@InterceptorAlpha My Switch's bulging battery solved the whole screen glue problem. Comes right off on its own, lol!
Cortana: ROFL! What as been seen can not be unseen. I still can not believe the "butt controller" is an honest to goodness Microsoft controller, even if it is Deadpool.
Gyros: I have a freaking screwdriver with a gyro. Nintendo was doing gyros when CRTs were still the norm. I can not comprehend how Xbox could be so disconnected they would not have gyros. They can make a refrigerator but not put a gyro in their controller.
@InterceptorAlpha Hardware has upfront costs, R&D, supply chain, things that eat at the opex. Software is just profits minus the umbrella operating budget. He doesn't hate hardware as much as he's just a finance guy and just hates any line that inclines at more than a 30 degree angle.
@OldGamer999 Nintendo's not actually a particularly large company, they just act like one because they're a monopoly in their own market and have cash reserves that are the envy of any company that's not one of the silicone valley big 10. IDK what their profit percentage looks like, but it's very likely to be extremely large. Their low operating expenses are laughable, their staff size is minimal (everything they do is outsourced), and they were managing to pull a slight profit when WiiU was catastrophically burning. There's a trick MS and Sony couldn't even dream of. PS5 "historic success" margin isn't much better than Nintendo's WiiU era margin. And they did it without fortnite money back then.
@abe_hikura You're reading too much into it - it's empty corporate rhetoric to touch on the keywords investors are looking to hear.
"What we love and always loved about gaming which is Xbox" (Which conveniently ignores Microsofts entire gaming presence and history prior to Xbox, and just gives a cursory nod to "we've been doing gaming stuff for a while" in simple digestible words investors can connect in their heads) - it's just pretend acknowledgement of recent history to get to the main talking point which is PC and mobile.
Given that PC was their FIRST gaming stronghold before sabotaging that to go Xbox before sabotaging that to go cloud before sabotaging that to go SwitchStation, his statement actually reveals a total disconnect from and unfamiliarity with Microsoft's entire history in the gaming market. Just empty rhetoric to glue together paragraphs to get to what investors want to hear.
Although if really parsing words we get to: "now we have both the content and the ability to access all the traditional high-scale platforms "
ABILITY TO ACCESS all the traditional high scale platforms. Not control over. Not compete as. Not lead in. No, the ability to ACCESS those platforms including console. He did not say who's platform. But, I think that would, again, be reading too much into his words because they're ultimately meant to be empty filler words to get to the meat of "expanding mobile and PC gaming presence." The rest is just decoration on that sentence.
Plus the talk of "sockets" which has got to be the weirdest use of corporate metaphor speak I've ever heard.
@BIG3 Yeah, I think it's premature to say if next gen will be last gen or not, it probably depends a lot on how well it sales, how they manage to blunder it or not, where cloud tech and even just mobile hardware, or even just laptops go over the next decade, and where subscriptions end up going in terms of growth outside the console and paid online, so it's as much 50/50 to them as it is to us at this point. But I've thought it's been pretty clearly telegraphed and not even hidden since January that Series XS is a dead parrot and they're in "transition" to next gen the same way Awkward Reggie and Bobby Kotick were playing with Skylanders action figures during the WiiU's last E3. As a Series X and PSVR2 owner, I feel like this entire generation has been one giant transition from X1PS4 to XYPS6. The PS5/XSX started winding down for next gen January 2021.
@OldGamer999 Yeah, the single digit margins coming out is when Jim "retired", Totoki apologized to investors, they shut down studios, killed the GaaS games, and doubled down on console+PC lol. Things aren't rosy at PS. But in their case they have solid revenue, their biggest problem is that Jim was spending all their revenue like a drunk sailor in a house of pleasure.
@GuyinPA75 In his own words from various interviews he's always afraid of "missing the next big thing" and therefore chases after it to try to get ahead of it. A wholly reactionary way of trying to be a visionary. And also he's still having Gates whisper in his ear what to do...... not exactly a proven strategy.
But he's bolstered by investors that love love love the money he's pulling in, from their perspective he's better than great, and it's of no conern to them that he's selling their long term stability to grab investment windfalls today. Investors never care about tomorrow, they only care about today.
@Grumblevolcano Yeah, definitely agreed. And I can't think of one single reason why the Series would not have gyros. I 100% expected Xbox would "finally" have gyros this gen. It was a given. How they managed to fail at the gates on that I will never understand.
@HonestHick "Holding back for next gen" that's kind of a metaphor for the whole generation, really.
@sixrings I'm not sure buying ABK to get CoD and rule the console and streaming gaming world was also a good reason to raise prices twice and kill subscriber growth or any reason to buy an Xbox. I'm not sure that there's really any good strategic reason to do much of anything they do regardless of what their strategy is, assuming there is one...
Normally a CEO saying something is still a priority is reassuring, but in the case of Nadella, it's more like Lucy telling Charlie Brown she really won't pull the football away this time, honest.
It's kind of like that time he told important people there won't be any price increases due to Call of Duty right before they raised prices and said it's because Call of Duty.
Nothing this man says is worth the bandwidth used to repeat it. He makes up whatever sounds good at the moment regardless of if it's true. He's playing investors, of course, too. Though he didn't say much of value here, with vagaries about covering all platforms starting with console, but somehow also thinks they had console covered just fine before ABK. Corporate not understanding their market position may be a huge part of their problem.
Also, where is Phil? Should not head of Xbox/Microsoft Gaming be the one talking about the future of the product? Why is the corporate CEO the only source of this information? I'm starting to picture Phil in a closet, bound, with duct tape over his mouth.
@Zenszulu That's exactly it. Whenever the sales are low, they give up, regroup, let it fizzle, and plan to reboot next launch to fix it.
@Jenkinss Indirectly. They've listed only a few older games for PS5, plus Doom, it's not like so far a plethora of games have gone to PS5. While many assume it means eventually everything goes to PS5, nobody knows that, and right now that isn't necessarily true. It's not the existence of their PS5 strategy that harmed them. It's their lack of communication, lack of clarity, endless equivocation when pressed for one that broke it. The fact they let the uncertainty and rumors dictate the conversation without stepping in has given the media version of the PS5 dump its own legs and life that then drove people away along with their various other problems and miscommunications while also killing favorite studios, removing familiar faces, and replacing them with Activision heads. Though when I look back, they'd half tried to recover from the PS5 blunder and it kind of worked, people were soothed again after that. It's the culling of Tango and Arkane that really changed the mood. They took the one big hit that defined the future of Game Pass and the console, HiFi Rush, and declared it a catastrophic failure worth disposing everyone involved, after just previously praising it as their high water mark indicating nothing they say carries any weight. I think that's the point where people started wondering what even is Game Pass and Xbox? up to then they were just signaling they didn't know what to do with consoles. It was then they indicated they just don't know what they're doing with anything at all.
TL;DR Their problem is the same problem they've had for 20 years. It's not that they step on rakes, it's that they run the weed wacker whilst naked on a honey farm.
@jumpin_jeeps Yeah, MS problem isn't "the games" really. Yeah they released a console way too soon because they had to because Sony was, and it looks horrible. But if they stayed the course and kept messaging how great it was for playing 3rd party, they'd have stayed in the game. They took their eye off the ball and stopped promoting their own product, even bashed it publicly just to get ABK through, and they changed the image of their own product to negative. PS5 hasn't been doing much of anything either, and if it weren't for VR mine would have gathered rediculous dust - it's not very different from XB minus some paid exclusives here and there. But the mood of the future is so much better there.
@PhileasFragg Yes and no. I think whats happening to Xbox is the same thing that's been happening to Windows, Azure, everything in MS. Nadella's so single mindedly focused on maximizing their exposure to the AI bubble, the massive investor influx and immediate return at peak bubble, he's culling everything that can be culled to funnel those resources into more AI returns. I.E. the bad stuff is happening precisely to add fuel to that out of control growth wildfire. Having to actually make returns across myriad products due to investor disinterest might actually make them cut less.
@Steel76 I think the problem, and it's Sonys point too, is the PC power user market is small though and overlaps console market so little that doesn't matter. Console is powered by the casual masses. If the PC power users make up enough of the console never to kill it, console is hosed anyway.
Hulst thinks ps games on PC will make people buy consoles for sequels. I don't really see it playing out that way. PC players will wait for the better version. And it's not like pc players will buy their third party games on the consoles even if they do, and if they don't, there's no point selling them a console anyway, that's where the money is.
Ms has an opposite issue. Microsoft game studios was a PC publisher before Xbox even existed. They destroyed and cannibalized that pc publishing in order to push Xbox and lock exclusives to it. So they're kind of rebuilding what they had and broke before.
@HonestHick And what a share button it is! But I wouldn't know. Because I use elite 2. Which is still an Xbox one controller....
Dual sense really isn't bad. The battery sucks badly, the parallel sticks will always be wrong, but I could live with that, but the tension is awful. Oh and the flat mushy face buttons are meh.
There's some switch/PC/mobile controllers that are seriously nice. Literally a copy of Elite V2 but with mechanical click facebuttons, Hall sticks and triggers etc. they don't work on ps or Xbox, but do work on switch. First party controllers are nice but they're starting to slip behind the Chinese companies. Though the Chinese companies just copied their mold....
@HonestHick modern is a stretch. It's got tech in it 😂
I still can't believe we don't have force feedback sticks. Microsoft made force feedback sticks for flight games in the 90s before Xbox. And now Sony has force feedback useless triggers and Microsoft has.... This. And nobody has ff sticks still!
Then again they can't get these to stop breaking even without motors!
@Romans12 That's the kind of nightmare with sony I'd fear most. It's pretty bleak when the focus of the console companies is just trying to turn their customers into whales and extract as much value from them as possible rather than trying to grow at this point. I guess if I'm going to be exploited, I'd rather be exploited by Nvidia? I mean the leather jacket is kinda cool I guess.
@101Force The AI chip bubble will pop. Businesses aren't going to keep shoveling money into short term instantly replaced AI hardware, and the AI cloud providers will need to show a return to their over enthusiastic investors and turn up short, and the expansions will grind to a crawl. AMD is well diversified and can shift gears whatever way the winds blow. Sure, half their sales are AI. But half aren't. NVidia OTOH is in deeper doo doo when it pops. They go all in on one thing and ignore the rest.
@GamingFan4Lyf Yeah, Intel has its advantages, AMD has its advantages. For a gaming PC, unless one specifically needs Intel's advantages I think AMD's longer term upgradability on a given mobo just makes a lot more sense. Though that only matters if your mobo has PCIE5 obviously as future GPUs will need it. For production PCs it doesn't matter, you'll need new IO before you need more powerful CPUs. (and CPUs aren't actualy getting much more powerful, Intel 14th gen is kind if 13.5th gen. ALL tech hardware is in a mess right now.
The double L2 cache of the X3Ds is really incomparable for gaming, they bench worse than a standard CPU as they have to run cooler, lower boost clocks, less cores at high speeds, but the cache makes up for it in gaming where that's the main bottleneck. Intel will have a 3D cache part coming soon, but I still think if you don't need intel they're less ideal for gaming (streamers however need Intel because the x3ds don't handle all the video encoding simultaneous with the game very well.)
It's always the waiting game though. Whatever you buy, whenever you buy it, you could have had something better if you waited just that bit longer! That's the frustrating part of PC.
@SleeplessKnight "Who will fill the void" I think it's a 1-2 combination that will mostly mean mobile. I think Apple, Amazon, other mobile-centric vendors will push mobile as the future of gaming harder and harder. Even MS for that matter. An xbox controller, an iPhone and a dongle....that's the future that will happen. I think gaming is just going mostly to mobile long term, even before cloud. ON the "premium" side, Steam deck, Ally, etc I think portends the future, followed by laptops, of PC really absorbing more of the "premium" console market. "Premium consoles" wanted to become low end PCs. Now they did. Now they'll struggle to compete with actual PCs. And mobile. Current phones are quite a bit more powerful than Switch...the line between "mobile" and "console" was already blurred by Nintendo's success. Xbox One and PS4 literally ran a tablet CPU.
@Ricky-Spanish They sold Series X for $349.99 with Diablo IV bundled at Christmas, and that was before the PS5 port announcements, and they still didn't move. They really damaged the brand.
@sonicbooming I agree, I think they're done trying to compete in Sony's "red ocean" and want to try a turn going head to head against Nintendo's market instead. Worked out well for Kinekt so I expect great things!
@OldGamer999 I mean a PC is just a really BIG hardware console. It can sit under your TV. Literally. It's not like PS5 wasn't pushing the size in that direction anyway.
And it will still harangue you to sign up for Game Pass, just like the good old days!
@GuyinPA75 FWIW, while Souls stans will gatekeep their superiority of rising to the challenge of accomplishment in a video game, and how letting anyone do it easier would diminish their accomplishment and make them feel like they wasted their time to the ends of the earth, it's worth considering Elden Ring and all Souls games (barring Bloodborne and Demons Souls) considerable sales on Steam and Epic and remembering that easy, and even invincibility mods exist on PC...........not everyone played through the challenge..... the gatekeeping is already meaningless outside people's heads. Sadly I think the fights could be fun if you'd just respawn INTO the fight rather than slog your way back into it again. The "difficulty" really isn't difficulty. Nioh? That's difficulty. Fromsoft isn't difficulty, It's a lack of functional checkpointing of progress. If the "difficulty" is generated not by the chanllenge but just by testing your endurance of wasting time between repeats of the challenge, it's not hard, it's just frustrating design that strokes some people's egoes. It set out to emulate the challenge of the NES era. Well...that was mostly bad design too... But it's built its fan base. Like Ghosts n Goblins. Which was designed mostly to eat quarters.
To be TOTALLY fair to Nintendo, I think the breakable weapon system could be considered an extension of the way the Master Sword always weakened whenever you took a hit (no beam shooting, etc.) And I get how the design of the weapons system was supposed to compel your to keep the loop up, but I also found it annoying, and mostly it led to me hoarding all my weapons, rarely using the good ones, thus slogging through fights with weak weapons so I didn't use up the good ones, and then trying to use the master sword for everything, then just running in circles killing time while it recharged. It's not a design that worked for me, however, I adore it compared to my contempt for TotK. The first zelda game I can say I can't actually stand and didn't bother finishing since Zelda II. And I'd rather play Zelda II. Between ACNH, ToTK and now the new one Nintendo is leaning REALLY hard into "make everything into Minecraft/Fortnite, because kids like building stuff." To be fair the game was clever and innovative, and I think with VR controls where you could actually use your hands to assemble things instead of tring to line them up with analog sticks and shaking them to separate them, it may have been a great game. I'm sure the inevitable Virtual Boy 2 gets a $90 remake of TotK and it will be amazing.
TotK REALLY jumped the shark with it's obsessive crafing and materials gathering. Similar to ACNH. Which I also don't like while I love love love ACNL.
I mean of course ABK is driving their software sales growth, they simply added an entire publisher's existing revenue to their own. How could that not be massive growth?
@Kezelpaso "unless their strategy changes again."
You're being sarcastic, right? They give the big wheel a spin once a quarter to see what the new strategy will be.
@sixrings Friendly reminder: $69B was spent to purchase King to get Candy Crush and a heavy footprint in to the massively lucrative mobile market their main competitors in Apple, Google, Amazon are already in. Activision and CoD were dead weight that came along with the purchase. Basically they only cared about getting mobile market share. The rest of gaming can take a long walk off a short pier. They got what they came for. The rest can be dumped.
@GamingFan4Lyf (Said in creepily over-calming synthesized AI voice): Welcome back.......
Nintendo will never do PC. I think they'll go Apple App store at some point, but never PC. Doesn't mesh with their market.
x3d chips can't directly compare to non-x3d chips and the R9 x3d won't be out for a while. Intel will have their x3d competitor though. Plus an AM5 now means you can upgrade through at least 2027 (AMD committed to minimum that long for AM5 which is amazing.) Especially important if NPUs become importand and MS is DEFINITELY going to push it for their games.
NV50...rumors are all over the place, but it's a sure bet the only NV50s out in 2024 will be 5090 and MAYBE 5080, and some rumors say even 5090 is pushed to 2025 now. 5070, definitely not 2024.
And remember availability will be near zero at launch like with consoles. And price is unknown, but probably more expensive.
@Titntin I read your post and my main take away is that if you eliminate the Xbox store your PC experience suddenly gets much better lol
@PhileasFragg If OpenAI goes belly up (ding dong the witch is dead!), with the billions invested in them, Microsoft will simply insert the extra cash and buy them to obtain their AI tech as proprietary. (Aww, sheet, here we go again.)
The Tulip Mania that is AI has derailed everything tech. From allocation of silicon, to altered business plans to everything else, Xbox is suffering partly from it but it's a branch on the larger tech limb, where the allocation of EVERYTHING into AI to cash in while the cash is hot has set everything not AI back 15 years, while generating tons of useless dead end efforts just to secure investment capital. It's like a worse version of the 1999/2000 dot com bubble.
@101Force "Whatever Microsoft is planning, I hope they don't leave people who bought into the hardware component of their ecosystem feeling overlooked or discarded."
You wrote that comment in 2019 right?
@__jamiie I think a big part of the problem this gen is, despite a strong start, once they started the ABK lawsuits the goal of the company became singularly focused on securing ABK. That meant pleading their case to governments. That meant going out of their way to make sure Xbox was NOT successful, so they could play the victim card to governments. Which became a self fulfilling prophecy because once they got out of court and got ABK secured, what they had left was a failed console that was not successful because they went out of their way to make sure it wasn't.
@OldGamer999 I considered the PS5 route briefly but then shortly after realized an Xbox-less Playstion would be a living nightmare even more than being an Xbox customer now. Sony gets Nintendo-ugly unchecked. Between this and PSVR2....PC's the only way forward for me...back to the future!
In fairness Nintendo plummeted as they sunset Switch, and Sony's not picking up numbers that you'd think they would with both competitors in a deep slump, and are in fact dropping as well. The entire console market seems to be deteriorating rapidly, and both Sony and Xbox have flubbed this generation hard enough to cause damage to the console market overall. I don't think mobile, or PCs or technology or even the economy sunk this generation and maybe the future of consoles as a product. I think Microsoft and Sony did that by themselves. With help from the large publishers.
But seriously, go figure, Xbox sends mixed signals about their hardware support, their strategy, their studio support, their long term pricing, cuts brand marketing, and has no new major games for 2024 up to now....can't imagine why their consoles aren't selling, their sub isn't growing, and their "software revenue" gains all come from the fact that they bought a different company that always made a lot of money selling software.
They really need to think about Xbox's identity. If the consoles are sinking and the sub is stalling...what exactly does Xbox have other than a big PC and Playstation publisher? We keep hearing how it's all about cloud. But that stalled TOO.
Mismanagement Simulator (MS 2024) is the Game Pass killer exclusive.
@Mustoe I have a wired 360 controller around somewhere, but the wireless ones I have a whole BOX of drifting sticks for those things! 360 controllers were the OG drift nightmare
@Mustoe @Tintin I still think Xbox sells at least one more generation of hardware. They still need a physical box that has Game Pass on it, and if they kill the box, and the paid online, their GP numbers will catastrophically drop. So the box needs to exist for a long while even if it's just to keep the GP subscriber base stable. Even if the box is a Surface PC with an Xbox logo on it.
IDK if they were always after the casual market. I'm not sure they were ever after ANY particular market which is half their identity crisis. The OGXB was clearly all about hardcore and the windows gaming element that wasn't committed to PC. 360 started the same, then with Kinekt went hard to chasing Wii casual. Then with 1 decided to go ultra casual with TV sports, but then went back to hardcore, and now they want people who stream Miss Maisel. There's not an actual pattern to who they've been targeting. PS meanwhile went from mainstream gamer teens to hardcore, to a specifically cultivated sony-only audience, to....hyper-casual fortnite players and an ever disappointed hardcore.
Xbox is a mess, but console overall is a mess, too. Too much ambition, too much overestimation of market growth, and too long a lag time before seeing the blown bridge ahead on the tracks after jamming the throttle in full ahead and throwing all the coal in the boiler.
@lacerz The only thing worse than being an Xbox customer in 2024 is being a Nintendo or Sony customer in a year after Xbox isn't around...
It would feel wrong playing Xbox with a controller more transparent than their hardware strategy.
"From hereon out, Xbox controller will use a smaller and lighter box, where "single-use plastics have been removed from the packaging and the traditional paper manual has been replaced with a QR code for a digital quick start guide." We can't moan at that!"
I love this....."We've found ways to cut more costs from production and distribution - let's spin it as being environmentalist and use it as a marketing point!" Amazes me how every time a company cuts their costs the public cheers "yay environment!" They're not being environmentalists, you dodos, they're being cheap, maximizing margins, and selling it with feel-good spin. When your next console is delivered in a crumpled paper lunch bag that still smells of fried onions, please praise the Sun Goddess.
While I don't need a paper manual for a controller, I'm sick of "scan the QR code" for a manual. When I'm setting up a motherboard, I'd like a book with the pinouts and BIOS settings rather than holding a phone in one hand and trying to scroll and pinch zoom a PDF rendering the pin layout 2 inches offset, while trying to wire it with the other. There's a time and a place to be "green" and interfering with the usability of a product is not one of them. Great way to maximize investor return though.
@Scummbuddy Because when we all play together we all win(TM). And look at the Sea of Thieves sales on PS5. LOOK AT THEM!
@GuyinPA75 ROFLMAO That is the absolute best description of a Soulsborne battle I have ever read! Well done! That really does characterize the whole "it does not respect your time" aspect that infuriates me so. Elden isn't quite as dire as prior as classic Soulsborne. It's still Fromsoft, but it's not as...obtuse?
Also, I now need to play the game with a Billy Gibbons mod. It needs to replace Torrent with the Eliminator or no buy. And naturally the only weapon is an axe.
@Tintin Elden Ring being open world does allow a more traditional RPG grind, for sure, but @GuyInPA is actually pretty spot on for most other Soulsborne games and its clones. Demons Souls is painful. The difficulty is really false, it's stupid mechanics, memorizing exact timing sequences, and wearing you down by attrition of repeating annoying sequences repeatedly more than "difficult." Elden ring does more or less just let you hulk smash through it with grinding, which is exactly why a lot of the Soulsborne purists were already revolting against how "easy" the game was.
IDK, I'm in GuyinPA's campe regarding Soulsborne overall, but Elden Ring has a "something special" that feels more like a Zelda 1 remake than even BotW did.
Once I get my PCVR rig set up I intend to try the Luke Ross VR mod. This game in VR would be an amazingly breathtaking experience. Though I've heard that it can get even veterans with VR legs of steel a bit green with all that dodge rolling. That definitely sounds like another chance for you to grind to level 400!
@mcdreamer I still say that's a sort of one track mind among a particular fan base of a particular element that's kind of ballooned into a rigidly dedicated market. The people that enjoy that aspect of it are enjoying it, yes, but I'd kind of liken that to if the people that like to speed run BotW entirely as shirtless Link decided that's the only way to play the game and it wouldn't be fun unless forced to play the game that way as though there's nothing else worth enjoying in the game, and that shirtless link as a mandated always-on play style is an arbitrary road block to enjoying anything else in the game.
There's a lot in these games that a lot of people that don't like throwing themselves against that brick wall "for the challenge" could enjoy, people who's reflexes are not at the same level as others etc. I know the argument becomes "not everything needs to be for everyone" which is true, but locking everything else about the games behind the (faux) "difficulty" is just an unnecessary restriction that accomplishes nothing in the game other than letting people feel superior for doing it as though it's something more useful than playing a video game.
Now, PERSONALLY, I don't find the games especially "difficult", I find them obnoxiously time wasting and therefore infuriatingly frustrating, by making you repeat things you've already done rather than respawn right at the challenge you failed, and nothing infuriates me and turns me off a game more than that. That, too would be aided by an "easy" mode, not because the challenge itself is frustrating but because I'd be able to escape that frustration. Not a challenging game per-se, but I like the way FFXIV does it, you die on a boss, it asks if you want to try again on normal, easy or very easy. I'll throw myself at normal for a while, but if it's clear that I just don't have the right equipment or the mechanics of that particular boss are obnoxious for playing as a particular class (black mage main - ouch.) I'll throw it in easy after enough failures for that one fight just to end the frustration and move on. And unlike Fromsoft games that's one where "skipping" challenges without learning the skills could negatively impact other players if you don't actually know what you're doing, once you get to high end trials.
@HonestHick I'm amazed they didn't tap into their #1 in Mexico status to name the sequel without referencing the numeral 2. They could have called it the Xbox Deuce.
Series is a terrible name because they already had Xbox S and Xbox X. Yes it's One vs Series. But Xbox Series X and S sounds identical to Xbox X and S last Gen. It's even still the white one and the black one.
@MjJmediablogger The thing where that won't matter as much is IDK about UK and EU but in the US the average American is accustomed to $150-200 cable tv bills so $50 doesn't seem as weird. Which is bad. And I've never paid that....
@HonestHick "lazy or dumb". Introducing the Xbox Lazy and Xbox Dumb. Yeah has a good ring to it in certain that's the names of the next consoles.
I'm so mad about the gyros. I thought it was a given for this Gen. I was floored when they said it has none. Xbox is holding the whole industry back. Even valorant said it's because Xbox they aren't using gyro on ps. That's just wrong.
@HonestHick Yeah, I don't need the haptic triggers and the like but gyros? Really? They now own the #1 shooter ever in CoD and are holding the whole industry back without gyros.
@mcdreamer If "It's fun because its hard" was true, the game wouldn't let you grind and level to level 400 to make it easier, summon outsiders to assist, cheese bosses, or even upgrade gear and stats, it would be a linear story game with fixed battle difficulty kind of like FFXIII where everyone basically had the same XP stats and gear at a given boss so the difficulty was controlled. I don't buy the whole difficulty is what makes it good malarky for an instant, it's clearly not actually designed around that, that's just sort of a cult mentality that's formed around it and they're afraid to change it for fear of their market revolting.
The games are good DESPITE the unbalanced difficulty, not because of it. Some people enjoy that. Some people enjoy speed running. But it doesn't mean it's an essential component of the design except to the cult that's formed around that notion. They're just well designed environments regardless of the "difficulty." I still think it's a shame that the obsession with "must be frustrating to be fun!" keeps a lot of people from seeing their immaculately designed world. It really doesn't need to.
@HonestHick To be fair, lack of innovation on the Xbox controller to the point of just ignoring industry standard gyros probably is why Sony gets away with their shoddy batteries and drifting sticks...
@Kezelpaso @Titntin Yeah that's a huge pet peeve of mine across these sites for ages. I get the need for SEO, and that the family of platform specific sites has to differentiate the search and all but there really must be a better way, it makes the headlines sound really awkward, or "fanboyish", or even misleading when it makes things look like one platform is affected differently from others on a multiplat game. Not a criticism of this specific article, I know it's a Hookshot standard headline convention across the sites, and I know its practical and functional purpose, but it's still nasty!
Besides, wouldn't adding "PC, and PS5" to the headline really boost search rankings/SEO for an Xbox site by like 4000%? lol
I said it on Push but everything about this game from the look to the style, genre, scope, price, everything feels like it fell out of the year 2005, and I'm loving that it does. And it feels like it came right of of the era of peak Potter-mania, which helps it even more.
I'm sure there's at least 10 of the 30-something-million GP subscribers who haven't heard of this game yet will be very excited. 2K isn't a big fan of subscriptions though, they hurt sales too much, the game might drop down to 4th place in the sales charts if this happens.
Of course, historically, 2K only uses Game Pass as a glorified "free play weekend" and takes the game off days to weeks after putting it up, so I'm sure it'll be back to #1 for the next 20 or 30 years soon enough.
@Balie3000 What amazes me is Rockstar/2K could go out of its way to release patches on PC for no other purpose but to break mods they throw cease & desists at, but they can't be bothered to fix FPS, fix RDR2 HDR, or really do much of anything else. 2K may be the sleaziest company in all gaming, and that's saying something.
@Vaako007 IIRC a few years back they have a slightly different version of the sedans thing, not that there wasn't market share, but that they couldn't compete with Asian brands there and thus wanted to pull out to the higher margin, higher end SUV markets only. Not so much that there wasn't a market, but not a market for THEM because competitors did it better, cheaper, and won more market share. Though the idea that Ford and gm see themselves as "only luxury" brands is kind of funny. Champagne and Walmart dreams.
I'm not sure where gaming/hardware goes from here. There's a market for consoles, to a point, but it's not the market that it was. It used to be fueled by casuals buying it for some sports and fitness games, propping up and subsidizing the "hardcore" market. Those people left almost entirely, leaving the hardcore to pay for themselves as the industry tries to tell the hardcore that'll cost more and more and more. Meanwhile every day devices rapidly do catch up to gaming hardware. It's hard to not see the decline in total hardware sales, decline in software sales to the point most revenue just comes from iap for the big service games, and the fact that consoles never really held much market in the world outside a few key areas and see the investment focus in those other areas. IDK where hardware goes from here. On one hand there's a market, on the other hand if there continues to be decline in sales, there's only so much that market can afford to be catered to before prices balloon into something that kills the rest of the market.
It's kind of death by a thousand cuts to the industry both internal and external. I think the industry hasn't really known where it's trying to go for over a decade now, and it's all starting to catch up. It's not just Xbox, PS is hurting too. Sure they post impressive numbers and a lot of their trouble is overspending, but declining sales even as Xbox barely has a presence at the margins, isn't a great sign. The fact that it's landing at a time where hardware prices are now stagnant and hold value forever without big upgrades behind it, it's just crushing the whole business model of consoles, both in increased costs of mfr/reduced profits on hardware, and in inability to discount without taking losses still, crippling their ability to grow the install base. More a Sony problem than Xbox, Xbox cut to $350 and included Diablo 4 and still couldn't move the things, they've already hit their max market size for console, and it's not very large.
I don't see console vanishing overnight, certainly, but we're rapidly getting close to the point where console makers want to tell us their console is $1000+ plus expensive games and paid online etc etc, meanwhile mobiles are already there and getting much better, and work with any controller and PCs aren't much more, and are way better.
@Kilamanjaro The battery aspects I can definitely agree with, these things before the X have horrendous battery life for sure. Great for running low settings in power saver down clocked mode for "switch type"games, but yeah bigger games I think really would rather be plugged in. I can kill a battery in any 40 minutes if armored core 6 at 45+ fps so for truly cordless on the go play, yeah it's not ideal. (Then again neither was launch switch or og 3ds if we're honest. I ran those plugged in too....)
Though starting with x and the WoA snapdragons that battery issue might improve fast.
Disagree on setup though. I did just use the touch screen, no mouse, maybe spent an hour on setup except for a Microsoft account issue that I'd maxed out on Microsoft devices attached to the store, it still has my x1xs on there and all taking up slots. Using it as JUST a gaming box, was really just clicking through the setup, doing Windows and armory crate updates/drivers, and installing and logging into steam, Uplay, epic, Gog, that's the time consumer with all those stores, and done.
Game tweaking, yeah I get that sort of. I'm not bothered by it but I can see that as a bottleneck. Thing is for me, consoles have awful tuning out of the box to ne so ANY tuning is a good tuning in comparison. I'm not going crazy googling to min-max it, I just drop the settings until I get 45-60fps and go. The big thing to remember is you want your screen at 720p, then turn on RSR and let the upscaling take care of it. Stuff looks good. Not always easy to get 60 locked fps but 40+ is easy enough for most games. Even Elden Ring lol. I'm sure it can be better tuned to squeeze even more performance out of it, but, like you, I don't want to spend that kind of time dialing it in for perfection, and the fast and dirty way gets good results. That's the non extreme ally which is pretty impressive (my legion is extreme so that's quite a bit more capable of course. Right now it's just an FFXIV machine though 😂
Oh yeah I have a kishi too. It was ok. Then got g cloud and a retroid which was better before landing finally on the portable PCs. I admit though that pocketable is definitely not what these things do well lol
@Kilamanjaro Yeah, that's not an Asus problem, that's an Xbox problem. "Play Anywhere/Smart Delivery" seriously sucks in a major way. Not only can they not get most 3rd party publishers to do crossbuy, they can barely get 3rd party publishers to list games on Windows Store at all. And even Bethesda games aren't Play Anywhere yet.
I have an ok number of games that carried over, but not a ton. Of course all Game Pass games do.
What setup did you have to do that took so long though? IIRC I just charged it up, turned it on, logged in with my same MS account as XB and downloaded Persona 3 Reload. Not much else to do other than Windows/MS store updates but that's the same on XB itself. Lots else you CAN do, but not much else you NEED to do.
@HarmanSmith Yeah it would be nice if the X drove prices down a bit of the normal units. Not sure if it'll happen with Asus being Asus, though. Unfortunately Asus, and especially the ROG subbrand is kind of the Sony of the PC world these days. They unapologetically charge exorbitant prices over average sold on their brand image of superiority, yet often the inverse is true and they have more problems with their hardware than supposedly inferior competitors of late at least where mobos and GPUs are concerned.
I really like the Ally though. Annoyed they cheaped out and used pot sticks rather than Hall for an $800 (X) device though, and the price jump for the new and improved X really irks me. Rather than fixing their defective SD slot, they release a new model with a 20% price increase and 2 slots. But it's overall a nice device. I bought the Z1 cheap as an open box on a whim after deciding on Legion for my Z1E machine, and I don't really regret it, and sometimes wish it was the Extreme, too. It's great for JRPGs which is a lot of what my handheld use is for anyway. Also does great with Armored Core 6!
I have to laugh, I paid less for it than my Switch OLED and I'm just using it for Live A Live right now, and the game looks and runs soooooo much better than Switch
Legion....ok I paid $700 for the 1TB version, yes the battery sucks massively, but with the huge screen and removable controllers (@Lavalera Legion fans unite!) 1TB drive, hall effect sticks...... The $800 Ally X seems pretty lame other than the (huge) battery increase.
@lechugajr Yeah compared to consoles the price is extreme, and honestly compared to OTHER handheld gaming PCs the price is ALSO extreme. Asus went full Sony with the pricing of this. The base (non-extreme) model is $400 and you can get it cheaper than a SWOLED and it runs circles around the Switch. The X is basically a cheap laptop more than it's an expensive console.
Keep in mind the "extreme" versions are basically more powerful than a Series S, likely more powerful than a Switch 2, all in a pocket format. The noneextreme is more like "somewhere between Switch and Series S."
I still think $800 is too much for what you get though. It's the most expensive PC handheld there is and I don't think you get enough more to justify the price difference, unless you need the battery life, in which case they have you trapped and they know it. Price felt like a joke when they announced it, and it still does, but they have a target market, and that market is people who travel and need the long battery without plugging in, and they also figured those are the kind of people that don't blink spending $1000 for anything.
Ally X is kind of offensive as a product. An $800 upgrade to an existing product that's not actually any faster. yeah, ram, battery, other improvements, but ultimately it just seems like a veiled price increase.
I currently have the Legion (love it) as well as a non-Extreme (lower powered) Ally. Love them both for different reasons, but the $800 premium for this model just sits wrong with me, much like Asus pricing on most everything these days. It's the same SoC.
@kihaennem Err, G Cloud is a streaming device that can run light Android games, this is a PC. Radically different products.
Comments 6,846
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@InterceptorAlpha My Switch's bulging battery solved the whole screen glue problem. Comes right off on its own, lol!
Cortana: ROFL! What as been seen can not be unseen. I still can not believe the "butt controller" is an honest to goodness Microsoft controller, even if it is Deadpool.
Gyros: I have a freaking screwdriver with a gyro. Nintendo was doing gyros when CRTs were still the norm. I can not comprehend how Xbox could be so disconnected they would not have gyros. They can make a refrigerator but not put a gyro in their controller.
Re: Microsoft CEO Reassures Investors That Xbox Is Focused On Console, PC And Mobile
@InterceptorAlpha Hardware has upfront costs, R&D, supply chain, things that eat at the opex. Software is just profits minus the umbrella operating budget. He doesn't hate hardware as much as he's just a finance guy and just hates any line that inclines at more than a 30 degree angle.
@OldGamer999 Nintendo's not actually a particularly large company, they just act like one because they're a monopoly in their own market and have cash reserves that are the envy of any company that's not one of the silicone valley big 10. IDK what their profit percentage looks like, but it's very likely to be extremely large. Their low operating expenses are laughable, their staff size is minimal (everything they do is outsourced), and they were managing to pull a slight profit when WiiU was catastrophically burning. There's a trick MS and Sony couldn't even dream of. PS5 "historic success" margin isn't much better than Nintendo's WiiU era margin. And they did it without fortnite money back then.
Re: Microsoft CEO Reassures Investors That Xbox Is Focused On Console, PC And Mobile
@abe_hikura You're reading too much into it - it's empty corporate rhetoric to touch on the keywords investors are looking to hear.
"What we love and always loved about gaming which is Xbox" (Which conveniently ignores Microsofts entire gaming presence and history prior to Xbox, and just gives a cursory nod to "we've been doing gaming stuff for a while" in simple digestible words investors can connect in their heads) - it's just pretend acknowledgement of recent history to get to the main talking point which is PC and mobile.
Given that PC was their FIRST gaming stronghold before sabotaging that to go Xbox before sabotaging that to go cloud before sabotaging that to go SwitchStation, his statement actually reveals a total disconnect from and unfamiliarity with Microsoft's entire history in the gaming market. Just empty rhetoric to glue together paragraphs to get to what investors want to hear.
Although if really parsing words we get to: "now we have both the content and the ability to access all the traditional high-scale platforms "
ABILITY TO ACCESS all the traditional high scale platforms. Not control over. Not compete as. Not lead in. No, the ability to ACCESS those platforms including console. He did not say who's platform. But, I think that would, again, be reading too much into his words because they're ultimately meant to be empty filler words to get to the meat of "expanding mobile and PC gaming presence." The rest is just decoration on that sentence.
Plus the talk of "sockets" which has got to be the weirdest use of corporate metaphor speak I've ever heard.
@BIG3 Yeah, I think it's premature to say if next gen will be last gen or not, it probably depends a lot on how well it sales, how they manage to blunder it or not, where cloud tech and even just mobile hardware, or even just laptops go over the next decade, and where subscriptions end up going in terms of growth outside the console and paid online, so it's as much 50/50 to them as it is to us at this point. But I've thought it's been pretty clearly telegraphed and not even hidden since January that Series XS is a dead parrot and they're in "transition" to next gen the same way Awkward Reggie and Bobby Kotick were playing with Skylanders action figures during the WiiU's last E3. As a Series X and PSVR2 owner, I feel like this entire generation has been one giant transition from X1PS4 to XYPS6. The PS5/XSX started winding down for next gen January 2021.
Re: Microsoft CEO Reassures Investors That Xbox Is Focused On Console, PC And Mobile
@OldGamer999 Yeah, the single digit margins coming out is when Jim "retired", Totoki apologized to investors, they shut down studios, killed the GaaS games, and doubled down on console+PC lol. Things aren't rosy at PS. But in their case they have solid revenue, their biggest problem is that Jim was spending all their revenue like a drunk sailor in a house of pleasure.
Re: PowerWash Simulator's Next Crossover Teased As Free Summer Update Arrives On Xbox
The success of this game to pop culture status absolutely confuses and delights me.
Re: Xbox Details Plans For Gamescom 2024, Including Daily Livestreams This Month
@somnambulance "No specific mention of Indiana Jones?"
Might be saving it for the September PlayStation Showcase......
(I kid, I kid! Probably...)
Re: Microsoft CEO Reassures Investors That Xbox Is Focused On Console, PC And Mobile
@GuyinPA75 In his own words from various interviews he's always afraid of "missing the next big thing" and therefore chases after it to try to get ahead of it. A wholly reactionary way of trying to be a visionary. And also he's still having Gates whisper in his ear what to do...... not exactly a proven strategy.
But he's bolstered by investors that love love love the money he's pulling in, from their perspective he's better than great, and it's of no conern to them that he's selling their long term stability to grab investment windfalls today. Investors never care about tomorrow, they only care about today.
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@Grumblevolcano Yeah, definitely agreed. And I can't think of one single reason why the Series would not have gyros. I 100% expected Xbox would "finally" have gyros this gen. It was a given. How they managed to fail at the gates on that I will never understand.
@HonestHick "Holding back for next gen" that's kind of a metaphor for the whole generation, really.
Re: Activision Blizzard Continues To Drive Massive Uptick In Revenue For Xbox
@sixrings I'm not sure buying ABK to get CoD and rule the console and streaming gaming world was also a good reason to raise prices twice and kill subscriber growth or any reason to buy an Xbox. I'm not sure that there's really any good strategic reason to do much of anything they do regardless of what their strategy is, assuming there is one...
Re: Microsoft CEO Reassures Investors That Xbox Is Focused On Console, PC And Mobile
Satya's discovered sockets. This is promising.
Normally a CEO saying something is still a priority is reassuring, but in the case of Nadella, it's more like Lucy telling Charlie Brown she really won't pull the football away this time, honest.
It's kind of like that time he told important people there won't be any price increases due to Call of Duty right before they raised prices and said it's because Call of Duty.
Nothing this man says is worth the bandwidth used to repeat it. He makes up whatever sounds good at the moment regardless of if it's true. He's playing investors, of course, too. Though he didn't say much of value here, with vagaries about covering all platforms starting with console, but somehow also thinks they had console covered just fine before ABK. Corporate not understanding their market position may be a huge part of their problem.
Also, where is Phil? Should not head of Xbox/Microsoft Gaming be the one talking about the future of the product? Why is the corporate CEO the only source of this information? I'm starting to picture Phil in a closet, bound, with duct tape over his mouth.
@Zenszulu That's exactly it. Whenever the sales are low, they give up, regroup, let it fizzle, and plan to reboot next launch to fix it.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@Jenkinss Indirectly. They've listed only a few older games for PS5, plus Doom, it's not like so far a plethora of games have gone to PS5. While many assume it means eventually everything goes to PS5, nobody knows that, and right now that isn't necessarily true. It's not the existence of their PS5 strategy that harmed them. It's their lack of communication, lack of clarity, endless equivocation when pressed for one that broke it. The fact they let the uncertainty and rumors dictate the conversation without stepping in has given the media version of the PS5 dump its own legs and life that then drove people away along with their various other problems and miscommunications while also killing favorite studios, removing familiar faces, and replacing them with Activision heads. Though when I look back, they'd half tried to recover from the PS5 blunder and it kind of worked, people were soothed again after that. It's the culling of Tango and Arkane that really changed the mood. They took the one big hit that defined the future of Game Pass and the console, HiFi Rush, and declared it a catastrophic failure worth disposing everyone involved, after just previously praising it as their high water mark indicating nothing they say carries any weight. I think that's the point where people started wondering what even is Game Pass and Xbox? up to then they were just signaling they didn't know what to do with consoles. It was then they indicated they just don't know what they're doing with anything at all.
TL;DR Their problem is the same problem they've had for 20 years. It's not that they step on rakes, it's that they run the weed wacker whilst naked on a honey farm.
@jumpin_jeeps Yeah, MS problem isn't "the games" really. Yeah they released a console way too soon because they had to because Sony was, and it looks horrible. But if they stayed the course and kept messaging how great it was for playing 3rd party, they'd have stayed in the game. They took their eye off the ball and stopped promoting their own product, even bashed it publicly just to get ABK through, and they changed the image of their own product to negative. PS5 hasn't been doing much of anything either, and if it weren't for VR mine would have gathered rediculous dust - it's not very different from XB minus some paid exclusives here and there. But the mood of the future is so much better there.
@PhileasFragg Yes and no. I think whats happening to Xbox is the same thing that's been happening to Windows, Azure, everything in MS. Nadella's so single mindedly focused on maximizing their exposure to the AI bubble, the massive investor influx and immediate return at peak bubble, he's culling everything that can be culled to funnel those resources into more AI returns. I.E. the bad stuff is happening precisely to add fuel to that out of control growth wildfire. Having to actually make returns across myriad products due to investor disinterest might actually make them cut less.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@PsBoxSwitchOwner Microsoft Gaming Game Pass Ultimate for Games.
Has a nice ring to it, really.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@Steel76 I think the problem, and it's Sonys point too, is the PC power user market is small though and overlaps console market so little that doesn't matter. Console is powered by the casual masses. If the PC power users make up enough of the console never to kill it, console is hosed anyway.
Hulst thinks ps games on PC will make people buy consoles for sequels. I don't really see it playing out that way. PC players will wait for the better version. And it's not like pc players will buy their third party games on the consoles even if they do, and if they don't, there's no point selling them a console anyway, that's where the money is.
Ms has an opposite issue. Microsoft game studios was a PC publisher before
Xbox even existed. They destroyed and cannibalized that pc publishing in order to push Xbox and lock exclusives to it. So they're kind of rebuilding what they had and broke before.
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@HonestHick And what a share button it is! But I wouldn't know. Because I use elite 2. Which is still an Xbox one controller....
Dual sense really isn't bad. The battery sucks badly, the parallel sticks will always be wrong, but I could live with that, but the tension is awful. Oh and the flat mushy face buttons are meh.
There's some switch/PC/mobile controllers that are seriously nice. Literally a copy of Elite V2 but with mechanical click facebuttons, Hall sticks and triggers etc. they don't work on ps or Xbox, but do work on switch. First party controllers are nice but they're starting to slip behind the Chinese companies. Though the Chinese companies just copied their mold....
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@HonestHick modern is a stretch. It's got tech in it 😂
I still can't believe we don't have force feedback sticks. Microsoft made force feedback sticks for flight games in the 90s before Xbox. And now Sony has force feedback useless triggers and Microsoft has.... This. And nobody has ff sticks still!
Then again they can't get these to stop breaking even without motors!
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@InterceptorAlpha That's incredible work, you really could be selling those mods. They look OEM!
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@Romans12 That's the kind of nightmare with sony I'd fear most. It's pretty bleak when the focus of the console companies is just trying to turn their customers into whales and extract as much value from them as possible rather than trying to grow at this point. I guess if I'm going to be exploited, I'd rather be exploited by Nvidia? I mean the leather jacket is kinda cool I guess.
@OldGamer999 Whoops, yeah, 59.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@101Force The AI chip bubble will pop. Businesses aren't going to keep shoveling money into short term instantly replaced AI hardware, and the AI cloud providers will need to show a return to their over enthusiastic investors and turn up short, and the expansions will grind to a crawl. AMD is well diversified and can shift gears whatever way the winds blow. Sure, half their sales are AI. But half aren't. NVidia OTOH is in deeper doo doo when it pops. They go all in on one thing and ignore the rest.
Re: Activision Blizzard Continues To Drive Massive Uptick In Revenue For Xbox
@GamingFan4Lyf Yeah, Intel has its advantages, AMD has its advantages. For a gaming PC, unless one specifically needs Intel's advantages I think AMD's longer term upgradability on a given mobo just makes a lot more sense. Though that only matters if your mobo has PCIE5 obviously as future GPUs will need it. For production PCs it doesn't matter, you'll need new IO before you need more powerful CPUs. (and CPUs aren't actualy getting much more powerful, Intel 14th gen is kind if 13.5th gen. ALL tech hardware is in a mess right now.
The double L2 cache of the X3Ds is really incomparable for gaming, they bench worse than a standard CPU as they have to run cooler, lower boost clocks, less cores at high speeds, but the cache makes up for it in gaming where that's the main bottleneck. Intel will have a 3D cache part coming soon, but I still think if you don't need intel they're less ideal for gaming (streamers however need Intel because the x3ds don't handle all the video encoding simultaneous with the game very well.)
It's always the waiting game though. Whatever you buy, whenever you buy it, you could have had something better if you waited just that bit longer! That's the frustrating part of PC.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@OldGamer999 And totally agree with #58. That's a spot on assessment.
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@SleeplessKnight "Who will fill the void" I think it's a 1-2 combination that will mostly mean mobile. I think Apple, Amazon, other mobile-centric vendors will push mobile as the future of gaming harder and harder. Even MS for that matter. An xbox controller, an iPhone and a dongle....that's the future that will happen. I think gaming is just going mostly to mobile long term, even before cloud. ON the "premium" side, Steam deck, Ally, etc I think portends the future, followed by laptops, of PC really absorbing more of the "premium" console market. "Premium consoles" wanted to become low end PCs. Now they did. Now they'll struggle to compete with actual PCs. And mobile. Current phones are quite a bit more powerful than Switch...the line between "mobile" and "console" was already blurred by Nintendo's success. Xbox One and PS4 literally ran a tablet CPU.
@Ricky-Spanish They sold Series X for $349.99 with Diablo IV bundled at Christmas, and that was before the PS5 port announcements, and they still didn't move. They really damaged the brand.
@sonicbooming I agree, I think they're done trying to compete in Sony's "red ocean" and want to try a turn going head to head against Nintendo's market instead. Worked out well for Kinekt so I expect great things!
@OldGamer999 I mean a PC is just a really BIG hardware console. It can sit under your TV. Literally. It's not like PS5 wasn't pushing the size in that direction anyway.
And it will still harangue you to sign up for Game Pass, just like the good old days!
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
@PsBoxSwitchOwner LOL this is the correct answer.
Or better yet, build controllers with Hall effect sticks and triggers so they don't fall apart and need to be replaced all the time.
Especially your $150-200 premium controller.
Though I guess there's 1 billion new Amazon Video customers that need Xbox controllers....
@InterceptorAlpha It always comes back to Nintendo strategy, doesn't it....
Re: Elden Ring Patch Makes Sweeping Changes To Difficulty Balance On Xbox
@GuyinPA75 FWIW, while Souls stans will gatekeep their superiority of rising to the challenge of accomplishment in a video game, and how letting anyone do it easier would diminish their accomplishment and make them feel like they wasted their time to the ends of the earth, it's worth considering Elden Ring and all Souls games (barring Bloodborne and Demons Souls) considerable sales on Steam and Epic and remembering that easy, and even invincibility mods exist on PC...........not everyone played through the challenge..... the gatekeeping is already meaningless outside people's heads. Sadly I think the fights could be fun if you'd just respawn INTO the fight rather than slog your way back into it again. The "difficulty" really isn't difficulty. Nioh? That's difficulty. Fromsoft isn't difficulty, It's a lack of functional checkpointing of progress. If the "difficulty" is generated not by the chanllenge but just by testing your endurance of wasting time between repeats of the challenge, it's not hard, it's just frustrating design that strokes some people's egoes. It set out to emulate the challenge of the NES era. Well...that was mostly bad design too... But it's built its fan base. Like Ghosts n Goblins. Which was designed mostly to eat quarters.
To be TOTALLY fair to Nintendo, I think the breakable weapon system could be considered an extension of the way the Master Sword always weakened whenever you took a hit (no beam shooting, etc.) And I get how the design of the weapons system was supposed to compel your to keep the loop up, but I also found it annoying, and mostly it led to me hoarding all my weapons, rarely using the good ones, thus slogging through fights with weak weapons so I didn't use up the good ones, and then trying to use the master sword for everything, then just running in circles killing time while it recharged. It's not a design that worked for me, however, I adore it compared to my contempt for TotK. The first zelda game I can say I can't actually stand and didn't bother finishing since Zelda II. And I'd rather play Zelda II. Between ACNH, ToTK and now the new one Nintendo is leaning REALLY hard into "make everything into Minecraft/Fortnite, because kids like building stuff." To be fair the game was clever and innovative, and I think with VR controls where you could actually use your hands to assemble things instead of tring to line them up with analog sticks and shaking them to separate them, it may have been a great game. I'm sure the inevitable Virtual Boy 2 gets a $90 remake of TotK and it will be amazing.
TotK REALLY jumped the shark with it's obsessive crafing and materials gathering. Similar to ACNH. Which I also don't like while I love love love ACNL.
Re: Activision Blizzard Continues To Drive Massive Uptick In Revenue For Xbox
I mean of course ABK is driving their software sales growth, they simply added an entire publisher's existing revenue to their own. How could that not be massive growth?
@Kezelpaso "unless their strategy changes again."
You're being sarcastic, right? They give the big wheel a spin once a quarter to see what the new strategy will be.
@sixrings Friendly reminder: $69B was spent to purchase King to get Candy Crush and a heavy footprint in to the massively lucrative mobile market their main competitors in Apple, Google, Amazon are already in. Activision and CoD were dead weight that came along with the purchase. Basically they only cared about getting mobile market share. The rest of gaming can take a long walk off a short pier. They got what they came for. The rest can be dumped.
@GamingFan4Lyf (Said in creepily over-calming synthesized AI voice): Welcome back.......
Nintendo will never do PC. I think they'll go Apple App store at some point, but never PC. Doesn't mesh with their market.
x3d chips can't directly compare to non-x3d chips and the R9 x3d won't be out for a while. Intel will have their x3d competitor though. Plus an AM5 now means you can upgrade through at least 2027 (AMD committed to minimum that long for AM5 which is amazing.) Especially important if NPUs become importand and MS is DEFINITELY going to push it for their games.
NV50...rumors are all over the place, but it's a sure bet the only NV50s out in 2024 will be 5090 and MAYBE 5080, and some rumors say even 5090 is pushed to 2025 now. 5070, definitely not 2024.
And remember availability will be near zero at launch like with consoles. And price is unknown, but probably more expensive.
@Titntin I read your post and my main take away is that if you eliminate the Xbox store your PC experience suddenly gets much better lol
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
@PhileasFragg If OpenAI goes belly up (ding dong the witch is dead!), with the billions invested in them, Microsoft will simply insert the extra cash and buy them to obtain their AI tech as proprietary. (Aww, sheet, here we go again.)
The Tulip Mania that is AI has derailed everything tech. From allocation of silicon, to altered business plans to everything else, Xbox is suffering partly from it but it's a branch on the larger tech limb, where the allocation of EVERYTHING into AI to cash in while the cash is hot has set everything not AI back 15 years, while generating tons of useless dead end efforts just to secure investment capital. It's like a worse version of the 1999/2000 dot com bubble.
@101Force "Whatever Microsoft is planning, I hope they don't leave people who bought into the hardware component of their ecosystem feeling overlooked or discarded."
You wrote that comment in 2019 right?
@__jamiie I think a big part of the problem this gen is, despite a strong start, once they started the ABK lawsuits the goal of the company became singularly focused on securing ABK. That meant pleading their case to governments. That meant going out of their way to make sure Xbox was NOT successful, so they could play the victim card to governments. Which became a self fulfilling prophecy because once they got out of court and got ABK secured, what they had left was a failed console that was not successful because they went out of their way to make sure it wasn't.
@OldGamer999 I considered the PS5 route briefly but then shortly after realized an Xbox-less Playstion would be a living nightmare even more than being an Xbox customer now. Sony gets Nintendo-ugly unchecked. Between this and PSVR2....PC's the only way forward for me...back to the future!
Re: Xbox Console Sales Struggling As Hardware Revenue Nosedives At Microsoft
In fairness Nintendo plummeted as they sunset Switch, and Sony's not picking up numbers that you'd think they would with both competitors in a deep slump, and are in fact dropping as well. The entire console market seems to be deteriorating rapidly, and both Sony and Xbox have flubbed this generation hard enough to cause damage to the console market overall. I don't think mobile, or PCs or technology or even the economy sunk this generation and maybe the future of consoles as a product. I think Microsoft and Sony did that by themselves. With help from the large publishers.
But seriously, go figure, Xbox sends mixed signals about their hardware support, their strategy, their studio support, their long term pricing, cuts brand marketing, and has no new major games for 2024 up to now....can't imagine why their consoles aren't selling, their sub isn't growing, and their "software revenue" gains all come from the fact that they bought a different company that always made a lot of money selling software.
They really need to think about Xbox's identity. If the consoles are sinking and the sub is stalling...what exactly does Xbox have other than a big PC and Playstation publisher? We keep hearing how it's all about cloud. But that stalled TOO.
Mismanagement Simulator (MS 2024) is the Game Pass killer exclusive.
@Mustoe I have a wired 360 controller around somewhere, but the wireless ones I have a whole BOX of drifting sticks for those things! 360 controllers were the OG drift nightmare
@Mustoe @Tintin I still think Xbox sells at least one more generation of hardware. They still need a physical box that has Game Pass on it, and if they kill the box, and the paid online, their GP numbers will catastrophically drop. So the box needs to exist for a long while even if it's just to keep the GP subscriber base stable. Even if the box is a Surface PC with an Xbox logo on it.
IDK if they were always after the casual market. I'm not sure they were ever after ANY particular market which is half their identity crisis. The OGXB was clearly all about hardcore and the windows gaming element that wasn't committed to PC. 360 started the same, then with Kinekt went hard to chasing Wii casual. Then with 1 decided to go ultra casual with TV sports, but then went back to hardcore, and now they want people who stream Miss Maisel. There's not an actual pattern to who they've been targeting. PS meanwhile went from mainstream gamer teens to hardcore, to a specifically cultivated sony-only audience, to....hyper-casual fortnite players and an ever disappointed hardcore.
Xbox is a mess, but console overall is a mess, too. Too much ambition, too much overestimation of market growth, and too long a lag time before seeing the blown bridge ahead on the tracks after jamming the throttle in full ahead and throwing all the coal in the boiler.
@lacerz The only thing worse than being an Xbox customer in 2024 is being a Nintendo or Sony customer in a year after Xbox isn't around...
Re: Microsoft Harkens Back To OG Xbox With This New Transparent Xbox Series X|S Controller
It would feel wrong playing Xbox with a controller more transparent than their hardware strategy.
"From hereon out, Xbox controller will use a smaller and lighter box, where "single-use plastics have been removed from the packaging and the traditional paper manual has been replaced with a QR code for a digital quick start guide." We can't moan at that!"
I love this....."We've found ways to cut more costs from production and distribution - let's spin it as being environmentalist and use it as a marketing point!" Amazes me how every time a company cuts their costs the public cheers "yay environment!" They're not being environmentalists, you dodos, they're being cheap, maximizing margins, and selling it with feel-good spin. When your next console is delivered in a crumpled paper lunch bag that still smells of fried onions, please praise the Sun Goddess.
While I don't need a paper manual for a controller, I'm sick of "scan the QR code" for a manual. When I'm setting up a motherboard, I'd like a book with the pinouts and BIOS settings rather than holding a phone in one hand and trying to scroll and pinch zoom a PDF rendering the pin layout 2 inches offset, while trying to wire it with the other. There's a time and a place to be "green" and interfering with the usability of a product is not one of them. Great way to maximize investor return though.
@Scummbuddy Because when we all play together we all win(TM). And look at the Sea of Thieves sales on PS5. LOOK AT THEM!
Re: Elden Ring Patch Makes Sweeping Changes To Difficulty Balance On Xbox
@GuyinPA75 ROFLMAO That is the absolute best description of a Soulsborne battle I have ever read! Well done! That really does characterize the whole "it does not respect your time" aspect that infuriates me so. Elden isn't quite as dire as prior as classic Soulsborne. It's still Fromsoft, but it's not as...obtuse?
Also, I now need to play the game with a Billy Gibbons mod. It needs to replace Torrent with the Eliminator or no buy. And naturally the only weapon is an axe.
@Tintin Elden Ring being open world does allow a more traditional RPG grind, for sure, but @GuyInPA is actually pretty spot on for most other Soulsborne games and its clones. Demons Souls is painful. The difficulty is really false, it's stupid mechanics, memorizing exact timing sequences, and wearing you down by attrition of repeating annoying sequences repeatedly more than "difficult." Elden ring does more or less just let you hulk smash through it with grinding, which is exactly why a lot of the Soulsborne purists were already revolting against how "easy" the game was.
IDK, I'm in GuyinPA's campe regarding Soulsborne overall, but Elden Ring has a "something special" that feels more like a Zelda 1 remake than even BotW did.
Once I get my PCVR rig set up I intend to try the Luke Ross VR mod. This game in VR would be an amazingly breathtaking experience. Though I've heard that it can get even veterans with VR legs of steel a bit green with all that dodge rolling. That definitely sounds like another chance for you to grind to level 400!
Re: Elden Ring Patch Makes Sweeping Changes To Difficulty Balance On Xbox
@mcdreamer I still say that's a sort of one track mind among a particular fan base of a particular element that's kind of ballooned into a rigidly dedicated market. The people that enjoy that aspect of it are enjoying it, yes, but I'd kind of liken that to if the people that like to speed run BotW entirely as shirtless Link decided that's the only way to play the game and it wouldn't be fun unless forced to play the game that way as though there's nothing else worth enjoying in the game, and that shirtless link as a mandated always-on play style is an arbitrary road block to enjoying anything else in the game.
There's a lot in these games that a lot of people that don't like throwing themselves against that brick wall "for the challenge" could enjoy, people who's reflexes are not at the same level as others etc. I know the argument becomes "not everything needs to be for everyone" which is true, but locking everything else about the games behind the (faux) "difficulty" is just an unnecessary restriction that accomplishes nothing in the game other than letting people feel superior for doing it as though it's something more useful than playing a video game.
Now, PERSONALLY, I don't find the games especially "difficult", I find them obnoxiously time wasting and therefore infuriatingly frustrating, by making you repeat things you've already done rather than respawn right at the challenge you failed, and nothing infuriates me and turns me off a game more than that. That, too would be aided by an "easy" mode, not because the challenge itself is frustrating but because I'd be able to escape that frustration. Not a challenging game per-se, but I like the way FFXIV does it, you die on a boss, it asks if you want to try again on normal, easy or very easy. I'll throw myself at normal for a while, but if it's clear that I just don't have the right equipment or the mechanics of that particular boss are obnoxious for playing as a particular class (black mage main - ouch.) I'll throw it in easy after enough failures for that one fight just to end the frustration and move on. And unlike Fromsoft games that's one where "skipping" challenges without learning the skills could negatively impact other players if you don't actually know what you're doing, once you get to high end trials.
Re: Four Years Later, People Are Still Getting Confused By Xbox's 'Horrible' Console Names
@HonestHick
Xbox
Xbox 360
Xbox Deuce
Xbox Deuce X
Xbox Deus X Machina
Xbox 10
Xbox 365
Simple!
Re: Four Years Later, People Are Still Getting Confused By Xbox's 'Horrible' Console Names
@HonestHick I'm amazed they didn't tap into their #1 in Mexico status to name the sequel without referencing the numeral 2. They could have called it the Xbox Deuce.
Series is a terrible name because they already had Xbox S and Xbox X. Yes it's One vs Series. But Xbox Series X and S sounds identical to Xbox X and S last Gen. It's even still the white one and the black one.
Re: Four Years Later, People Are Still Getting Confused By Xbox's 'Horrible' Console Names
@HonestHick Better than Xbox Zero? That was the launch model. It upgraded to Xbox One with the day one patch that removed Kinekt.
Re: Samsung Now Selling 'Select' TVs Bundled With Xbox Game Pass Ultimate
@MjJmediablogger The thing where that won't matter as much is IDK about UK and EU but in the US the average American is accustomed to $150-200 cable tv bills so $50 doesn't seem as weird. Which is bad. And I've never paid that....
Re: Four Years Later, People Are Still Getting Confused By Xbox's 'Horrible' Console Names
@HonestHick "lazy or dumb". Introducing the Xbox Lazy and Xbox Dumb. Yeah has a good ring to it in certain that's the names of the next consoles.
I'm so mad about the gyros. I thought it was a given for this Gen. I was floored when they said it has none. Xbox is holding the whole industry back. Even valorant said it's because Xbox they aren't using gyro on ps. That's just wrong.
Re: Four Years Later, People Are Still Getting Confused By Xbox's 'Horrible' Console Names
@HonestHick Yeah, I don't need the haptic triggers and the like but gyros? Really? They now own the #1 shooter ever in CoD and are holding the whole industry back without gyros.
Re: Elden Ring Patch Makes Sweeping Changes To Difficulty Balance On Xbox
@mcdreamer If "It's fun because its hard" was true, the game wouldn't let you grind and level to level 400 to make it easier, summon outsiders to assist, cheese bosses, or even upgrade gear and stats, it would be a linear story game with fixed battle difficulty kind of like FFXIII where everyone basically had the same XP stats and gear at a given boss so the difficulty was controlled. I don't buy the whole difficulty is what makes it good malarky for an instant, it's clearly not actually designed around that, that's just sort of a cult mentality that's formed around it and they're afraid to change it for fear of their market revolting.
The games are good DESPITE the unbalanced difficulty, not because of it. Some people enjoy that. Some people enjoy speed running. But it doesn't mean it's an essential component of the design except to the cult that's formed around that notion. They're just well designed environments regardless of the "difficulty." I still think it's a shame that the obsession with "must be frustrating to be fun!" keeps a lot of people from seeing their immaculately designed world. It really doesn't need to.
Re: Four Years Later, People Are Still Getting Confused By Xbox's 'Horrible' Console Names
@HonestHick To be fair, lack of innovation on the Xbox controller to the point of just ignoring industry standard gyros probably is why Sony gets away with their shoddy batteries and drifting sticks...
Re: Elden Ring Patch Makes Sweeping Changes To Difficulty Balance On Xbox
@Kezelpaso @Titntin Yeah that's a huge pet peeve of mine across these sites for ages. I get the need for SEO, and that the family of platform specific sites has to differentiate the search and all but there really must be a better way, it makes the headlines sound really awkward, or "fanboyish", or even misleading when it makes things look like one platform is affected differently from others on a multiplat game. Not a criticism of this specific article, I know it's a Hookshot standard headline convention across the sites, and I know its practical and functional purpose, but it's still nasty!
Besides, wouldn't adding "PC, and PS5" to the headline really boost search rankings/SEO for an Xbox site by like 4000%? lol
Re: Digital Foundry Investigates 'Bricked' Xbox One Consoles That Can't Update
@Steel76 I miss when PCs didn't require Internet and accounts to set them up 😔
Re: Here's Your First Look At Gameplay For 'Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions'
@trev666 $29.99 USD all platforms standard edition. $39.99 deluxe/preorder.
Re: Digital Foundry Investigates 'Bricked' Xbox One Consoles That Can't Update
Over a decade later and the Always Online #dealwithit Xbox DOne is STILL a disaster.
Q: How many Matricks does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Just one as long as you only need it screwed up.
Re: Here's Your First Look At Gameplay For 'Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions'
I said it on Push but everything about this game from the look to the style, genre, scope, price, everything feels like it fell out of the year 2005, and I'm loving that it does. And it feels like it came right of of the era of peak Potter-mania, which helps it even more.
Re: Rumour: GTA 5 Is Coming To PC Game Pass For The Very First Time
I'm sure there's at least 10 of the 30-something-million GP subscribers who haven't heard of this game yet will be very excited. 2K isn't a big fan of subscriptions though, they hurt sales too much, the game might drop down to 4th place in the sales charts if this happens.
Of course, historically, 2K only uses Game Pass as a glorified "free play weekend" and takes the game off days to weeks after putting it up, so I'm sure it'll be back to #1 for the next 20 or 30 years soon enough.
Re: Four Years Later, People Are Still Getting Confused By Xbox's 'Horrible' Console Names
@HonestHick Strange! I hadn't had any problems, but maybe I missed an outage. Or mAybE thEyRe oUT tO gEt YoU? Just blame Xbox.
Re: Two More Games Strongly Rumoured For Xbox Game Pass In August
@Balie3000 What amazes me is Rockstar/2K could go out of its way to release patches on PC for no other purpose but to break mods they throw cease & desists at, but they can't be bothered to fix FPS, fix RDR2 HDR, or really do much of anything else. 2K may be the sleaziest company in all gaming, and that's saying something.
Re: Xbox Series X|S Console Sales Down A Third In Europe With 'Weaker Software Lineup' In 2024
@Vaako007 IIRC a few years back they have a slightly different version of the sedans thing, not that there wasn't market share, but that they couldn't compete with Asian brands there and thus wanted to pull out to the higher margin, higher end SUV markets only. Not so much that there wasn't a market, but not a market for THEM because competitors did it better, cheaper, and won more market share. Though the idea that Ford and gm see themselves as "only luxury" brands is kind of funny. Champagne and Walmart dreams.
I'm not sure where gaming/hardware goes from here. There's a market for consoles, to a point, but it's not the market that it was. It used to be fueled by casuals buying it for some sports and fitness games, propping up and subsidizing the "hardcore" market. Those people left almost entirely, leaving the hardcore to pay for themselves as the industry tries to tell the hardcore that'll cost more and more and more. Meanwhile every day devices rapidly do catch up to gaming hardware. It's hard to not see the decline in total hardware sales, decline in software sales to the point most revenue just comes from iap for the big service games, and the fact that consoles never really held much market in the world outside a few key areas and see the investment focus in those other areas. IDK where hardware goes from here. On one hand there's a market, on the other hand if there continues to be decline in sales, there's only so much that market can afford to be catered to before prices balloon into something that kills the rest of the market.
It's kind of death by a thousand cuts to the industry both internal and external. I think the industry hasn't really known where it's trying to go for over a decade now, and it's all starting to catch up. It's not just Xbox, PS is hurting too. Sure they post impressive numbers and a lot of their trouble is overspending, but declining sales even as Xbox barely has a presence at the margins, isn't a great sign. The fact that it's landing at a time where hardware prices are now stagnant and hold value forever without big upgrades behind it, it's just crushing the whole business model of consoles, both in increased costs of mfr/reduced profits on hardware, and in inability to discount without taking losses still, crippling their ability to grow the install base. More a Sony problem than Xbox, Xbox cut to $350 and included Diablo 4 and still couldn't move the things, they've already hit their max market size for console, and it's not very large.
I don't see console vanishing overnight, certainly, but we're rapidly getting close to the point where console makers want to tell us their console is $1000+ plus expensive games and paid online etc etc, meanwhile mobiles are already there and getting much better, and work with any controller and PCs aren't much more, and are way better.
Re: Asus ROG Ally X Reviews Suggest It's The Best Xbox Handheld Yet
@Kilamanjaro The battery aspects I can definitely agree with, these things before the X have horrendous battery life for sure. Great for running low settings in power saver down clocked mode for "switch type"games, but yeah bigger games I think really would rather be plugged in. I can kill a battery in any 40 minutes if armored core 6 at 45+ fps so for truly cordless on the go play, yeah it's not ideal. (Then again neither was launch switch or og 3ds if we're honest. I ran those plugged in too....)
Though starting with x and the WoA snapdragons that battery issue might improve fast.
Disagree on setup though. I did just use the touch screen, no mouse, maybe spent an hour on setup except for a Microsoft account issue that I'd maxed out on Microsoft devices attached to the store, it still has my x1xs on there and all taking up slots. Using it as JUST a gaming box, was really just clicking through the setup, doing Windows and armory crate updates/drivers, and installing and logging into steam, Uplay, epic, Gog, that's the time consumer with all those stores, and done.
Game tweaking, yeah I get that sort of. I'm not bothered by it but I can see that as a bottleneck. Thing is for me, consoles have awful tuning out of the box to ne so ANY tuning is a good tuning in comparison. I'm not going crazy googling to min-max it, I just drop the settings until I get 45-60fps and go. The big thing to remember is you want your screen at 720p, then turn on RSR and let the upscaling take care of it. Stuff looks good. Not always easy to get 60 locked fps but 40+ is easy enough for most games. Even Elden Ring lol. I'm sure it can be better tuned to squeeze even more performance out of it, but, like you, I don't want to spend that kind of time dialing it in for perfection, and the fast and dirty way gets good results. That's the non extreme ally which is pretty impressive (my legion is extreme so that's quite a bit more capable of course. Right now it's just an FFXIV machine though 😂
Oh yeah I have a kishi too. It was ok. Then got g cloud and a retroid which was better before landing finally on the portable PCs. I admit though that pocketable is definitely not what these things do well lol
Re: Asus ROG Ally X Reviews Suggest It's The Best Xbox Handheld Yet
@Kilamanjaro Yeah, that's not an Asus problem, that's an Xbox problem. "Play Anywhere/Smart Delivery" seriously sucks in a major way. Not only can they not get most 3rd party publishers to do crossbuy, they can barely get 3rd party publishers to list games on Windows Store at all. And even Bethesda games aren't Play Anywhere yet.
I have an ok number of games that carried over, but not a ton. Of course all Game Pass games do.
What setup did you have to do that took so long though? IIRC I just charged it up, turned it on, logged in with my same MS account as XB and downloaded Persona 3 Reload. Not much else to do other than Windows/MS store updates but that's the same on XB itself. Lots else you CAN do, but not much else you NEED to do.
Re: Asus ROG Ally X Reviews Suggest It's The Best Xbox Handheld Yet
@HarmanSmith Yeah it would be nice if the X drove prices down a bit of the normal units. Not sure if it'll happen with Asus being Asus, though. Unfortunately Asus, and especially the ROG subbrand is kind of the Sony of the PC world these days. They unapologetically charge exorbitant prices over average sold on their brand image of superiority, yet often the inverse is true and they have more problems with their hardware than supposedly inferior competitors of late at least where mobos and GPUs are concerned.
I really like the Ally though. Annoyed they cheaped out and used pot sticks rather than Hall for an $800 (X) device though, and the price jump for the new and improved X really irks me. Rather than fixing their defective SD slot, they release a new model with a 20% price increase and 2 slots. But it's overall a nice device. I bought the Z1 cheap as an open box on a whim after deciding on Legion for my Z1E machine, and I don't really regret it, and sometimes wish it was the Extreme, too. It's great for JRPGs which is a lot of what my handheld use is for anyway. Also does great with Armored Core 6!
I have to laugh, I paid less for it than my Switch OLED and I'm just using it for Live A Live right now, and the game looks and runs soooooo much better than Switch
Legion....ok I paid $700 for the 1TB version, yes the battery sucks massively, but with the huge screen and removable controllers (@Lavalera Legion fans unite!) 1TB drive, hall effect sticks...... The $800 Ally X seems pretty lame other than the (huge) battery increase.
@lechugajr Yeah compared to consoles the price is extreme, and honestly compared to OTHER handheld gaming PCs the price is ALSO extreme. Asus went full Sony with the pricing of this. The base (non-extreme) model is $400 and you can get it cheaper than a SWOLED and it runs circles around the Switch. The X is basically a cheap laptop more than it's an expensive console.
Keep in mind the "extreme" versions are basically more powerful than a Series S, likely more powerful than a Switch 2, all in a pocket format. The noneextreme is more like "somewhere between Switch and Series S."
I still think $800 is too much for what you get though. It's the most expensive PC handheld there is and I don't think you get enough more to justify the price difference, unless you need the battery life, in which case they have you trapped and they know it. Price felt like a joke when they announced it, and it still does, but they have a target market, and that market is people who travel and need the long battery without plugging in, and they also figured those are the kind of people that don't blink spending $1000 for anything.
Re: Asus ROG Ally X Reviews Suggest It's The Best Xbox Handheld Yet
Ally X is kind of offensive as a product. An $800 upgrade to an existing product that's not actually any faster. yeah, ram, battery, other improvements, but ultimately it just seems like a veiled price increase.
I currently have the Legion (love it) as well as a non-Extreme (lower powered) Ally. Love them both for different reasons, but the $800 premium for this model just sits wrong with me, much like Asus pricing on most everything these days. It's the same SoC.
@kihaennem Err, G Cloud is a streaming device that can run light Android games, this is a PC. Radically different products.