themightyant

It LOOKS absolutely stunning, but I wasn't blown away by the combat gameplay which looked pretty basic and rigid to me. But hopefully it will play better than it seemed. Fingers firmly crossed for this one, as I love Fable.

@RadioHedgeFund I suspect they are waiting for the Microsoft iOS store to have no roadblocks so they don't have to give Apple their cut. Why would you give up to 30% away if you don't have to?

It would be a PR disaster to launch it on the Apple iOS store only to take it away later to launch on theirs, better to wait from THEIR perspective.

The Orange Box

There’s pros and cons to Opencritic or Metacritic. I like that Opencritic just has a score for the game, not per platform, thought this can be a problem if you have a stinky Switch version for example dragging down the average, or conversely, on the switch showing a better game than that version. But all in all I marginally prefer opencritic.

@AlwaysPlaying there are plenty of examples where the Xbox version scores a point or two higher and vice versa.

@Ilyn Contrary to popular belief Metacritic doesn’t use a straight average, they use a weighted average where some more reputable, or at least more renowned, publications scores count for a bit more than others. They don’t tell us which and by how much but you can see it on games that have very few scores sometimes, the straight average doesn’t quite work out.

@BAMozzy I think we are slightly arguing the same thing, from different angles. That most live services are very simple to pick up, with an easy to understand initial loop.

But they often have a lot of depth too if you are willing to invest the time and learn with a super high skill-ceiling. Rocket League for example is easy to learn in seconds but one of the hardest games to master.

@Medic_alert This is a fair point. Some live service games can also be single player experiences. But something like COD is an 8 hour campaign with little replay value. It wouldn't keep being at the top of these lists week after, week, month after month, for the single player component. Sports games are probably more evenly split.

@AlwaysPlaying I also play a few live services but solely single player, and I don't really spend, but that doesn't stop them being live services.

Not sure if you guys saw the whole State of Gaming 2025 report that did the rounds earlier this year. But it covered a lot of this and more. Slides 95 - 103 are particularly sobering for those of us that primarily like single player games.

Sorry, you have interpreted the data incorrectly. As Piscatella stated 70% of US Xbox players played at least ONE of the top 10 live service games. 30% didn't.

But that ONLY covers the top 10 live services, there are hundreds of others that don't make the top 10 on Xbox including, but not limited to Apex Legends, Overwatch 2, Destiny 2, EA FC24 (still super popular despite FC25 being out), Sea of Thieves, Dead by Daylight, Fallout 76 NBA 2K25, DayZ, War Thunder, Madden 25, PUBG, Genshin Impact Among us, Ark etc. etc.

At a guess it's probably something like 10-15% of total players that don't play ANY live service games.

@GamingFan4Lyf Most single player games are very derivative too and often don't have much to make them unique, except the specific mash up of existing ideas, sometimes with a slight twist. It's the same in live services. This is a more general video game problem not a 'live service' specific problem.

@BAMozzy I'm not so sure, plenty of live services are not "simple games". I think you are conflating being approachable and being easy to pick up with 'simple' but many of them have an exceptionally high skill ceiling which is one of the things that keeps people coming back. e.g. GTA Online, COD, Apex Legends, Rocket League, Street Fighter, EA Sports etc.

Of course there are some simple live services, just as there are some simple single player games, but I think they are the minority. Usually to keep coming back live services needs a bit more depth.

This is nothing new. Vocal players complain about live services yet they are the most played games, make the most money etc. etc. The majority plays Fortnite, Roblox, COD, 'FIFA', R6 Siege, Minecraft, Rocket League, GTA Online, Marvel Rivals, Apex Legends etc.

Don't believe me? Check out the most played games on Xbox according to Microsoft.

Occasionally a single player game like, currently, Avowed will join for a week or two. This is why you can't always believe what the vocal crowd on forums and news sites like this say. We are the minority, our voices aren't always representative of wider gaming.

This LOOKS flashy and cool... I will be amazed, and very grateful, if it FEELS as fun to play. Pretty please 🙏

@Ryu_Niiyama I very much doubt it was Devs that wanted to announce early, studios and Xbox leadership far more likely.

Can I interest you in a spot of chicken kicking sir?

"improvements to thumbstick auto-centering" but you still can't increase the dead-zones in the app... unless you pay for an Elite controller. It's frustrating as just slightly increasing the dead-zone would fix drift on plenty of controllers.

@BacklogBrad All WB studios are currently in the US, Canada or UK.

@Misternobody Marvel Rivals was a 6 person team that was laid off, the story was grossly exaggerated.

Always sad to see games get cancelled and studios closed. Got to be hard to work on something for years that never sees the light of day and then get fired to boot. Wishing all the devs well.

Nice to hear, but this should have been obvious with so many studios, several with multiple teams.

I liked snap... but they removed it when they increased the amount of resources they gave to developers on XBO suggesting it used up more than they were willing to concede. Would you rather the processing power goes towards your games or snap?

Just make it brilliant, plenty of other games. Not a big deal.

It looks fantastic to me. It's on BOTH Game Pass and PS+ Day 1 which is super-rare. The only other one I can think of off the top of my head is Sea of Stars. Anyone else remember any?

That’s a simply brilliant list of games. Well done Xbox!

They’re also saying it runs at a very iffy frame rate and low base resolution in performance mode. That’s not the end of the world but it does make me think to wait for patches.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner I'm usually for more transparency, but I can understand why Ubisoft and others are currently lobbying Valve for remove it as it seems to primarily be used by rage-baiters as evidence a game has failed, usually to give their poorly reasoned conspiracy theories some weight. Though they will probably just latch onto something else for their grift.

@mac_da_man Don't forget the "...so far", it's early days and can all change. But they likely had to come out and say something as a lot of the culture war team are posting many videos about how it's failed due to Steam concurrent players. As usual they have little to no information apart from one metric but claim to have all the answers. Sad.

Probably. But like automation and electricity and other huge shifts they bought an equal amount of jobs in other areas. Electricians, engineers, etc. Unemployment didn't massively shift long term due to these landmark technological leaps, it just rebalanced what the work was. It will be the same for AI... else humanity will revolt.

@Kaloudz Agreed. It's like Horizon or some other franchises that would cost so much to do well i'd rather they did animation or a film, else it's likely to look cheap.

@Fiendish-Beaver if you very rarely use it, drop it, or maybe just subscribe every few months whenever there is a game you want to play.

As for PC yes you don’t need Game Pass to play online v people on Xbox. I’ve never done voice chat Xbox to Pc so someone else would have to confirm. Or perhaps let it lapse and you can see for yourself. You can always resubscribe.

@Cikajovazmaj @Weebleman I agree. On average I’ve paid around £5 a month for Ultimate the last 5+ years through cheap codes and MS rewards. It’s going to be a big change to pay full price.

That said I still think £15 a month is still excellent value for how much I use it (I play 20+ Game Pass games a year) but as I’m stocked to 2028 it will likely be more expensive by then, probably £20 a month.

17k would be a MASSIVE 41% price hike to Game Pass Ultimate via Rewards, that sucks.

MS Rewards in general have been on a massive downward trend for years with them taking more time to get less points and now the points are worth less. The juice just isn’t worth the squeeze anymore for me. A shame, it was good while it lasted.

Have spent all mine at the lower rate and am stacked for 3 years GP Ult though.

@Weebleman @Millionski I honestly don't know. I know @Fiendish-Beaver has nailed his flag to the post that it will be a 2026 release with Gears E-day, Perfect Dark... and I forget... was it SoD3? (The 3 games from last not-E3 that didn't have 'Series X' listed is his argument)

I can see pros and cons for releasing a new console early, but my gut says 2026 is too early. Maybe announced 2026 for 2027, seems more reasonable? But it really depends on their strategy. A more powerful Xbox isn't going to cut it alone, they have to do something ground-breaking to break the status quo imo. If they can they will have a chance to SLOWLY change the tide, it will take time, if they can't i'm sorry to say I can only see Xbox consoles further declining, which would be a disaster for gamers and the industry.

I definitely don't want to further embolden Sony. We need good competition to keep them all honest.

No. But i'm used to it now, and every major revision is worse, so i'd be more worried about what they would introduce like the hundreds of ads for games I don't want to play, movies I don't want to watch and apps I don't want to download on the dashboard. I'd rather it stays as it is, better the devil you know.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner It's already showing as 17,000 for me sadly. But the 1 month (without auto-renew) is still 12,000 and 3 months 35,000. Thanks for the heads up I'll stack now.

@Kaloudz There's SOME truth to that, but this is part of a much larger decline for Xbox sales. It was reported that 2024 was the lowest full-year for Xbox EVER in terms of units sold with just over 3 million worldwide, that was on the back of around 4.35m in 2023 which was itself a very low year. By comparison PS5 sold 9.5 million last quarter alone.

It is pretty worrying, especially as next gen sales are often dictated by momentum from the end of last gen. Microsoft need to do something drastic or they will come out the gate at a crawl next-gen. While console sales aren't everything, especially for Microsoft, they do still matter, especially to those of us that prefer to play on consoles.

@Lordyeet I do have too much patience sometimes. There are definitely times I should have given up a game earlier, but by the time I decide I might i'm so close to the end it feels like a sunk cost and I persevere to the end. Which is often a mistake, but I feel a little compelled to see it through having got so far.

There are also games like Starfield that I absolutely loved in places, but I loathed in many others and by the end of the long rollercoaster was not a big fan. That game specifically a lot of reviewers said things like "we won't spoil it... but it only gets good after you finish it" which led to a big disappointment when I felt the absolute opposite when the ending didn't hit and you were punished for finishing.

Though much better to have a love/hate game like that which makes us feel SOMETHING, than one that's just mid the whole way through. Happy gaming fella.

@Lordyeet Can also recommend Moonlighter. Good game.

@Kaloudz I think there is a large difference between "strongly detesting" something and "ending up not liking by the end".

When I hate a game I usually give up in the first 5 - 60 minutes. Which I do on Game Pass risk free. But sometimes there is just enough to keep you going, maybe it gets good every now and again, even if most of it is busywork or a bit boring. And then if the ending doesn't land, or it gets too grindy at the end, or something else falls flat it can turn from "it was OK" to "I didn't like it, when all was said and done". We all play differently.

@Kaloudz @Fishysensei I've definitely played games for far longer than I should, when I could have given up. Sometimes there are occasional good moments that keep you going, or you want the 1000GS or, usually in my case, you have a hard time not seeing things to their conclusion.

I've definitely put 50+ hours into games I ended up not liking by the end (I might have liked them more earlier) and I've put over 100 hours into games I ended up thinking were mid, probably most recently Starfield.

@Fiendish-Beaver @Millionski Also re: Game Pass: We don't have any specifics because Microsoft don't divulge them but some of their numbers don't add up and you have to read between the lines of what they announce to see the bigger picture. This is because of how they present their information, they don't usually give hard numbers and only cherry pick a few statistics like PC subs up being up 30%. That's great right?

Well, no, not necessarily. They also announced revenue from services (incl. Game Pass) was also only up 2%. Additionally this was the same quarter that they raised prices, so if PC subs were up 30%, and they raised prices, yet revenue from services was ONLY up 2%, then logically something else was significantly down for those numbers to balance. We don't know what, as they haven't divulged that.

This is the problem with how Microsoft reports all their figures you have to read between the lines of what they are telling you, between the numbers they are cherry picking to sound as strong as possible, to see the wider picture. Ideally we'd want more transparency. Instead we have to piece together bits of information here and there and it's often more telling what they AREN'T telling us.

@Fiendish-Beaver @Millionski I don't really want to get in the middle of your back and forth but thought i'd confirm a few stats on console sales as you are both kinda right and kinda wrong.

Re: PS5 sales: it is ahead of PS4 in USA but JUST behind PS4 worldwide (75m vs 76.5m), which frankly is staggering as they had stock issues for almost 2 years; a financial crisis where many people couldn't afford luxuries; and the PS5 and PS5 Pro are $500 / $700 after 4 years whereas the PS4 and PS4 Pro were around $300 / $400 at this point in the lifecycle. Moreover Sony announced it just sold 9.5 million last quarter alone, more than in any previous quarter. In short PS5 is selling well above expectations.

Re: Xbox sales: we know far less as Microsoft don't publish numbers but analysts have it around 32 million. So lifetime it's currently around 2.3 : 1 which is wider than the roughly 2 : 1 last gen. While that may not initially look THAT bad what will be of greater concern for Microsoft is that their console sales have completely fallen off a cliff in the last two years, down virtually every quarter, while the competition is setting new records. The gap is widening.

E.g. Last year was the worst full-year in the US market in Xbox history for units sold, which is meant to be their strongest territory. In total it was reported they shipped just over 3 million units worldwide which was down from 4.35m in 2023, which in turn was also a bad year. As we noted above PS5 sold 9.5m last quarter alone. Some analysts have PS5 trending as high as 5 : 1 in recent months. But more broadly it's around 3 : 1 over the last 2 years, but as I said the gap is widening.

@Coletrain Nice! Enjoy dude.

Brilliant! That has fixed the bugs I had and I now have 1000GS. Looking forward to the DLC.

They're doing pretty great recently, just need to turn the quality dial up to 11 on a few titles that have been a bit messy at launch.

But it's great to hear this from the Satya specifically as he usually doesn't talk about games directly.

A more extreme take on this: One of the ideas people have suggested is that the next Xbox could be more of a streamlined PC. This has some upsides e.g. developers would only have to optimise the game for PC and it would be compatible with 'Xbox' vastly increasing the number of games coming to 'Xbox' including, potentially, Sony's titles.

However one of the potential problems with this is that the licenses to the games we bought (especially third party) are for Xbox not PC, they aren't directly transferable without Microsoft negotiating something with the publishers. However something like Muse COULD (and I stress COULD) potentially be used to get the Xbox games running on PC in future.

I look forward to seeing how all this pans out.

Muse = Exciting news!

On another article I was saying how few games are actually 'backwards compatible' through emulation and it would be amazing if more games were added. This could be the answer.

@Ricky-Spanish OOF! that sucks. Good luck finding it for a reasonable price.

@Ricky-Spanish I still have my physical copy of the Orange Box for this reason, though it's so sun bleached that the spine is not very orange anymore!

It's a brilliant feature, but not true backwards compatibility. You are using your disc, or previous digital license to download an emulated version of the game.

Additionally it's still only a tiny percentage of older Xbox titles, I believe it's around 6% of OG Xbox and 29% of X360 titles. Would love them to expand this, especially with features like 4K for OG Xbox (X-enhanced) and 60fps (FPS boost) as it makes a huge difference when playing the older titles today.

@Kaloudz This is the difference between the vocal minority online and the masses who make up the gaming landscape. Things 'blowing up the internet' are often tiny in the whole scheme of things.

A small number online complain and a few might actually boycott the game (but probably won't, see below) but the millions of players who never touch a gaming forum simply don't care enough. MTX, DLC are bigger business than actual games - though obviously can't survive without them.

Additionally a lot of vocal gamers are spineless, their bark is worse than their bite. There was a hilarious example of this when a group of vocal gamers formed a thread on Steam's forum where they were moaning about a game introducing loot boxes, they were all apparently outraged and all said they were going to boycott the game.

What they didn't think about was Steam shows what game you were currently playing and on release day basically all of them had bought and were playing the game... so much for a boycott. But there are so many other examples of this.

What people say and what they actually do often aren't the same thing

@Kaloudz Gamers definitely aren't boycotting loot boxes, DLC and MTX in large numbers. The vocal minority here might complain about them but that doesn't stop them selling. These make at least as much revenue as all full game sales and certainly more profit.

E.g. Sony actually breaks this down and last quarter made 50.45% of their revenue from games via DLC, MTX etc. compared to 41.14% via full Digital Games, 5.66 via Physical and 2.75% via other platforms like PC.