carlos82

@SpacemanJupiter yet physical media still sells really well for both Playstation and Nintendo 🤔

This is why I buy all my games elsewhere these days, Xbox have all but destroyed their own platform when it comes to physical games and don't even bother releasing their own games complete on disc or even have a disc. At this point I'll be stunned if any future Xbox even has a disc drive

By buying lots of developers/publishers so they can say someone who likes Doom is an Xbox fan?

He's not wrong, he's changed me from being someone who bought every Xbox console and really enjoyed them, to someone who doesn't even own an Xbox now and will just by the odd game from them on Playstation or Steam

Firstly, all 3 console manufacturers would love to get rid of physical but it's very obvious that Xbox will be first and I doubt next gen will have a disc drive. Xbox have been using the wrong size disc for modern games, meaning so many aren't in the disc or even had a chance, as well as releasing some of their games without a disc, the Series S never had the option of physical and now there's even a digital X with no way of adding a drive

It's because of this, that Xbox will be the first of these platforms that I stop using as I want these options

It's a shame they won't port FH4 as that's the better game and also regularly has more players on Steam than FH5. Still FH5 would be the best racing game of its type on Playstation should it release.

They can certainly keep Motorsport on Xbox as that's one of the most disappointing games I've played for some time and cannot compete with GT7

I thought these went with the 360, I can't remember the last time I saw them

@Markatron84 all their first party games are on Gamepass and as you need that to stream these, it'd be rather pointless

That reminds me, I really need to test out the Xbox streaming app on my TV. I don't own many of these particular games but will give Cyberpunk a go

I was always disappointed that this, the Crash Trilogy and Crash Team Racing all targeted 30fps when the equivalent Mario games are all 60fps on weaker hardware, so for that reason alone I was never particularly impressed by these and would give them a 7 at best.

That said I would put the Spyro games above Crash but still feel they could have done a better job bringing them to modern consoles

Let's just say I buy the Xbox games I want on Steam.

A year or so ago the Xbox App was dreadful and I had many issues with it, these days it's improved but still way worse than Steam. Download speeds seem to be pretty variable, sometimes it'll use my full bandwith but other times it's slow

@Ilyn I was wondering when I was reading that and yeah, it's just like the GPU market and what the price vs performance is worth for yourself

@GeeForce you could argue that and ironically enough that was one of the big reasons they made the One X as it was. The problem today is that Xbox have a decade worth of sales data that tells them that they won't recover that gap to PlayStation

Let's be honest, if Xbox's console sales were in a much better position, then they absolutely would be launching a "Pro" console.

As for the Pro itself, is it needed? Not really, but personally I'm very happy with it. I had started to buy my games on PC as I wasn't entirely happy with the performance/image quality of many console games and the Pro has solved this

Infinite Wealth is my GOTY, I much preferred ot to FFVII Rebirth and whilst Astro Bot is a great platformer, it was just lacking something for me and I've yet to finish Shadow Generations which is rather good too

@PsBoxSwitchOwner they certainly won't want them to be that much but will they be able to get down to those prices? As I said, the RRP of their current consoles is higher than at launch 4 years ago, when normally this price would have reduced significantly by now

"He actually pointed to the idea of a $1,000 console as being something that Xbox needs to avoid if the company wants to reach new players"

A dig at the Pro or not, the PS5 Pro does point towards an uncomfortable reality where the next generation of consoles are likely to launch at least as expensive and possibly more so. We've never had a generation where 4 years in, the hardware costs more than at launch.

Looking at the likelihood Xbox and PS sticking with AMD, their CPU's have made massive gains due to the addition of 3D V-cache, so how they go about trying to incorporate that into an SOC and keeping cooling and costs under control will be a huge challenge

@FraserG and after all that it seems today they've patched the last gen versions after all

@FraserG the update doesn't apply to last gen consoles according to the patch notes
https://support.rockstargames.com/articles/35337378670739/Grand-Theft-Auto-The-Trilogy-The-Definitive-Edition-Title-Update-Notes-1-112-PlayStation-5-Xbox-Series-X-S-PC

Xbox is hit the worst here as things like that Streets of Rage collection is fantastic and Crazy Taxi is always good fun, even if not as good as the Dreamcast original

I'd highly recommend picking these up whilst you still can and can only hope this is leading to some new collections from Sega

My personal GOTY last year, it's effectively a sequel to Robocop 2 and a really fun fps with satisfying shooting

Age of Empires 2 was on Playstation long before Xbox anyway

It's amazing what performance you can get by using good game engines, instead of garbage like UE5

So still nowhere near as good as Steam.

Even the console UI has gone backwards hugely from the days when we could actually customise the home screen

@cburg erm ok, what an odd response

Congratulations to Microsoft for buying some popular games

@DonkeyFantasy there's absolutely nothing wrong with my Internet, this is an Xcloud issue

@Astig I've tried pretty much everything, by default I split my 5ghz and 2.4ghz signals and Xcloud has been poor whether I'm trying it on console, PC, wired/wireless or on mobile and as I said, Stadia worked great on the exact same setup.

So in my case I'm fairly certain that my location is the biggest issue

To add to this, I'd suggest that if such a service requires this level of troubleshooting, then its not fit for purpose. As your average person is simply not going to do this, they'll just try it once and see it doesn't work and move on

I'll preface this by saying that it could simply be because of my location but Xcloud has basically been useless for me whenever I've tried it. Either by having very poor image quality or when trying to play Halo, I had unplayable levels of input lag.

I did try the now dead Google Stadia and that was a significantly better experience in both regards.

I'm not really the target audience for such a service as I'm unwilling to sacrifice the benefits of having the game installed on the device I'm using but it really has to be a much better experience and actually work, no matter where you are

Xbox out here doing a better job than Sony of making the PS5 Pro look like good value

@OldGamer999 I agree, the price of this is comical, being only marginally cheaper than the disc based version. I get some people don't care for physical media but you'd have to be a bit mad to buy this. On Amazon you can even get refurbished X's for £400 and unlike Playstation, there isn't even an option to get a disc drive later if you change your mind

The engine isn't the problem with the games and making it a bit prettier in Unreal isn't going to solve those. At least Unreal Engine is famous for its great stutter free performance...............

Xbox has a strategy? They seem to be making it up as they go along recently and the sad reality is that I don't ever see their console numbers improving when even some of their upcoming games are going to be multiplatform.

Also what is the selling point of that middle tier of Gamepass which has had a lot of games removed from it? That won't increase subscription numbers.

There are a quite a few Xbox games I want to play hut I'll never own another Xbox console as I don't need to

At this point I just want to see a new Banjo or Conker game from anybody

Not much by the look of it, just seems to be quality mode settings at 60fps with the help of upscaling that's better than FSR. It still seems to have mediocre RT performance but this time at 60fps instead of 30.

Even without the ludicrous price it seems like a lacklustre upgrade but because of that price it's laughable

@themightyant the issue is that it's much harder for these kinds of games to gain any traction, due to their nature of requiring significantly more of your time than single player games. So whilst there is a very large market for them, most of those customers already have the ones they want to play and are unlikely to change.

Sure some new successes can happen, such as Palworld and there's probably mobile stuff I'm not aware of but the problem here is the AAA market to treat them like a major release. Making them with these huge budgets, which is just mind blowingly stupid at this point as the likes of Anthem, Avengers, Suicide Squad and now Concord are all basically dead or about to be, whilst losing a ton of money in the process.

"I've made some of the worst game choice decisions"

Good job you're not in charge of one of the biggest video game publishers/platforms in the world..............

It's quickly going to become an industry problem, Black Myth just launched on PS5 and uses frame generation to hit 60 and as more developers adopt the performance black hole that is Unreal Engine 5, then performance isn't going to get any better

Play Day O̵n̵e̵ Four (or up to 12 months later) on Gamepass

It's funny being able to play Mario Doom on Xbox but not on Switch as it doesn't support uploaded mods, you can even play the Chex Quest trilogy. On PC there's a great RT and Voxel mod for it but only for the Steam version

I bought it a long time ago and I still prefer this to FH5, I made sure to get FH3 too back when it was available

This is why I buy such games on PC instead of console these days and specifically Steam as the Xbox PC version of games often miss out on mods, even the recent Doom update has missed out on a new RT mod.

Even Starfield gets updates on Steam first

All that said, thanks for reporting on this as I now have another mod to look forward to

I wouldn't be surprised if Hi-Fi Rush was the only one they wanted. I doubt we'll ever see another entry for those other games from either Xbox or the former Tango studio anyway

It's a great remaster in the sense of them replicating the original games but as someone who played Mario 64 before these back then, I was never a huge fan but still enjoyed them.

Back to the remasters themselves and I was always disappointed that this, Spyro and CTR were only 30fps games. It'd crazy that Nintendo make Mario Kart and Odyssey at 60fps on Switch and then these are lower fps on the more powerful consoles

Local multiplayer is far more important to me than online play, it's really stupid that just to play a game with my son, I often need 2 pieces of hardware and two screens and then an online subscription to play multiplayer a few feet apart.

This is why the Switch is very important for our gaming but even that is sometimes a step back from 3DS with its download play multiplayer.

We need more split screen/local multiplayer games

Well it just means that I'm barely going to be playing on Xbox for the rest of the year, Avowed was the one I was looking forward to playing along with Indy. Overall this is a very poor year for Xbox

I've got one of those Samsung TV's, the S90c to be precise, though I've not tried Xcloud on it as both my Series X and a high end PC are hooked up to it

"PC & Mobile gamers haven’t purchased Game Pass at the rate Microsoft expected"

The mobile part of this is what gets me. I'm sick of hearing people talking about these billions of mobile gamers in the context of console style gaming. The overwhelming majority of those gamers are just playing free to play games that don't even resemble console games and were NEVER going to subscribe to a service en mass to play the likes of Halo

Why not just scrap the middle tier altogether? It only seems to exist to push people straight to Ultimate, at least Gamepass console was a genuine option if you didn't care for online but I guess they want day one players to be paying much more

For Xbox, the console is increasingly becoming less and less important to them and is now effectively just an option to play their games.

As for Hellblade, well it was never a "big" game and I've got to be honest, it's also the worst game I've played this year

Going forward though, there are some very promising games on the horizon with Indiana Jones in particular later this year

@OldGamer999 I just tried another Gamepass game and it came up with "There's a temporary network problem" but I just clicked on use offline at the bottom of the screen and it worked