross back over.
PERSONALLY I'm looking at top tier GPUs as well, however I honestly would not be if VR did not matter to me. I think value wise a 4070 super or Ti Super + another 6070 later is probably more value than one supercard today that will be old later. But for me VR is a major priority and even a 4090 "isn't quite enough" to fully drive a good PCVR set, and even 5090 may barely cut it, so it's sort of a "get by for now until what I actually need actually exists, probably a decade later" sort of thing.
@Vaako007 " It costs money to run a data center plus expand and upgrade servers. Infrastructure doesn’t come cheap."
You're mixing up cloud and GP itself, where GP's datacenter cost is just the transmission bandwidth for download, shared with digital purchases - I.E. If they're selling the games, the subs require 0% more disk space or rack capacity, only transmission bandwidth for extra downloads.
Cloud requires more racks, but then there's all the more reason to separate cloud into its own expensive tier as a hardware purchasing alternative rather than as a bundle for hardware purchasers, because renting GPUs isn't cheap - doesn't affect the download portion of the service. Or are console buyers and PC/Windows buyers being used to subsidize other people renting GPUs? Another consideration.
@GamingFan4Lyf "Would getting a laptop with an Nvidia 4080 (and DLSS, Ray-reconstruction, and Frame Generation, etc..) carry me both through this generation and through next generation?"
Definitely not a laptop version of a 4080 and equivalent CPU through Series Y/PS6. Honestly desktop 4090 probably won't carry you through NEXT generation either. I could see it lasting for 3 GPU gens (2 years each) so maybe a 4-7 year lifespan, but by mid-next gen I'm certain it'll start showing its age. Though, over that much time you have as much chance of it breaking as just being not good enough. By then there will be some new must-have feature (DLSS4? New HDMI standard? Required AI components? 48GB VRAM?) that will be locked behind a 7070.
There's a caveat to that though. With game devs tapping out on spending too much on developing "high end' graphics games, the industry might be dialing back. I don't know what that means for the next consoles. For GPUs the trend has been that the TOP tier cards (xx80/xx90) go up 50% in performance (and also up 40% in price) each generation, but the mid-tier cards which are the cards MOST people buy (xx60, xx70) only get a 15% bump or so (4070 Ti Super being the outlier, it's really a stripped down and gimped 4080, not a 4070.) And those high end cards are only bought half by gamers, competing in the market with people using them as "cheap" alternative to $6000 workstation cards for CAD and video production and local deep learning AI models so the steady sales don't reflect gaming users necessarily - a video editor needs 24GB VRAM. A 4090 is the only viable option and is cheaper than the A6000 pro cards by a few grand. In other words, performance is mostly static for the majority of gamers between gens now with minimal gains. Nvidia even said something similar about why the prices will stay high, basically, they don't get much better any more, and if game devs aren't going to be pushing the gfx as hard, we might be stagnant for a while in which case, run the 4080 till it breaks. But IDK about laptop versions.... The whole "it's a 4080, but not actually the same product" naming of mobile parts has always bothered me. It's not the same part. It doesn't have the same power profile, thermals, or performance.
@somnambulance It's a catch-22. There's that temptation to be so frustrated with Xbox you just want to go to PS. Then you remember that the problem with Xbox is that' it's moving ever closer to where PS already is, it's just that it makes no sense from them to do that while also being in a losing position. Xbox used to be the better but less popular alternative. Now it's just the same alternative except without the popularity to back it up and (for now) a few nicer features.
@Jake_homs "Family plan", "play your own library games on cloud", "Series X cloud servers/4k" there's a whole raft of promised GP features from years ago that they still haven't implemented yet managed 2 price increases, a new tier, and blacklisting games outside the top tier all before implementing basic features promised in 2022.
@PsBoxSwitchOwner I think it depends on defining success. They're now, I believe the largest publisher in the world. That smells like success. I don't think it's that they haven't found success, it's that they haven't actually decided what success actually is, and it's hard to achieve success in any one area if you keep changing the goal posts and confusing your customers by jerking them in every new direction your CFO wants to adventure to. But......that also defines MS as a whole these days. I've said it often but they operate like a hedge fund rather than a tech company. They don't have a tech goal. They don't focus on ONE thing until they're the biggest and best. They jump from thing to thing whichever way the market trend is blowing and abandon the old one.
The main problem is exactly as Amy Hood stated in the trials. They want to see Xbox generate margin more in line with their other divisions. Their other divisions are monopolies with government contracts. Xbox will never generate margins anywhere close to those other divisions. It's impossible, even if they bought Sony and Nintendo. So while they chase the impossible, they keep kneecapping their real success potential in the market by changing directions with no clear message every few months.
@JayJ "Subscriptions can only get so expensive until I start to question the value they're presenting."
Exactly. A lot of these sub companies keep messing with the idea that "all things just get more expensive forever so we can just keep raising the price every year forever." It misses the point that at some point they cross a value line where that money is better spent on something else, and a reduction of their product usage makes the most sense.
The problem is the game industry outside mobile doesn't seem to be growing, and appears to even be shrinking. So they feel the need to milk the customers they have for every last penny. And worse a lot of gamers seem to be both wealthy and stupid enough to not care and be willing to pay it. Makes a dangerous combination that abusing customers actually leads to better numbers.
@Ooccoo_Jr "Game Pass only makes sense at this point for a 'fast food gamer', consuming and disposing of games at a rapid rate."
Yeah I said a similar thing yesterday. At the old pricing GP was a great companion subscription for any gamer to get access to a bunch of things they might not otherwise try. But now at the newest pricing, 25% more than it was a year ago, the value changed. It's now an either or. GP is a route for a non-committed gamer that just wants to try things without building their own library - it's their only access to gaming and they play whatever's on it. If you're someone that also builds your own library and goes off the farm to games that aren't on GP, it's just too expensive to continue using. I think they're going to see a large sub drop due to this, as a whole class of customer got outpriced by this change, and probably won't come back. Not sure what new customer they expect to pick up to replace them.
There's a potential plus side to this we're all overlooking. This is really just a Game Pass price drop back to the original $15, because is there anybody at all that feels they actually got value out of playing Starfield and Redfall Day One? It's now $15 for Game Pass, or $20 to join their Xbox QA Ready Access Program (X-QRAP) service.
Really hit the nail on the head, and I'd said something similar myself. The entirety of the Xbox experience has become "case by case basis", "more details later", "don't worry, nothing's going to change" (one month later: "WE CHANGED IT like the youtubers said we would when we said no!") They don't know who their customer is, they don't know where that customer is, they don't know what that customer wants, they seem to only know the customer they have isn't the one they want and is an expendable tool to try to get the one they want.
Not so different from PS where the F2P whale appears to be the only customer they want/need/have and everyone else just doesn't matter.
Right now, I would find it hard to recommend Xbox to anyone. Not because it doesn't have good features but because you don't know what those features are, what they will be 6 months from now, or if they will exist at all, nor what it will cost. It's a scratch-off lottery. They'll figure it out next month after this month's figures come in. It's like a console by a Kickstarter company except it's Microsoft.
And any time they get good press and put themselves in a confident place they slap their customers in the face with a 2x4 within a few weeks, stirring the chaos again.
Meanwhile on PS you know you're going to get screwed before you start. And on Nintendo you've been screwed since you were a kid so you're just used to it.
Really you summarized the entire xbox customer experience with this reply: " We don't know. They have haven't specified. What we do know is that there will be some games that will ONLY be on Ultimate according to their FAQ. I assume other games will come after different amount of times"
I think that sentence can be applied to every aspect of Xbox, it's always, "we don't know, we can assume it's, unclear, they'll figure it out later."
For me, for value, this really kills GP. The last price hike came close to killing it. It's not that I get no value from it as much as it then becomes cost-benefit to sub vs just paying for the games that are on it. The debate then became play it day 1 vs wait 6-12 months for sales. But the new GP tier kind of flips that value as well.
It all goes back to they do not know what business plan they want and they keep changing it on the fly to see what sticks. Which makes the customer experience poor. Before everything was about subs. Now it's all about publisher unit sales and aligning subs not to interfere. What will it be tomorrow? Roll 2d10 to find out.
The fact that the lower tiers don't even include all games (LOL Call of Duty, Call of Duty, Call of Duty, Call of Duty, Sports, TV) Once again, I can't even identify what the product IS or what to expect for payment. And they can't tell me. Because they'll figure it out later on a case by case basis. I'd have missed gems like Little Kitty Big City and Ghostwire without GP. OTOH is that worth $250/yr?
9th gen is the gen the joy of gaming got sucked out of gaming. It became a fight against bankers instead of the gaming industry now. I can't say "Xbox is worse than PS now", it's just that both of them suck, and Nintendo's always been abusive.
@CaptnDave Griping aside for a moment, if you purchased the game, you absolutely should be able to play them on Core, that's the entire point of Core, Core is just a renamed Gold. That's a tech support issue, not a tier issue. It's not working and it's supposed to be working.
@TJ81 Agree in a lot of ways, but PC has almost the same sort of Stockholm syndrome where you get to pay Nvidia $1000 for a $400 video card and it'll be $1250 next time no doubt. There's really no escaping it anymore. Gaming is no longer an equitable hobby, it's an uncomfortable relationships between the abusers and the dependent. Dealers and pushers no longer try to win your business, they push you to the brink and see how far they can go before you break.
@Foxx_64740 ""I'm cancelling my sub right now" but we all know they will be here tomorrow and next year (still subscribing)"
Nah, I'll ride it one more month until the change takes effect, and then drop. The appeal was it was a trifle of an expense and I get to try lots of stuff I wouldn't have and play the MS games cheaper than buying without waiting. At this price, it's an expense. I have a backlog. It's crossed a line I can't get much value out of the expense anymore. And it'll just get worse. MS games will join all other publishers as "buy it in a year on sale if I'm still interested in a year." What I'll consider going forward is if it's still worth it to drop to PCGP only from ultimate, or if the fact that it'll just keep going up in price until it's the same poor pricing as this really kills the interest in that too. Also remember in the US, sales tax is added to that price, different by state, national average is 6% so a $21.20 recurring bill starts weighing down the monthly statements...
@themightyant I think the prickly issue is, Game Pass had carved out a unique brand and market with its "day one" image and low pricing. With raising prices, and splitting into tiers, maybe its greatest risk is becoming "just another subscription like the others." Kind of like Xbox became "just another console like the others" (but is the one with Game Pass.)
Yeah it was "too much value" but that buffet feeling of "too much value" is what made it desirable. It's why most showed up. Rearranging the value proposition feels like a mixture of MS celebrating a victory lap at the 1.2k mark of a 10k marathon and MS biz people stepping in to interfere in a service based on spreadsheet values rather than understanding the market- and their confused identity, with ABK people at the helm, trying to run a publisher from within a platform, focusing on publisher numbers.
But as you say, success depends on volume in the subs market, and the subs were already saturating. Limiting growth artificially seems like a bad move. Who is the actual market? Console owners? There's only 35 mil and not all will sub. Fire stick owners? Will they even buy in at HIGHER prices? CoD players? What a horrible value for them. Casuals? They weren't buying when it was cheap let alone expensive. It used to be people like me, but at the new pricing, it no longer is. And again, it seems in line with MS's recent strategy to push all of their users out of their ecosystems.
@themightyant They really do. Every time the narrative changes from doom they do something the shatter all rebuilt trust again. Their brand identity is starting to be "the two faced console"
I think there's a threshold in pricing that shifts it from being a great companion to your game library to instead bring an alternative to owning a library only really valuable to players that don't intend to own a library at all while not being appealing to those that do. Imo they're now on that doorstep.
@PsBoxSwitchOwner "Feel the burn!"
At last we have proof that infinite monkeys typing in infinite typewriters will in fact not eventually produce Hamlet. It's really just an incoherent mess after all.
@themightyant Yeah there's a lot of layers that make it especially bad. The biggest is that this is a 25% price hike in 1 year after the platforms selling point was built on its value. 25% is a significant change to its value proposition. And 100% on console only as you said. Is it another 15% in a year? At what point does it become really poor value? Maybe they want to kill it and roll back day 1.. With them who knows?
Second is, yet again Microsoft says one thing, paints one image to coax trust, then just turns around and reverses it a few months later. Every time they right the ship and look stable they go and announce they're erratic and unstable, and worse untrustworthy politicians, where ever word most be parsed for meaning, every time. A product not good on its word with random changes isn't enticing. That's the biggest problem Xbox has. They not only don't earn customer trust, they actively erode it. But it's not just Xbox, that's nadellas Microsoft in all areas. Ask Intel.
Honestly if they just said "tiers" when asked about call of duty the optics would be better instead of doubling down on "DAY ONE**" (on a tier we haven't told you about). The Xbox community was built on a trust contract. That contract has definitely expired.
Objectively it's technically a good value. But the higher the price goes the market it's a good value to becomes narrower. And the inability to trust their pricing structure stability makes the long term value dubious.
I don't know how they expect to increase slowing subs by raising prices. Or increase console sales by making the platform less approachable.
Again quarterlies above product success. Again, standard nadella. But don't worry, the screenshots of your PC are totes encrypted, honest! (Syke!)
Remember when everyone was going "see the fear mongers lied, there's no tiers, there's no price increase?". That's 2 price hikes in a year.
$20 a month now. $240 a year plus tax. This is where I get off the bus. I could buy 5 games a year on sale for the same price which is probably exactly how many I'd play on GP. Goodbye monthly renewal!
@OldGamer999 Yeah, I mean at this point the real issue is just hive mind and marketing. People, weirdly, don't like choices, they just want to chose between "the right answer" and the "bad answer." And whatever most other people already picked is the obvious right answer. I'm convinced most of the western world would have been happiest in 1980's Russia. It's their Eden.
At this point the "right answer" is PS because everybody else chose it and nobody would dare choose different than everybody else, and that means no other option can ever succeed unless PS throws itself off a cliff. (And seemingly, even that doesn't do the job.)
I'd say it's the same scenario in PC gaming where everybody choses Nvidia to the point that AMD basically doesn't exist, but that's actually a different situation where even that absurd prices nvidia is charging, when performance is compared dollar for dollar, they actually still end up the better value of the two poor value choices, where for the same money they tend to run a bit faster, cooler, and with less power, so they get away with murder because their nearest competitor can't compete.
@InterceptorAlpha LOL yeah, I think I had the same experience and thoughts with that. Then again, half the problem with that game was that the first 60% of the game was just the tutorial, just reaaaaaally drawn out lol.
Pick up and play didn't go anywhere. There's more of it than ever. What it doesn't have is big marketing budgets and physical copies that cost fortunes to distribute through major mega-publishers. The small publishers that make such games went digital-distribution at lower prices than mega-publishers, started getting called "indies". Game Pass is loaded with such content as well.
@Tasuki @InterceptorAlpha Despite saying the above, I massively agree with you both. Gaming jumped a couple of sharks in a monster truck in moving from a set of basic controls you use in interesting ways through the game to the the tutorial that "builds" on the systems through half the game. I can't tell you how many games I have half finished that I can't play again or have to restart because jumping back in and learning all the systems you were supposed to learn over time is impossible 60% into the game. When did playing a video game become a field of study (flight/racing sims excluded which bring in real world learning of real vehicle operation.) And the trend of needing to watch a bunch of youtubers and read guides just to figure out how to beat bosses (From Software, I'm looking at you), or "min-max" everything to have the best odds has become ridiculous. Even the P&P D&D based games of old didn't need all that, and they even came with spiral bound manuals.
Ooof, those industry-wide console sales.... Gaming is ducked. Hardware is down, hardware is down below last gen, game sales are down, devs going bankrupt. GPUs at LOL$$. Absolutely brutal time for the entire medium. Some of it is economy, some if it is greed putting everyone off, some of it is F2P mobile games eating the lion's share...but something else is just wrong in gaming right now. Even AMD showed a, what 43%? 47%? decline in gaming revenue? Although most of that probably correlates to the drop in console sales/production for PS/XB considering AMD only makes up something like 3% of GPUs according to Steam, so PC gaming isn't really a slice they have anyway, that's 97% NVDA.
@GuyinPA75 I don't think anyone needed articles to "prove" subscription "hurts" "sales". Subscription is an alternative payment method to "sales", of course it "hurts" the sales, it's supposed to - it's an alternate payment plan. That's like saying 12 month 0% financing hurts single-month TV sales revenue. Of course it does. It's supposed to. It was factored into the pricing. It's $216 a year. $1300 over a 6 year console generation assuming naively no price increases over 6 years. Plus DLC and addons still. That's more games than the normal console buyer actually buys. It's not hurting overall anything unless one wants to pedantically compare individual game sales SKUs (cue Tango conversation.)
@OldGamer999 I think that poll referenced is HIGHLY biased. The massive Astrobot response, and honestly, inflated M&L response for a series that sells pretty poorly in general, is a giveaway. There's a particular brand of internet forum gamers that are excited about that game (Astrobot). Heck, Metaphor even appearing on the list at all tells us that's not a poll for the mass market, but merely internet dwellers like us. Looking at the performance of Sackboy, the general market on PS is not particularly interested in such games like Astrobot and Sackboy (unfortunately. The PS market is no longer the FF and Jak market, it's now the GTA & Fortnite market.)
Is this just a UK thing? I keep seeing the "just for you" mentions on this site over the years, and have never, once, seen such a deal "just for me." Is it just not a thing in the US where more than 30 people actually buy Xboxen, or does Phil Spencer personally have a vendetta against me and pays to keep deals off my platform?
@Titntin LOL, a shame, but understandable! Meanwhile I'm so addicted to VR, and the writing's been on the wall so long for PSVR, that I'm going to have to go back to PC to get into PCVR where the good stuff is. Couldn't help but think of your experience reading reviews for Dirt Rally 2 VR and DCS World combat flight sim, lol. Apparently you don't just need solid VR legs, you need to be a VR cephalopod for those!
@Sol4ris LOL, no I didn't mean they were paying for this one, obviously, but after the accusations of such behavior the whole "we're releasing our game on EVERY platform EXCEPT that one" (while that one is putting games on ours), seemed to announce that mentality. The whole thing just came across as exceedingly petty. I get the business case for it, but the optics are not complimentary. If you're going to do the multiplatform thing, do the multiplatform thing, leave the politics out of it.
It also comes across as exceedingly out of touch in that they're putting their money where their ABK lawsuit era mouth was, in that they genuinely don't see Nintendo as a competitor while they do see Xbox as one, which is arguably weird and out of touch, arguably Nintendo is a bigger competitor to Sony's "real console" market, the Asia/international market, and the family market than Xbox ever will be post-360.
I still don't even understand the success of GTA online. Send like a dead empty nothing to do thing that became the biggest thing ever. I'm convinced most "gamers" don't even game.
While I do get that install base and potential sales is the weakest of the platforms, and I do get that Xbox is the more direct competitor, and I do get that MS is doing it only because the they have to and Sony doesn't.
However, as soon as they revealed this, the whole "Sony releases a major IP game with Lego on every platform except Xbox!" announcement came across as exceptionally petty, and managed to lower my opinion of Sony. It was almost like them directly confirming that they also pay to keep games off one single platform, publicly.
@Xeno_Aura " the team realizing the scope of the project and the fact that devoting years and years of your life to a project that has no financial benefit and for a game that has a relatively small player base nowadays wasn't a great use of their time or skills."
Is it wrong that I read this and immediately thought of Arkane Austin?
Comments 6,665
Re: Rumour: Day One Releases Delayed On A 'Case-By-Case Basis' For Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
@HarmanSmith Absolutely agree all around. And yeah, actually the Windows Store as a whole is just dreadful. Play Anywhere could have been the killer feature, but it's so barren. Most publishers games don't support it. Some, like Square seem to randomly have some games (DQXI, Octopath, Balan (lol)) that support it, and others (anything FF) that don't. And many publishers/major games (Bamco/From/Elden Ring) that don't exist on the Windows store even to buy Windows only games. The whole thing feels incomplete. I ended up buying a few MS games on Steam for my Ally/Legion because of that mess....it's a pity.
It really was set up to be a great platform, but took so many wrong turns at so many key points. Though, to be fair to Xbox management, I think things really started going wrong when MS corporate decided what they really wanted was mobile. For a critical year of the Series X they focused on nothing but cloud to try to get GP into mobile hands to get part of mobile gaming instead of on the console. And then few the two years after that they focused on nothing but ABK to get King instead of the console. Then this year they remembered the console exists and seem to be bent on exploiting console customers to pay for the transition to mobile.
Re: Rumour: Day One Releases Delayed On A 'Case-By-Case Basis' For Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
@PsBoxSwitchOwner Ironically it was......Activision.....that was the first to raise to $70. Followed by 2K. But it was Sony that normalized it.
What really irritates me is MS's constant changing positions. They took a public stance that they believed in the $60 game. People believed that strategy. Then when they actually released games they switched to $70. And oh what a game to do it on.
Re: Rumour: Day One Releases Delayed On A 'Case-By-Case Basis' For Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
@HonestHick MS has always made better hardware than software. It's weird. They're a software company but their software is terrible. They actually make fantastic hardware and always have, but nobody ever buys it because they have no marketing talent. I can't think of any generation of MS hardware going back to the 90's and the original scroll wheel, a Microsoft creation, and those indestructible mice, that was anything short of excellent. But it was accompanied by Windows 95.....
The only thing you can count on with MS is whenever they have a great thing going, which is often, they'll destroy it as fast as possible.
Re: Rumour: Day One Releases Delayed On A 'Case-By-Case Basis' For Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
@GuyinPA75 Absolutely, Nadella has been a disaster. Gates was bad. Ballmer seemed worse. Nadella has been a disaster. Yes, Wall street loves him. Financial mags love him. Investors love him. But he's trading the company's stability for short term investor love. And worse, he's a compulsive liar. I comes naturally to him. It's always been his MO to say things that sound good, and come across 100% genuine and sincere, then do the exact opposite moments later. Were he not a corporate finance guy he'd probably be behind bars.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@Zenszulu "long term business plan"
That's a huge part of it but I think only one part of it. They needed more games to keep the subs appealing, and they absolutely could have bought in studios to keep that need up and manage the service. And less than ironically, studios like Tango making smaller viral hits to give the service shots of relevance were a huge key to doing so.
The problem isn't so much that they didn't plan for GP. The problem isn't that they bought studios. The problem is WHO they bought and why. They didn't buy ABK to get content to fit into Game Pass to better sustain subscription numbers. And ABK being overwhelmingly financially tied up in generating one single game annually was a very costly purchase, that served almost no value to sustaining the GP service.
What went wrong is they bought ABK, a MASSIVE money sink into a single game that doesn't really help their sub, because the only real goal was to tap into the mobile gaming market that's worth 50x what all of Xbox is worth, and King was up for sale. So they bought King to get MICROSOFT (not Xbox) into the mobile gaming revenue cut to better level their playing field with rival APPLE (not Sony), on a quarterly earnings level. Having to absorb Activision and CoD is a side effect generated by doing so, and if doing so undermines the entire fundamental business stability of Game Pass and collapses it, doesn't matter, MSFT now tapped a key revenue stream controlled by AAPL, and it only cost them Game Pass to do it.
That's the subtext everyone misses. We're quick to blame Xbox for messing up, and they have, but that's only part of what happened. The real story is that Xbox was offered as sacrifice and Xbox's customers as collateral in order to buy King to tap into a market Apple controlled and MS was missing out. If Game Pass were the business plan, ABK would not have been their acquisition. It's a bad fit for GP, and as we see, fundamentally breaks the model. But that wasn't the goal. Mobile was the goal, and Microsoft got it. If it broke Game Pass and the console business so be it. It's worth more.
Re: Microsoft Provides More Detail On Its New Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
@Fiendish-Beaver Because a product and service needs a policy. If there is not an actual policy, what exactly is anyone buying? Game Pass until now had a policy. An assortment of games, with all Microsoft published titles on the service day one. Ultimate has a policy. An assortment of games selected monthly, with all Microsoft published titles on the service day one.
Standard has no policy. "Some games, and maybe some Microsoft ones, maybe not, not day one, probably, but eventually, maybe, maybe not, not sure when, or what ones. Sign here." An open ended policy is basically a loot box. You pay your money and see if you get a good pack. It doesn't even state the odds.
So, yes, they need to define it by outright saying EVERYTHING and making it a policy. or saying NOT everything and defining what that means. It's not a service if they're making up what the service is on a monthly basis, and it's not a mistake if they're being intentionally vague and cagey about defining it.
We know what ultimate includes and can decide the value of that. Nobody actually knows what Standard includes for $15/mo. And MS's policy is to have no policy and decide by whim what it will include based on tarot cards and quarterly outlooks. With that I think adding this tier makes the whole of Game Pass look worse than if they'd just raised the price and not added a tier. A price increase for the second time in a year is bad. Adding a service offering that refuses to say what it actually includes to make the price of the real product look more valuable is worse. It comes across as a situation where marketing said "we need to make a new tier to make Ultimate and the discontinuation of Console look better" and then they ran with that to groom the market without defining what that product will even be.
Imagine starting employment at Microsoft with a contract that says "I'll determine which tasks and obligations I'll carry out later, on a case by case basis."
Imagine EA signing an Xbox platform deal to sell EA Sports titles on Xbox for the next 5 years with terms that say "we'll determine what your revenue split will be later, on a case by case basis." Not going to happen. So why should consumers think this is normal? We've been trained to believe businesses have contract rights but consumers should accept what they're given, that's why.
At a simply high level, Xbox is mostly offering a platform of uncertainty, doubt, and ever changing terms. They need to define a policy of what Xbox products and services offer, and stick to the policy. I said it the other day but Xbox is operating like a Kickstarter company. Everything is by the seat of their pants, fly by night, check the metrics in the morning and redefine the product again until they find something that works. Except that model barely works for Kickstarters, and it sure doesn't work for the #2 market cap on Earth. They're not treating customers as customers, they're treating customers as voluntary market research subjects.
One interesting side effect of this is I think it's actually going to bite them later, in places much more important than Xbox. FTC had it in for them before. But now one of their key promises that they won't raise prices due to the merger, they've gone back on, not just once, but twice. The next time MS finds themselves in antitrust court, and they absolutely will, they've now provided ammunition to use against them. All to be petty and maximize the quarterly.
Re: Report: UK Retailer GAME Ending In-Store Pre-Orders This Month
Wait so does that mean you no longer get new games Day One at GAME? Did they say when you can get those games at GAME? 6 months later? 12 months later? Is it all games or is it on a case by case basis?
Re: Rumour: Day One Releases Delayed On A 'Case-By-Case Basis' For Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
Xbox. Pay now, find out what for later. **
Subject to change. Terms and conditions apply.
That's the whole problem with xbox as a product and a brand right now. Nobody can tell you what you're actually buying and why you should buy it, because even MS doesn't know, and they refuse to commit to anything, preferring to define it as a vague undefined product that will never have a permanent shape, instead redefining it's shape to fit the moment continuously.
If Xbox was an Ebay listing it would be a blurry picture of a controller where you can't quite make out how many buttons it has. This seller does not accept returns.
For a service-based product to be successful, the consumer needs to have a solid idea of what the service provides and reasonable confidence it will continue to provide it and a reasonable expectation it will continue to carry roughly the same costs and value over the long duration.
Throwing your weight around and exploiting customers is what you do when you control the market and know your customers don't have much alternative. It's not what you do when you're publicly stating you're stagnating and missing all your targets.
This isn't Microsoft adjusting for Xbox's needs. This is Microsoft corporate leadership having no understanding of subscriptions and services beyond Office 365 where everybody must buy it and nobody has a choice.
This is the same company that keeps trying to make operating systems a monthly subscription.
@Spider-Kev It's simpler than that and includes old products. It's:
Core: Hostage ransom to play online with a slick new name.
Standard: The Decoy.
Ultimate: Game Pass plus other garbage nobody asked for for one high price.
PC: The thing we've been calling Game Pass for a decade, only available on platforms we care about.
Re: Xbox Game Pass Gets Price Increases And New 'Standard' Subscription Tier
@SingleStooge "Is Microsoft against their own brand? "
Are you new?
@datamonkey Nono, The Xbox 180 was last gen. This gen we get the Xbox 365!
Re: Microsoft Provides More Detail On Its New Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
@themightyant Yeah, there it is again, case by case basis. Everything is case by case since Bethesda was bought. A fancy way of saying "We have no policy, we have no direction, we won't even tell you what you're paying for, you'll find out after we decide it, now fork it over."
Re: Microsoft Provides More Detail On Its New Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
@Fiendish-Beaver ....but....I think that's a different way of saying they're trying to deceive tho...
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@OldGamer999 Wait, wait....WHAT?! Features, subscriptions, switching them off....WHAT?! Cars with "No subscriptions?" What? Seriously, WTF? I have no idea what you're talking about and all I'm thinking is I have no idea what this is but if I ever hear anything like that I'll just smash windows and take what I want. Does that make me a real American now?
Re: Rumour: Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Is Joining Xbox Game Pass This Month
@The-Chosen-one The answer to that again depends on if you're with the FTC or not.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@Jenkinss what means of torment do you imagine for us the next few years?
Sony abandoning VR had largely pushed me into planning a PC migration anyway along with Xbox chaos, but I admit after the showcase I briefly thought it was maybe the wrong plan.... Nope, is a good plan.
@Utena-mobile It's a good analogy because we'll keep getting routinely effed the whole time.
Re: Xbox Game Pass Changes Partly Because Microsoft 'Isn't Seeing Strong Growth', Claims Analyst
@Jenkinss "we're happy with the value proposition we have to offer at our current pricing"
10/15/24 "Introducing Game Pass Mega: Includes all AAAAA games including Indiana Jones and Call of Duty for just 99.99/mo!"
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@somnambulance Yeah that's exactly it. The lying. The fact that now anything they say is meaningless because they'll just directly lie to you shamelessly. No product or promise means anything because they keep proving they don't make good on their statements. That's the real killer.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@Nexozi That's a reduction. It's the parade of carefully worded half promises, reversals, empty and hollow statements, one after another. The customer-foucsed reason It's not "GP went up $2" It's "GP went up 25% in one year with no reason to believe this is the last increase within the next year, all while Phil and Sarah said no price increases or tiers were happening, demonstrating, again, their words carry no value."
Beyond that, Xbox is basically jumping up and down screaming into a megaphone that they see PC as their primary platform - between how they're treating GP PC vs console, their game release states (30fps on console, then updated later, etc.) Why would it be weird for people to consider jumping to PC after this news that pretty much announces MS encouraging jumping to PC (again?) My perspective is that in MS's view PC is their main platform, Xbox "exists" for those looking for a cheaper route.
And that's not necessarily a wrong route. I was PCMR back when Xbox OG came out and many PC gamers were livid with MS for destroying PC gaming by forcing their console onto everything, publishers, branding, controls, console-exclusives, ending PC series and studios (RIP Ensemble) etc, so it's fair if MS wants to focus on being a PC publisher with console being a weird adventure on the side. It's what they used to be until console briefly sidetracked them. Though MS's lack of interest in console leaves the console market in a dire place in Sony's hands mostly alone.
In my case it's the double whammy of all this plus Playstation abandoning PSVR2 pushing PCVR as the only viable path for a VR customer that kind of makes both platforms pushing me that direction. Ironically one of the flagship titles for PCVR is......MS Flight Sim.
@Medic_alert We thought we were having a joke when we drew up our annual Xbox Showcase bingo cards, until Microsoft started issuing us Cease and Desist letters.
Re: Xbox Game Pass Changes Partly Because Microsoft 'Isn't Seeing Strong Growth', Claims Analyst
@carlos82 @GuyinPA75 That stupidity is what has infected the C suites of most of the gaming industry. The belief that "mobile gamers" are "gamers" and it's all one big happy market rather than recognizing that they are two distinct markets. If these guys were the executives in charge of a theater company they'd look at McDonald's commercials and decide the market reach potential is the same as Macbeth because both feature watching actors perform and the names are similar.
@MikeOrator Haha, glad you're not regretting it over this. It helps when you thought it was more to begin with!
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@GamingFan4Lyf Yeah, excluding Zen5 as it's JUST announced basically, 300-350 basically buys top-end CPUs. And if on AM5, AMD committed to at least 2027 to make new CPUs for it, so you can get at least one more major upgrade from a board if, say, NPUs become critical for gaming over the next 3 years, and you get into DDR5. Intel's a bit tighter since they only do 2 years on a socket so upgrading just the CPU is almost non-existent. AM5 boards are still pretty pricy if you want to make sure it has PCIE5, but IMO it's worth it, because that guarantees the next 2 gens at least of GPUs work with it, and also nvme5 SSDs for the inevitable faster-than-PS5-storage needs next gen, but it's a debate of pay more now for future proofing, or go cheap and replace board later.
Just don't forget the hundred bucks for Windows. Satya needs your tithe no matter what way you go
Realistically a PS5 XSX is a 3060 equivalent. Realistically a 3060 outclasses current consoles a bit. 4060 even more so. The consoles aren't THAT beefy. And basically any CPU you can buy will run circles around the lousy APUs in these things. If you're not going for 4k ultra RT 120fps, the cheap cards really still shine. And remember the real cost of an XSX with decent storage is, what $650? More? I'm factoring in a 2TB drive in the PC pricing. I think if you want a "better than current console" and fairly overspec future proofed PC you can get away with $1300-1600 if you keep the GPU "a little better than current console" and upgrade later and don't need to "rip the consoles a new one" out of the gate. $1300-1600 sounds like a lot, but an XSX + PS5, plus extra 1TB HD each, plus the subscriptions to each.....is actually more expensive. Then you just throw an extra grand in it and rip the consoles a new one anyway.
Re: Xbox Game Pass Changes Partly Because Microsoft 'Isn't Seeing Strong Growth', Claims Analyst
You know what will help growth? Higher prices!
I think someone really needs to reassess the value of a Harvard MBA. Product seems faulty.
@MikeOrator Man I feel kind of guilty encouraging you into this mess. You should have seen it back in the glory days when Xbox was a golden city, before the Darkness fell.
Re: Microsoft Provides More Detail On Its New Xbox Game Pass Standard Tier
How much do you think they'll charge us to buy tickets to watch the next time Sarah Bond has to answer questions about these changes? "Uhh...uhmm..well...uhh....moments...we like moments...and every day is made of moments...and we're there....all those moments....and...uhh....we're taking screenshots of your banking passwords in those moments too....and...uhh...so we believe charging more makes this more valuable...uhh...for our investors....game pass has a lot more value now that it has tiers...and call of duty is day one...for some customers....soo...uhhm....our next hardware will be such a technological leap.....the technology...what do we mean by technology leap?....we don't know yet...we'll know later....and don't worry about pricing...we'll get to that....later....uhh....help?"
@PsBoxSwitchOwner @Ricky-Spanish Exactly. I said it yesterday, and I'll say it again. The Xbox community/customer relationship was a contract based on trust. Phil told us in plain language the plan, the goal, the strategy, we liked the offering and bought on. That contract has been shattered now that repeated promises are hollow and broken as soon as they're said, and very word they say must be parsed for it's real hidden meaning like talking to a lawyer or slimy salesman. Once that trust is broken the contract falls apart. If we don't trust the platform or the promises of where it's going, the platform loses cohesion.
@Fiendish-Beaver @Kezelpaso The fact that they're being deliberately vague tells us just how hard they're trying to deceive. Not a good look. But the one thing I think is clear, to me, is that day one games are not coming to standard, period.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@GamingFan4Lyf Yeah it sounds like your timeline is a whole lot like mine actually. I think that's exactly when I built my last gaming rig as well, and spent like $3k on it, and was looking over my shoulder at $400 consoles thinking "why am I doing this?" Felt like I was wasting infinite money and then spending more time making it work.
I think PC remains expensive, and possibly much more expensive than console in terms of hardware. OTOH games discount better, are cheaper at launch, and GP is almost half the price if sticking with it. That's something. Long run you still spend a lot more I think on PC, but the problem is with console nickel and diming as it is, the gap is closing that in the end, it's still cheaper on console, but if you compare how MUCH cheapr it really is total vs how much worse an experience you have, IDK if it's worth it if it's a major hobby.
Using the little ROG Ally, not the Z1 Extreme, just the regular Z1, and I can coax most non-blockbuster games to get 45-60fps where I can't even do that with most games on PS5/XSX where shadow detail is forced on me, framerate be darned....there's more life in those PC parts than console, even where games are poorly optimized. The console performance this gen is just flat out poor.
When I figure, $500 for Xbox, $500 for PS5, another probably $600+ for PS5 Pro to make it almost acceptable. Next gen probably 600-700 for each console...under-speced as always, then probably another pro? Yeah, a $1600 4090 + another $1200 PC compoents + probably another $1800 7090 + another $350 CPU in a few years.....it's still more expensive. But at $250 a year for GP (or over 300 by then)....how much more expensive is it really? At the current price 4 years of Game Pass buys you a 4080 FE/Ventus/Windforce/Trinity. With the backlogs we have....that 4080 is a lot more valuable. You can pick up those XGS games when they hit $30 on Steam (unless MS gates them to Windows Store only which would be hilarious, pathetic, and on-brand.)
Also totally agreed on "most" Sony games but probably not Astrobot. If I go full headfirst into PC again, Astrobot may end up being my last PS purchase. ALTHOUGH, I also suspect that it will sell terribly and then end up ported to PC where it will also sell terribly, just like Sackboy. Nerdz are interested in the game. The mass PS market I suspect is not, and the mass PC market I know is not. At least the PC version I can rig VorpX up to run it in VR lol.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@jFug At least someone noticed! 😂
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@GamingFan4Lyf I think if you don't mind stepping down to 1080p/30 with DLSS scaling and framegen, it might end up ok, or at least often ok. But then if you need say DirectX 13 support by then, you're SoL. Or, with a 4080 with 16GB VRAM if 24GB starts to become normal and 6090 has 48GB you might start feeling it etc. It's one of those hard to predict things.
My gut feeling says you can probably run a GPU DESKTOP mind you, if it doesn't break, for a decade, these days, if you don't mind dropping down to low internal resolutions and lots of gfx settings off. Which is really console like anyway. But where you'll end up in trouble eventually might be VRAM, DX version requirements etc where you just hit a brick wall. or it may not happen.
Then again I can guarantee you the next PSXbox will be $600 minimum but more likely 700. Phil hinted at subsidy ending. PS wanted 600 last gen. So if you figure, this gen console plus next gen console, excluding mid gens, it's $1200 for 2 gens of ONE brand consoles anway....is 2 GPUs much worse? And you can upgrade your CPU too especially if AM5 in that time. That's better than "PRO" models offer if you want.
Pricier? Yes, still probably pricier. Maybe. But I'd be more wary of the cards just breaking in that time. Stuff happens. Cards run hot. Fan bearings don't last forever. Though for a whole laptop that change is more painful and what laptop really lasts a decade or more? Something breaks somewhere.
All that being said, I, too, Am looking into the PC conversion full speed at this point. I dipped my toes in with Legion/Ally and love it. Used to be PCMR for over a decade back in the day. Seems like this is the right time to cross back over.
PERSONALLY I'm looking at top tier GPUs as well, however I honestly would not be if VR did not matter to me. I think value wise a 4070 super or Ti Super + another 6070 later is probably more value than one supercard today that will be old later. But for me VR is a major priority and even a 4090 "isn't quite enough" to fully drive a good PCVR set, and even 5090 may barely cut it, so it's sort of a "get by for now until what I actually need actually exists, probably a decade later" sort of thing.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@Vaako007 " It costs money to run a data center plus expand and upgrade servers. Infrastructure doesn’t come cheap."
You're mixing up cloud and GP itself, where GP's datacenter cost is just the transmission bandwidth for download, shared with digital purchases - I.E. If they're selling the games, the subs require 0% more disk space or rack capacity, only transmission bandwidth for extra downloads.
Cloud requires more racks, but then there's all the more reason to separate cloud into its own expensive tier as a hardware purchasing alternative rather than as a bundle for hardware purchasers, because renting GPUs isn't cheap - doesn't affect the download portion of the service. Or are console buyers and PC/Windows buyers being used to subsidize other people renting GPUs? Another consideration.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@GamingFan4Lyf "Would getting a laptop with an Nvidia 4080 (and DLSS, Ray-reconstruction, and Frame Generation, etc..) carry me both through this generation and through next generation?"
Definitely not a laptop version of a 4080 and equivalent CPU through Series Y/PS6. Honestly desktop 4090 probably won't carry you through NEXT generation either. I could see it lasting for 3 GPU gens (2 years each) so maybe a 4-7 year lifespan, but by mid-next gen I'm certain it'll start showing its age. Though, over that much time you have as much chance of it breaking as just being not good enough. By then there will be some new must-have feature (DLSS4? New HDMI standard? Required AI components? 48GB VRAM?) that will be locked behind a 7070.
There's a caveat to that though. With game devs tapping out on spending too much on developing "high end' graphics games, the industry might be dialing back. I don't know what that means for the next consoles. For GPUs the trend has been that the TOP tier cards (xx80/xx90) go up 50% in performance (and also up 40% in price) each generation, but the mid-tier cards which are the cards MOST people buy (xx60, xx70) only get a 15% bump or so (4070 Ti Super being the outlier, it's really a stripped down and gimped 4080, not a 4070.) And those high end cards are only bought half by gamers, competing in the market with people using them as "cheap" alternative to $6000 workstation cards for CAD and video production and local deep learning AI models so the steady sales don't reflect gaming users necessarily - a video editor needs 24GB VRAM. A 4090 is the only viable option and is cheaper than the A6000 pro cards by a few grand. In other words, performance is mostly static for the majority of gamers between gens now with minimal gains. Nvidia even said something similar about why the prices will stay high, basically, they don't get much better any more, and if game devs aren't going to be pushing the gfx as hard, we might be stagnant for a while in which case, run the 4080 till it breaks. But IDK about laptop versions.... The whole "it's a 4080, but not actually the same product" naming of mobile parts has always bothered me. It's not the same part. It doesn't have the same power profile, thermals, or performance.
@somnambulance It's a catch-22. There's that temptation to be so frustrated with Xbox you just want to go to PS. Then you remember that the problem with Xbox is that' it's moving ever closer to where PS already is, it's just that it makes no sense from them to do that while also being in a losing position. Xbox used to be the better but less popular alternative. Now it's just the same alternative except without the popularity to back it up and (for now) a few nicer features.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
@Jake_homs "Family plan", "play your own library games on cloud", "Series X cloud servers/4k" there's a whole raft of promised GP features from years ago that they still haven't implemented yet managed 2 price increases, a new tier, and blacklisting games outside the top tier all before implementing basic features promised in 2022.
@PsBoxSwitchOwner I think it depends on defining success. They're now, I believe the largest publisher in the world. That smells like success. I don't think it's that they haven't found success, it's that they haven't actually decided what success actually is, and it's hard to achieve success in any one area if you keep changing the goal posts and confusing your customers by jerking them in every new direction your CFO wants to adventure to. But......that also defines MS as a whole these days. I've said it often but they operate like a hedge fund rather than a tech company. They don't have a tech goal. They don't focus on ONE thing until they're the biggest and best. They jump from thing to thing whichever way the market trend is blowing and abandon the old one.
The main problem is exactly as Amy Hood stated in the trials. They want to see Xbox generate margin more in line with their other divisions. Their other divisions are monopolies with government contracts. Xbox will never generate margins anywhere close to those other divisions. It's impossible, even if they bought Sony and Nintendo. So while they chase the impossible, they keep kneecapping their real success potential in the market by changing directions with no clear message every few months.
@JayJ "Subscriptions can only get so expensive until I start to question the value they're presenting."
Exactly. A lot of these sub companies keep messing with the idea that "all things just get more expensive forever so we can just keep raising the price every year forever." It misses the point that at some point they cross a value line where that money is better spent on something else, and a reduction of their product usage makes the most sense.
The problem is the game industry outside mobile doesn't seem to be growing, and appears to even be shrinking. So they feel the need to milk the customers they have for every last penny. And worse a lot of gamers seem to be both wealthy and stupid enough to not care and be willing to pay it. Makes a dangerous combination that abusing customers actually leads to better numbers.
@Ooccoo_Jr "Game Pass only makes sense at this point for a 'fast food gamer', consuming and disposing of games at a rapid rate."
Yeah I said a similar thing yesterday. At the old pricing GP was a great companion subscription for any gamer to get access to a bunch of things they might not otherwise try. But now at the newest pricing, 25% more than it was a year ago, the value changed. It's now an either or. GP is a route for a non-committed gamer that just wants to try things without building their own library - it's their only access to gaming and they play whatever's on it. If you're someone that also builds your own library and goes off the farm to games that aren't on GP, it's just too expensive to continue using. I think they're going to see a large sub drop due to this, as a whole class of customer got outpriced by this change, and probably won't come back. Not sure what new customer they expect to pick up to replace them.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
There's a potential plus side to this we're all overlooking. This is really just a Game Pass price drop back to the original $15, because is there anybody at all that feels they actually got value out of playing Starfield and Redfall Day One? It's now $15 for Game Pass, or $20 to join their Xbox QA Ready Access Program (X-QRAP) service.
Re: Reaction: Microsoft's Constant Tweaking Of Xbox Game Pass Is Becoming Exhausting
Really hit the nail on the head, and I'd said something similar myself. The entirety of the Xbox experience has become "case by case basis", "more details later", "don't worry, nothing's going to change" (one month later: "WE CHANGED IT like the youtubers said we would when we said no!") They don't know who their customer is, they don't know where that customer is, they don't know what that customer wants, they seem to only know the customer they have isn't the one they want and is an expendable tool to try to get the one they want.
Not so different from PS where the F2P whale appears to be the only customer they want/need/have and everyone else just doesn't matter.
Right now, I would find it hard to recommend Xbox to anyone. Not because it doesn't have good features but because you don't know what those features are, what they will be 6 months from now, or if they will exist at all, nor what it will cost. It's a scratch-off lottery. They'll figure it out next month after this month's figures come in. It's like a console by a Kickstarter company except it's Microsoft.
And any time they get good press and put themselves in a confident place they slap their customers in the face with a 2x4 within a few weeks, stirring the chaos again.
Meanwhile on PS you know you're going to get screwed before you start. And on Nintendo you've been screwed since you were a kid so you're just used to it.
Re: Xbox Game Pass Gets Price Increases And New 'Standard' Subscription Tier
Really you summarized the entire xbox customer experience with this reply:
" We don't know. They have haven't specified. What we do know is that there will be some games that will ONLY be on Ultimate according to their FAQ. I assume other games will come after different amount of times"
I think that sentence can be applied to every aspect of Xbox, it's always, "we don't know, we can assume it's, unclear, they'll figure it out later."
For me, for value, this really kills GP. The last price hike came close to killing it. It's not that I get no value from it as much as it then becomes cost-benefit to sub vs just paying for the games that are on it. The debate then became play it day 1 vs wait 6-12 months for sales. But the new GP tier kind of flips that value as well.
It all goes back to they do not know what business plan they want and they keep changing it on the fly to see what sticks. Which makes the customer experience poor. Before everything was about subs. Now it's all about publisher unit sales and aligning subs not to interfere. What will it be tomorrow? Roll 2d10 to find out.
The fact that the lower tiers don't even include all games (LOL Call of Duty, Call of Duty, Call of Duty, Call of Duty, Sports, TV) Once again, I can't even identify what the product IS or what to expect for payment. And they can't tell me. Because they'll figure it out later on a case by case basis. I'd have missed gems like Little Kitty Big City and Ghostwire without GP. OTOH is that worth $250/yr?
9th gen is the gen the joy of gaming got sucked out of gaming. It became a fight against bankers instead of the gaming industry now. I can't say "Xbox is worse than PS now", it's just that both of them suck, and Nintendo's always been abusive.
@CaptnDave Griping aside for a moment, if you purchased the game, you absolutely should be able to play them on Core, that's the entire point of Core, Core is just a renamed Gold. That's a tech support issue, not a tier issue. It's not working and it's supposed to be working.
Re: Xbox Game Pass Gets Price Increases And New 'Standard' Subscription Tier
@TJ81 Agree in a lot of ways, but PC has almost the same sort of Stockholm syndrome where you get to pay Nvidia $1000 for a $400 video card and it'll be $1250 next time no doubt. There's really no escaping it anymore. Gaming is no longer an equitable hobby, it's an uncomfortable relationships between the abusers and the dependent. Dealers and pushers no longer try to win your business, they push you to the brink and see how far they can go before you break.
@Foxx_64740 ""I'm cancelling my sub right now" but we all know they will be here tomorrow and next year (still subscribing)"
Nah, I'll ride it one more month until the change takes effect, and then drop. The appeal was it was a trifle of an expense and I get to try lots of stuff I wouldn't have and play the MS games cheaper than buying without waiting. At this price, it's an expense. I have a backlog. It's crossed a line I can't get much value out of the expense anymore. And it'll just get worse. MS games will join all other publishers as "buy it in a year on sale if I'm still interested in a year." What I'll consider going forward is if it's still worth it to drop to PCGP only from ultimate, or if the fact that it'll just keep going up in price until it's the same poor pricing as this really kills the interest in that too. Also remember in the US, sales tax is added to that price, different by state, national average is 6% so a $21.20 recurring bill starts weighing down the monthly statements...
@themightyant I think the prickly issue is, Game Pass had carved out a unique brand and market with its "day one" image and low pricing. With raising prices, and splitting into tiers, maybe its greatest risk is becoming "just another subscription like the others." Kind of like Xbox became "just another console like the others" (but is the one with Game Pass.)
Yeah it was "too much value" but that buffet feeling of "too much value" is what made it desirable. It's why most showed up. Rearranging the value proposition feels like a mixture of MS celebrating a victory lap at the 1.2k mark of a 10k marathon and MS biz people stepping in to interfere in a service based on spreadsheet values rather than understanding the market- and their confused identity, with ABK people at the helm, trying to run a publisher from within a platform, focusing on publisher numbers.
But as you say, success depends on volume in the subs market, and the subs were already saturating. Limiting growth artificially seems like a bad move. Who is the actual market? Console owners? There's only 35 mil and not all will sub. Fire stick owners? Will they even buy in at HIGHER prices? CoD players? What a horrible value for them. Casuals? They weren't buying when it was cheap let alone expensive. It used to be people like me, but at the new pricing, it no longer is. And again, it seems in line with MS's recent strategy to push all of their users out of their ecosystems.
Re: Xbox Game Pass Gets Price Increases And New 'Standard' Subscription Tier
@themightyant They really do. Every time the narrative changes from doom they do something the shatter all rebuilt trust again. Their brand identity is starting to be "the two faced console"
I think there's a threshold in pricing that shifts it from being a great companion to your game library to instead bring an alternative to owning a library only really valuable to players that don't intend to own a library at all while not being appealing to those that do. Imo they're now on that doorstep.
@PsBoxSwitchOwner "Feel the burn!"
At last we have proof that infinite monkeys typing in infinite typewriters will in fact not eventually produce Hamlet. It's really just an incoherent mess after all.
Re: Xbox Game Pass Gets Price Increases And New 'Standard' Subscription Tier
@themightyant Yeah there's a lot of layers that make it especially bad. The biggest is that this is a 25% price hike in 1 year after the platforms selling point was built on its value. 25% is a significant change to its value proposition. And 100% on console only as you said. Is it another 15% in a year? At what point does it become really poor value? Maybe they want to kill it and roll back day 1.. With them who knows?
Second is, yet again Microsoft says one thing, paints one image to coax trust, then just turns around and reverses it a few months later. Every time they right the ship and look stable they go and announce they're erratic and unstable, and worse untrustworthy politicians, where ever word most be parsed for meaning, every time. A product not good on its word with random changes isn't enticing. That's the biggest problem Xbox has. They not only don't earn customer trust, they actively erode it. But it's not just Xbox, that's nadellas Microsoft in all areas. Ask Intel.
Honestly if they just said "tiers" when asked about call of duty the optics would be better instead of doubling down on "DAY ONE**" (on a tier we haven't told you about). The Xbox community was built on a trust contract. That contract has definitely expired.
Objectively it's technically a good value. But the higher the price goes the market it's a good value to becomes narrower. And the inability to trust their pricing structure stability makes the long term value dubious.
I don't know how they expect to increase slowing subs by raising prices. Or increase console sales by making the platform less approachable.
Again quarterlies above product success. Again, standard nadella. But don't worry, the screenshots of your PC are totes encrypted, honest! (Syke!)
Re: Xbox Game Pass Gets Price Increases And New 'Standard' Subscription Tier
@IOI "I really really don’t like the direction Xbox is heading"
This is a lie. It implies you know the direction they're heading. You can't know that. They don't even know that.
Re: Xbox Game Pass Gets Price Increases And New 'Standard' Subscription Tier
Remember when everyone was going "see the fear mongers lied, there's no tiers, there's no price increase?". That's 2 price hikes in a year.
$20 a month now. $240 a year plus tax. This is where I get off the bus. I could buy 5 games a year on sale for the same price which is probably exactly how many I'd play on GP. Goodbye monthly renewal!
Re: Xbox's New 'Just For You' Offers Include Super-Cheap Mafia Trilogy Deal
@Scummbuddy Huh, so it's just that Phil pays to keep deals off my platform then... 😢
Re: US Sales Figures Reveal Interesting Stats About Xbox Series X|S & Hellblade 2
@OldGamer999 Yeah, I mean at this point the real issue is just hive mind and marketing. People, weirdly, don't like choices, they just want to chose between "the right answer" and the "bad answer." And whatever most other people already picked is the obvious right answer. I'm convinced most of the western world would have been happiest in 1980's Russia. It's their Eden.
At this point the "right answer" is PS because everybody else chose it and nobody would dare choose different than everybody else, and that means no other option can ever succeed unless PS throws itself off a cliff. (And seemingly, even that doesn't do the job.)
I'd say it's the same scenario in PC gaming where everybody choses Nvidia to the point that AMD basically doesn't exist, but that's actually a different situation where even that absurd prices nvidia is charging, when performance is compared dollar for dollar, they actually still end up the better value of the two poor value choices, where for the same money they tend to run a bit faster, cooler, and with less power, so they get away with murder because their nearest competitor can't compete.
Re: Soapbox: I Miss The Type Of Pick-Up-And-Play Games We Got On Original Xbox
@InterceptorAlpha LOL yeah, I think I had the same experience and thoughts with that. Then again, half the problem with that game was that the first 60% of the game was just the tutorial, just reaaaaaally drawn out lol.
Re: Soapbox: I Miss The Type Of Pick-Up-And-Play Games We Got On Original Xbox
Pick up and play didn't go anywhere. There's more of it than ever. What it doesn't have is big marketing budgets and physical copies that cost fortunes to distribute through major mega-publishers. The small publishers that make such games went digital-distribution at lower prices than mega-publishers, started getting called "indies". Game Pass is loaded with such content as well.
@Tasuki @InterceptorAlpha Despite saying the above, I massively agree with you both. Gaming jumped a couple of sharks in a monster truck in moving from a set of basic controls you use in interesting ways through the game to the the tutorial that "builds" on the systems through half the game. I can't tell you how many games I have half finished that I can't play again or have to restart because jumping back in and learning all the systems you were supposed to learn over time is impossible 60% into the game. When did playing a video game become a field of study (flight/racing sims excluded which bring in real world learning of real vehicle operation.) And the trend of needing to watch a bunch of youtubers and read guides just to figure out how to beat bosses (From Software, I'm looking at you), or "min-max" everything to have the best odds has become ridiculous. Even the P&P D&D based games of old didn't need all that, and they even came with spiral bound manuals.
Re: US Sales Figures Reveal Interesting Stats About Xbox Series X|S & Hellblade 2
Ooof, those industry-wide console sales.... Gaming is ducked. Hardware is down, hardware is down below last gen, game sales are down, devs going bankrupt. GPUs at LOL$$. Absolutely brutal time for the entire medium. Some of it is economy, some if it is greed putting everyone off, some of it is F2P mobile games eating the lion's share...but something else is just wrong in gaming right now. Even AMD showed a, what 43%? 47%? decline in gaming revenue? Although most of that probably correlates to the drop in console sales/production for PS/XB considering AMD only makes up something like 3% of GPUs according to Steam, so PC gaming isn't really a slice they have anyway, that's 97% NVDA.
@GuyinPA75 I don't think anyone needed articles to "prove" subscription "hurts" "sales". Subscription is an alternative payment method to "sales", of course it "hurts" the sales, it's supposed to - it's an alternate payment plan. That's like saying 12 month 0% financing hurts single-month TV sales revenue. Of course it does. It's supposed to. It was factored into the pricing. It's $216 a year. $1300 over a 6 year console generation assuming naively no price increases over 6 years. Plus DLC and addons still. That's more games than the normal console buyer actually buys. It's not hurting overall anything unless one wants to pedantically compare individual game sales SKUs (cue Tango conversation.)
@OldGamer999 I think that poll referenced is HIGHLY biased. The massive Astrobot response, and honestly, inflated M&L response for a series that sells pretty poorly in general, is a giveaway. There's a particular brand of internet forum gamers that are excited about that game (Astrobot). Heck, Metaphor even appearing on the list at all tells us that's not a poll for the mass market, but merely internet dwellers like us. Looking at the performance of Sackboy, the general market on PS is not particularly interested in such games like Astrobot and Sackboy (unfortunately. The PS market is no longer the FF and Jak market, it's now the GTA & Fortnite market.)
Re: Xbox's New 'Just For You' Offers Include Super-Cheap Mafia Trilogy Deal
Is this just a UK thing? I keep seeing the "just for you" mentions on this site over the years, and have never, once, seen such a deal "just for me." Is it just not a thing in the US where more than 30 people actually buy Xboxen, or does Phil Spencer personally have a vendetta against me and pays to keep deals off my platform?
Re: Cities: Skylines 2's Xbox Release Delayed Again, Dev Blames 'Unresolved Issues'
I blame Jim Ryan.
Re: Apple TV+ Is Giving Away 3 Free Months To Xbox Users Right Now
Apple promoting itself to Microsoft fans. That's a new one 😆
Re: Talking Point: Has Your Gaming Slowed Down As You've Got Older?
@Titntin LOL, a shame, but understandable! Meanwhile I'm so addicted to VR, and the writing's been on the wall so long for PSVR, that I'm going to have to go back to PC to get into PCVR where the good stuff is. Couldn't help but think of your experience reading reviews for Dirt Rally 2 VR and DCS World combat flight sim, lol. Apparently you don't just need solid VR legs, you need to be a VR cephalopod for those!
Re: LEGO Horizon Adventures Dev Gives Non-Answer For Lack Of Xbox Version
@Sol4ris LOL, no I didn't mean they were paying for this one, obviously, but after the accusations of such behavior the whole "we're releasing our game on EVERY platform EXCEPT that one" (while that one is putting games on ours), seemed to announce that mentality. The whole thing just came across as exceedingly petty. I get the business case for it, but the optics are not complimentary. If you're going to do the multiplatform thing, do the multiplatform thing, leave the politics out of it.
It also comes across as exceedingly out of touch in that they're putting their money where their ABK lawsuit era mouth was, in that they genuinely don't see Nintendo as a competitor while they do see Xbox as one, which is arguably weird and out of touch, arguably Nintendo is a bigger competitor to Sony's "real console" market, the Asia/international market, and the family market than Xbox ever will be post-360.
Re: GTA 5 Dev Talks Cancelled Single-Player DLC, Says It Was 'Really, Really Good'
I still don't even understand the success of GTA online. Send like a dead empty nothing to do thing that became the biggest thing ever. I'm convinced most "gamers" don't even game.
Re: Starfield Modder Blames Lack Of Support As Elder Scrolls Project Gets Cancelled
@BrilliantBill People don't even talk about it now let alone years from now 😂
Re: Talking Point: Has Your Gaming Slowed Down As You've Got Older?
@Titntin Completely OT, but that reminds me, did you ever get around to trying GT7 in VR?
Not that PSVR2 isn't dead as a doornail, but still...
Re: LEGO Horizon Adventures Dev Gives Non-Answer For Lack Of Xbox Version
While I do get that install base and potential sales is the weakest of the platforms, and I do get that Xbox is the more direct competitor, and I do get that MS is doing it only because the they have to and Sony doesn't.
However, as soon as they revealed this, the whole "Sony releases a major IP game with Lego on every platform except Xbox!" announcement came across as exceptionally petty, and managed to lower my opinion of Sony. It was almost like them directly confirming that they also pay to keep games off one single platform, publicly.
Re: Starfield Modder Blames Lack Of Support As Elder Scrolls Project Gets Cancelled
@Xeno_Aura " the team realizing the scope of the project and the fact that devoting years and years of your life to a project that has no financial benefit and for a game that has a relatively small player base nowadays wasn't a great use of their time or skills."
Is it wrong that I read this and immediately thought of Arkane Austin?