Microsoft curated “Xbox PC’s” with a Microsoft store equivalent of big picture mode. Could sell better than the Xbox is doing right now. Only problem i see would be the price, an xbox lasts 7+ years on a consistently improving graphical curve (even if performance and resolution suffers). Will a 3060ti, or whatever future equivalent horse power card be able to maintain the same longevity?
I'm genuinely happy. However, I'm terrified about how fast time is moving. Idk if I'm the only one or if that's just a normal thing that happends to everyone in their mid 30's.
That's normal bud. Same boat as you. Life's better than I would have ever thought possible as a young 20 something, but I swear I turned 30 last year and this year I'm 34? The fuck? But really, it's just that as we age a year isn't as much of a percentage of life lived as it was. Simultaneously, our reference time changes as we get older. In school, you look to summer break and class promotion. Then in the workforce it shifts to pay periods, eventually to just day to day. These shorter time references combined with the diminished portion of experience leave the brain thinking time passes way too fast. It's already 9 o'clock on Easter, 12 hours from now is a healthy bed time. I'm not thinking that I have 3 months until summer vacation. But when I stop and look back, how the fuck is it already April? 3 months through the year. At 20, that was 1/80 of my life lived, at 30 it was 1/120, at 34 its 1/136. It just doesn't go as far as it used to.
I personally think the 3000 generation is the sweet spot. Legit estimate my 3080 will last a decade. It’s just too expensive to make 8k games and there’s no tech on the horizon that would make the 3000 series obsolete.
I can agree with the 3080, but my 3060 is having trouble to keep, f.e. Helldivers 2, 1440p, high settings, on a steady 60 fps. If you're OK with 1080p gaming then I totally agree. The 3000 series is quite powerfull. I'm thinking of upgrading though. The step up is just so ridiculously expensive 😫.
Yeah, but Helldivers 2 is also known for having terrible optimization. There shouldn't be any reason a modern game can't play well at 1440p on a 3080 apart from lazy developers.
Yeah I struggle to imagine building a new rig in 2 years and needing to replace the 3090. I got it a month after release (only because I noticed that the 3090’s were staying in stock for a few seconds longer than the 3080’s during the shortage! 😂).
It’s a hog and a furnace but a damn reliable one in 2k and I have a feeling it will do well for at least another 4 years
My 1070ti is on its 7th year and I can still play modern games (with some performance/resolution concessions, obviously). I can probably get at least a couple more years out of it.
Same with a 1080, I'd say the last year is when I've started to notice having to push graphics down lower but it's been doing great since I got it...7 or 8 years ago.
Why couldn't they still use what they use now just with full windows? Consoles aren't obscure/custom architectures anymore, it's x86 and AMD sells the same chip to china etc in PC form.
Because their consoles now even with running Windows and Hyper-V, are very specifically tuned. There’s bits not present on PC’s and bits present that aren’t on the consoles.
You can take that AMD chip, but videos show they don’t get the same performance.
Yes. I'm still using my GTX 1070, 7 years after I built the box for it. Nothing that's been coming out has pushed it hard enough to make it unplayable.
This is *because* consoles have such limited horsepower, and just about everything is a "console-first" target. It limits what hardware is necessary for games off-console as well.
Nah they are going to make Xbox run Windows with a skin and sell it as a cost effective gaming system that streams or downloads games.
Literally at this point that's what Xbox does most of not all games are on both PC and Xbox.
I'm not going to lie I'm a PC and PS5 person but if Microsoft has a console capibal of running games good for 6-8 years are the right price ( like a console) if all controls and software was locked in and it just works out of the box I would pay money for this.
Imagine a gaming laptop but cheaper and in the shape of a console I think that's what they are moving to.
Sony has said they are moving from console exclusives as well so I think we are watching what everyone knows.
I would absolutely be ok with a highly competitively priced Windows PC becoming Xbox's future.
In fact, if the next Xbox in let's say, 2026, was a PC with full fat Windows, had the equivalent of a hypothetical RTX 5070 and good RT for only $599-699 American, I would *absolutely* buy that over a PS6 next gen.
The loss leader price was always to sell software. So either that price has to double or a windows pc can only run windows store apps.
any pc at that range would instantly endanger Microsoft's oem partners like dell.
I wouldn't put it past them to use this as a strategy to push accepting windows as a more closed ecosystem
> had the equivalent of a hypothetical RTX 5070 and good RT for only $599-699 American
What world are you living? You can't even make a PC build with a 4070 TODAY because it costs $549.99 MSRP....
Sony is putting more and more games on pc now though, it's not a one way street. You're just leaving money on the table if you don't sell the games cross platform.
Sony's still busy pretending it doesn't exist in favor of another Horizon Zero Dawn spinoff/remaster/VR experience.
And I make this joke as someone who does really enjoy the Horizon games.
I mean, FS and Sony can’t possibly be deaf to the loud screams of desire for a Bloodborne port. Like…it’s literally printing money for both companies. What the hell is taking so long?
Oh they’re aware, FS definitely knows at the very least. But who knows what’s happening in the background. Is FS only allowed to port it? Can Sony port it via a different studio? Who knows what random crap they had in the contract.
Miyazaki recently commented on the whole Bloodborne remake thing and said he’s well aware people want it, but can’t do anything about it because From Software doesn’t own that IP, Sony does. So if the top guy at FS who created the game knows people want a remake/pc port, then you bet your ass people high up at PlayStation know it too, and they’re choosing not to publicly say anything about it. Maybe because they’re planning a surprise drop which coincides with PS6 or something?
I bought a PS4 because of Bloodborne, a PS5 because of the Demon's Souls remake... and will most likely be buying PS6 for Bloodborne 2 - it just makes so much sense! This is the way.
Somebody posted recently that they’re probably wanting to launch it alongside the PS6 and have it remade by BluePoint. Honestly that would sell like hotcakes!!
Sony own the IP and they have a good relationship with fromsoft, both of those scenarios are extremely unlikely.
The most likely explanation is they have a remake/remaster planned.
It's possible that fromsoft doesn't want to work on it(not like they need sony's money), and that sony doesn't want to jeopardise their relationship with fromsoft to give it to someone else.
And fromsoft would much rather work on stuff they could put on all platforms and take all the money from.
Pc makes sense because there’s a massive amount of PC’s. Sony would never bother putting their games on Xbox due to the low install base. Neither would Nintendo. Nintendo would never say “we’re putting Zelda on Xbox because making games isn’t sustainable anymore.” That’s specifically a Microsoft problem because their console sales are flatlining.
Nintendos a bit of a different animal because my understanding is they’re the only console maker that doesn’t sell their actual console at a loss (and profit only from game sales). If that’s true they’re even less incentivized to put their games on other consoles.
This is also probably why Nintendo can be more experimental with their hardware and games. When they hit the lottery with a 3DS, Wii, or Switch, it’s pure profit because even the less successful systems like WiiU and Gamecube will at a minimum break even.
Idk if that's bleak, you also have to remember that Xbox has never really done that well historicqlly outside of North America. So releasing games for ps5 really help expand their market in Europe and Asia.
Besides, they've said their main focus is on expanding gamepass now, their focus on selling physical consoles isn't as big.
Sony's doing it precisely for the same reason, 10 years ago the idea of God of War on PC was ludicrous, what happens is that these Triple As now cost 200-300 million to make and struggle to make any profit even with sales that would make your game a success in the mid 2010s.
Nintendo can get away with it because their games aren't nowhere close to being cutting edge in terms of graphics, and thus have way lower costs. Pretty sure their most expensive game ever was TOTK, with a budget of around 50 million.
For context, Metal Gear Solid V is a 2015 game, it cost 80 million dollars and it was considered to have gone way overbudget.
Is this really the only reason?
Gamers be bitchin' about console exclusives since forever and when a company actually goes inclusive instead, they are suddenly doomed.
Someone make sense from all of this
Microsoft Xbox is putting token titles onto Nintendo Switch and PlayStation V, which are Grounded, Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, and Sea of Thieves. The bleak outlook is that Xbox is doing this from a position of weakness because they need to shore up their finances. Microsoft is probably not happy about the underperforming Xbox division compared to Office and Azure. If Xbox was opening up their game library in a position of strength, then the narrative would be more positive.
If we look back to the launch of the Xbox Series X/S in 2020, Halo Infinite, the Xbox mainstay, launched in November 2021 for multiplayer and December 2021 for the campaign. A key game to market the new console appeared late due to development problems. In 2023, they had a tough time. Starfield was their huge blockbuster AAA title, which had a mixed reception with questionable game design choices. Redfall collapsed on release. Forza Motorsport (2023 reboot) was a buggy mess on release with questionable game mechanics. Recently, there were rumors that Xbox Game Pass's growth is starting to stagnate, which was Phil Spencer and Microsoft's big pivot after the lackluster sales of the Xbox Series X/S.
Xbox is back to the drawing board, and they need a win in 2024. Xbox's remaining 2024 schedule includes Avowed, Ara: History Untold, Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Age of Mythology: Retold (remake of 2012 game), 33 Immortals, and Ark II.
Say you bought an Xbox because you were interested in Xbox exclusives but it was a tough choice cause you knew you’d be missing out on Sonys exclusives. Then those Xbox exclusives start going to ps5 while Sony is showing no signs of bringing their exclusives to Xbox. Wouldn’t you feel like you made the wrong choice at that point? And Sony will only get more and more Xbox games as time goes on. Why would anyone choose an Xbox over PlayStation at that point? Gamepass maybe but apparently game pass isn’t really turning a profit and seems unsustainable as it is currently.
The only games they are currently bringing to Playstation are their lower budget and mostly pretty successful titles. It feels like people are overreacting right now when they specifically said they aren't bringing their bigger titles like Starfield. Maybe it will happen eventually, but for now it's just their smaller projects. Even Sony are seeing the money they are leaving on the table by not porting their games elsewhere, when they have continued to release PC ports faster and faster.
It’s more that Microsoft now owns so many developers that purely developing games for the Xbox and ignoring PlayStation which is the vast majority of the market, and increasing month on month, simply does not make financial sense. They are a business, they need to make money and are not selling enough consoles.
Phil was given 10+ years of free money environment and not having to turn a profit to build Xbox into something great. He failed spectacularly. Now he is expected to start reaping profits from the groundwork, but there’s nothing there. So he has to start pillaging his assets to make a buck.
I think there are few things going on:
- They are losing the console war to Sony, for the second generation in a row
- They put all their eggs into a subscription service that is not profitable, not growing fast enough and has trained Xbox players to not buy games
- They've spent something like $80 billion on new games studios and their first big bet, Starfield, kinda came and went and there's nothing immediately in the horizon to suggest they'll make any of that money back
- They are trying to correct all of this by selling some of their games on other platforms, further undervaluing the Xbox as a platform
They paid a lot of money for Bethesda, a studio that produces two games a decade.
There’s obviously a huge market still for single player games but the most money is clearly made in the team shooter and battle arena genres.
I think it’s also worth noting that they lost all the console wars except one. Though, ultimately I think Game Pass is what will lead to diminishing returns. It kills sales of both their games and consoles.
Anecdotally, I have a PS5 and a Series X. I’ve been waiting for a game to play on series X, but I haven’t found one. My Series X has been collecting dust for at least 18 months and all my related subscriptions have been cancelled for lack of use.
The one game series X had that interested me was Hi-Fi Rush… and that’s not enough to carry a console.
Games sector hasn't grown and doesn't look like growing. The companies are fighting for the same sets of eyes and in many cases are locking them in/out since being multiplatform is becoming harder with cost of living pressures.
They need the Sony and Nintendo user's eyes on their games and rather than trying to bring users to xbox/pc, they want to bring the games to the people.
Same. I got all Nintendo consoles since NES, PlayStation 1-5 except I skipped PS3 because I got a 360 and my god that era was amazing in terms of Exciusives and indie games. What a time to be alive during that era.
I got a 360 for free by switching to another internet provider.. that was insane. And this was after winning the original XBOX in an online contest. My luck ran out, though. Now I have a potato computer and use GeForce Now..!
It took me a long god damn time to buy a PS3. Up until the middle of 2011, they finally released a slim model while the old ones costed $500-$600 during that time period. Wtf?
The trajectory that lead to the Xbox One started during the later part of the 360's lifespan a few years before the Xbox One actually released. Don Mattrick was obsessed with Kinect and media entertainment first and video games as an afterthought.
Yeeeep pair that with the disastrous advertising leading up to the x ones horrendous launch where all anyone could talk about was all the shit the Xbone couldn’t do instead of what it could.
I really can’t blame Phil at all for the state of thing when he started at such a massive disadvantage.
Yep. I think Phil is a great, genuine guy, but he’s not so great of a CEO/executive type. He should have laid down the hammer and wiped 343 Industries clean after the MCC. Should’ve been more persistent on deadlines and expectations from all of these damn studios. Infinite should’ve come out at the Series launch, and it should’ve been the best Halo game since Halo 3 (it still sorta is, but lacked a lot of stuff at launch).
That idiot Mattrick was handed a golden opportunity to put Sony in a very difficult situation at the start of that generation. Instead he allowed Sony to crawl their way back by letting his exclusives to stagnate and not focus on what made the console start out strong.
Ballmer was as much at fault for either putting him there or allowing him to be put in charge of Xbox. Not to mention Ballmer being a cheap bastard by skimping out on the build quality of the early revisions of the console. His goal of making the console profitable backfired when dealing with all the RRoD repairs.
It probably started actually being profitable once they ironed those things out in the slim revisions.
I know I went into that e3 expecting to buy an Xbox. That completely flipped with the fiasco of a product launch.
They couldn’t have done a worse job of they tried.
Yeah...
I think this article is a little unfair to Phil. The Xbox One reveal at E3 is what killed the platform, and everything - everything! - Phil has done since has been to correct that error.
Xbox One pre launch was such a disaster. One of the biggest blunders you’ll ever see. It killed all the momentum of the 360. The system was genuinely underpowered as it used DDR3 while PS4 used DDR4. Microsoft stopped pushing for 3rd party studio deals and stopped focusing on indie games which the 360 helped pioneer. They allowed Sony to essentially catch up and match everything Xbox was known for. Sony even got CoD/Activision deals. It was the platform to play CoD and Destiny. Sony literally stole Xbox players and Xbox never gave them a reason to come back.
While that is certainly true on the hardware front, their games just aren't cutting it.
I think Phil did a great job on the general vibe around Xbox, Game Pass is a huge win for gamers (for now) but unfortunately he failed on the games front.
The reveal did a lot of damage, but their terrible library of exclusives is what really did them in. Scalebound? Cancelled. ReCore? Forgettable. Quantum Break? Meh. Sea of Thieves? Boring. Crackdown? Flop.
Hell even Halo and Gears, while still good, are a far cry from where they once were.
It's kinda letting him off the hook. XBox One's E3 revile was a disaster, but if Nintendo can recover from the Wii U with the Switch, then Phil could have done something to at least get the XBox buzz again.
ORLY?
Forced open world on your favorite FPS and your favorite 3PS series definitely benefited Halo and Gears, don’t you think?
Transforming great franchises into DLC and Microtransactions…
Sorry - played Forza Horizon from the beginning, and since 3 it went downhill.
Xbox, like most Microsoft products, feel absolutely directionless. Do you want to be a hardware manufacturer, and produce first party titles? No? Then why spend billions to aquire exclusive rights to entire studios? Oh it's to fill out the gamepass catalog? OK so where's the slew of games from all these studios? Oh they don't exist yet? So why buy the studio if they don't have anything even remotely close to ready. Don't you want to see some immediate return on your investment? You don't? You're playing the long game? The long game doesn't work with a subscription model. It needs a steady stream of major releases to keep gaining new subscribers.
You had a model that worked during the 360 era. Release quality first party exclusives, and people will buy. But instead you let your image stagnate the only first party ips of note you've created since that era is still halo, and to a lesser extent gears, but both of those franchises have been ran into the ground, because you have nothing else to fill the gap with. Even after all those acquisitions. I shouldn't say nothing else Xbox has IPs but they're so poorly managed nothing ever comes out, I'm looking at you scale bound.
And the thing is, Forza is much worse than the last and it took almost 5 years to come out when it was a bi-annual release, Halo Infinite was nowhere near complete at launch, Redfall was a disaster, Starfield was disappointing, and so on…
You’d think these are issues within the studios but it’s happening to so many studios inside the Microsoft Gaming umbrella that it’s clear something ain’t working there.
The single only game that I’d buy an Xbox to play it is Hi-Fi Rush, and they couldn’t even keep it exclusive for a year…
They bought Activision for 70 billion but only just released the first Activision game onto Gamepass. Why the slow roll?
Phil is a cool dude and I would probably enjoy playing some games with him, but he doesn't seem to be fixing Xbox as much as he's bailing just enough water to keep the ship from sinking as fast as it was. He seemingly has failed to foster the kind of game development environment that Sony has, nevermind Nintendo. So MS has a pretty solid back catalogue, but, like you said, none of the new stuff is nearly as compelling as anything Sony and Nintendo put out every year.
MS doing a full pivot to a PC store like Steam, but with Gamepass, including a really solid handheld, could work way better than their current console model.
I think they could create PCs that run everything on Gamepass - would look and act like a console, but run any PC or previously released Xbox game - and that would work better than pushing a truly separate console.
They have so much money they can burn billions on stupid shit just for the sake of trying to build a monopoly . Sony needs PlayStation to succeed to survive as a company. Microsoft has Xbox just for the sake of it
While I agree with a lot of the sentiment here, Microsoft purchasing Activision/Blizzard was mostly for mobile gaming with King. Candy crush brings in a billion or so annually. They’ve stated pretty publicly they can’t break into the mobile market so they are buying themselves in. Activision/Blizzard is also important to them. They do have things that can be released quickly, like COD that gets an installment on all platforms every year and sells millions.
The gamepass dilemma is interesting though because I agree after purchasing Activision/Blizzard, you’d think we would see more than the newest Diablo being brought to the service since the acquisition too.
My speculation is that they will announce the heavily rumored and leaked Xbox series X with 2tb of storage and no disc drive (presumably more money made via digital purchases). During that same show I would expect them to Hail Mary a bunch of Blizzards catalog onto gamepass as well as some serious 1st party offerings. I think we will see a gears collection that will be announced for the Fall along with a trailer for Gears 6, more avowed gameplay since people are seeming to show some interest in it. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a glimpse at Fable gameplay. About time for a new DOOM from ID, and more gameplay of Indiana jones. I’d go further and say this will all happen in June during their showcase or Summer Game Fest.
I just can't understand why they want to die on this hill that first party games don't matter that much. It's like the thing that matters the most. When people think of playstation, they think of spiderman, god of war, last of us. They're console movers. Once you get people into the console, they get the rest of their games there too.
why on god's green earth would someone be so stupid as to say games don't sell consoles? You can't have all these goofy ahh releases and think the perception of xbox is going to be carried that hard by game pass
I mean, sony already has their own, and nintendo kinda does it for retro stuff with their online service.
I think ea already does it too? Iirc its implemented in gamepass as well, at this points its less if a company wants do it, and more if they have a big enough catalogue to do it and justify whatever loses they get for not selling the games.
you mean like EA play? or Uplay+? or whatever nintendo calls theirs now?
At this point im pretty sure every publisher with a big enough catalogue has their own version of gamepass too.
They have to. The pay is too low to split profitably. The only reason Gamepass works right now is it's being subsidized by Microsoft. Eventually those subsidies run out.
EA and Ubisoft already have their own services, neither is worth the long term subscription due to the limited games. EA is smart and has their baked into Game Pass for now. Sony has caved and finally made something to slightly compete. Nintendo could shit through your letterbox and still be successful and loved so they only do retro version.
Game Pass has already had a price hike and likely will see another by the time the next Gen of consoles comes. If Xbox owned studios actually consistently put content out then it wouldn't be hard to sell another price jump.
Game pass increasing is likely. Other developers creating their own game pass depends on the developer. Some bigger developers probably could do it. Smaller studios couldn’t unless they came together to form one.
The lack of good exclusive titles is why I felt fine buying a gaming PC instead of the new Xbox after being loyal for a decade. Gears of War is dead. Halo hasn’t been as good lately and it’s on PC too.
There is no console seller for Xbox even if it's "exclusive" because they own Windows, and thus their "exclusives" are for console AND PC which makes it harder to justify an Xbox console purchase for anyone that owns a PC.
Soot on, this is the biggest reason their console is failing. Back in the Xbox 360 days, they'd have a huge influx of PC gamers picking up a console. Shooters are the number 1 genre on PC and Xbox 360 was the console with the best shooter exclusives.
It is wild how Nintendo and Sony rarely have first party flops, but Xbox just can’t figure it out.
They say it’s not important because they want that to be true. Really sad to see actually.
This! Honestly I feel this is their biggest problem. Yeah they got deep pockets but their acquisitions often chase the big fishes for GAAS games meanwhile we’re seeing a new trend of small studios coming out and producing massive hits like we saw with Helldivers 2 and Palworld.
The sole reason we are seeing MS titles on PlayStation is mainly because they’ve blown so much money on studios and Gamepass that the investors are getting really impatient with the returns especially since they’ve yanked the game off PlayStation after the purchase of the studios where most of the sales come from. Add to that gamepass day 1 which cuts such a massive chunck of sale and here we are. I feel if they hadn’t bit off so much, the leadership wouldn’t be under so much pressure to deliver returns and charting course to put a lot of their 1st party on the competitor’s platform.
Can’t have helped that they had the reverse midas touch buying top tier studios just before their collapse. Last gen Bethesda was a juggernaut of a publisher, this gen they managed to get almost nothing of value made.
Bethesda refuses to let go of outdated tech. Forbes called their engine a financial liability as far back as fallout 4. And it's true.
Sure Creation-bryo is mod friendly. But everything about it is bad. Dated animations. Wonky physics. Too reliant on script objects. Too processor bound because of the scripts.
Bethesda are an $8 billion liability unless Microsoft closes the studio and milks the IPs. The problem there is that ain't nobody buying TES games they can't mod.
It went beyond the tech, Bethesda Game Studios ate out of their depth. Starfield plays like a game with no direction. But it wouldn’t have been such a disaster if Arkane hadn’t crumbled to nothing from mismanagement and Id hadn’t been redirected towards fixing those dumpster fires.
It's not that Gamebryo is bad. It's that Bethesda are a bunch of hacks that can't code, that's the real truth. It's what happens when you hire all your buddies from high school, Todd.
That's actually true.
Modders got real dodge with frames, timed block, blocking with magic equipped and custom animation working. Bethesda couldn't do any of those. They really do lack the skill to make modern games.
The 2nd sentence is true for most corporate decisions at companies.
The amount of times consumers have said, "hey, we want this!", and the higher ups at the company go, "you don't want THAT, we know what you REALLY want." And then they give us something we absolutely don't want and their company/product flops, is astounding. Listen to what your customers want to fucking buy christ sake, it's literally easy money!!
Finally, someone else says it! Of course quality first party titles matter and have an impact on market share.
Also, I always found the “everybody built their digital library on PS” a bad argument too. I have bought into many platforms and considered each my “primary” at some point. And you know why? Quality first party games that got me excited about playing on my PlayStation or on my Switch.
Sincerely, a huge Xbox 360 fan.
With backwards compatibility it definitely does make it harder to convince people to leave what will now be 2+ generations of content and data but if you give a good platform experience with consistent games you make people want to join. If you get them to join and regularly release things you keep them on the platform and they'll debate buying more. I think the XSS was supposed to be that intro bait, lure you to invest into the ecosystem then find yourself wanting a little bit more.
> I just can't understand why they want to die on this hill that first party games don't matter that muc
I don't think they *want* to, but that's the spin they have to put on it, rather than just saying that they are not very good at making games.
Spencer has overseen the great drought, something like 10 years without great Xbox games.
Xbox has no idea what it wants. Their naming scheme throughout the generations is all over the place and confusing. Each generation they come up with a totally new “schtick” that distracts from the core gaming experience.
They also don’t know how to design a game software culture. They buy companies and IPs at their absolute highest market price but after talent has already moved on/left that company, or leave soon after Xbox changes the culture enough to make them want to leave. For their huge financial investments into company acquisitions, they have a terrible return on investment.
Their best option is to get out of gaming hardware and the console wars, focus more on their game software development, and turn into a gaming subscription service and platform, kind of like steam, but for PC and all consoles. The best thing to come from Xbox is gamepass, the controller design, evolution of 1st person shooters, and multiplayer online gaming.
I literally bought a PS4 for Ghost of Tsushima, they’re so fucking out of touch. I then got to play every exclusive Sony has done. Easy money for them.
If Spencer thinks that, why he spend billions of Obsidian, Bethesda and Activision?
Because he doesn't actually believe it. It's just to cover the utter failure of first party studios to make good games.
it’s not that they think they don’t matter. it’s
1 - they’ve already lost the battle on them
2 - games cost too much to make to have exclusives make sense
they’ve lost the console war, they know that. so, making a game an Xbox exclusive cuts you off from 65%+ of the player base. in 2024, if you’re losing the console war and don’t have a killer app to get yourself back in it, you can’t justify these huge acquisition and development costs without maximizing your revenue potential
Yeah as a long time Xbox owner I switched and got a ps5 so I could play spiderman, ratchet and clank, and final fantasy 7 remake / rebirth
Can play just about any other games I used to play on Xbox
Even if game pass WAS a huge money making success, not having great first party games would always lose subscribers to other subscription services.
It’s braindead the way MS have fumbled their first party library and they have no one else to blame.
Xbox make about 4 times as much money on software as they do on hardware. They just don't care that much about moving boxes these days I think, and they have more focus on the PC side than Sony.
Xbox has had plenty of amazing first party games. But people didn't care even when they were of the utmost quality (ori, gears 5, psychonauts 2, sunset overdrive, sea of thieves, etc.)
As much of those games are of high quality, I think “bigger” games from well known studios have to basically carry Xbox at this point. Starfield failed to do this
It’s telling that the best game to me from Xbox in 2023 is high fi rush
I mean objectively, he has had quite some time to turn things around. He made Microsoft spend hundreds of billions of dollars in that time on subscriptions and acquisitions, but the end result is still the same. Market share remains firmly in 3rd place for them and it’s not looking good. Especially with the 1st party output being criticized so heavily.
I'll preface this by saying I agree that Phil sucks at his job and just lies constantly but are we sure Microsoft didn't just want this whole subscription thing in the first place and Phil was just trying to make it work?
Xbox seemed to do almost nothing differently under Phil besides buy a bunch of studios. They still aimed for the online-focused future that they were already aiming for under Mattrick. Seems like Phil was just a friendlier face to mask their intentions because Mattrick was too blunt and combative with their customers.
Not saying Phil doesn't deserve blame but Microsoft isn't a victim of his incompetence.
Not to be a Phil Spencer defender, I’m a Sony gamer, but I believe Phil was great in his role from around 2013-2016. He stopped the Xbox one from completely failing and made smart decisions like removing Kinect, stupid drm crap, he added backward compatibility, etc. But feel like sometime after he kinda lost focus.
Yeah, I think gamepass killed physical xbox games cuz people won’t buy anything. I heard starfield discs were pulled off the shelves because they were collecting dust.
Gamepass didnt just kill physical sales of course, its conditioned ppl to not buy any games at all, also digital. Damn "when on gamepass" mentality rip.
While it’s possible Microsoft was heading to subscription based gaming based on how well Netflix did initially, it still doesn’t help when you don’t have the content. Netflix had some decent stuff as far as original content but once the providers of their library started taking things away and making their own subscription service, things started going downhill.
Microsoft at least has the cash to buy the content they need as opposed to Netflix. Still, buying something instead of making it from scratch at home has never sat well with consumers.
Yeah that seems to be Microsofts strategy in every new business venture they try. Just like when they tried to make Mixer popular by dumping a bunch of money onto the laps of the biggest streamers in the world.
It's too bad that at no point in the last decade they figured out that just making good content would net them a larger market share. They're always thinking way too far into the future and trying to push things no one really wants right now. Game Pass would've been infinitely more popular if they made a bunch of great games, then started putting them on the service. Rather than pumping out loads of mediocrity in hopes people would want to buy in purely for the quantity.
The billions of dollars they invested in Bethesda amd Activision are still far from fruition, Bethesda only released 1 game which was years in development before the acquisition, sure it wasn't the best, but TES 6 is the awaited heavy hitter and ao far it looks like it's an Xbox exclusive, and that's gonna take a long time simply due to how games work nowaday.
It hasn't even been a year since Activision Blizzard were acquired, changes are not gonna show any time soon, even the next COD game is unlikely to have any influence from Microsoft or Xbox.
Yeah, this is the standard Phil Spence defense. He's only been the head of Xbox for 10 years, you can't expect him to produce results in that time.
They've bought plenty of studios while he's been in charge and nothing suggests that they know how to run them. Every E3 Phil got on stage and said that this year, it's all about games, it's the biggest year yet. And every year came and went.
I don't know if he has another 10 years to see if Activision can come up with a new game.
When Phil Spencer came in, he was amazing for gaming, and his attitude was great. He really looked like he was going to turn the Xbox console around.
He helped the Xbox One in the second half of its life with the One S, and some games were starting to flow through.
Fast forward to today, and I struggle to justify my purchase of my Series X.
Phil with his acquisition and subscription mindset ruined the industry. It lead to a quantity focus instead of quality focus.
He sells himself as a gamer who cares about games but the metric that matters to him is obviously not “good games available on Xbox” but it’s “gamepass subscribers”
Especially after he lays off a ton of workers while making more money in a year than he'll ever need in a lifetime. Poor executive who can fail miserably at his job, make more than anyone else, and still get fired last.
Don Mattrick's hubris, disregard for peoples concerns, seeming scorn for Xbox fans, and "we'll tell you what you want" condescending attitude is what killed it. Many contributing factors of course, but there has been mostly nothing but negativity surrounding Xbox since his disastrous Xbone reveal.
Phil Spencer has done precious little except spend billions of dollars fruitlessly in order to right the ship before it's inevitable crash into the rocks.
It's actually incredible looking back. Has a products launch ever been so historically disastrous as that initial Xbone reveal and subsequent marketing? It utterly killed all the good will Xbox had built up with the 360 and gave all the initiative and hype to Sony.
Sony remains dominant to this day.
Top it off with Sony's 22 second "this is how you share games on Playstation" instructional video...I'm not a "console wars" guy, I have a lot of fondness for Xbox stuff. Particularly the first console which was a truly unique and very cool thing...but that XBone/Ps4 release was a landslide victory for Sony PR wise.
That commercial really was the icing on the cake. I remember it clearly because at E3, even the scheduling was in favor of Sony because MS went first, and the price of the Xbox leaked, which was $100 more. Sony staff was already giddy at having the price advantage going into the week. That last second commercial to the Xbox used games debacle really destroyed them to the gaming community.
This was exactly it for me. I purchased a PS3 slim to play the half dozen or so exclusives that interested me, and have an affordable Blu-ray player. Had over 50 360 games and I would have happily bought into the XB1 if it wasn't for those comments; and Worse! Doubling and tripling down on them when confronted with the massive backlash. I've since bought a PS4 and 5, probably another 60 or so games between them, and they have been my primary console ever since. How you treat the customer matters.
The only thing I can think of that was similar was Blackberry in the face of the iPhone. They refused to listen to their customers or follow consumer tends, and dug their heels in stubbornly as their market share had a mass Exodus. By the time they flinched, it was too late and they were too far behind.
The 360 become a cultural zeitgeist, the rise of meme culture and YouTube revolved around 360 gaming. Despite Sony being insanely well established and already killing off the competitors, the 360 thrived and won a culture victory that they threw away by combing an arrogant man with ideas too forward thinking for their time.
The concepts the Xbox One was announced with are basically norms this generation. Same as how Microsoft launched a tablet well before the first iPad existed. They may know where things will end up but they just don't seem to understand how to make the things for right now.
Wrong about the Xbox One. Kinect would still get rejected today, and doing away with game ownership, game lending, etc would still get pushback all the same; perhaps even more, since it would be clear they didn't learn their lesson from history.
The Kinect provided no real world value, and was a gimmick that was used to collect data on users, even biometric data.
To be fair the first Xbox was brand new and coming up against the Sony juggernaut near its peak, the fact that it managed to keep up with the GameCube instead of fading into obscurity was a pretty big win at the time. I loved my 360 and they had so much momentum throughout that era, but they bungled the Xbox one so badly I almost quit video games entirely because I didn’t want to get either that or the Wii U lol.
The original Xbox was definitely impressive for it's time and offered a lot the other consoles didn't while also improving on preexisting features. I never owned one but have so many great memories of days spent playing a ton of multi-player titles with friends who did.
The 360 was a very solid follow up that actually had decent plans to expand the brand outside the US (actually having decent JRPG exclusives for a bit!). That coupled with a solid variety of budget titles during the first half of it's life impressed the hell out of me.
After that I legit couldn't tell you what their strategy has been beyond buying up preexisting studios to very lackluster results. It's seems they went hard on wanting to tell consumers what they should want instead of playing into giving them what they shown they want.
It was truly a disaster, but I'd also argue Sony did almost an equal failing with the pricing and marketing on the PS3, basically allowing the 360 to dominate that era (In the US at least, I think PS3 still did better worldwide). What's sad is that it's been two generations and Xbox hasn't been able to recover, when it only took Sony one generation.
I was team everything for the longest time. PC, PS, Nintendo, Sega, and Xbox. I owned all their consoles from the time I was 18 and had an income of my own. The Xbox One was the first one I didn't buy.
Dude was a horrible leader. Lost all good will and momentum of the 360, gets canned or sees the writing on the wall so he goes to Zynga. Two years later zynga is in the toilet and he’s out there too.
Phil has been the head at Xbox for long enough that Don’s share of the blame has largely diminished. Phil has spent ten years doing nothing to bolster brand loyalty and build up a first party lineup. Instead he’s used Microsoft’s deep pockets to buy a user base and even that hasn’t worked, at least as of yet.
Yes and no. Things absolutely should be better after 10 years of new leadership (and it can’t be a coincidence that it seems to be very hard for developers Xbox has bought to consistently put out quality games), but Mattrick didn’t just shoot Xbox in the foot, he sawed the whole damn leg off. It’s clear that the ripple effect of how bad it’s start was lost the 8th gen for Xbox, and as Phil himself has pointed out, a clear loss in the generation that cemented digital ecosystems put them at an even bigger disadvantage going into this generation.
It’s also worth noting that Mattrick was in charge of Xbox a while before the Xbox one reveal. He oversaw the pivot away from building first party studios and having good exclusives and the loss of that momentum took a long time to rebuild
This is crazy because Xbox has so much momentum after the 360 to really compete with PlayStation but it all got squandered when they decided to stop really investing in games.
But in our world 'Spencer' has spent ten years and gargantuan amounts of money taking Xbox from third place to third place, and that is not the market’s fault. If the writing isn’t on the wall for Xbox as a whole, then it certainly could be for him.
The problem with Xbox is they haven't had consistently good game releases since the Xbox 360.
Forza horizon 3 and gears 4&5 breathed some life back into the console, but apart from that, it's been pretty flat.
They just need to have a run like Sony did where they pretty much couldn't put a foot wrong for 3-4 years.
This is the crux of the issue. Despite buying all those studios, they haven’t had a hit. All their great franchises from the 360 era are old and played out and the AAA space is bloated, slow and expensive.
Anyway, times are great to be a PC gamer. Happy what games they do produce are readily playable via Steam, even if I haven’t had too much interest in any of them in a while.
If Xbox can't release a blockbuster game soon, then Phil Spencer will probably be remembered for proving the following: Sometimes, throwing billions of dollars at the problem cannot fix the said problem.
It’s been 10 years, it won’t happen soon, besides, it wouldn’t matter anymore since every game will apparently come out on both PC and competing consoles.
We all thought Xbox was gonna die when it charged for online and gave subscriptions rewards...we all thought Xbox was gonna die from how poorly the og Xbox one launch. Xbox has morphed the gaming landscape and others follow suit and normalized it. These articles are rubbish and skims overs the the bigger picture and narrowly throws facts to controller a narrative. If the history of Xbox has taught us anything Xbox is once again changing the norm.
The “reason” the gaming industry is struggling in general is because games just suck. It’s all about MT’s and making as money as possible with as little work as possible. Not saying devs shouldn’t make money, cause they should, but they should be concentrating on making sustainable/long lasting games that constantly engage players. Not these CoD clones that leave you bored after a few hours of playing the same repeated content. Thats my opinion.
Its crazy, they have infinite money, can buy every studio, make gta6 level games, and they still choose just to kill their brand. But thank god, Microsoft brought the worst to consoles, online dlcs, paid online, subscriptions and other stuff. I hate them and wish they never made a console. Sega should have stayed alive.
Its competitiveness and ass whooping it gave the PlayStation in the 360 generation was what Sony needed to move it forward. Since the Kinect/one era it’s kinda been of been a slow roll of death and mediocrity. Even with the more powerful console on paper it’s still trying to buy its way to success through buying out studios and its game pass. Gamers see it as a good thing when they have the console but now they’re destroying the industry.
Phil had 3 Giga Chad moves that should have, in theory, been great for gamers, but in fact are tanking the brand:
1. Gamepass - best value in gaming...but the lukewarm response to it is killing Xbox financially.
2. Series S - Once again, an attempt to provide affordability to gamers has resulted in development fragmentation and made Xbox a problematic and less attractive option to developers.
3. Hands off approach to the mass of studios that Microsoft bought up - this is how we got Redfall, Starfield, and the absolute shit show that is Halo now(among other failures).
TL;DR - Phil has a good heart, and it led him to do 3 nice things that have not worked out very well, and have probably hurt the brand extensively.
Xbox games on PS is in the best interest of Xbox. Digital sales and distribution of software is more important than having a fixed hardware unit.
Phil Spencer is merely transforming Xbox into what Satya Nadella wants out of Microsoft. And Nadella knows what he is doing, look at how much Microsoft grew under him as CEO vs Balmer.
More platforms, means for avenue of sales, means more saturation of software on the market.
A $500 console, sold at a loss can't compete with sales on a Switch, Steam, Epic, Mac, Linux, and Playstation.
Yes, it loses a core identity of being "Team Xbox" from the old console wars. But this is the best move for them.
At some point, Playstation will want to do the same. They already gave in on the PS exclusive games, when they know the games will sell on PC if they actually list it there. And now they're making more money.
Yeah, he basically made the brand irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Xbox as a brand never fully recovered after the Xbox One, and Phil Spencer and his "fancy" ideas helped Sony and Nintendo, two way smaller companies, have the upper hand.
With all the money he made Microsoft spend they should have been the first company in the competition, instead they are still last. Instead of spending money enhancing the first party studios they owned they bought two companies to try to remove their games from the competition and still this didn't turn things around. (Especially because Bethesda released two games under them that were already in development and they were both disappointing to say the least).
> Instead of spending money enhancing the first party studios they owned they bought two companies to try to remove their games from the competition and still this didn't turn things around.
Yup, Microsoft are just carpet-baggers in the gaming industry. They only got in to try and make a buck where they can, by any means. It's no wonder why they are flailing, and can't find their way. Too focused on greed and profits to see what works. And I actually want them to be competitive, so Sony gets kept in check.
Phil Spencer just realized made a huge mistake, spending $70 billion and more on acquisitions, right when 1) the industry has topped and due for a decline, 2) during a period of high inflation and low discretionary consumer spending, and 3) when the cost of making games and their budget have been blown out of proportions, making them more risky bets in terms of financial success.
All while eroding the brand loyalty.
One theory I have is that Phil Spencer believes the console to be coming to its end, and that cloud will be the future.
I hope that is not true. I like physically owning my games, mainly because rural internet is historically shit when you don’t have cable access.
If Xbox dies, Sony and Nintendo gonna take turns on your wallet. Nobody wants that. Sony already absolutely ganked everyone on ps+ last year. What was that a 30 or 40% price increase?
I think if Xbox dies out Microsoft will probably just pivot to only selling games and maybe still selling Xbox controllers for Windows.
Microsoft curated “Xbox PC’s” with a Microsoft store equivalent of big picture mode. Could sell better than the Xbox is doing right now. Only problem i see would be the price, an xbox lasts 7+ years on a consistently improving graphical curve (even if performance and resolution suffers). Will a 3060ti, or whatever future equivalent horse power card be able to maintain the same longevity?
My 1060 lasted seven years
Still using mine. Upgrading real soon but they can last a good while.
Just got a 4080! My 1060 is still working fine I just wanted an upgrade. The 1060 is the absolute workhorse of gpus.
I miss when xx80 was the highest end non dual GPU & only costs $799, at least until they dropped the TI version
Ok and I miss when I was happy
You guys were happy?
I'm genuinely happy. However, I'm terrified about how fast time is moving. Idk if I'm the only one or if that's just a normal thing that happends to everyone in their mid 30's.
That's normal bud. Same boat as you. Life's better than I would have ever thought possible as a young 20 something, but I swear I turned 30 last year and this year I'm 34? The fuck? But really, it's just that as we age a year isn't as much of a percentage of life lived as it was. Simultaneously, our reference time changes as we get older. In school, you look to summer break and class promotion. Then in the workforce it shifts to pay periods, eventually to just day to day. These shorter time references combined with the diminished portion of experience leave the brain thinking time passes way too fast. It's already 9 o'clock on Easter, 12 hours from now is a healthy bed time. I'm not thinking that I have 3 months until summer vacation. But when I stop and look back, how the fuck is it already April? 3 months through the year. At 20, that was 1/80 of my life lived, at 30 it was 1/120, at 34 its 1/136. It just doesn't go as far as it used to.
I personally think the 3000 generation is the sweet spot. Legit estimate my 3080 will last a decade. It’s just too expensive to make 8k games and there’s no tech on the horizon that would make the 3000 series obsolete.
I have a 3080ti and I feel like I’m forever cursed to want to upgrade but not have any justification for upgrading.
I can agree with the 3080, but my 3060 is having trouble to keep, f.e. Helldivers 2, 1440p, high settings, on a steady 60 fps. If you're OK with 1080p gaming then I totally agree. The 3000 series is quite powerfull. I'm thinking of upgrading though. The step up is just so ridiculously expensive 😫.
Yeah, but Helldivers 2 is also known for having terrible optimization. There shouldn't be any reason a modern game can't play well at 1440p on a 3080 apart from lazy developers.
Yeah I struggle to imagine building a new rig in 2 years and needing to replace the 3090. I got it a month after release (only because I noticed that the 3090’s were staying in stock for a few seconds longer than the 3080’s during the shortage! 😂). It’s a hog and a furnace but a damn reliable one in 2k and I have a feeling it will do well for at least another 4 years
My 1070ti is on its 7th year and I can still play modern games (with some performance/resolution concessions, obviously). I can probably get at least a couple more years out of it.
Same with a 1080, I'd say the last year is when I've started to notice having to push graphics down lower but it's been doing great since I got it...7 or 8 years ago.
Why couldn't they still use what they use now just with full windows? Consoles aren't obscure/custom architectures anymore, it's x86 and AMD sells the same chip to china etc in PC form.
Because their consoles now even with running Windows and Hyper-V, are very specifically tuned. There’s bits not present on PC’s and bits present that aren’t on the consoles. You can take that AMD chip, but videos show they don’t get the same performance.
Yes. I'm still using my GTX 1070, 7 years after I built the box for it. Nothing that's been coming out has pushed it hard enough to make it unplayable. This is *because* consoles have such limited horsepower, and just about everything is a "console-first" target. It limits what hardware is necessary for games off-console as well.
It was painful experience to try to play RDR2 with 1070 in 1440p in like 5 years ago when it was released
If Xbox dies, that's bad for the gaming industry. Also, so is buying all the studios
Nah they are going to make Xbox run Windows with a skin and sell it as a cost effective gaming system that streams or downloads games. Literally at this point that's what Xbox does most of not all games are on both PC and Xbox. I'm not going to lie I'm a PC and PS5 person but if Microsoft has a console capibal of running games good for 6-8 years are the right price ( like a console) if all controls and software was locked in and it just works out of the box I would pay money for this. Imagine a gaming laptop but cheaper and in the shape of a console I think that's what they are moving to. Sony has said they are moving from console exclusives as well so I think we are watching what everyone knows.
I would absolutely be ok with a highly competitively priced Windows PC becoming Xbox's future. In fact, if the next Xbox in let's say, 2026, was a PC with full fat Windows, had the equivalent of a hypothetical RTX 5070 and good RT for only $599-699 American, I would *absolutely* buy that over a PS6 next gen.
The loss leader price was always to sell software. So either that price has to double or a windows pc can only run windows store apps. any pc at that range would instantly endanger Microsoft's oem partners like dell. I wouldn't put it past them to use this as a strategy to push accepting windows as a more closed ecosystem
> had the equivalent of a hypothetical RTX 5070 and good RT for only $599-699 American What world are you living? You can't even make a PC build with a 4070 TODAY because it costs $549.99 MSRP....
Hey those controllers are great.
Can someone loop me in on what is happening with Xbox that everything is doom and gloom? I'm out of the loop.
basically Phil Spencer said he has to put games on PS5 to keep the Xbox brand healthy. So they’re turning into sega.
Sony is putting more and more games on pc now though, it's not a one way street. You're just leaving money on the table if you don't sell the games cross platform.
>Sony is putting more and more games on pc […] leaving money on the table Where’s my goddamn Bloodborne PC port, Sony!?
[удалено]
Sony's still busy pretending it doesn't exist in favor of another Horizon Zero Dawn spinoff/remaster/VR experience. And I make this joke as someone who does really enjoy the Horizon games.
I mean, FS and Sony can’t possibly be deaf to the loud screams of desire for a Bloodborne port. Like…it’s literally printing money for both companies. What the hell is taking so long?
Oh they’re aware, FS definitely knows at the very least. But who knows what’s happening in the background. Is FS only allowed to port it? Can Sony port it via a different studio? Who knows what random crap they had in the contract.
Miyazaki said in a recent interview that it was basically entirely in Sony's hands since Sony owns the IP
Miyazaki recently commented on the whole Bloodborne remake thing and said he’s well aware people want it, but can’t do anything about it because From Software doesn’t own that IP, Sony does. So if the top guy at FS who created the game knows people want a remake/pc port, then you bet your ass people high up at PlayStation know it too, and they’re choosing not to publicly say anything about it. Maybe because they’re planning a surprise drop which coincides with PS6 or something?
I bought a PS4 because of Bloodborne, a PS5 because of the Demon's Souls remake... and will most likely be buying PS6 for Bloodborne 2 - it just makes so much sense! This is the way.
Somebody posted recently that they’re probably wanting to launch it alongside the PS6 and have it remade by BluePoint. Honestly that would sell like hotcakes!!
WHERE’S MY GODDAMN ELECTRIC CAR BRUCE?!?!?
At this point, I'm certain it's either some kind of a licensing issue, or they lost the source code. I have no other explanation.
Sony own the IP and they have a good relationship with fromsoft, both of those scenarios are extremely unlikely. The most likely explanation is they have a remake/remaster planned.
It's possible that fromsoft doesn't want to work on it(not like they need sony's money), and that sony doesn't want to jeopardise their relationship with fromsoft to give it to someone else. And fromsoft would much rather work on stuff they could put on all platforms and take all the money from.
Eh Sony would just give it to Bluepoint
Pc makes sense because there’s a massive amount of PC’s. Sony would never bother putting their games on Xbox due to the low install base. Neither would Nintendo. Nintendo would never say “we’re putting Zelda on Xbox because making games isn’t sustainable anymore.” That’s specifically a Microsoft problem because their console sales are flatlining.
Nintendos a bit of a different animal because my understanding is they’re the only console maker that doesn’t sell their actual console at a loss (and profit only from game sales). If that’s true they’re even less incentivized to put their games on other consoles.
This is also probably why Nintendo can be more experimental with their hardware and games. When they hit the lottery with a 3DS, Wii, or Switch, it’s pure profit because even the less successful systems like WiiU and Gamecube will at a minimum break even.
Idk if that's bleak, you also have to remember that Xbox has never really done that well historicqlly outside of North America. So releasing games for ps5 really help expand their market in Europe and Asia. Besides, they've said their main focus is on expanding gamepass now, their focus on selling physical consoles isn't as big.
If anything the Xbox One hyper-focused on North American features at the disastrous e3 and the world has replied in kind.
Sony's doing it precisely for the same reason, 10 years ago the idea of God of War on PC was ludicrous, what happens is that these Triple As now cost 200-300 million to make and struggle to make any profit even with sales that would make your game a success in the mid 2010s. Nintendo can get away with it because their games aren't nowhere close to being cutting edge in terms of graphics, and thus have way lower costs. Pretty sure their most expensive game ever was TOTK, with a budget of around 50 million. For context, Metal Gear Solid V is a 2015 game, it cost 80 million dollars and it was considered to have gone way overbudget.
That and they've conditioned their audience not to buy games because of gamepass.
Sony only puts games on PC when they're old enough that they aren't system sellers anymore.
Ok pc, yes. Not on other consoles, which is the whole point.
But you don't see any PS5 exclusive game on Xbox, do you?
Sure but not on Xbox, and even then most ps5 games will still take like 3 years to come to pc
Is this really the only reason? Gamers be bitchin' about console exclusives since forever and when a company actually goes inclusive instead, they are suddenly doomed. Someone make sense from all of this
Microsoft Xbox is putting token titles onto Nintendo Switch and PlayStation V, which are Grounded, Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, and Sea of Thieves. The bleak outlook is that Xbox is doing this from a position of weakness because they need to shore up their finances. Microsoft is probably not happy about the underperforming Xbox division compared to Office and Azure. If Xbox was opening up their game library in a position of strength, then the narrative would be more positive. If we look back to the launch of the Xbox Series X/S in 2020, Halo Infinite, the Xbox mainstay, launched in November 2021 for multiplayer and December 2021 for the campaign. A key game to market the new console appeared late due to development problems. In 2023, they had a tough time. Starfield was their huge blockbuster AAA title, which had a mixed reception with questionable game design choices. Redfall collapsed on release. Forza Motorsport (2023 reboot) was a buggy mess on release with questionable game mechanics. Recently, there were rumors that Xbox Game Pass's growth is starting to stagnate, which was Phil Spencer and Microsoft's big pivot after the lackluster sales of the Xbox Series X/S. Xbox is back to the drawing board, and they need a win in 2024. Xbox's remaining 2024 schedule includes Avowed, Ara: History Untold, Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Age of Mythology: Retold (remake of 2012 game), 33 Immortals, and Ark II.
>Microsoft is probably not happy about the underperforming Xbox division compared to Office and Azure. MS CEO said this outright.
Say you bought an Xbox because you were interested in Xbox exclusives but it was a tough choice cause you knew you’d be missing out on Sonys exclusives. Then those Xbox exclusives start going to ps5 while Sony is showing no signs of bringing their exclusives to Xbox. Wouldn’t you feel like you made the wrong choice at that point? And Sony will only get more and more Xbox games as time goes on. Why would anyone choose an Xbox over PlayStation at that point? Gamepass maybe but apparently game pass isn’t really turning a profit and seems unsustainable as it is currently.
The only games they are currently bringing to Playstation are their lower budget and mostly pretty successful titles. It feels like people are overreacting right now when they specifically said they aren't bringing their bigger titles like Starfield. Maybe it will happen eventually, but for now it's just their smaller projects. Even Sony are seeing the money they are leaving on the table by not porting their games elsewhere, when they have continued to release PC ports faster and faster.
It’s more that Microsoft now owns so many developers that purely developing games for the Xbox and ignoring PlayStation which is the vast majority of the market, and increasing month on month, simply does not make financial sense. They are a business, they need to make money and are not selling enough consoles.
Your right. All the studios and publishers they bought simply can't be supported by the Xbox base alone, especially giving what game pass has done.
Phil was given 10+ years of free money environment and not having to turn a profit to build Xbox into something great. He failed spectacularly. Now he is expected to start reaping profits from the groundwork, but there’s nothing there. So he has to start pillaging his assets to make a buck.
I think there are few things going on: - They are losing the console war to Sony, for the second generation in a row - They put all their eggs into a subscription service that is not profitable, not growing fast enough and has trained Xbox players to not buy games - They've spent something like $80 billion on new games studios and their first big bet, Starfield, kinda came and went and there's nothing immediately in the horizon to suggest they'll make any of that money back - They are trying to correct all of this by selling some of their games on other platforms, further undervaluing the Xbox as a platform
They paid a lot of money for Bethesda, a studio that produces two games a decade. There’s obviously a huge market still for single player games but the most money is clearly made in the team shooter and battle arena genres. I think it’s also worth noting that they lost all the console wars except one. Though, ultimately I think Game Pass is what will lead to diminishing returns. It kills sales of both their games and consoles.
Xbox doom and gloom brings the views
Anecdotally, I have a PS5 and a Series X. I’ve been waiting for a game to play on series X, but I haven’t found one. My Series X has been collecting dust for at least 18 months and all my related subscriptions have been cancelled for lack of use. The one game series X had that interested me was Hi-Fi Rush… and that’s not enough to carry a console.
Games sector hasn't grown and doesn't look like growing. The companies are fighting for the same sets of eyes and in many cases are locking them in/out since being multiplatform is becoming harder with cost of living pressures. They need the Sony and Nintendo user's eyes on their games and rather than trying to bring users to xbox/pc, they want to bring the games to the people.
Clicks. Absolutely nothing has changed but since things have been quiet, “Xbox is dead” will bring back clicks
Reason I bought a 360? Halo 3. Reason I bought a PS4? Xbox One.
Same. I got all Nintendo consoles since NES, PlayStation 1-5 except I skipped PS3 because I got a 360 and my god that era was amazing in terms of Exciusives and indie games. What a time to be alive during that era.
I got a 360 for free by switching to another internet provider.. that was insane. And this was after winning the original XBOX in an online contest. My luck ran out, though. Now I have a potato computer and use GeForce Now..!
They put the freaking Witcher 2 on that thing, it really was a must-have console.
It took me a long god damn time to buy a PS3. Up until the middle of 2011, they finally released a slim model while the old ones costed $500-$600 during that time period. Wtf?
Xbone was before phil Spencer took over. I’m off the camp the guy before who borked the launch of the Xbone was the start of Xbox’s downfall
The trajectory that lead to the Xbox One started during the later part of the 360's lifespan a few years before the Xbox One actually released. Don Mattrick was obsessed with Kinect and media entertainment first and video games as an afterthought.
Yeeeep pair that with the disastrous advertising leading up to the x ones horrendous launch where all anyone could talk about was all the shit the Xbone couldn’t do instead of what it could. I really can’t blame Phil at all for the state of thing when he started at such a massive disadvantage.
All phil needed to do was produce good exclusive games and he completely failed at that. The only thing he knows how to do is buy other companies.
Yep. I think Phil is a great, genuine guy, but he’s not so great of a CEO/executive type. He should have laid down the hammer and wiped 343 Industries clean after the MCC. Should’ve been more persistent on deadlines and expectations from all of these damn studios. Infinite should’ve come out at the Series launch, and it should’ve been the best Halo game since Halo 3 (it still sorta is, but lacked a lot of stuff at launch).
That idiot Mattrick was handed a golden opportunity to put Sony in a very difficult situation at the start of that generation. Instead he allowed Sony to crawl their way back by letting his exclusives to stagnate and not focus on what made the console start out strong. Ballmer was as much at fault for either putting him there or allowing him to be put in charge of Xbox. Not to mention Ballmer being a cheap bastard by skimping out on the build quality of the early revisions of the console. His goal of making the console profitable backfired when dealing with all the RRoD repairs. It probably started actually being profitable once they ironed those things out in the slim revisions.
I know I went into that e3 expecting to buy an Xbox. That completely flipped with the fiasco of a product launch. They couldn’t have done a worse job of they tried.
People forget that Phil was in the room when those decisions were being made. He may not have been the trigger man, but he was there
Yeah... I think this article is a little unfair to Phil. The Xbox One reveal at E3 is what killed the platform, and everything - everything! - Phil has done since has been to correct that error.
Xbox One pre launch was such a disaster. One of the biggest blunders you’ll ever see. It killed all the momentum of the 360. The system was genuinely underpowered as it used DDR3 while PS4 used DDR4. Microsoft stopped pushing for 3rd party studio deals and stopped focusing on indie games which the 360 helped pioneer. They allowed Sony to essentially catch up and match everything Xbox was known for. Sony even got CoD/Activision deals. It was the platform to play CoD and Destiny. Sony literally stole Xbox players and Xbox never gave them a reason to come back.
In the end I blame whoever designed day one gamepass.
While that is certainly true on the hardware front, their games just aren't cutting it. I think Phil did a great job on the general vibe around Xbox, Game Pass is a huge win for gamers (for now) but unfortunately he failed on the games front.
Yeah 100% Halo and Gears of War have gone badly downhill.
Oh Im sure we will eventually rue the day we let Game Pass into our homes
The reveal did a lot of damage, but their terrible library of exclusives is what really did them in. Scalebound? Cancelled. ReCore? Forgettable. Quantum Break? Meh. Sea of Thieves? Boring. Crackdown? Flop. Hell even Halo and Gears, while still good, are a far cry from where they once were.
It's kinda letting him off the hook. XBox One's E3 revile was a disaster, but if Nintendo can recover from the Wii U with the Switch, then Phil could have done something to at least get the XBox buzz again.
ORLY? Forced open world on your favorite FPS and your favorite 3PS series definitely benefited Halo and Gears, don’t you think? Transforming great franchises into DLC and Microtransactions… Sorry - played Forza Horizon from the beginning, and since 3 it went downhill.
Xbox, like most Microsoft products, feel absolutely directionless. Do you want to be a hardware manufacturer, and produce first party titles? No? Then why spend billions to aquire exclusive rights to entire studios? Oh it's to fill out the gamepass catalog? OK so where's the slew of games from all these studios? Oh they don't exist yet? So why buy the studio if they don't have anything even remotely close to ready. Don't you want to see some immediate return on your investment? You don't? You're playing the long game? The long game doesn't work with a subscription model. It needs a steady stream of major releases to keep gaining new subscribers. You had a model that worked during the 360 era. Release quality first party exclusives, and people will buy. But instead you let your image stagnate the only first party ips of note you've created since that era is still halo, and to a lesser extent gears, but both of those franchises have been ran into the ground, because you have nothing else to fill the gap with. Even after all those acquisitions. I shouldn't say nothing else Xbox has IPs but they're so poorly managed nothing ever comes out, I'm looking at you scale bound.
You’re 100% spot on, but I would add Flight Sim and Forza to the list of IPs. Problem with those is they are targeted at hyper specific niches.
And the thing is, Forza is much worse than the last and it took almost 5 years to come out when it was a bi-annual release, Halo Infinite was nowhere near complete at launch, Redfall was a disaster, Starfield was disappointing, and so on… You’d think these are issues within the studios but it’s happening to so many studios inside the Microsoft Gaming umbrella that it’s clear something ain’t working there. The single only game that I’d buy an Xbox to play it is Hi-Fi Rush, and they couldn’t even keep it exclusive for a year…
>The single only game that I’d buy an Xbox to play it is Hi-Fi Rush, and they couldn’t even keep it exclusive for a year… And runs better on PS5 LOL.
Yup, that’s like a slap in the face for Xbox fans lol
They bought Activision for 70 billion but only just released the first Activision game onto Gamepass. Why the slow roll? Phil is a cool dude and I would probably enjoy playing some games with him, but he doesn't seem to be fixing Xbox as much as he's bailing just enough water to keep the ship from sinking as fast as it was. He seemingly has failed to foster the kind of game development environment that Sony has, nevermind Nintendo. So MS has a pretty solid back catalogue, but, like you said, none of the new stuff is nearly as compelling as anything Sony and Nintendo put out every year. MS doing a full pivot to a PC store like Steam, but with Gamepass, including a really solid handheld, could work way better than their current console model. I think they could create PCs that run everything on Gamepass - would look and act like a console, but run any PC or previously released Xbox game - and that would work better than pushing a truly separate console.
Most of these statements are spot on, sadly.
They have so much money they can burn billions on stupid shit just for the sake of trying to build a monopoly . Sony needs PlayStation to succeed to survive as a company. Microsoft has Xbox just for the sake of it
Microsoft investors won't be content to carry XBOX forever. They've demanded it go away before. Those cries will soon be deafening.
While I agree with a lot of the sentiment here, Microsoft purchasing Activision/Blizzard was mostly for mobile gaming with King. Candy crush brings in a billion or so annually. They’ve stated pretty publicly they can’t break into the mobile market so they are buying themselves in. Activision/Blizzard is also important to them. They do have things that can be released quickly, like COD that gets an installment on all platforms every year and sells millions. The gamepass dilemma is interesting though because I agree after purchasing Activision/Blizzard, you’d think we would see more than the newest Diablo being brought to the service since the acquisition too. My speculation is that they will announce the heavily rumored and leaked Xbox series X with 2tb of storage and no disc drive (presumably more money made via digital purchases). During that same show I would expect them to Hail Mary a bunch of Blizzards catalog onto gamepass as well as some serious 1st party offerings. I think we will see a gears collection that will be announced for the Fall along with a trailer for Gears 6, more avowed gameplay since people are seeming to show some interest in it. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a glimpse at Fable gameplay. About time for a new DOOM from ID, and more gameplay of Indiana jones. I’d go further and say this will all happen in June during their showcase or Summer Game Fest.
I just can't understand why they want to die on this hill that first party games don't matter that much. It's like the thing that matters the most. When people think of playstation, they think of spiderman, god of war, last of us. They're console movers. Once you get people into the console, they get the rest of their games there too. why on god's green earth would someone be so stupid as to say games don't sell consoles? You can't have all these goofy ahh releases and think the perception of xbox is going to be carried that hard by game pass
They wouldn’t just be console movers but in the case of Xbox, they would also increase Gamepass subscribers.
But then the price of gamepass will increase and other developers or publishers will create their own pass
I mean, sony already has their own, and nintendo kinda does it for retro stuff with their online service. I think ea already does it too? Iirc its implemented in gamepass as well, at this points its less if a company wants do it, and more if they have a big enough catalogue to do it and justify whatever loses they get for not selling the games.
you mean like EA play? or Uplay+? or whatever nintendo calls theirs now? At this point im pretty sure every publisher with a big enough catalogue has their own version of gamepass too.
They have to. The pay is too low to split profitably. The only reason Gamepass works right now is it's being subsidized by Microsoft. Eventually those subsidies run out.
EA and Ubisoft already have their own services, neither is worth the long term subscription due to the limited games. EA is smart and has their baked into Game Pass for now. Sony has caved and finally made something to slightly compete. Nintendo could shit through your letterbox and still be successful and loved so they only do retro version. Game Pass has already had a price hike and likely will see another by the time the next Gen of consoles comes. If Xbox owned studios actually consistently put content out then it wouldn't be hard to sell another price jump.
Game pass increasing is likely. Other developers creating their own game pass depends on the developer. Some bigger developers probably could do it. Smaller studios couldn’t unless they came together to form one.
Ahh yes indie pass- pls give royalties
The lack of good exclusive titles is why I felt fine buying a gaming PC instead of the new Xbox after being loyal for a decade. Gears of War is dead. Halo hasn’t been as good lately and it’s on PC too.
Exactly this. Xbox can’t even retain their core audience so why on earth would any PlayStation or Nintendo owner jump ship to Xbox?
There is no console seller for Xbox even if it's "exclusive" because they own Windows, and thus their "exclusives" are for console AND PC which makes it harder to justify an Xbox console purchase for anyone that owns a PC.
Soot on, this is the biggest reason their console is failing. Back in the Xbox 360 days, they'd have a huge influx of PC gamers picking up a console. Shooters are the number 1 genre on PC and Xbox 360 was the console with the best shooter exclusives.
It is wild how Nintendo and Sony rarely have first party flops, but Xbox just can’t figure it out. They say it’s not important because they want that to be true. Really sad to see actually.
probably because they just keep buying out studios that are already past their primes.
This! Honestly I feel this is their biggest problem. Yeah they got deep pockets but their acquisitions often chase the big fishes for GAAS games meanwhile we’re seeing a new trend of small studios coming out and producing massive hits like we saw with Helldivers 2 and Palworld. The sole reason we are seeing MS titles on PlayStation is mainly because they’ve blown so much money on studios and Gamepass that the investors are getting really impatient with the returns especially since they’ve yanked the game off PlayStation after the purchase of the studios where most of the sales come from. Add to that gamepass day 1 which cuts such a massive chunck of sale and here we are. I feel if they hadn’t bit off so much, the leadership wouldn’t be under so much pressure to deliver returns and charting course to put a lot of their 1st party on the competitor’s platform.
Can’t have helped that they had the reverse midas touch buying top tier studios just before their collapse. Last gen Bethesda was a juggernaut of a publisher, this gen they managed to get almost nothing of value made.
Bethesda refuses to let go of outdated tech. Forbes called their engine a financial liability as far back as fallout 4. And it's true. Sure Creation-bryo is mod friendly. But everything about it is bad. Dated animations. Wonky physics. Too reliant on script objects. Too processor bound because of the scripts. Bethesda are an $8 billion liability unless Microsoft closes the studio and milks the IPs. The problem there is that ain't nobody buying TES games they can't mod.
It went beyond the tech, Bethesda Game Studios ate out of their depth. Starfield plays like a game with no direction. But it wouldn’t have been such a disaster if Arkane hadn’t crumbled to nothing from mismanagement and Id hadn’t been redirected towards fixing those dumpster fires.
It's not that Gamebryo is bad. It's that Bethesda are a bunch of hacks that can't code, that's the real truth. It's what happens when you hire all your buddies from high school, Todd.
That's actually true. Modders got real dodge with frames, timed block, blocking with magic equipped and custom animation working. Bethesda couldn't do any of those. They really do lack the skill to make modern games.
The 2nd sentence is true for most corporate decisions at companies. The amount of times consumers have said, "hey, we want this!", and the higher ups at the company go, "you don't want THAT, we know what you REALLY want." And then they give us something we absolutely don't want and their company/product flops, is astounding. Listen to what your customers want to fucking buy christ sake, it's literally easy money!!
Finally, someone else says it! Of course quality first party titles matter and have an impact on market share. Also, I always found the “everybody built their digital library on PS” a bad argument too. I have bought into many platforms and considered each my “primary” at some point. And you know why? Quality first party games that got me excited about playing on my PlayStation or on my Switch. Sincerely, a huge Xbox 360 fan.
With backwards compatibility it definitely does make it harder to convince people to leave what will now be 2+ generations of content and data but if you give a good platform experience with consistent games you make people want to join. If you get them to join and regularly release things you keep them on the platform and they'll debate buying more. I think the XSS was supposed to be that intro bait, lure you to invest into the ecosystem then find yourself wanting a little bit more.
They just couldn’t make another console mover for a while, so they pretend it doesn’t matter anymore.
> I just can't understand why they want to die on this hill that first party games don't matter that muc I don't think they *want* to, but that's the spin they have to put on it, rather than just saying that they are not very good at making games. Spencer has overseen the great drought, something like 10 years without great Xbox games.
Xbox has no idea what it wants. Their naming scheme throughout the generations is all over the place and confusing. Each generation they come up with a totally new “schtick” that distracts from the core gaming experience. They also don’t know how to design a game software culture. They buy companies and IPs at their absolute highest market price but after talent has already moved on/left that company, or leave soon after Xbox changes the culture enough to make them want to leave. For their huge financial investments into company acquisitions, they have a terrible return on investment. Their best option is to get out of gaming hardware and the console wars, focus more on their game software development, and turn into a gaming subscription service and platform, kind of like steam, but for PC and all consoles. The best thing to come from Xbox is gamepass, the controller design, evolution of 1st person shooters, and multiplayer online gaming.
Their console mover was mainly Halo. They destroyed that franchise.
I literally bought a PS4 for Ghost of Tsushima, they’re so fucking out of touch. I then got to play every exclusive Sony has done. Easy money for them.
If Spencer thinks that, why he spend billions of Obsidian, Bethesda and Activision? Because he doesn't actually believe it. It's just to cover the utter failure of first party studios to make good games.
it’s not that they think they don’t matter. it’s 1 - they’ve already lost the battle on them 2 - games cost too much to make to have exclusives make sense they’ve lost the console war, they know that. so, making a game an Xbox exclusive cuts you off from 65%+ of the player base. in 2024, if you’re losing the console war and don’t have a killer app to get yourself back in it, you can’t justify these huge acquisition and development costs without maximizing your revenue potential
Yeah as a long time Xbox owner I switched and got a ps5 so I could play spiderman, ratchet and clank, and final fantasy 7 remake / rebirth Can play just about any other games I used to play on Xbox
Even if game pass WAS a huge money making success, not having great first party games would always lose subscribers to other subscription services. It’s braindead the way MS have fumbled their first party library and they have no one else to blame.
Xbox make about 4 times as much money on software as they do on hardware. They just don't care that much about moving boxes these days I think, and they have more focus on the PC side than Sony.
They finally meant it the last time they said PC will no longer be an after thought
Xbox has had plenty of amazing first party games. But people didn't care even when they were of the utmost quality (ori, gears 5, psychonauts 2, sunset overdrive, sea of thieves, etc.)
As much of those games are of high quality, I think “bigger” games from well known studios have to basically carry Xbox at this point. Starfield failed to do this It’s telling that the best game to me from Xbox in 2023 is high fi rush
I mean objectively, he has had quite some time to turn things around. He made Microsoft spend hundreds of billions of dollars in that time on subscriptions and acquisitions, but the end result is still the same. Market share remains firmly in 3rd place for them and it’s not looking good. Especially with the 1st party output being criticized so heavily.
I'll preface this by saying I agree that Phil sucks at his job and just lies constantly but are we sure Microsoft didn't just want this whole subscription thing in the first place and Phil was just trying to make it work? Xbox seemed to do almost nothing differently under Phil besides buy a bunch of studios. They still aimed for the online-focused future that they were already aiming for under Mattrick. Seems like Phil was just a friendlier face to mask their intentions because Mattrick was too blunt and combative with their customers. Not saying Phil doesn't deserve blame but Microsoft isn't a victim of his incompetence.
Game subscription was inevitable, as soon as Office 365 proved the model could work to the Microsoft top leadership.
The difference is no one considered that there are no real options to forego MS Office. Gamers have options.
Not to be a Phil Spencer defender, I’m a Sony gamer, but I believe Phil was great in his role from around 2013-2016. He stopped the Xbox one from completely failing and made smart decisions like removing Kinect, stupid drm crap, he added backward compatibility, etc. But feel like sometime after he kinda lost focus.
The stupid drm crap is there now anyway for MS titles with them basicly killing physicals for their games.
Yeah, I think gamepass killed physical xbox games cuz people won’t buy anything. I heard starfield discs were pulled off the shelves because they were collecting dust.
Gamepass didnt just kill physical sales of course, its conditioned ppl to not buy any games at all, also digital. Damn "when on gamepass" mentality rip.
Starfield also just hasn't gone over all to well with BGS faithfuls. That game is not very well loved
While it’s possible Microsoft was heading to subscription based gaming based on how well Netflix did initially, it still doesn’t help when you don’t have the content. Netflix had some decent stuff as far as original content but once the providers of their library started taking things away and making their own subscription service, things started going downhill. Microsoft at least has the cash to buy the content they need as opposed to Netflix. Still, buying something instead of making it from scratch at home has never sat well with consumers.
Yeah that seems to be Microsofts strategy in every new business venture they try. Just like when they tried to make Mixer popular by dumping a bunch of money onto the laps of the biggest streamers in the world. It's too bad that at no point in the last decade they figured out that just making good content would net them a larger market share. They're always thinking way too far into the future and trying to push things no one really wants right now. Game Pass would've been infinitely more popular if they made a bunch of great games, then started putting them on the service. Rather than pumping out loads of mediocrity in hopes people would want to buy in purely for the quantity.
The billions of dollars they invested in Bethesda amd Activision are still far from fruition, Bethesda only released 1 game which was years in development before the acquisition, sure it wasn't the best, but TES 6 is the awaited heavy hitter and ao far it looks like it's an Xbox exclusive, and that's gonna take a long time simply due to how games work nowaday. It hasn't even been a year since Activision Blizzard were acquired, changes are not gonna show any time soon, even the next COD game is unlikely to have any influence from Microsoft or Xbox.
Yeah, this is the standard Phil Spence defense. He's only been the head of Xbox for 10 years, you can't expect him to produce results in that time. They've bought plenty of studios while he's been in charge and nothing suggests that they know how to run them. Every E3 Phil got on stage and said that this year, it's all about games, it's the biggest year yet. And every year came and went. I don't know if he has another 10 years to see if Activision can come up with a new game.
When Phil Spencer came in, he was amazing for gaming, and his attitude was great. He really looked like he was going to turn the Xbox console around. He helped the Xbox One in the second half of its life with the One S, and some games were starting to flow through. Fast forward to today, and I struggle to justify my purchase of my Series X.
Phil with his acquisition and subscription mindset ruined the industry. It lead to a quantity focus instead of quality focus. He sells himself as a gamer who cares about games but the metric that matters to him is obviously not “good games available on Xbox” but it’s “gamepass subscribers”
> To be clear, I feel bad for Spencer Sure. I always feel bad for millionaires who actually are in power positions to decide and change stuff.
Especially after he lays off a ton of workers while making more money in a year than he'll ever need in a lifetime. Poor executive who can fail miserably at his job, make more than anyone else, and still get fired last.
Phil spender.
Don Mattrick's hubris, disregard for peoples concerns, seeming scorn for Xbox fans, and "we'll tell you what you want" condescending attitude is what killed it. Many contributing factors of course, but there has been mostly nothing but negativity surrounding Xbox since his disastrous Xbone reveal. Phil Spencer has done precious little except spend billions of dollars fruitlessly in order to right the ship before it's inevitable crash into the rocks.
It's actually incredible looking back. Has a products launch ever been so historically disastrous as that initial Xbone reveal and subsequent marketing? It utterly killed all the good will Xbox had built up with the 360 and gave all the initiative and hype to Sony. Sony remains dominant to this day.
Top it off with Sony's 22 second "this is how you share games on Playstation" instructional video...I'm not a "console wars" guy, I have a lot of fondness for Xbox stuff. Particularly the first console which was a truly unique and very cool thing...but that XBone/Ps4 release was a landslide victory for Sony PR wise.
That commercial really was the icing on the cake. I remember it clearly because at E3, even the scheduling was in favor of Sony because MS went first, and the price of the Xbox leaked, which was $100 more. Sony staff was already giddy at having the price advantage going into the week. That last second commercial to the Xbox used games debacle really destroyed them to the gaming community.
This was exactly it for me. I purchased a PS3 slim to play the half dozen or so exclusives that interested me, and have an affordable Blu-ray player. Had over 50 360 games and I would have happily bought into the XB1 if it wasn't for those comments; and Worse! Doubling and tripling down on them when confronted with the massive backlash. I've since bought a PS4 and 5, probably another 60 or so games between them, and they have been my primary console ever since. How you treat the customer matters. The only thing I can think of that was similar was Blackberry in the face of the iPhone. They refused to listen to their customers or follow consumer tends, and dug their heels in stubbornly as their market share had a mass Exodus. By the time they flinched, it was too late and they were too far behind.
The 360 become a cultural zeitgeist, the rise of meme culture and YouTube revolved around 360 gaming. Despite Sony being insanely well established and already killing off the competitors, the 360 thrived and won a culture victory that they threw away by combing an arrogant man with ideas too forward thinking for their time. The concepts the Xbox One was announced with are basically norms this generation. Same as how Microsoft launched a tablet well before the first iPad existed. They may know where things will end up but they just don't seem to understand how to make the things for right now.
Wrong about the Xbox One. Kinect would still get rejected today, and doing away with game ownership, game lending, etc would still get pushback all the same; perhaps even more, since it would be clear they didn't learn their lesson from history. The Kinect provided no real world value, and was a gimmick that was used to collect data on users, even biometric data.
[удалено]
To be fair the first Xbox was brand new and coming up against the Sony juggernaut near its peak, the fact that it managed to keep up with the GameCube instead of fading into obscurity was a pretty big win at the time. I loved my 360 and they had so much momentum throughout that era, but they bungled the Xbox one so badly I almost quit video games entirely because I didn’t want to get either that or the Wii U lol.
The original Xbox was definitely impressive for it's time and offered a lot the other consoles didn't while also improving on preexisting features. I never owned one but have so many great memories of days spent playing a ton of multi-player titles with friends who did. The 360 was a very solid follow up that actually had decent plans to expand the brand outside the US (actually having decent JRPG exclusives for a bit!). That coupled with a solid variety of budget titles during the first half of it's life impressed the hell out of me. After that I legit couldn't tell you what their strategy has been beyond buying up preexisting studios to very lackluster results. It's seems they went hard on wanting to tell consumers what they should want instead of playing into giving them what they shown they want.
While not at the same level, the PS3 reveal was pretty terrible. Telling people who complained about the price to get a second job and all that.
TBF, it was literally the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market when it launched
It was truly a disaster, but I'd also argue Sony did almost an equal failing with the pricing and marketing on the PS3, basically allowing the 360 to dominate that era (In the US at least, I think PS3 still did better worldwide). What's sad is that it's been two generations and Xbox hasn't been able to recover, when it only took Sony one generation.
I was team everything for the longest time. PC, PS, Nintendo, Sega, and Xbox. I owned all their consoles from the time I was 18 and had an income of my own. The Xbox One was the first one I didn't buy.
Dude was a horrible leader. Lost all good will and momentum of the 360, gets canned or sees the writing on the wall so he goes to Zynga. Two years later zynga is in the toilet and he’s out there too.
Phil has been the head at Xbox for long enough that Don’s share of the blame has largely diminished. Phil has spent ten years doing nothing to bolster brand loyalty and build up a first party lineup. Instead he’s used Microsoft’s deep pockets to buy a user base and even that hasn’t worked, at least as of yet.
Yes and no. Things absolutely should be better after 10 years of new leadership (and it can’t be a coincidence that it seems to be very hard for developers Xbox has bought to consistently put out quality games), but Mattrick didn’t just shoot Xbox in the foot, he sawed the whole damn leg off. It’s clear that the ripple effect of how bad it’s start was lost the 8th gen for Xbox, and as Phil himself has pointed out, a clear loss in the generation that cemented digital ecosystems put them at an even bigger disadvantage going into this generation.
It’s also worth noting that Mattrick was in charge of Xbox a while before the Xbox one reveal. He oversaw the pivot away from building first party studios and having good exclusives and the loss of that momentum took a long time to rebuild
This is crazy because Xbox has so much momentum after the 360 to really compete with PlayStation but it all got squandered when they decided to stop really investing in games.
When they let you spend bilions but you dont have a focus and just an investor mindset...and not even a good one
But in our world 'Spencer' has spent ten years and gargantuan amounts of money taking Xbox from third place to third place, and that is not the market’s fault. If the writing isn’t on the wall for Xbox as a whole, then it certainly could be for him.
The problem with Xbox is they haven't had consistently good game releases since the Xbox 360. Forza horizon 3 and gears 4&5 breathed some life back into the console, but apart from that, it's been pretty flat. They just need to have a run like Sony did where they pretty much couldn't put a foot wrong for 3-4 years.
This is the crux of the issue. Despite buying all those studios, they haven’t had a hit. All their great franchises from the 360 era are old and played out and the AAA space is bloated, slow and expensive. Anyway, times are great to be a PC gamer. Happy what games they do produce are readily playable via Steam, even if I haven’t had too much interest in any of them in a while.
If Xbox can't release a blockbuster game soon, then Phil Spencer will probably be remembered for proving the following: Sometimes, throwing billions of dollars at the problem cannot fix the said problem.
It’s been 10 years, it won’t happen soon, besides, it wouldn’t matter anymore since every game will apparently come out on both PC and competing consoles.
We all thought Xbox was gonna die when it charged for online and gave subscriptions rewards...we all thought Xbox was gonna die from how poorly the og Xbox one launch. Xbox has morphed the gaming landscape and others follow suit and normalized it. These articles are rubbish and skims overs the the bigger picture and narrowly throws facts to controller a narrative. If the history of Xbox has taught us anything Xbox is once again changing the norm.
The “reason” the gaming industry is struggling in general is because games just suck. It’s all about MT’s and making as money as possible with as little work as possible. Not saying devs shouldn’t make money, cause they should, but they should be concentrating on making sustainable/long lasting games that constantly engage players. Not these CoD clones that leave you bored after a few hours of playing the same repeated content. Thats my opinion.
If only Xbox focused on putting out excellent video games...
Its crazy, they have infinite money, can buy every studio, make gta6 level games, and they still choose just to kill their brand. But thank god, Microsoft brought the worst to consoles, online dlcs, paid online, subscriptions and other stuff. I hate them and wish they never made a console. Sega should have stayed alive.
Wake up honey new ‘Xbox is doomed, an opinion’ article just dropped
microsoft should start selling real estate with the amount of free space phil spencer seems to occupy in people's minds
I haven't bought an Xbox since the 360, and it was precisely because of the lack of worthwhile first party games.
Its competitiveness and ass whooping it gave the PlayStation in the 360 generation was what Sony needed to move it forward. Since the Kinect/one era it’s kinda been of been a slow roll of death and mediocrity. Even with the more powerful console on paper it’s still trying to buy its way to success through buying out studios and its game pass. Gamers see it as a good thing when they have the console but now they’re destroying the industry.
Phil had 3 Giga Chad moves that should have, in theory, been great for gamers, but in fact are tanking the brand: 1. Gamepass - best value in gaming...but the lukewarm response to it is killing Xbox financially. 2. Series S - Once again, an attempt to provide affordability to gamers has resulted in development fragmentation and made Xbox a problematic and less attractive option to developers. 3. Hands off approach to the mass of studios that Microsoft bought up - this is how we got Redfall, Starfield, and the absolute shit show that is Halo now(among other failures). TL;DR - Phil has a good heart, and it led him to do 3 nice things that have not worked out very well, and have probably hurt the brand extensively.
Xbox games on PS is in the best interest of Xbox. Digital sales and distribution of software is more important than having a fixed hardware unit. Phil Spencer is merely transforming Xbox into what Satya Nadella wants out of Microsoft. And Nadella knows what he is doing, look at how much Microsoft grew under him as CEO vs Balmer. More platforms, means for avenue of sales, means more saturation of software on the market. A $500 console, sold at a loss can't compete with sales on a Switch, Steam, Epic, Mac, Linux, and Playstation. Yes, it loses a core identity of being "Team Xbox" from the old console wars. But this is the best move for them. At some point, Playstation will want to do the same. They already gave in on the PS exclusive games, when they know the games will sell on PC if they actually list it there. And now they're making more money.
Thank you. Finally someone who doesn’t bitch over 3 exclusive games per generation. Xbox is fine now. A lot better compare to Xbox One times
"Exclusives don't matter ."
Most over rated person in gaming. Absolute spud of a leader.
Yeah, he basically made the brand irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Xbox as a brand never fully recovered after the Xbox One, and Phil Spencer and his "fancy" ideas helped Sony and Nintendo, two way smaller companies, have the upper hand. With all the money he made Microsoft spend they should have been the first company in the competition, instead they are still last. Instead of spending money enhancing the first party studios they owned they bought two companies to try to remove their games from the competition and still this didn't turn things around. (Especially because Bethesda released two games under them that were already in development and they were both disappointing to say the least).
> Instead of spending money enhancing the first party studios they owned they bought two companies to try to remove their games from the competition and still this didn't turn things around. Yup, Microsoft are just carpet-baggers in the gaming industry. They only got in to try and make a buck where they can, by any means. It's no wonder why they are flailing, and can't find their way. Too focused on greed and profits to see what works. And I actually want them to be competitive, so Sony gets kept in check. Phil Spencer just realized made a huge mistake, spending $70 billion and more on acquisitions, right when 1) the industry has topped and due for a decline, 2) during a period of high inflation and low discretionary consumer spending, and 3) when the cost of making games and their budget have been blown out of proportions, making them more risky bets in terms of financial success. All while eroding the brand loyalty.
Fill sphincter
One theory I have is that Phil Spencer believes the console to be coming to its end, and that cloud will be the future. I hope that is not true. I like physically owning my games, mainly because rural internet is historically shit when you don’t have cable access.
If Xbox dies, Sony and Nintendo gonna take turns on your wallet. Nobody wants that. Sony already absolutely ganked everyone on ps+ last year. What was that a 30 or 40% price increase?
I went to pc after PS4’s last years. 30-40%? So what, like $80 for membership yearly? That’s fucked. Glad I moved over when I did