Last year I bought an Xbox for the first time to give Game Pass a try.. And I sold it to buy a PS5 w\ Plus a few weeks ago. If there's a reason to own an Xbox I couldn't find it.
The UX for the XB feels unpolished and unintuitive compare to the PS5 (uninstalling a game, etc), Game Pass vs Playstation Plus the exclusives on Xbox/Game Pass are uninteresting (Scorn vs Returnal vs everything Nintendo), the PS5 controller blows the Xbox controller out of the water (feel, responsiveness, haptics).
I might jump ship for Sony except for the fact I've never been able to use a Playstation controller without my thumbs knocking together and I find the sensation unendurably irritating.
You and I have the exact opposite opinions on this. I own all 3 major consoles but I only find the Xbox controller and UI nice to use. I subscribe to gamepass and have no interest in PS+. My PS5 is only used for playing GoW, Final Fantasy, and Uncharted.
I also having a gaming PC where I use an Xbox controller, racing wheel, or VR controls.
I still don't understand why people like the PS5 haptics. To me, they don't feel like they add anything and just drain the battery.
The PS5 haptics help with immersion a lot for me and the adaptive triggers potentially double the functionality of the triggers in an immersive way.
I also find the the PS5 controller the most comfortable I've ever used. I was strictly an xbox controller guy through xbox 360 and ps4 eras but the ps5 controller won me over.
I have two PS5 controllers, one for the PS5 and one for PC, just so I don't have to bother resyncing every time. If the PS5 controller extra features worked on PC without a cable it would be the perfect controller.
And yea I have gamepass too but who needs an xbox when they have a PC and the PS5 has the console exclusives I like.
I'm currently neglecting my fairly decent and expensive gaming PC with GamePass because I prefer the PS5, but AFAIK Xbox has pretty much 95 % of games that we have on PS and we have 95 % of games that they have..? I'd actually love to play some Forza Horizon and Stalker 2 and the new Elder Scrolls game when they come out and I guess some Xbox users would love to play God of War or Spider Man 2 when it comes out. What makes PS so much better for you?
Both PlayStation and Xbox have some really hard hitting exclusives comparable to the Elder Scrolls series, but my intention was not to start a pissing contest of who has the most or the best.
It is not exactly a pissing contest. The point is that Microsoft bought Bethesda, so theoretically they can make it exclusive to Xbox and start using it as a leverage. I question "comparable" here. The available data suggests they really are not.
It's hard to make a direct comparison because they're trying to do different things. God of War and Spider-Man were released on PC 4 years after their console versions.
As someone who's looking forward to both new Elder Scrolls and Spider-Man 2, I've only considered buying a console for the second: I'll just update my PC for the first.
Yeah, but that just proves my point further: having more exclusives only matters to the point that the exclusives drum up interest; which for my household won't happen with Microsoft for another 5+ years unless they get a surprise in there.
It really depends on how you game. A subscription gaming service wouldn't work for me, but I've had other friends say they don't even buy games anymore because of gamepass.
It’s obnoxious because it appears he’s trying to make light of the question by misidentifying its scope. It wasn’t a question about his ability but rather a future state of affairs.
Responding to "can you..." with "I can but won't" is generally obnoxious behavior.
Maybe he was thinking out loud, but they should have known full well what the judge was asking and by refusing to answer the clarified follow-up they seemed to be doing whatever they could to weasel out of saying anything meaningful.
> I'm not sure it's a reasonable thing to be asked to promise
If that was their response, I'd have no issue with it. I dislike the "technically I can but won't" answer followed by silence. It shows an attempt to deceive.
> Responding to "can you..." with "I can but won't" is generally obnoxious behavior.
It's a prod to get people to say what they actually want, instead of asking a vague questions with a stronger implication because it waters down the actual meaning of the words and is as weaselly as the response. Asking for the ability, requesting an action and giving a command are different things. Doubly so in hearings by government officials.
If it isn't a guarantee in writing it isn't even worth wasting the time to perceive it, let alone believe it. Executives are just piles of wet meat whose only function is turning lies into profit.
The guarantee has been spoken, it has been written, is has been commited to in writing with nation states, it has been sworn to under oath.
You obviously have information that is counter to this, I for one would appreciate if you could produce it. Xbox executives can then be charged criminally and prosecuted.
These kinds of questions are such bullshit too just getting promises from these people are meaningless. Ticketmaster "promised" that buying LiveNation wouldn't lead to more price gouging, venues extorting artists, etc and all that happened nearly instantly because they were able to consolidate the market further and vertically integrate more.
Why would Sony refuse to allow diablo 4, or call of duty for that matter, to appear on the PlayStation? The most contentious thing about the entire activision deal is the titles that currently release on PlayStation becoming exclusive to Microsoft platforms, there’s no chance Sony would ever block those games from their platform arbitrarily just silly business move.
In the future, these games could come with their own nested game stores, bypassing the platform store. It wouldn't be an issue for Microsoft because they own both games and platform. It might be tough to accept for Sony.
WHo knows? Times change, leadership changes, priorities change. I never thought Sony, a Japaanese company, would abandon their Japanese branch of first party development, but here we are. It's simply Gran Turismo and some support wings to help out 3rd party developers. Oh, and a singular VR team that hasn't yet announced its first time since the scale down.
I would love to see this level of scrutiny applied somewhere it actually matters.
Mobile.
The real tax on innovation is the device + platform + payments + services duopoly where the gatekeepers get to pick winners (typically their own), tax everything, force tech choices and update regimes, and keep the customer relationships.
It's maddening that general purpose computing and financial transactions became this. Owned by a handful of giants.
Please tell me how I can run my own version of Android on my Samsung phone that doesn't phone home to Google or Samsung, while still being able to run my banking apps.
If the duopoly hadn't trained users so well to rely on app stores for everything, banks probably would've invested more in web interfaces. At one point, the Bank of America website was the only access point for Windows Phone, but it was good enough for my needs and helped supported a little more diversity.
You can generally sideload whatever you want on Android.
But people will ALWAYS point out the edge cases such as banking apps not working on custom firmware/rooted devices, and somehow that makes Android very bad and very walled garden.
Can someone explain why FTC is trying to stop the deal? Isn’t it good for the US for MS to be propped up in the gaming business, when Sony is basically the single major player.. ?
Activision Blizzard is already a US company. If the US is worried about the health of the video game platform market (which is to say, if it ignores PC and Switch), then it can use the exact same antitrust argument to force Sony to allow sideloading on consoles and break their stranglehold on the hardware.
Microsoft already owns a large number of successful studios and IP, such as Halo, Minecraft, and Bethesda, developers of The Elder Scrolls Series (Skyrim) and the upcoming Starfield. They don't need a helping hand from the government to prevent them being squished out. Starfield was confirmed to have been going on Playstation until they were acquired by Microsoft; now the only way to play it will be on Xbox or Windows.
If Microsoft buys Activision/Blizzard, it's safe to assume that future A/B games will go the same way, and only be available on Xbox or Windows. This is problematic because Activision's IP portfolio is massive (including huge console annuals like Call of Duty), and Blizzard games are still extremely popular. If a normal game studio acquisition is like a comet colliding and adding its mass to the Earth, this would be like the moon crashing into the Earth.
Sony has way more exclusives than MS— why would it be catastrophic to even that particular playing field? This just sounds like Sony fans pissed that a few games are going to get taken away.
No one is having issues understanding the scale of the acquisition—a $70 billion dollar price tag kinda makes that obvious to everyone.
The question that myself and others in the thread have been asking without getting a clear answer is how could this acquisition make Microsoft a monopoly in the gaming space?
Even with the scale there doesn’t seem to be any legitimate path to Microsoft becoming a monopoly: video games is a $200b a year industry. Activision Blizzard’s 2022 revenue was $7.5b and combining that with Xbox’s $15b revenue still doesn’t even surpass PlayStation’s $24b. Is that a monopoly? I don’t see it.
The real answer is that the FTC is pursuing the currently canonical Democrat party regulatory agenda of trying to stop big companies from getting bigger (search terms “Neo-Brandeisian” and “market power”). This goes along with the general optics / narrative that regulators “failed” to stop big acquisitions that, in hindsight, made Big Tech more competitive (the most common examples are Google acquiring DoubleClick and YouTube, and Facebook acquiring WhatsApp and Instagram). This deal had a large headline price ($70B / “biggest gaming acquisition ever”), so the FTC opposed it knee-jerk and has tried to justify it post-hoc.
Most of the comments here are uninformed on the law and the underlying market dynamics. My job involves analyzing the games market and there is no reasonable support to the claim that this deal will significantly harm competition in itself. Various parties might not like it for various reasons, but it would be pretty bog-standard, business-as-usual in video games. Activision is big but its portfolio isn’t big enough to single-handedly sew up the market for long. Huge swings happen every decade and no content or IP is guaranteed to keep its influence for very long. Xbox is in a distant third among consoles and MS would lose more money by pulling their biggest titles from the biggest console platform (PlayStation) than they’d gain by muscling more device share. They’d also degrade the value of the product because cross-platform play is basically table stakes and gamers would move towards games they can play together. MS is proving all this by offering all other platforms access to said content (which Nintendo and most others have accepted, but Sony has performatively refused). Some smaller content will be held exclusive, but that’s the running standard in the industry and has been for all time.
So, the FTC really doesn’t have shit here. They’re going to lose the ongoing injunction case and by all likelihood MS will close the deal before the July 18th deadline.
The UK’s Competitive Markets Authority is also holding it up (but notably, no other major regulator has objected, including the EU which has the most regulatory credibility). Playstation has a huge corporate presence and its European HQ in the UK, so the CMA is likely driven by local lobbying strength combined with similar political motivations (further bolstered by pressure from the current FTC commissioners, which has been reported). The CMA’s objection is (amazingly) even more poorly constructed, based on the argument that this will make future “cloud gaming” markets uncompetitive. I’ll spare you the details, but that is even more comically ridiculous than the FTC case. Once the FTC loses this injunction, the CMA will have to fold or else they will be embarrassed as a regulatory body by Microsoft closing the deal over their objections and showing them to have no teeth (and no clue).
> big acquisitions that, in hindsight, made Big Tech more competitive (the most common examples are Google acquiring DoubleClick and YouTube, and Facebook acquiring WhatsApp and Instagram).
How did these acquisitions make big tech more competitive?
I’m saying it made those companies more competitive (as in “better equipped to compete”), not that it made the various markets more competitive (as in “characterized by competition by multiple actors”).
“Big Tech” tends to refer to the companies.
Edit: To clarify further, I’m not casting those claims about older Big Tech acquisitions as wrong or misinformed. Nor am I trying to make any specific argument about the Democrats’ strategy / Neo-Brandeisian thought here. Just directly answering the question I replied to. I’m quite confident that this particular case against Microsoft, as argued by the regulators, is quite weak and that the political tail is wagging the dog here.
The only reason I bought an Xbox (in pieces since 2013??) is at the time it had only been two years since the Sony rootkit incident. Really even now I still don't trust Sony. Yes Microsoft is probably just as bad in some ways but Sony in my mind is still the company who spied on me.
The reason I bought an Xbox is because of the PS4 I had before. It was quite bad and I have no idea why anyone would think it’s better. The game controller was average, laggy and had to be charged every 5 hours. The console was noisy and the UI was sluggish. Download speeds from the store were also weirdly slow. The whole experience was very meh. Then I bought an Xbox and was pleasantly surprised with the quality.
I think so. Nobody I know has an Xbox, even though we all had Xbox 360s back in the day. But they all have PS5s because Sony has great exclusive games. I don't see why Microsoft shouldn't be able to buy Activision, exclusives would be very helpful for them becoming competitive. But I don't play many (any?) Activision games so it wouldn't really move the needle much for me.
It is interesting the US is trying to block the last place player in the market from growing, which is also the only US company in the market.
> I don't see why Microsoft shouldn't be able to buy Activision, exclusives would be very helpful for them becoming competitive.
Because acquisitions make markets less competitive, not more. There are a zillion US companies making games, and if the platform gatekeepers become an issue, then the US can force them to open up their platforms and quit their rent-seeking.
> Because acquisitions make markets less competitive, not more.
This is just simply not true as a blanket rule.
Also, I don't understand what you're saying. Activision is not in the console market, only Microsoft is. Buying Activision makes the console market more competitive because it makes Microsoft's console more compelling in that market, a market where they are floundering.
You could also look at the game market, which as you say has a zillion US companies making games, and Activision under Microsoft would have to continue to compete in that market.
How does this reduce competition, and in what market?
It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.
> Buying Activision makes the console market more competitive
Why should the FTC care about the console market specifically rather than the gaming market in general?
> How does this reduce competition, and in what market?
The very notion of "console exclusives" reduces competition because it removes incentives to compete on hardware cost or quality and instead compete only on whatever IPs a company happens to own.
> It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.
It isn't, which is why the FTC often approves mergers.
> Why should the FTC care about the console market specifically rather than the gaming market in general?
They should consider both.
> The very notion of "console exclusives" reduces competition because it removes incentives to compete on hardware cost or quality and instead compete only on whatever IPs a company happens to own.
Why is competing on hardware cost or quality more valid than competing on exclusive content? And if that's the rule, why is the company with better exclusive content, Sony, allowed to acquire more studios, like Bungie?
How is Sony holding their "first party games" (which were all made form company acquisitions, just years ago) from Xboxes not literally the same thing as M$ purchasing Activision and blocking them from PlayStations?
Both are 1) buying a game making company, 2) making a game, 3) withholding it from the competition.
Sony's purchases were generally smaller individual studios that didn't have big libraries of existing established IPs?
There doesn't seem to be many examples of them buying studios to take existing cross platform megahits exclusive.
Edit: They apparently bought Bungie recently? Wikipedia kinda doesn't include it in their list of PlayStation studios in a normal fashion so I missed it. I suppose that is buying a big IP in Destiny (in reaction to the MS-AB takeover?), although that's basically a 1 game studio (next to no-one is really going to care about Myth or Marathon), so it's still a fair bit smaller than the sort of stuff proposed with MS and A-B.
Most of the studios Sony bought were “2nd party” - i.e. they predominantly made games only for PlayStation. The effect on competing consoles was minimal - their game never made it to non-Sony consoles anyway; this was a different era where porting games was very painful since the hardware can vary radically between consoles.
But windows gaming isn't like console gaming. You don't have to pay license fees to microsoft to publish on windows - its a general purpose platform thats relatively open. It has nothing to do with the console market for you to count it except to purposely misrepresent the market.
You are having a different lens. If you focus on what Microsoft could do (enforce Apple like rules) not what they are doing right now you will understand the regulators better.
It’s just about making sure the biggest player has competition.
Sony built its library of exclusives. Microsoft is trying to just gobble up the biggest studios not already owned by a console manufactuerer. That's blatantly anti-competitive.
Let's not act like both companies haven't bought up every independent studio they can get their hands on. Hell Sony just bought Bungie in a multi billion dollar deal.
IMO the only of the big 3 that can truly be said to "built is library" is Nintendo.
Because we are talking about the companies’ behaviour today? MS is trying to buy one of the biggest publishers right now.
Secondly, most of those game studios already have a close relationship with Sony, they can be considered 2nd party, and mostly make PS games. Sony’s competitors aren’t losing out much.
P.S. Frankly, I don’t think Sony ever intended to be in the game development business - they are a hardware company. There is a pattern to the game developers they buy - almost all of them are “tech wiz” developers; i.e. optimisation gods while gameplay of their games are usually so-so. The raison d'être of their acquired studios are to showcase the power of their hardware and coincidently provide development tool chain feedback as well as development knowledge which Sony’s “ICE team” will then share with other developers, not compete with their 3rd party developers.
That said this might have change in recent years as exclusives become a differentiator for their console.
Speaking about the origin of Sony PlayStation divison (Sony Computer Entertainment), it was derived from Sony Music. Its origin was a content company than a hardware company.
The PlayStation all started with Ken Kutaragi who worked in Sony’s digital research labs. It started as the “Play Station” a CD addon for the SNES. But due to contract disputes Sony got dumped for Philips in a very public fashion - probably Nintendo’s biggest mistake ever. Sony went ahead on its own and created the “PlayStation” (aka PS1 today) and the rest is history.
The Bungie purchase isn’t puzzling if you look at Sony’s future trajectory. They have 10 or so live-service titles in development, and have stated very openly that they aim to greatly expand their offerings in that area going forward. There are only a handful of studios that have created successful live service games and even fewer that haven’t leant on popular existing IP (such as Call of Duty: Warzone) to do so, Bungie (and Epic) are pretty much the pioneers in this space, and Bungie have learnt a lot from their trials cultivating the Destiny franchise.
Sony purchased Bungie to essentially teach them how to make successful live service games, not for the IP. They hold so much power inside PlayStation studios that they, as per the recent The Last of Us factions leaks, review and determine if a multiplayer title meets their requirements for success (factions didn’t).
I don’t think it’s a good thing (as I personally disapprove of the way Destiny operates & see a focus on these sorts of games from Sony as a major blunder) but the business logic of the purchase is obvious.
Destiny 2 has the 20th most concurrent users on Steam right now and had 300k+ concurrent players after the last $30 expansion, its by all rights a very successful game within the live service RPG space.
They built it off of companies they bought when they were 4/10 big, and they bought like 30. Microsoft is buying like 5 10/10 big companies and everyone starts freaking out.
Ahh yes, the THQ Nordic/Embracer Group approach. Works everytime if you slowly buy companies that made that one smash hit 10 years ago and was forgotten about. Genius business move.
Objectively they are selling significantly less than the PS5. And subjective estimates put it at 1 Xbox for every 2 PS5s at best, but it's most likely a bit worse.
With nearly all of the Xbox games I’m interested in being on Windows too and PlayStation having both better exclusives and better genre variety, I have no idea why I’d want an Xbox.
The last time Xboxes were remotely interesting to me was with the 360. Every generation since has been dominated by unremarkable competitive FPS games.
> Every generation since has been dominated by unremarkable competitive FPS games.
PvE games are for unskilled gamers. PlayStation and Switch are the preferred platforms for unskilled gamers. PC is the preferred platform for skilled gamers who can afford a good PC. Xbox is the preferred platform for skilled gamers who are poor (Xbox controllers are better for shooters than PlayStation controllers).
By the time you’re 28 it’ll be impossible to be a ”skilled” gamer as your reaction times will start to slow down due to being a “senior gamer”. No amount of expensive gaming peripherals on PC or XBox can stop this.
Biology catches up fast, and it doesn’t matter what gaming hardware you’re using. I’d suggest chasing fun or develop competency in a longer term skill instead of working on your “skilled” gaming clout.
Hard disagree. The top Quake Champions player right now - a German called k1llsen - is 40+.
Now, you are free to argue that Quake has been dead for a while and competition isn't as strong but the guy's reflexes seem just as good as they did 20 years ago. Yeah, he's been around for some time.
There are many formidable old school guys in their 40s, even 50s, that still play high skill games and they will kick your ass.
I'm still in the 40-50 range. My reflexes and hand-eye coordination haven't deteriorated significantly. It's not about age, it's about practice, talent, and will.
I still kick some ass in CS, TF2 and Quake. I get tired a lot quicker, of course. But it's mostly my unwillingness to waste my stamina on games rather than work.
When I was involved in CoD Blackops the top player in pulic play, was a guy in his 50s iirc. He had a username that we called Kidfan (for convenience and privacy) and had above average stats, per game. He was such a statistical outlier that he was invited to an onsite office where his play was recorded. Some people just click with game design choices and he was a super intuit.
I have a PS5 and Xbox Series S and Series X - the PS5 is just gathering dust, started up only now and then to play one of the few exclusives(last one being God of War.....like 6 months ago?) or Genshin Impact as it doesn't exist on Xbox. It's a brilliant system but the ability to pick up any Gampass Game and have the saves instantly synchronized with my gaming PC is just incredible. I can play something like Forza or Yakuza 0 on my gaming PC upstairs then go to the living room, pick up the controller and continue the same game on the Xbox - that's a complete gamechanger and what makes this console more useful(for me) than PS5.
I do similar with the upstairs/downstairs, except in the living room it’s another PC instead of an Xbox. It does Steam, GoG, etc in addition to Gamepass for a much wider variety of games. It was more expensive than an Xbox sure, but the greater game variety and flexibility is worth it.
My PS5 also hasn’t gotten a ton of usage playing PS5 games, but there are finally some interesting ones brewing now. It’s been nice as a “PS4 Ultimate” with backwards compatibility though.
I like gaming on the couch. All my friends are on either Xbox or PC and, seeing as I don’t want to game on a PC, Xbox is perfect. Quick resume, SSD, and enhanced backwards compatibility make the Series X the best console I’ve ever had. This definitely reads like an ad lol but figure I’d give you some insight into why people still buy Xbox.
Haha this is funny as it reads exactly like the checklist of why I bought a PS5 after playing PC games for the longest. Which like, we’re adults here and I don’t care what console you have, more power to you. I think we’re both comparing to PC more than anything here.
The first game I played after getting my PS5 was… Bloodborne. I’d tried it on PS4 then sold the PS4 as it offended my eyes how ugly the game was back in December 2020. Two years later when the PS5 finally became available where I could just walk into my local store and buy it, it looked very pretty on the new PS5 hardware once the market calmed down. Such a delightfully weird and creepy game.
I've never bought or owned an Xbox, but my friend has a One, bought new at roughly the same time I bought my PS4 new (2014). my PS4 sounds like a helicopter taking off and his One is almost silent. I remember roughly similar experiences for my PS3 and others' 360s. it seems that perhaps Microsoft is (or was) less expectant of you buying their Slim/XS/mini/etc model in 3 years time. no idea how true this still is though
10 players in the field of game consoles? I honestly believe that having 10 competing console platforms would make console gaming worse, just like everyone and their dog starting a streaming platform is much less convenient and much more expensive than just watching everything on Netflix was a few years ago.
Yeah, people can barely handle having to install three game launchers on their PCs. Pretty much everyone I know would prefer to buy every single game on Steam, except those couple no-DRM fanatics that would prefer to buy every single game on GOG. Very few people are even superficially rooting for Epic Games Store.
That's like ten different types of USB that don't work with each other. Steam is the direction we should be heading in. Hardware doesn't matter and even small independent makers can be found and supported.
I find this entire thing interesting. If you look at percents then sure, the PS5 is "winning" by a large margin, but from a units sold prospectrive if the PS5 is really selling 2:1 the Series X/S than we can estimate that the PS5 is around 38 Million and the Xbox is at 19 Million. From the best I can find that is still better than the Xbox 360 was by this time (someone please correct me if I am wrong in this case, finding concrete numbers for this is difficult). That number is nowhere near a failure.
That being said, its also obvious that Microsoft is playing at a different game and that it is largely fanboys and news sites keeping the "console wars" alive. (And I guess this case now but that's something else entirely) Every game that Microsoft publishes is day one also on Windows and on Game Pass. The box that is an xbox is just another avenue to playing games from Microsoft, but not the only way they care about.
I have an Xbox because it is my preferred console to play on (Xbox Live, the UI, Controller, etc) if I am playing on a console instead of a PC. I have a PS5 but that is only for exclusives.
Personally I am hoping this deal goes through because I want Xbox to be taken more seriously. Not because I want Microsoft to control these specific games or I want xbox to "Win".
But because I am particularity worried about a cocky Sony. We saw it before with the PS3 erra and we are starting to see it again with the PS5. They are making certain decisions that are not gamer friendly (cross play, paying for third party exclusives, and paying for exclusive content being some key examples). My concern is that unlike the PS3 erra where they stumbled hard, gamers are not pushing back against it this time and Sony is just continuing what they have been doing. For me personally an unchecked Sony/Playstation power in gaming is worse than this deal going through. They are both harmful for gaming, but I don't see a choice outside of it.
I used to keep a Ps4pro for their exclusives and they certainly were enjoyable. But... Seeing previous exclusives now make its way to desktop has me a bit sad about missing out on high fidelity gaming. I could have enjoyed God of war, horizon, rdr2 at higher frame rates and resolutions, if I were just a little more patient.
I'm not happy about the way Epic wrings exclusives, I shouldn't be a hypocrite for Sony.
I feel like I should train myself to be more patient, but I just can't. I tell myself I will wait and then I am up at midnight playing the new Horizon game at launch.
I have thought about that option, and if Sony does continue to actually put out games on PC I will likely consider it. But I hate how long of a wait it is. And then we see how badly some of the ports like the last of us launch.
> Personally I am hoping this deal goes through because I want Xbox to be taken more seriously
It was taken seriously by the 360 era. MS just bleed away all the good will the following generation, ceding significant market share to Sony. Now Sony is riding on the momentum from the previous generation to an easy 1st place.
> They are making certain decisions that are not gamer friendly (cross play, paying for third party exclusives, and paying for exclusive content being some key examples)
Was Sony buying any exclusives before MS attempted to take over Activision-Blizzard? (Those that they fund don’t count since it makes no difference to their competitors - the games wouldn’t be available to them either way; either it doesn’t exist if Sony doesn’t fund it or it’s exclusive to Sony if Sony did.)
Microsoft screwed up with the announcement of the Xbox One and they were never able to recover from that. They basically made one big mistake that has screwed them over. You are right but we are talking about a mistake from 10 years ago.
Yes they were, they have been doing it for years including in the PS4 generation. The distinction between funding and paying for however is a complicated one since we don't know whether or not something would have existed if it was not for Sony stepping in.
A few examples of this practice from Sony:
FF7 remake (3 years ago) and FF16 (there is no way in hell you can convince we either of those would not have been made without money from Sony)
We know from yesterday Sony tried to make Starfield exclusive
GhostWire Tokyo and Deathloop (both of these have since come to Xbox but it is unclear if this would have ever been the case if Microsoft had not bought Bethesda)
KOTOR remake that has yet to come out
Death Stranding (The exact situation for this is a bit unclear, but I doubt sony specifically funded it considering it is on Game Pass but not on Xbox)
It is not a hard to find a list of third party exclusives that Sony has paid for.
And again this also doesnt even get into the exclusive content for games. Meaning someone playing on another platform is spending the same amount of money and getting less of a game. "But its just one mission" I don't care, we spent the same amount of money. Off the top of my head I know of Call of Duty, Harry Potter, Destiny 2, and I know there are others.
The exclusive content thing during the 360 era was to counter MS buying up timed exclusives. Sony basically said, sure you can do time exclusivity for MS but we demand that games that launch late on our console have content exclusive to it or you don’t launch at all. So I guess developers just cut content from the 360 version and repurpose it as exclusive content for PS3.
Does Sony still do it now? I’m a bit out of the loop. Which games have they demanded exclusive content and are they timed exclusive to MS?
Edit: I think the real issue with MS buying Activision-Blizzard is games that were original multi-platform, i.e. available on PlayStation and Nintendo consoles, becoming exclusive to MS platforms. PlayStation and Nintendo consoles will lose games.
No one cares that God of War is exclusive to Sony’s machines. No one is losing anything - you can’t lose what you never had.
IMHO if you cannot stomach say Sony buying EA and making all their sport franchises exclusive to PlayStation then you shouldn’t be OK with the MS and Activision-Blizzard merge either.
> PlayStation and Nintendo consoles will lose games
No one loses games. Previously published games will still be playable. They may not have access to new titles in those series, but they were never guaranteed that anyway. Just like with console generations, sometimes you have to buy a new box to play the next game in your favorite series.
It seems that switch owners may even get access to Call of Duty, which they never would have without the aquisition.
> "Microsoft screwed up with the announcement of the Xbox One and they were never able to recover from that."
Put the blame where it belongs: Don Mattrick screwed up the positioning and announcement of the Xbox One and they were never able to recover from that.
Microsoft has been messing up the stewardship of their platform, the games on it and the studios that make them for a long time. Not just with the early Xbox one.
Halo's fall from grace as an IP, for instance, cannot in any way be blamed on anyone other than Microsoft, at multiple times and with multiple bad decisions. It's not due to one bad big screwup with the Xbox one; it's an ever-continuing quality problem with Microsoft.
I was fully ready to but an XBONE but ended up getting a PS4 after that. Could've lived with the downsides, but not with all the arrogance that they were announced with. Based on the games that generation I probably made the right choice too.
Don Mattrick fucked up good and proper and Sony owes him a huge debt of gratitude.
I don't see how an unchecked Playstation is at all comparable to how much Microsoft can leverage ABK across several industries. Microsoft knows this, it's why they're OK with Game Pass destroying software console sales (something they admitted during previous trials). It's peanuts for what they want to do.
Microsoft has been keeping the Windows platform away from the gaming market in favor of Xbox, I'd imagine to avoid competing with themselves. Xbox has to have been getting subsidies from somewhere to run Game Pass. Despite all this help, they do seem to be stuck third place. Excluding Nintendo as a competitor seems wrong, it's not just about current-gen.
I don't play Activision/Blizzard games or use Xbox so I'm not really invested, but I tend to oppose market consolidation and monoculture whenever possible. That said, lately game releases have been pretty lackluster with some major flops and lots of remakes coming out. If the underdog thinks they can turn the tide by acquiring a major studio, I don't particularly want the government in the way either.
> Microsoft has been keeping the Windows platform away from the gaming market in favor of Xbox
Consoles have admirable hardware. It is a pity that consoles are walled gardens.
Steam on PC is my choice for gaming because I like Valve's platform and I prefer the versatility of owning my hardware platform despite occasional problems with drivers. PC gamers are accustomed to finding solutions.
You can still hook your SNES to your TV and replay Chrono Trigger, although I have to admit eventually things will break and old machines will end up getting dismantled and recycled.
What do you mean by your first statement? Since like 5/6 years if not more, MS has started using "console exclusive" to mean "Xbox/Windows" for their exclusives. All their biggest hits (Forza, Halo, Sea of Thieves, etc.) have been coming out to Xbox and windows at the same time. I think part of it is the pressure from Apple in the computer space, part of it might be envisioning their console as a "cheap gaming pc" rather than its own platform.
Seems to me it's more like Xbox has been redefined into something much bigger, now it's an umbrella of many big name game companies across all three platforms. They've also gained a lot more relevance on PC side of things, and their GamePass is very popular. They've finally embraced their Windows moat, and built a lot on top of it in the last few years.
Xbox as we know it (the console) became irrelevant, but that'd be assumed by everyone incl. Microsoft the moment they promised to bring Xbox exclusives to PC. IMO that was the first visible point of them committing to change course for Xbox. If anything, nowadays Sony seems to be pigeonholed to their own world, while Microsoft seems to be thriving.
Might as well drop the console then or at least drop the console business model. However I have a feeling they won’t.
Consoles make money via licensing - each game sold they get a cut. Is MS willing to give that up? If no then they are still in the console business - and Windows is an internal competitor; MS earns nothing when someone buys a game for Windows.
I don’t know the statistics but I feel like that misses a huge market segment. Lots and lots of people just have laptops for school / work that won’t run AAA games. Moreover, lots of people want to game in their living room and, while I know they exist, I’ve never met anyone that hooks their PC up to their TV to do that. Doing so might not even cross the mind of less tech savvy people.
That’s me. Have built computers since I was a kid but have no interest in (or time to devote to) building a gaming rig. Whatever I paid for the xbox ($300 maybe?) was a bargain and well worth being able to play with friends on a Friday night and let my kids check out new games without needing to worry about specs. I’d just not be in the ecosystem otherwise.
I really tried the whole Steam with big picture mode a few years ago. I had a 2080Ti and mostly ended up with micro stuttering in AAA titles, it took months of swapping out parts to finally get it halfway stable, then I discovered the power from that electrical socket was dirty. It was a nightmare. My PS5 just works, no fuss, no muss. Which I a real PC gamer would just tell me to “git gud” but I’m getting too old for this shit. I just want to relax and play games not tweak settings for hours before I play.
They’re trying the opposite, bringing the console model to PC. The consoles themselves are still necessary, since they’re the default hardware non-enthusiasts buy.
From reading the article it also seems like Microsoft is well aware that the console isn't necessarily the point, the games are. Sure, they are in the number three spot for consoles, but doing fairly well for the Xbox division as a whole.
This might also be a case of Xbox having a different user segment, as compared to the PlayStation, and certainly compared to Nintendos offerings. I might be completely wrong, but PlayStation seems very much like the console for people who want large worlds, larger than life scenaries and single player games. Xbox is for when you want to play with friends, either in person of online.
The social console is the Switch. You can have split screen. Or local wifi where one console is the host. I used to play D3 with workmates this way. You also get 2 controllers with the base console.
With multiple Switches: Splatoon 3, Monster Hunter Rise, Pac-Man Vs. (part of Namco Museum), 51 Worldwide Games
With one Switch: Super Bomberman R, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Overcooked 2 (these are also on Xbox), Zarvot, Mario Party, New Super Mario Bros. U, Super Mario 3D World
You can also play through Donkey Kong Country, Pikmin 3, and Untitled Goose Game with two players.
I know this isn't exactly on topic. I haven't played video games since I was a teenager, but I'm struck by how cheap consoles are now!
I remember the Xbox and Playstation being prohibitively expensive. I just looked it up, the Playstation was $749 AUD [1] and the Xbox was $649 AUD [2]. I had to wait yeeeears for the price to fall so I could get an Xbox.
Today, I can get a Playstation 5 Digital Edition for $649 AUD on the Sony website, or $794 AUD for the "normal" edition from Amazon.
The Xbox series X is similarly priced, at $749 AUD.
Given inflation since then, these are prices many teenagers could realistically save up for now.
The consoles used to be sold at a loss, that was back a long time ago, Xbox 360, PS3 I believe were the last generation to be sold at a loss. The next gen Xbox at the time was sold for a 20% markup on cogs or there about at the time.
Games sold on the consoles have around a 15 usd flat royalty for big titles, not sure how that affected low cost games at the time. The 360 needed 5 games to brake even, but I believe they had an attach rate of around 3 at launch and that was unreal and unexpected at the time.
Unexpectedly low. Conventionally you're selling this product to Gamers™ who will have at least one annual franchise they buy, (e.g. a sports game) and then pick up a few titles at the start plus one or two big titles. So you hit your desired attach rate and then it's profit. But if people buy your console, plus one game, and then are happy, with that model you are screwed.
It's actually doubtful whether they were really selling at a loss per se even then, most likely the notional loss represented amortizable R&D. Which is a loss on your annual balance sheet but - if you understand your business, can finance the R&D cost affordably and have a steady nerve so as to stick with the plan - this can be profitable eventually. The era of straight up dumping (exporting products for less than their BOM price, which may be illegal in some international trade rules) was last century. In the Sega era it really was possible you'd spend $100 on the actual product, sell it for $80 and figure you'll make up for it on royalties.
No, a 3 attach rate was huge, I said in a previous reply other consoles at the time were around 1.25. Over the lifetime older consoles needed around 5 games per console to break even and Xbox 360 hit that super fast compared to the competition.
This needs to be noted that it’s average as in 5 games per unit sold. So two consoles and 10 games sold to one person. The attach rate is a term related to games sold with the console at time of console purchase.
360 for sure was selling for a loss on cogs, that was rectified with the Xbox one that I believe was 400 cogs for 500 retail. It frustrated a ton of folk because 360 was 300 retail, but this was a clear change to make the console profitable without sales since they were worried people were buying it as a media device, hence the media focus of the Xbox one.
Just to be clear they managed to reduce the cogs with the Xbox 360 small and sold them at a profit without license sales.
I've never seen this idea of attach rate as "related to games sold with the console at time of console purchase". I've seen people say attach rate is %of platform which took the game (so e.g. some First Party Nintendo titles score very highly because if you own a Nintendo Wii U, you are very likely to take the Wii-U specific franchise titles) and use tie rate for games per console unit. But never the description you've used.
In industry, attach rate (aka software tie ratio) is typically the number of titles purchased for the console over the lifetime of ownership, not just at purchase (though that number is tracked as well).
Ok, we used a different term and associated attach rate as with console purchase. Either way, just take what I said as games sold with console purchase.
Three was huge at the time. Before Xbox 360 the attach rate was estimated at 1.25 for previous consoles. Often due to low games at launch or including a game with the console.
Xbox 360 broke this at the time with a huge launch portfolio and a whole set of HD games, it was really exciting and beating PS3 to launch was a big bonus. Shame the Xbox One had disastrous leadership that turned the console into a media device and forgot that people bought it for games primarily. This is a whole different conversation though.
It’s not personal, because basically everyone does it, but I love how people just say “inflation adjusted” as if we aren’t talking about fraud, they, plunder by a parasitic ruling class that used to live off the “inflation” delta between their assets and profits increasing, and the income of regular people increasing less. What’s gotten even worse now though is that they’ve gotten so greedy and there have been no consequences, that mere inflation is insufficient, they commit open theft and fraud through things like the COVID relief con job where $800 billion dollars go missing or are known to have been stolen.
Inflation is simply a manipulative way of covering up fraud, but those vomiting the fraud.
(Mild) inflation benefits debtors. The people who benefit from constant prices are the rent-seeking class, who never have to take on any risk to keep income. You have this backwards just as the people you claim to dislike want.
Your #1 debt is likely to be a fixed rate mortgage. That payment gets less in real terms every time there’s inflation. And even if it’s not yours it’s still most people’s. So most people are helped by this.
I don't recall having to spend $5 to 15 a month extra on my PS1, or N64 though. Inflation adjusted amounts tend to leave out a lot of externalized factors
Microsoft are going to put the price of the console up in August (in addition to their game pass) in Australia, among other places. Not sure by how much.
They've moved to more standard PC like hardware over the past few generations so they've got far more economy of scale on their hardware bills than they did in earlier generations.
They’re so cheap for what you get! I walked into a Walmart and for ~$600 USD including tax I got a AAA game (God of War Ragnarok) and a console ready to play it.
As someone who built a high end gaming PC and skipped the PS3/360 and PS4/Xbox One generations, the value proposition of the PS5 is just too good compared to buying a fully specced out PC! Which sure, it can be argued a midrange PC is the actual competitor, but if I decided to start PC gaming again I’d 100% drop $2000 on a 4090, definitely a personal problem), but I had an ultra high end rig with a 2080ti and games were still stuttering in 4K, then the crypto mining boom happened and I sold my GPU for more than I originally paid for it, and bought a PS5.
To do real 4K gaming these days is something like $3500! That’s not even including if you want to use a good monitor instead of a TV to push all those pixels to. I almost convinced myself “well I might use it for ML”, but even then I’m better off renting off of Runpod for a few dollars an hour. It’d take years to break even and by then a new better GPU will be out.
Alternatively, playing on PS5 has been a dream. The Demons Souls remake is a shockingly beautiful game, one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen, and God of War Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 16 are games that just work. If I want to play them away from my couch (one of my favorite features of the Switch), my Steam Deck streams them flawlessly using Chiaki4Deck (after a little bit of admittedly annoying config and adding a wired connection to the PS5, it’s a totally seamless, lag free experience. Played for 5 hours yesterday without a single drop.)
Even with a top of the line GPU gaming on a PC with AAA titles like Borderlands 3 and Monster Hunter World felt fiddly and janky, HDR setup was always confusing, and I’d have to identify why things were causing microstuttering which took me MONTHS to figure out. I also learned that games just sort of add experimental bells and whistles that a $1200 video card couldn’t actually run so I’d have to spend hours tweaking the settings for each game no matter how much hardware I threw at it. It just got tedious.
Frankly, I dont understand why most people go playstation. Think objectively about it: if youre on hnews, you're not the target for a console, as you probably either dont play games, or play games on the PC. Then, the majority of people probably have a switch because nintendo is a very common household name. Then once you surpass all of those groups, you have ps5 or xbox. But why do people buy a ps5 when gamepass is so good, and the only real difference is cost (xbox wins) and exclusives (this generation, there aint a huge difference).
Anecdotal, but I know a huge number of people that play games casually, and almost all of them have playstations if they arent PC/switch. Why? I have no idea. Nearly none of them have any interest in any playstation exclusives, they just bought a playstation because. Why? No idea.
> But why do people buy a ps5 when gamepass is so good,
You might have just fallen into the trap you were warning us about. Do they know or care about "gamepass"? They know "playstation" because that's what their friends had when they were kids, etc. Brand can be incredibly strong.
To add to this, in Ireland the main retailer for toys was Smyth’s. They didn’t sell the original Xbox because they sold PlayStation and when Microsoft tried to get the Xbox 360 stocked by them, they initially refused saying when people want to buy a games console they come into the store and ask to buy a PlayStation or a games machine. Nobody was going in asking for Xbox. Microsoft had to do a massive deal with them to get shelf space and it was always in the corner away from the Sony and Nintendo stuff.
My friends got playstations because their friends had them. They wanted to be in the same ecosystem so they could play together. Of course with cross console play, this is becoming less and less of a thing.
Wow interesting. I have a feeling the controller thing is super dependent on what you’ve had more exposure to. I recently started gaming for the first time since I was younger and got the Xbox elite controller and love it but I can’t stand playstation controllers. The feedback feels wrong, buttons, everything. Granted like I said I haven’t used them much.
I've always found the original Xbox/Xbox one controllers horribly oversized and heavy compared to the PlayStation 2 ones. The early PS1 controllers without analog sticks were a bit small but personally they've always seemed to have the best balance of weight, size, shape, stiffness, and quality.
As I mentioned in another thread, dpads are still used especially in platform games that require precision and the Xbox dpad disk is horrendous.
I've had both playstation and Xbox, although I stopped after the original and the 360, and I can't imagine completing something like Celeste on an Xbox controller.
The Series S/X controller dpad is a pretty nice and clicky dpad. It's a farcry from the mush of the 360 or original Xbox and a step up from the Xbox One (which was already a lot better). I picked up one recently and even though on paper it's barely different from the Xbox One controller they made enough subtle tweaks and design changes that I actually really like it despite never really being a fan of the Xbox One controller.
Current Xbox controller is just fine, but I feel it stopped evolution. I want to see any evolution for controller, like trackpad for aim on Steam Controller.
Maybe console gammers are not that much into trying different games so gamepass is worthless. Personally I couldn't care less about a game subscription. I just want to buy the game I like and play it for 20 years at least!
A couple of reasons why I personally will buy PS5 vs XBOX:
- I already have a bunch of games for PS4, which will still work on PS5
- I try to avoid Microsoft when possible. They are too powerful and spread out for their own good. And yet I still happily use VSCode, Microsoft ToDo daily. Same sentiment goes for google products.
- I can fit PS5 under my TV. XBOX Series X won’t fit.
Gamepass is good, but PS Plus is also good. Arguably the main thing you get with Gamepass is more AAA games, but honestly, both iclude more games than you can reasonably play.
> exclusives (this generation, there aint a huge difference)
The difference doesn't need to be huge, it just needs to be there. For me personally, the backcatalog of From Software games (including 2020 Demon's Souls) and Returnal were enough to push me towards PS5.
> the majority of people probably have a switch because nintendo
I do also own a switch. It's nice and all, but for me competes in a different niche: portable indie game machine. Anecdotally, I also don't know anyone where a Switch displaces PC/PS/Xbox, so the non-overlapping group logic doesn't really apply.
People do not buy consoles, they buy games, and PlayStation has the best collection of them across all categories. Saying that can upset some, but i think its true. Also Xbox has a bit more “edgy” or action oriented brand, while PlayStation has a more wider whole family brand. All of this helps make the appeal wider in general, while Xbox can have more appeal in specific niches, eg shooters, for example.
Forza Horizon 5 is the highest rated racing game of all time on Opencritic. Sony has no open world racing game at all so it loses by default in this space.
They don't really need it. There's 3rd party options like Need for Speed.
There's lots of first party titles MS has no one to one answer for either. They don't have a big mascot 3rd person shooter platform game like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart.
Forza (any Forza game) is either blatantly arcade (Horizon) or toxic online experience (Motorsport).
Gran Turismo although has its own issues is miles ahead over anything Xbox has to offer.
Horizon is as racing games as GTA Online for that matter
> Think objectively about it: if youre on hnews, you're not the target for a console, as you probably either dont play games, or play games on the PC. Then, the majority of people probably have a switch because nintendo is a very common household name.
HN readers don't use gaming consoles? "Nintendo" is more of a household name than "PlayStation" or "Xbox"? Doesn't sound like a objective analysis to me.
From a quick search, the switch has 122m units shipped to 116m ps4 units shipped.
Based on that, I’d agree that Nintendo and Sony are on pretty comparable footing - certainly not that one brand is notably more widespread than the other.
PlayStation has a lot of exclusive games that have never come to PC, or only arrived on PC until significantly later—see: Killzone, Gran Turismo, The Last of Us until recently, Horizon Zero Dawn until recently, Dark Souls until recently, Bloodborne, God of War, Death Stranding. People want to play those games, and they want to play them now.
Thankfully, PlayStation exclusives do appear to be coming to PC more often nowadays. Hopefully the timed exclusivity window continues to decrease.
Death Stranding came to PC ~7 months after it released on PlayStation, which isn't too bad if they were focusing on finishing the game for the PS release rather than working on the port.
The delay in the FFVII remake was painful though, ~2 years before hitting Steam. It's a shame to see FFXVI release only on PS5 as well, the game looks interesting.
I had an OG Xbox, and the dpad was horrible (ignoring the size of the thing). I hate the disk shape dpad and like the traditional cross that Playstation offers.
If they made a controller that was nice I might reconsider my options, but after also having to deal with Microsoft locking hard disks, and then doing the same during the 360 era soured my attitude towards them. And this is ignoring all the other bad will that Microsoft has generated over the decades.
I've stuck with Playstation, Nintendo and Steam and I don't see anything Xbox that I'm missing so unless something fundamental changes, I'll stick with Playstation over Xbox.
For one, gyro aim is such an improvement for console shooters (at least for me) that I absolutely cannot downgrade to a console that can’t even support it.
For me, I chose xbox recently because of very specific titles (like, starfield). And not to mention the MS/activision talks that were going on for a while now, and I really do love blizzard games, so there would have been a risk of losing out with sony in the longer run.
What I don't get in return a _some_ JRPG titles that ps5 has access to. On the other hand, I also have a switch (which has some exceptionally great exclusives + some of the missing JRPGs), and quite a lot of the gaming portfolio is covered by having xbox+switch.
The only thing I refuse to do nowadays is playing on PC, at all. I am tied to this unhealthy seating position most of the day already, and with consoles I can move to the couch, not to mention multiplayer there. I get why PC gaming is better in several aspects, but body posture is the single thing I am no longer accepting here.
My deck works fine in the garden, the sofa or the train.
And I was able to get a Lenovo SFF Ryzen 5600 for £300 from ebay, which is cheaper, smaller and faster than the current consoles.
It's a shame that Valve don't distribute the current Steam Deck Linux, but HoloOS does effectively the same and that plugs into the TV just as well.
You don't need to compromise with PC gaming, and when I upgrade I won't be forced to buy all my games again to carry on playing Overcooked and Moving Out with the kids.
We have all three consoles due to kids. I play pretty much only on the steam deck. It’s been great for getting back into pc gaming. Currently replaying Oblivion on it but also a bit of Yakuza 0.
I don't understand this common argument. Of course a PC can technically be connected to a TV. The problem is that most people don't have their PC in a living room, much less within the HDMI-range from a TV.
So, unless you want to permanently move your PC (and lose your desk setup with a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse) OR to have another PC dedicated for your TV setup in a living room, then no, you can't play on PC while sitting a couch.
Everything that Microsoft makes looks like technology - it has a million buttons and knobs, a colorful plastic aesthetic and names like "Xbox" or "Microsoft Gamepass Azure Edition Professional". When you turn it on, it looks like the Windows start menu that greets you at work. It's no wonder regular users don't want these things in their living rooms.
You must be an LLM with no concept of aesthetics since most people agree the PS5 is an ugly monstrosity. Unless you are living in a dorm, it looks out of place in most adult living rooms. Meanwhile the Xbox is a simple, modern black box, literally the exact opposite of how you’re trying to paint their hardware and trust me, I’m no Microsoft fan. Give me a break.
Maybe stop and think if you’d react the same way to someone critiquing the product market fit of a workplace chat product. If not, then ask yourself why is a preference for a video game console a core part of your identity to the point where you feel under attack when someone doesn’t like what you like.
Also I never once mentioned PlayStation - this is HN, not an IGN comment section. We talk about technology from the POV of the people who make it, not “gamers” or whatever.
All I’m saying is if you feel that way about a black box then I’m curious what you’d say about the PlayStation since that is clearly more fitting to your original comment. My identity isn’t under attack either, couldn’t care less what you stick under your tv or what you think of what’s under mine.
That's a new kind of insult LOL. In my case, the slimmer side of PS5 barely fits my setup in a small room. Maybe my case is uncommon, but Xbox Series X won't fit my setup.
“People I disagree with are LLMs” is a terrible stance and awful way to continue a discussion. People can have different opinions to you.
Having said that I do personally agree that physically the Xbox looks better. The software experience of the Xboxes I’ve used, however, really do remind me I’m using a Microsoft device.
> In my mind, you can't get better value than XBOX for console games
Speaking of value, you should not be using Apple but go with Windows or Linux. The reason you went with Apple is the same reason people go for Playstation instead of Xbox.
Sony exclusives on the PS5 and a dearth of quality exclusives on Microsoft's side definitely have a lot to do with this but I wonder whether the Xbox Series S/X distinction contributed as well.
The current console generation came with a fairly large price hike and Microsoft responded by also releasing a more affordable but less powerful model.
The problem is that a non-technical consumer can go out and purchase a PS5 safe in the knowledge that they're getting the same gaming experience as anyone else that owns a PS5. Someone considering an Xbox now has to choose between the series S and X.
They now need to compare specifications, figure out which one is more powerful and worry whether the console will be able to deliver decent fidelity and performance in newer games.
On another note, it'd be nice to see exclusivity agreements die entirely. Microsoft has always been fairly good at making their titles available on PC and Sony is moving in that direction but still makes heavy use of timed exclusives.
It doesn't help at all that Microsoft's usual brand insanity infected this product. So whereas Sony have made the Playstation, the Playstation 2, the Playstation 3, the Playstation 4 and now the Playstation 5 - Microsoft names products based on picking a handful of "hot" words with no specific meaning, and so like a modern CPU you need to go read a detailed specification document to even figure out what you're actually buying.
Do we need Windows Azure .NET Live? No idea, maybe it's similar to Microsoft Active Core X except targetted at a different market? Here's a blurb telling us it's "For the smart professional", presumably as opposed to products which are only for dumb amateurs ?
Microsoft couldn't follow the 1,2,3... naming convention because the first Xbox came out when the PS2 was out. They'd always seem one behind if they released the Xbox 2 when the PS3 released.
Windows XP and Windows ME have joined your party. They corroborate your story, but seem to be carrying a text only version that claims to be Windows 1.0, who asks in a wheeze where 2 is. Windows 2.1 hides their face and pretends not to notice as they walk away, but they awkwardly trip over Office 365 in the process.
Don't forget Windows 2000. Between Millennium Edition and 2000, Microsoft had two versions of windows simultaneously named in reference to the new century, but with different underlying technology and no way for average users to determine which was better (hint: not the one they marketed to average users.)
Xbox ultimately made the same mistake as Nintendo with the Wii / Wii U.
Just give the console a number. And. Increment.
That's it. You can still have Pro / Slim / whatever models, but I have no idea why Nintendo and Microsoft both willingly threw away the easiest marketing strategy there is: your kid has the 4 and the 5 just came out. 5 is larger than 4 therefore the kid knows what to ask, regardless of age. The parent also knows what to buy because 5 is larger than 4.
Nothing convinces me that this isn't the reason why new Playstation models sell like crazy before any decent games are out. 4 was larger than 3 and 5 is larger than 4. That's it.
Nintendo got out of it by starting a new line of consoles with the Switch, but Microsoft's marketing just keeps giving this one away to Sony for free. It's unbelievable.
I don't think Xbox made the same mistake. Because while the naming is pretty bad, people do actually know it's the latest generation console.
The Wii U on the other hand completely flew under most people's radar. People were over the Wii and then Nintendo releases the Wii U. Most people thought it was an addon tablet because that's all they kept showing, just Wii remotes and the tablet.
I just had to look up the difference between the series X and S. It wasn't obvious to me. It's not even obvious which is the more powerful model, there's no mention anywhere of what X and S stand for. Is 'S' Small or Super? And I guess the 'X' is for eXperience.
Compare that to PlayStation 4/PlayStation 4 Pro/PlayStation 5 (and yeah, I'm not going to argue that 'pro' isn't a stupid designation for a slightly-more-powerful-than-before console), but it's at least obvious where they sit in the lineup.
Yea, I couldn’t tell. It felt like it, but the way he kept responding implied that maybe he really did think it was simple for some reason I wasn’t getting.
I do not believe that you tried to figure out which was more powerful and it was not immediately obvious. MS even made a page comparing them and highlights the differences: one can do 12 teraflops the other 4. One does 4k the other only 1440p.
You wouldn't google Playstation 4 and 5 to find out which is which. I have no idea why Microsoft would do this. Try sending your mother out to buy one. Would she know which one to buy and understand the difference?
The person you’re responding to’s point is that you know that a PS5 is better than a PS4 without cursory investigation because you know 5 > 4. When you’re dealing with mass market consumers, there are many that won’t perform cursory investigations of products. Busy parents, technologically illiterate grand parents, kids with limited internet access, etc.
I believe the point they were trying to make is that the naming is confusing for consumers. Even if you’re aware of the difference, the naming is still confusing. If someone with knowledge of the product can’t figure out the naming, then how can anyone else?
Having to open a comparison page means it's not immediately obvious. Picture an office worker who has one December evening to run through the mall, buy and wrap gifts for the whole family. Opening his phone, googling the differences between X and S, and also between Xbox series X and Xbox one X? He'll just take Playstation 5 instead.
It really isn't obvious at all. In the past, the slimmer model tends to come out after a few years, maybe with some minor upgrades. Having two released at the same time within the same generation is just... stupid.
> Because while the naming is pretty bad, people do actually know it's the latest generation console.
Do they? I don't. At this moment, I couldn't tell you the name of Microsoft's newest console, because their naming convention is so convoluted. Meanwhile, I can tell from a glance that the PS5 is newer than the PS4.
Granted, I'm not a console gamer, but neither are (most) parents buying consoles for their children.
"Ehh, people will know what we're talking about" seems like a haphazard marketing strategy.
I work in the industry and mostly play on consoles (admittedly Sony’s) and even I’m not sure at first glance. I have to stop and think a bit every time.
I used to own Xbox consoles but the last few generations have only had Playstation (and PC). I would have absolutely no idea which of the last 3 (4?) released Xbox versions came before which. The naming is horrible. The X is top dog with S below? What was the last generation even called? Where there 1 or 2? I have no idea even though I have used it (them?) many times at a friend's house.
Edit: I googled it. Xbox X and the old one is Xbox One X? That is simply hilariously stupid.
It's not just stupid, it's demeaning to the audience. Be like Intel/BMW and give your models numbers that roughly correlate to the performance/size/features.
Sony/Apple/Samsung have this one solid - just release the next semver and market the hell out of it. Don't make me confused when I'm thinking about paying you money. Note: even the ones that aren't "on the version treadmill" do poorly: "iPhone mini" vs. "Samsung Fold" etc are niche products and exist to essentially sell the mainline item.
I honestly though the Wii U was an accessory until years after it was released, and at this moment now I couldn't tell you whether an Xbox X or S is better. Is S better because 'S-tier' is the top rating, or is X better because 'X'box? Either way could make sense, you can't intuitively divine this.
It wasn't very long ago that kids were struggling to get their parents to stop calling xbox and playstation "the nintendo". Young parents today are probably comfortable with the brands of xbox and playstation, having grown up with those brands, but expecting them to be up-to-date on the latest models isn't smart. There can be a considerable gap in understanding between those who are tuned into gaming matters and those who might be making the actual purchase. The value of simple branding should not be underestimated.
There's probably an entire department within Microsoft that makes their own alphabets and number systems. 95 comes after 3.1, right, but before 10? And XP is bigger than 365 but smaller than One? If you have a series of something, it obviously stands to reason that X is bigger than Vista.
But fret not, there's an easy shortcut to see which Microsoft product is newer. Just try them side by side and whichever has more advertisements is newer.
That would be a good thing for Microsoft. I don't think the data supports this. A quick google search showed that there are 25 million Game Pass subscribers and 125 million people in the Xbox ecosystem. There are also still plenty of games that aren't included in Game Pass.
This seems like it assumes the Xbox's target audience are kids, which doesn't automatically follow. It's like thinking rock music is greasy kids' stuff: Update your mental model. The MTV generation has grandkids now.
In short, Ford doesn't release the Ford 5 because it knows the Ford 4 is old news. (Also, get a horse, ya durn kids.)
> 5 is larger than 4 therefore the kid knows what to ask, regardless of age.
I don't know a single kid that would not know which models are current gen and which are better or worse. Argument about non technical parents is valid but any kid today will know which Xbox to get and will tell their parents. Kids these days know much more stuff than you seem to think, they spent 1/3-1/4 of their lives on the internet. My 11-12yo nephews built PCs just following youtube guides, they do video montages of their Fortnite games to put on youtube and almost every single friend of theirs is similarly familiar with current tech.
Xbox having lower numbers is purely fault of PS dominating the market over last decade, people will continue buying it cause they trust Sony to deliver exclusives and they have existing game libraries. I converted two Sony fanboys to Xbox with Game Pass and they both love it. Noone these days buys a PS "because they are confused with Xbox naming", 5 minutes of googling answers any questions. The only people who might really have an issue with this are boomers+ who are not even going to buy a console for themselves cause "games are for kids and a waste of time".
You have to go younger. My son is in first grade, he knows we have a PS bit he couldn't tell you what number. His friend is in kindergarten and loves his Xbox, and I'll wager a box of donuts he couldn't tell me what Xbox he has.
If he doesn't know, no way grandma and grandpa are going to be able to get him a birthday present.
The Xbox line goes: Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X.
The kids may know and understand this, but parents may not. If you go to a store today, you will only find the latter two, and you won’t have an issue picking the one your kid asked for (i.e. the X). But when both generations were on sale, the parent might end up buying "One X" instead of "Series X" because it’s cheaper, or buying "360" instead of "One" because it’s clearly bigger (by 359 no less).
15+ years ago when I worked at Target's electronic dept over the summer, it was hard enough for parents to track whether the PS2 or PS3 was the latest one much less where a "Wii" or "360" fit into that.
The Xbox line-up is just comical. I walk through any gaming department and see an "S", "X", or sometimes even both "S" and "X" on Xbox games. If it was just "Xbox 7" and "Xbox 8", you'd at least have some idea of what's going on.
It's like someone who knows nothing about cars trying to figure out SE vs LE vs CE vs XLE trimmings when looking at accessories.
Nintendo wants to communicate in their platform what they are targeting, so it will usually make sense. In comparison, Xbox tried, but always failed with clearly communicating their names.
I don't think non-numbers are a bad naming scheme, just the simplest. It means its easiest to keep up with and archive, but it can also mean it's hard to tell audiences what fancy new features you're marketing. If the Wii was the Nintendo 5 and the Switch was the Nintendo 7 I'm not sure if it would be quite as snappy in consumer minds.
The difference is that Microsoft released consoles with very similar purposes and names in the same generation.
Labelling the Switch as a new version of the Wii doesn't make much sense because it occupies a different niche, comparable to PlayStation/2/3/4/5 vs the PlayStation Portable.
PlayStation's addition of "Pro" in it's own naming scheme clearly distinguishes the more powerful console. Delaying the release of the pro model until later in the generation's lifecycle also helps reduce friction.
Every DS could play the same games at the same level of quality. So, unless a kid really wanted a specific console feature, it didn't really matter if you bought the wrong one.
Xbox is the opposite, if you get the cheaper console games will look worse and/or run at lower FPS. It only has one option for internal storage, leaving you with ~360gb after accounting for the OS, five or six modern games can fill that pretty easily. Official external storage costs about as much as the console itself.
For many people the trade-offs won't matter but it does make the PlayStation a much simpler choice if you're looking for a console for a kid that doesn't already favour one or the other.
I'm surprised that with all the money that MSFT has that they can't just put 1 or 2 Bm into a few few AAA titles / or just create them to drive the experience.
On the hardware note, I would not discount the impact that covid chip shortage had on the ability for MSFT to pivot on this problem.
Microsoft put over 200 mil in Halo 5, only to promptly abandon it. Needless to say, Microsoft has not been a great steward for first party games. Ninja Theory has been making Hellblade for god knows how many years, Redfall, Sea of Thieves... All massive investments with very little return.
Yeah I think the problem is MSFT being directly involved in the game. I think the better model for them would be if they just sprinkled money on studio's with ambition. It's like the movie business, there'll be misses, but there'll be big wins.
IIRC they weren't directly involved in Redfall's development. They may have pushed for it to release when it did though.
HiFi Rush is exactly what you describe. Published by Bethesda but developed by a smaller studio. Very well received without requiring a huge investment.
The funny thing is even as a consumer that understands all the confusing branding and power differences, I would still buy the cheaper system if it had compelling games to play compared to the PS5…it just doesn’t, and when it comes to first party titles everything Microsoft puts out is mid at best (Halo), or downright awful (Redfall). I also own a Nintendo Switch and I think I own more games on that than any other console I’ve owned in my entire life so raw power is t an issue for me. I want to want to buy an Xbox but the most important thing (games) just is t there. I may still buy one when Starfield comes out because it would be more expensive to build a gaming PC to play it (mac user), but I’m waiting to find out from reviews if it lives up to the (admittedly impressive from what they’ve shown) stuff they’ve shown off recently.
Do non-technical consumers care though? The Series S is an amazing little machine, and it's the cheapest. I think that's all most non-technical or casual gamers really want.
I'm pretty technical but I'm definitely a casual gamer, the Series S serves me perfectly.
I don't think the Series S is selling that particularly well. Back when the consoles were in very short supply in 2021-2022, the Series S and the Switch were the only consoles advertised in electronics stores print ads – the PS5 and Xbox Series X would be long sold out before the print ads would even get to circulation.
Funny thing is, that video was made within Microsoft. It's fascinating that everyone can be aware of the problem, but they still can't steer the behemoth.
There isn’t a console war. There are the same companies dancing around each other for 20 years.
This generation is about trying figure out how to expand past a console and expand eaches gaming platform and ecosystem across all devices.
> One of the biggest surprise revelations around exclusives was the reasoning behind Microsoft’s Bethesda acquisition. Spencer revealed that Sony regularly pays competitors to “skip our platform,” and Microsoft felt it needed to own Bethesda to compete
How is this a big revelation? Exclusivity deals have been a part of the console market since forever.
I agree they’re a bad thing for consumers, but I think this is a disingenuous argument since exclusivity deals benefit Microsoft just as much as Sony, and this acquisition is effectively just a giant version of one.
It always seems like the kind of gamers who are attracted to the XBox are better off with a PC. Like, if you are a dedicated gamer, maybe you have a gaming PC, a Switch, and a PS5, and that gives you pretty broad coverage / FOMO avoidance. What incremental gain is there from XBox? It seems like it would be better positioned as a PC that you can use on your big TV with less dicking around than attaching a full PC to a regular TV.
But in general I think Valve has beaten Microsoft to the console-ization of PC gaming with the Windows-less Steam Deck. Maybe the Steam Machine is ready for a comeback.
The XBox is basically a mid range gaming pc with a better gaming oriented os.
No idea if PS5 has this, but XBox’s ability to suspend games and instantly start back in the game is indispensable for someone with a minimum of gaming time available!
Every gaming console has that functionality, though depending on the game it's better to exit and restart often. Memory leaks and all that, aside from bugs caused by long runtime.
I switched from being a hardcore PC gamer to Xbox and haven't turned on my gaming PC in the 2 years since I got it.
The gain I get is how much easier it is to use. I'm fairly tech savvy, but Windows has been a curse and there've been too many times I've spent my intended gaming time troubleshooting Windows, or a game's display settings, or drivers etc.
Steam as software never felt great to me. I don't have the greatest eyes and I find it difficult to use. Xbox UI is just stupidly simple and intuitive.
I like that the Xbox gamepass experience is so streamlined I can sit down on a couch, turn on my controller, and that will turn the console and TV on and I can be playing a game in 10 seconds. On PC it just ain't even close.
I've had more bugs on the Xbox side than with Steam. Stuff like quick resume server issues where you have to launch the game, then backout to the dashboard, then quit the game, then launch again. I've also seen games get stuck in matchmaking without actually searching and with no way to back out.
Microsoft isn't in the business of selling you a box, they want you in their ecosystem. They'll be happy if you play on PC as long as you buy their games to play on it.
I have a gaming PC, bought it beginning of the pandemic. I turn it on and things start trying to update and eight different game storefronts pop up and windows will reboot to install updates when I step away to go to the bathroom, whole thing is just a nightmare.
I vastly prefer my Xbox. I sit on the couch, power up near instantly, pick a game. Play my games. Everything’s works. The UX is just sooo much better.
I have had both PlayStation and Xbox consoles every generation since the inception of both and every generation I just find Xbox more inviting. Maybe it’s some form of dyslexia but I also have never internalized the PlayStations button labels. Every time it tells me to hit a shape I need to look at the controller.
The original game pool for all consoles should put them all at risk.
I bought a PS5 and there's almost no games for it that aren't already on steam.
It's incomprehensible to me how Sony could win the console war when all the AAA games on PlayStation are either from somewhere else or are painfully cinematic.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 356 ms ] threadIn which PvP shooters are you currently ranked Diamond or higher?
I also having a gaming PC where I use an Xbox controller, racing wheel, or VR controls.
I still don't understand why people like the PS5 haptics. To me, they don't feel like they add anything and just drain the battery.
I also find the the PS5 controller the most comfortable I've ever used. I was strictly an xbox controller guy through xbox 360 and ps4 eras but the ps5 controller won me over.
I have two PS5 controllers, one for the PS5 and one for PC, just so I don't have to bother resyncing every time. If the PS5 controller extra features worked on PC without a cable it would be the perfect controller.
And yea I have gamepass too but who needs an xbox when they have a PC and the PS5 has the console exclusives I like.
Just, to offer another counterpoint.
GoW seems to be available on Steam, but doesn't even hit top 100 currently played.
As someone who's looking forward to both new Elder Scrolls and Spider-Man 2, I've only considered buying a console for the second: I'll just update my PC for the first.
>Spencer: Can I promise? I am able to promise, yes.
The kind of obnoxious reply I'd expect from somebody on Xbox live, not their chief.
Maybe he was thinking out loud, but they should have known full well what the judge was asking and by refusing to answer the clarified follow-up they seemed to be doing whatever they could to weasel out of saying anything meaningful.
If that was their response, I'd have no issue with it. I dislike the "technically I can but won't" answer followed by silence. It shows an attempt to deceive.
It's a prod to get people to say what they actually want, instead of asking a vague questions with a stronger implication because it waters down the actual meaning of the words and is as weaselly as the response. Asking for the ability, requesting an action and giving a command are different things. Doubly so in hearings by government officials.
"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
You obviously have information that is counter to this, I for one would appreciate if you could produce it. Xbox executives can then be charged criminally and prosecuted.
Is that written enough for you? 4 seconds of googling.
Mobile.
The real tax on innovation is the device + platform + payments + services duopoly where the gatekeepers get to pick winners (typically their own), tax everything, force tech choices and update regimes, and keep the customer relationships.
It's maddening that general purpose computing and financial transactions became this. Owned by a handful of giants.
I'm not implying one answer or the other, because I definitely don't know.
But people will ALWAYS point out the edge cases such as banking apps not working on custom firmware/rooted devices, and somehow that makes Android very bad and very walled garden.
If Microsoft buys Activision/Blizzard, it's safe to assume that future A/B games will go the same way, and only be available on Xbox or Windows. This is problematic because Activision's IP portfolio is massive (including huge console annuals like Call of Duty), and Blizzard games are still extremely popular. If a normal game studio acquisition is like a comet colliding and adding its mass to the Earth, this would be like the moon crashing into the Earth.
it shocks me every time how few people here seem to understand that scale changes things. is this not a forum frequented by SV techies?
The question that myself and others in the thread have been asking without getting a clear answer is how could this acquisition make Microsoft a monopoly in the gaming space?
Even with the scale there doesn’t seem to be any legitimate path to Microsoft becoming a monopoly: video games is a $200b a year industry. Activision Blizzard’s 2022 revenue was $7.5b and combining that with Xbox’s $15b revenue still doesn’t even surpass PlayStation’s $24b. Is that a monopoly? I don’t see it.
Most of the comments here are uninformed on the law and the underlying market dynamics. My job involves analyzing the games market and there is no reasonable support to the claim that this deal will significantly harm competition in itself. Various parties might not like it for various reasons, but it would be pretty bog-standard, business-as-usual in video games. Activision is big but its portfolio isn’t big enough to single-handedly sew up the market for long. Huge swings happen every decade and no content or IP is guaranteed to keep its influence for very long. Xbox is in a distant third among consoles and MS would lose more money by pulling their biggest titles from the biggest console platform (PlayStation) than they’d gain by muscling more device share. They’d also degrade the value of the product because cross-platform play is basically table stakes and gamers would move towards games they can play together. MS is proving all this by offering all other platforms access to said content (which Nintendo and most others have accepted, but Sony has performatively refused). Some smaller content will be held exclusive, but that’s the running standard in the industry and has been for all time.
So, the FTC really doesn’t have shit here. They’re going to lose the ongoing injunction case and by all likelihood MS will close the deal before the July 18th deadline.
The UK’s Competitive Markets Authority is also holding it up (but notably, no other major regulator has objected, including the EU which has the most regulatory credibility). Playstation has a huge corporate presence and its European HQ in the UK, so the CMA is likely driven by local lobbying strength combined with similar political motivations (further bolstered by pressure from the current FTC commissioners, which has been reported). The CMA’s objection is (amazingly) even more poorly constructed, based on the argument that this will make future “cloud gaming” markets uncompetitive. I’ll spare you the details, but that is even more comically ridiculous than the FTC case. Once the FTC loses this injunction, the CMA will have to fold or else they will be embarrassed as a regulatory body by Microsoft closing the deal over their objections and showing them to have no teeth (and no clue).
How did these acquisitions make big tech more competitive?
“Big Tech” tends to refer to the companies.
Edit: To clarify further, I’m not casting those claims about older Big Tech acquisitions as wrong or misinformed. Nor am I trying to make any specific argument about the Democrats’ strategy / Neo-Brandeisian thought here. Just directly answering the question I replied to. I’m quite confident that this particular case against Microsoft, as argued by the regulators, is quite weak and that the political tail is wagging the dog here.
It is interesting the US is trying to block the last place player in the market from growing, which is also the only US company in the market.
Because acquisitions make markets less competitive, not more. There are a zillion US companies making games, and if the platform gatekeepers become an issue, then the US can force them to open up their platforms and quit their rent-seeking.
This is just simply not true as a blanket rule.
Also, I don't understand what you're saying. Activision is not in the console market, only Microsoft is. Buying Activision makes the console market more competitive because it makes Microsoft's console more compelling in that market, a market where they are floundering.
You could also look at the game market, which as you say has a zillion US companies making games, and Activision under Microsoft would have to continue to compete in that market.
How does this reduce competition, and in what market?
It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.
> Buying Activision makes the console market more competitive
Why should the FTC care about the console market specifically rather than the gaming market in general?
> How does this reduce competition, and in what market?
The very notion of "console exclusives" reduces competition because it removes incentives to compete on hardware cost or quality and instead compete only on whatever IPs a company happens to own.
It isn't, which is why the FTC often approves mergers.
> Why should the FTC care about the console market specifically rather than the gaming market in general?
They should consider both.
> The very notion of "console exclusives" reduces competition because it removes incentives to compete on hardware cost or quality and instead compete only on whatever IPs a company happens to own.
Why is competing on hardware cost or quality more valid than competing on exclusive content? And if that's the rule, why is the company with better exclusive content, Sony, allowed to acquire more studios, like Bungie?
Both are 1) buying a game making company, 2) making a game, 3) withholding it from the competition.
There doesn't seem to be many examples of them buying studios to take existing cross platform megahits exclusive.
Edit: They apparently bought Bungie recently? Wikipedia kinda doesn't include it in their list of PlayStation studios in a normal fashion so I missed it. I suppose that is buying a big IP in Destiny (in reaction to the MS-AB takeover?), although that's basically a 1 game studio (next to no-one is really going to care about Myth or Marathon), so it's still a fair bit smaller than the sort of stuff proposed with MS and A-B.
Many may not like it but it is not about what is fair, but what keeps the market healthy.
But windows gaming isn't like console gaming. You don't have to pay license fees to microsoft to publish on windows - its a general purpose platform thats relatively open. It has nothing to do with the console market for you to count it except to purposely misrepresent the market.
It would make Microsoft more competitive/powerful
IMO the only of the big 3 that can truly be said to "built is library" is Nintendo.
Bungie is puzzling. Frankly, I’m not even sure what’s there to buy. All they got is Destiny that’s a pretty so-so game popularity-wise.
Who else has Sony bought?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Studios
Secondly, most of those game studios already have a close relationship with Sony, they can be considered 2nd party, and mostly make PS games. Sony’s competitors aren’t losing out much.
P.S. Frankly, I don’t think Sony ever intended to be in the game development business - they are a hardware company. There is a pattern to the game developers they buy - almost all of them are “tech wiz” developers; i.e. optimisation gods while gameplay of their games are usually so-so. The raison d'être of their acquired studios are to showcase the power of their hardware and coincidently provide development tool chain feedback as well as development knowledge which Sony’s “ICE team” will then share with other developers, not compete with their 3rd party developers.
That said this might have change in recent years as exclusives become a differentiator for their console.
The PlayStation all started with Ken Kutaragi who worked in Sony’s digital research labs. It started as the “Play Station” a CD addon for the SNES. But due to contract disputes Sony got dumped for Philips in a very public fashion - probably Nintendo’s biggest mistake ever. Sony went ahead on its own and created the “PlayStation” (aka PS1 today) and the rest is history.
Don’t see where Sony Music comes into the story.
Sony purchased Bungie to essentially teach them how to make successful live service games, not for the IP. They hold so much power inside PlayStation studios that they, as per the recent The Last of Us factions leaks, review and determine if a multiplayer title meets their requirements for success (factions didn’t).
I don’t think it’s a good thing (as I personally disapprove of the way Destiny operates & see a focus on these sorts of games from Sony as a major blunder) but the business logic of the purchase is obvious.
Yes, because no one you know has an XBox, it obviously means that Microsoft isn’t selling any…
The last time Xboxes were remotely interesting to me was with the 360. Every generation since has been dominated by unremarkable competitive FPS games.
PvE games are for unskilled gamers. PlayStation and Switch are the preferred platforms for unskilled gamers. PC is the preferred platform for skilled gamers who can afford a good PC. Xbox is the preferred platform for skilled gamers who are poor (Xbox controllers are better for shooters than PlayStation controllers).
For what it's worth though, the really skilled FPS players have always been on the PC side.
Nerds. The word you’re looking for is nerds.
Biology catches up fast, and it doesn’t matter what gaming hardware you’re using. I’d suggest chasing fun or develop competency in a longer term skill instead of working on your “skilled” gaming clout.
But what do I know, maybe I just need to git gud.
Now, you are free to argue that Quake has been dead for a while and competition isn't as strong but the guy's reflexes seem just as good as they did 20 years ago. Yeah, he's been around for some time.
There are many formidable old school guys in their 40s, even 50s, that still play high skill games and they will kick your ass.
I'm still in the 40-50 range. My reflexes and hand-eye coordination haven't deteriorated significantly. It's not about age, it's about practice, talent, and will.
I still kick some ass in CS, TF2 and Quake. I get tired a lot quicker, of course. But it's mostly my unwillingness to waste my stamina on games rather than work.
My PS5 also hasn’t gotten a ton of usage playing PS5 games, but there are finally some interesting ones brewing now. It’s been nice as a “PS4 Ultimate” with backwards compatibility though.
The first game I played after getting my PS5 was… Bloodborne. I’d tried it on PS4 then sold the PS4 as it offended my eyes how ugly the game was back in December 2020. Two years later when the PS5 finally became available where I could just walk into my local store and buy it, it looked very pretty on the new PS5 hardware once the market calmed down. Such a delightfully weird and creepy game.
E.g. properly recognize the market power of a platform owner, and not let them get away with any abuse.
That being said, its also obvious that Microsoft is playing at a different game and that it is largely fanboys and news sites keeping the "console wars" alive. (And I guess this case now but that's something else entirely) Every game that Microsoft publishes is day one also on Windows and on Game Pass. The box that is an xbox is just another avenue to playing games from Microsoft, but not the only way they care about.
I have an Xbox because it is my preferred console to play on (Xbox Live, the UI, Controller, etc) if I am playing on a console instead of a PC. I have a PS5 but that is only for exclusives.
Personally I am hoping this deal goes through because I want Xbox to be taken more seriously. Not because I want Microsoft to control these specific games or I want xbox to "Win".
But because I am particularity worried about a cocky Sony. We saw it before with the PS3 erra and we are starting to see it again with the PS5. They are making certain decisions that are not gamer friendly (cross play, paying for third party exclusives, and paying for exclusive content being some key examples). My concern is that unlike the PS3 erra where they stumbled hard, gamers are not pushing back against it this time and Sony is just continuing what they have been doing. For me personally an unchecked Sony/Playstation power in gaming is worse than this deal going through. They are both harmful for gaming, but I don't see a choice outside of it.
I used to keep a Ps4pro for their exclusives and they certainly were enjoyable. But... Seeing previous exclusives now make its way to desktop has me a bit sad about missing out on high fidelity gaming. I could have enjoyed God of war, horizon, rdr2 at higher frame rates and resolutions, if I were just a little more patient.
I'm not happy about the way Epic wrings exclusives, I shouldn't be a hypocrite for Sony.
I have thought about that option, and if Sony does continue to actually put out games on PC I will likely consider it. But I hate how long of a wait it is. And then we see how badly some of the ports like the last of us launch.
It was taken seriously by the 360 era. MS just bleed away all the good will the following generation, ceding significant market share to Sony. Now Sony is riding on the momentum from the previous generation to an easy 1st place.
> They are making certain decisions that are not gamer friendly (cross play, paying for third party exclusives, and paying for exclusive content being some key examples)
Was Sony buying any exclusives before MS attempted to take over Activision-Blizzard? (Those that they fund don’t count since it makes no difference to their competitors - the games wouldn’t be available to them either way; either it doesn’t exist if Sony doesn’t fund it or it’s exclusive to Sony if Sony did.)
Yes they were, they have been doing it for years including in the PS4 generation. The distinction between funding and paying for however is a complicated one since we don't know whether or not something would have existed if it was not for Sony stepping in.
A few examples of this practice from Sony:
FF7 remake (3 years ago) and FF16 (there is no way in hell you can convince we either of those would not have been made without money from Sony)
We know from yesterday Sony tried to make Starfield exclusive
GhostWire Tokyo and Deathloop (both of these have since come to Xbox but it is unclear if this would have ever been the case if Microsoft had not bought Bethesda)
KOTOR remake that has yet to come out
Death Stranding (The exact situation for this is a bit unclear, but I doubt sony specifically funded it considering it is on Game Pass but not on Xbox)
It is not a hard to find a list of third party exclusives that Sony has paid for.
And again this also doesnt even get into the exclusive content for games. Meaning someone playing on another platform is spending the same amount of money and getting less of a game. "But its just one mission" I don't care, we spent the same amount of money. Off the top of my head I know of Call of Duty, Harry Potter, Destiny 2, and I know there are others.
Does Sony still do it now? I’m a bit out of the loop. Which games have they demanded exclusive content and are they timed exclusive to MS?
Edit: I think the real issue with MS buying Activision-Blizzard is games that were original multi-platform, i.e. available on PlayStation and Nintendo consoles, becoming exclusive to MS platforms. PlayStation and Nintendo consoles will lose games.
No one cares that God of War is exclusive to Sony’s machines. No one is losing anything - you can’t lose what you never had.
IMHO if you cannot stomach say Sony buying EA and making all their sport franchises exclusive to PlayStation then you shouldn’t be OK with the MS and Activision-Blizzard merge either.
No one loses games. Previously published games will still be playable. They may not have access to new titles in those series, but they were never guaranteed that anyway. Just like with console generations, sometimes you have to buy a new box to play the next game in your favorite series.
It seems that switch owners may even get access to Call of Duty, which they never would have without the aquisition.
Put the blame where it belongs: Don Mattrick screwed up the positioning and announcement of the Xbox One and they were never able to recover from that.
Halo's fall from grace as an IP, for instance, cannot in any way be blamed on anyone other than Microsoft, at multiple times and with multiple bad decisions. It's not due to one bad big screwup with the Xbox one; it's an ever-continuing quality problem with Microsoft.
Don Mattrick fucked up good and proper and Sony owes him a huge debt of gratitude.
I don't play Activision/Blizzard games or use Xbox so I'm not really invested, but I tend to oppose market consolidation and monoculture whenever possible. That said, lately game releases have been pretty lackluster with some major flops and lots of remakes coming out. If the underdog thinks they can turn the tide by acquiring a major studio, I don't particularly want the government in the way either.
Consoles have admirable hardware. It is a pity that consoles are walled gardens.
Steam on PC is my choice for gaming because I like Valve's platform and I prefer the versatility of owning my hardware platform despite occasional problems with drivers. PC gamers are accustomed to finding solutions.
But it would be excellent if an older generation console could at least also run Debian or Pop!OS. As it is, the older consoles are just techno-waste.
Xbox as we know it (the console) became irrelevant, but that'd be assumed by everyone incl. Microsoft the moment they promised to bring Xbox exclusives to PC. IMO that was the first visible point of them committing to change course for Xbox. If anything, nowadays Sony seems to be pigeonholed to their own world, while Microsoft seems to be thriving.
Consoles make money via licensing - each game sold they get a cut. Is MS willing to give that up? If no then they are still in the console business - and Windows is an internal competitor; MS earns nothing when someone buys a game for Windows.
I don’t know the statistics but I feel like that misses a huge market segment. Lots and lots of people just have laptops for school / work that won’t run AAA games. Moreover, lots of people want to game in their living room and, while I know they exist, I’ve never met anyone that hooks their PC up to their TV to do that. Doing so might not even cross the mind of less tech savvy people.
They earn money from each Windows license though and gaming helps to keep Windows relevant against Linux and macOS, especially for younger people.
This might also be a case of Xbox having a different user segment, as compared to the PlayStation, and certainly compared to Nintendos offerings. I might be completely wrong, but PlayStation seems very much like the console for people who want large worlds, larger than life scenaries and single player games. Xbox is for when you want to play with friends, either in person of online.
What new games can you actually play in person, like splitscreen? Seems most don't allow it, or at best it's 2 player.
On Xbox we play Castle Crashers.
With one Switch: Super Bomberman R, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Overcooked 2 (these are also on Xbox), Zarvot, Mario Party, New Super Mario Bros. U, Super Mario 3D World
You can also play through Donkey Kong Country, Pikmin 3, and Untitled Goose Game with two players.
I remember the Xbox and Playstation being prohibitively expensive. I just looked it up, the Playstation was $749 AUD [1] and the Xbox was $649 AUD [2]. I had to wait yeeeears for the price to fall so I could get an Xbox.
Today, I can get a Playstation 5 Digital Edition for $649 AUD on the Sony website, or $794 AUD for the "normal" edition from Amazon.
The Xbox series X is similarly priced, at $749 AUD.
Given inflation since then, these are prices many teenagers could realistically save up for now.
[1] https://www.arnnet.com.au/article/82336/ps2_debut_november_3... [2] https://news.microsoft.com/2002/03/14/xbox-goes-global-with-...
Games sold on the consoles have around a 15 usd flat royalty for big titles, not sure how that affected low cost games at the time. The 360 needed 5 games to brake even, but I believe they had an attach rate of around 3 at launch and that was unreal and unexpected at the time.
It's actually doubtful whether they were really selling at a loss per se even then, most likely the notional loss represented amortizable R&D. Which is a loss on your annual balance sheet but - if you understand your business, can finance the R&D cost affordably and have a steady nerve so as to stick with the plan - this can be profitable eventually. The era of straight up dumping (exporting products for less than their BOM price, which may be illegal in some international trade rules) was last century. In the Sega era it really was possible you'd spend $100 on the actual product, sell it for $80 and figure you'll make up for it on royalties.
This needs to be noted that it’s average as in 5 games per unit sold. So two consoles and 10 games sold to one person. The attach rate is a term related to games sold with the console at time of console purchase.
360 for sure was selling for a loss on cogs, that was rectified with the Xbox one that I believe was 400 cogs for 500 retail. It frustrated a ton of folk because 360 was 300 retail, but this was a clear change to make the console profitable without sales since they were worried people were buying it as a media device, hence the media focus of the Xbox one.
Just to be clear they managed to reduce the cogs with the Xbox 360 small and sold them at a profit without license sales.
The PS1 cost 299$ at launch.
Nintendo64 cost 199$.
Here is an article comparing it:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/every-game-console-pric...
Inflation is simply a manipulative way of covering up fraud, but those vomiting the fraud.
Your #1 debt is likely to be a fixed rate mortgage. That payment gets less in real terms every time there’s inflation. And even if it’s not yours it’s still most people’s. So most people are helped by this.
Student loans also have fixed rates.
Did a lot of online gaming on the PS1 and N64?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/microsoft-to-raise-prices-o...
As someone who built a high end gaming PC and skipped the PS3/360 and PS4/Xbox One generations, the value proposition of the PS5 is just too good compared to buying a fully specced out PC! Which sure, it can be argued a midrange PC is the actual competitor, but if I decided to start PC gaming again I’d 100% drop $2000 on a 4090, definitely a personal problem), but I had an ultra high end rig with a 2080ti and games were still stuttering in 4K, then the crypto mining boom happened and I sold my GPU for more than I originally paid for it, and bought a PS5.
To do real 4K gaming these days is something like $3500! That’s not even including if you want to use a good monitor instead of a TV to push all those pixels to. I almost convinced myself “well I might use it for ML”, but even then I’m better off renting off of Runpod for a few dollars an hour. It’d take years to break even and by then a new better GPU will be out.
Alternatively, playing on PS5 has been a dream. The Demons Souls remake is a shockingly beautiful game, one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen, and God of War Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 16 are games that just work. If I want to play them away from my couch (one of my favorite features of the Switch), my Steam Deck streams them flawlessly using Chiaki4Deck (after a little bit of admittedly annoying config and adding a wired connection to the PS5, it’s a totally seamless, lag free experience. Played for 5 hours yesterday without a single drop.)
Even with a top of the line GPU gaming on a PC with AAA titles like Borderlands 3 and Monster Hunter World felt fiddly and janky, HDR setup was always confusing, and I’d have to identify why things were causing microstuttering which took me MONTHS to figure out. I also learned that games just sort of add experimental bells and whistles that a $1200 video card couldn’t actually run so I’d have to spend hours tweaking the settings for each game no matter how much hardware I threw at it. It just got tedious.
Maybe it's not the consoles whoch are cheap. It's just you sitting on that 300k per year FAANG salary.
Anecdotal, but I know a huge number of people that play games casually, and almost all of them have playstations if they arent PC/switch. Why? I have no idea. Nearly none of them have any interest in any playstation exclusives, they just bought a playstation because. Why? No idea.
You might have just fallen into the trap you were warning us about. Do they know or care about "gamepass"? They know "playstation" because that's what their friends had when they were kids, etc. Brand can be incredibly strong.
This time around the Xbox Series X is arguably sleeker, but by God is the controller pure trash.
The Xbox’s controller vibrations resemble those of a cheap trimmer, whereas the Playstation’s controller has a much nicer feel.
It’s also a fact that many games are better optimized for PS5, even though on paper the Xbox should have a slight edge.
I don’t care about console wars, and I’m glad I have both of them, but some games are only on PS5, which is another reason people opt for it.
I've had both playstation and Xbox, although I stopped after the original and the 360, and I can't imagine completing something like Celeste on an Xbox controller.
> exclusives (this generation, there aint a huge difference)
The difference doesn't need to be huge, it just needs to be there. For me personally, the backcatalog of From Software games (including 2020 Demon's Souls) and Returnal were enough to push me towards PS5.
> the majority of people probably have a switch because nintendo
I do also own a switch. It's nice and all, but for me competes in a different niche: portable indie game machine. Anecdotally, I also don't know anyone where a Switch displaces PC/PS/Xbox, so the non-overlapping group logic doesn't really apply.
Sony has no answer to Forza Horizon—open world arcade racer.
There's lots of first party titles MS has no one to one answer for either. They don't have a big mascot 3rd person shooter platform game like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart.
“I haven’t watched TV in 10 years. Do people still watch TV”?
It’s not hard to find real data that goes against your anecdotes.
HN readers don't use gaming consoles? "Nintendo" is more of a household name than "PlayStation" or "Xbox"? Doesn't sound like a objective analysis to me.
Based on that, I’d agree that Nintendo and Sony are on pretty comparable footing - certainly not that one brand is notably more widespread than the other.
Death Stranding came to PC ~7 months after it released on PlayStation, which isn't too bad if they were focusing on finishing the game for the PS release rather than working on the port.
The delay in the FFVII remake was painful though, ~2 years before hitting Steam. It's a shame to see FFXVI release only on PS5 as well, the game looks interesting.
By the same token, I would happily own an Xbox as well if it had the games I want, but it's severely lacking in that department.
I had an OG Xbox, and the dpad was horrible (ignoring the size of the thing). I hate the disk shape dpad and like the traditional cross that Playstation offers.
If they made a controller that was nice I might reconsider my options, but after also having to deal with Microsoft locking hard disks, and then doing the same during the 360 era soured my attitude towards them. And this is ignoring all the other bad will that Microsoft has generated over the decades.
I've stuck with Playstation, Nintendo and Steam and I don't see anything Xbox that I'm missing so unless something fundamental changes, I'll stick with Playstation over Xbox.
Why would anyone buy Xbox? No idea.
I dont think you know the HN demographics, I would assume lot of them are gamers.
What I don't get in return a _some_ JRPG titles that ps5 has access to. On the other hand, I also have a switch (which has some exceptionally great exclusives + some of the missing JRPGs), and quite a lot of the gaming portfolio is covered by having xbox+switch.
The only thing I refuse to do nowadays is playing on PC, at all. I am tied to this unhealthy seating position most of the day already, and with consoles I can move to the couch, not to mention multiplayer there. I get why PC gaming is better in several aspects, but body posture is the single thing I am no longer accepting here.
And I was able to get a Lenovo SFF Ryzen 5600 for £300 from ebay, which is cheaper, smaller and faster than the current consoles.
It's a shame that Valve don't distribute the current Steam Deck Linux, but HoloOS does effectively the same and that plugs into the TV just as well.
You don't need to compromise with PC gaming, and when I upgrade I won't be forced to buy all my games again to carry on playing Overcooked and Moving Out with the kids.
Maybe the CPU is faster but I doubt the GPU is.
So, unless you want to permanently move your PC (and lose your desk setup with a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse) OR to have another PC dedicated for your TV setup in a living room, then no, you can't play on PC while sitting a couch.
Microsoft doesn't know how to create a consumer product. The Xbox owners I know were also PC gamers at some point.
The PS5 is designed to play games.
I don't know what the Xbox is designed for, it's confusing l,
Microsoft's design choices have been consistently ghastly.
I begrudgingly accept my workplace choosing their platform.
Why would I pay for that experience?
Also I never once mentioned PlayStation - this is HN, not an IGN comment section. We talk about technology from the POV of the people who make it, not “gamers” or whatever.
[citation needed]
PS5 is really the only one of the two with any kind of a design identity to it. The Xbox Series is just a box.
At least the name is accurate.
That's a new kind of insult LOL. In my case, the slimmer side of PS5 barely fits my setup in a small room. Maybe my case is uncommon, but Xbox Series X won't fit my setup.
Having said that I do personally agree that physically the Xbox looks better. The software experience of the Xboxes I’ve used, however, really do remind me I’m using a Microsoft device.
I have two of their best XBOX and I'm loving the game pass and their "game streaming" actually works.
In my mind, you can't get better value than XBOX for console games.
My kids have the switch, with all the mario titles, they're super cool too. But in terms of winning, XBOX has the best value proposition + powerhouse.
Speaking of value, you should not be using Apple but go with Windows or Linux. The reason you went with Apple is the same reason people go for Playstation instead of Xbox.
The current console generation came with a fairly large price hike and Microsoft responded by also releasing a more affordable but less powerful model.
The problem is that a non-technical consumer can go out and purchase a PS5 safe in the knowledge that they're getting the same gaming experience as anyone else that owns a PS5. Someone considering an Xbox now has to choose between the series S and X.
They now need to compare specifications, figure out which one is more powerful and worry whether the console will be able to deliver decent fidelity and performance in newer games.
On another note, it'd be nice to see exclusivity agreements die entirely. Microsoft has always been fairly good at making their titles available on PC and Sony is moving in that direction but still makes heavy use of timed exclusives.
Do we need Windows Azure .NET Live? No idea, maybe it's similar to Microsoft Active Core X except targetted at a different market? Here's a blurb telling us it's "For the smart professional", presumably as opposed to products which are only for dumb amateurs ?
Just give the console a number. And. Increment.
That's it. You can still have Pro / Slim / whatever models, but I have no idea why Nintendo and Microsoft both willingly threw away the easiest marketing strategy there is: your kid has the 4 and the 5 just came out. 5 is larger than 4 therefore the kid knows what to ask, regardless of age. The parent also knows what to buy because 5 is larger than 4.
Nothing convinces me that this isn't the reason why new Playstation models sell like crazy before any decent games are out. 4 was larger than 3 and 5 is larger than 4. That's it.
Nintendo got out of it by starting a new line of consoles with the Switch, but Microsoft's marketing just keeps giving this one away to Sony for free. It's unbelievable.
The Wii U on the other hand completely flew under most people's radar. People were over the Wii and then Nintendo releases the Wii U. Most people thought it was an addon tablet because that's all they kept showing, just Wii remotes and the tablet.
Compare that to PlayStation 4/PlayStation 4 Pro/PlayStation 5 (and yeah, I'm not going to argue that 'pro' isn't a stupid designation for a slightly-more-powerful-than-before console), but it's at least obvious where they sit in the lineup.
Seems pretty intuitive..
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One#Xbox_One_X
It should be pretty obvious that Series > One > 360.
I think it’s absolutely baffling that somebody might find such a perfectly logical and reasonable naming system confusing.
But why does Series > One?
What is obvious about series being better than 360? why would someone think that if they were just presented with those names and nothing else?
Why would someone think x is better than s without doing any research?
AFAIK, S is “no physical media”
AFAIK, “series” means “fancy”
I’ve only ever purchased XBox consoles and currently rock an XBox One.
Lemme fix your marketing, XBox: call the “no drive” ones “cloud” or “online” or “vapor” or whatever.
Call your next one 9006 so it is simultaneously “over 9000”, and puts you back in the semver race with PlayStation. /s
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/consoles/compare
Yes the names are not as easy to compare as PS5 vs PS4, but upon cursory investigation it's blatantly obvious that the X is more powerful than the S.
The part I emphasize is exactly the argument of the person you're responding.
You wouldn't google Playstation 4 and 5 to find out which is which. I have no idea why Microsoft would do this. Try sending your mother out to buy one. Would she know which one to buy and understand the difference?
"it's not even obvious which is the more powerful model, there's no mention anywhere of what X and S stand for."
At a glance the difference between the X and the S could be like the PS4 vs PS4 Slim, or the PS5 and PS5 Digital Edition.
Do they? I don't. At this moment, I couldn't tell you the name of Microsoft's newest console, because their naming convention is so convoluted. Meanwhile, I can tell from a glance that the PS5 is newer than the PS4.
Granted, I'm not a console gamer, but neither are (most) parents buying consoles for their children.
"Ehh, people will know what we're talking about" seems like a haphazard marketing strategy.
Edit: I googled it. Xbox X and the old one is Xbox One X? That is simply hilariously stupid.
Sony/Apple/Samsung have this one solid - just release the next semver and market the hell out of it. Don't make me confused when I'm thinking about paying you money. Note: even the ones that aren't "on the version treadmill" do poorly: "iPhone mini" vs. "Samsung Fold" etc are niche products and exist to essentially sell the mainline item.
It wasn't very long ago that kids were struggling to get their parents to stop calling xbox and playstation "the nintendo". Young parents today are probably comfortable with the brands of xbox and playstation, having grown up with those brands, but expecting them to be up-to-date on the latest models isn't smart. There can be a considerable gap in understanding between those who are tuned into gaming matters and those who might be making the actual purchase. The value of simple branding should not be underestimated.
If they want me to check on google, they failed.
Also it is funny that you attack people on.. hacker news for not understanding the versioning.
It just proves that microsoft does it in a bad way.
But fret not, there's an easy shortcut to see which Microsoft product is newer. Just try them side by side and whichever has more advertisements is newer.
Everyone subscribes to Game Pass, but nobody buys many games.
Kind of like how Apple hasn't "lost" any "laptop war"
In short, Ford doesn't release the Ford 5 because it knows the Ford 4 is old news. (Also, get a horse, ya durn kids.)
Anyway, research:
https://www.windowscentral.com/heres-some-interesting-stats-...
> Most Xbox One gamers reside in the 25- to 34-year-old bracket, followed closely by the 35- to 44-year-old bracket.
> 56 percent of Xbox One owners live with a married spouse or partner, 10 percent live alone, and 23 percent live with their parents.
> Many Xbox One owners have an annual income of around $75,000.
I'd say I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac, but both of those references are outdated these days.
I don't know a single kid that would not know which models are current gen and which are better or worse. Argument about non technical parents is valid but any kid today will know which Xbox to get and will tell their parents. Kids these days know much more stuff than you seem to think, they spent 1/3-1/4 of their lives on the internet. My 11-12yo nephews built PCs just following youtube guides, they do video montages of their Fortnite games to put on youtube and almost every single friend of theirs is similarly familiar with current tech.
Xbox having lower numbers is purely fault of PS dominating the market over last decade, people will continue buying it cause they trust Sony to deliver exclusives and they have existing game libraries. I converted two Sony fanboys to Xbox with Game Pass and they both love it. Noone these days buys a PS "because they are confused with Xbox naming", 5 minutes of googling answers any questions. The only people who might really have an issue with this are boomers+ who are not even going to buy a console for themselves cause "games are for kids and a waste of time".
If he doesn't know, no way grandma and grandpa are going to be able to get him a birthday present.
The kids may know and understand this, but parents may not. If you go to a store today, you will only find the latter two, and you won’t have an issue picking the one your kid asked for (i.e. the X). But when both generations were on sale, the parent might end up buying "One X" instead of "Series X" because it’s cheaper, or buying "360" instead of "One" because it’s clearly bigger (by 359 no less).
The Xbox line-up is just comical. I walk through any gaming department and see an "S", "X", or sometimes even both "S" and "X" on Xbox games. If it was just "Xbox 7" and "Xbox 8", you'd at least have some idea of what's going on.
It's like someone who knows nothing about cars trying to figure out SE vs LE vs CE vs XLE trimmings when looking at accessories.
Wtf, there are two different S's and two different X's? I thought 'Xbox One _' and 'Xbox Series _' referred to the same products.
Xbox One _ :: PS4.
Xbox Series _ :: PS5.
I don't think non-numbers are a bad naming scheme, just the simplest. It means its easiest to keep up with and archive, but it can also mean it's hard to tell audiences what fancy new features you're marketing. If the Wii was the Nintendo 5 and the Switch was the Nintendo 7 I'm not sure if it would be quite as snappy in consumer minds.
Labelling the Switch as a new version of the Wii doesn't make much sense because it occupies a different niche, comparable to PlayStation/2/3/4/5 vs the PlayStation Portable.
PlayStation's addition of "Pro" in it's own naming scheme clearly distinguishes the more powerful console. Delaying the release of the pro model until later in the generation's lifecycle also helps reduce friction.
NES -> SNES
GB -> GBC, GBA, GBA SP
DS -> DSi, 3DS, 2DS
Xbox is the opposite, if you get the cheaper console games will look worse and/or run at lower FPS. It only has one option for internal storage, leaving you with ~360gb after accounting for the OS, five or six modern games can fill that pretty easily. Official external storage costs about as much as the console itself.
For many people the trade-offs won't matter but it does make the PlayStation a much simpler choice if you're looking for a console for a kid that doesn't already favour one or the other.
Microsoft has never been able to do that.
On the hardware note, I would not discount the impact that covid chip shortage had on the ability for MSFT to pivot on this problem.
HiFi Rush is exactly what you describe. Published by Bethesda but developed by a smaller studio. Very well received without requiring a huge investment.
I'm pretty technical but I'm definitely a casual gamer, the Series S serves me perfectly.
Funny thing is, that video was made within Microsoft. It's fascinating that everyone can be aware of the problem, but they still can't steer the behemoth.
> Consider a statement from Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s testimony at a 2011 congressional hearing:
> We face an extremely competitive landscape in which consumers have a multitude of options to access information.
> Or, translated from PR-speak to plain English:
> Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.
How is this a big revelation? Exclusivity deals have been a part of the console market since forever.
I agree they’re a bad thing for consumers, but I think this is a disingenuous argument since exclusivity deals benefit Microsoft just as much as Sony, and this acquisition is effectively just a giant version of one.
But in general I think Valve has beaten Microsoft to the console-ization of PC gaming with the Windows-less Steam Deck. Maybe the Steam Machine is ready for a comeback.
No idea if PS5 has this, but XBox’s ability to suspend games and instantly start back in the game is indispensable for someone with a minimum of gaming time available!
The gain I get is how much easier it is to use. I'm fairly tech savvy, but Windows has been a curse and there've been too many times I've spent my intended gaming time troubleshooting Windows, or a game's display settings, or drivers etc.
Steam as software never felt great to me. I don't have the greatest eyes and I find it difficult to use. Xbox UI is just stupidly simple and intuitive.
I like that the Xbox gamepass experience is so streamlined I can sit down on a couch, turn on my controller, and that will turn the console and TV on and I can be playing a game in 10 seconds. On PC it just ain't even close.
The main reasons why game studios love consoles, and the gamers as well, is the development and user experience of using them.
I vastly prefer my Xbox. I sit on the couch, power up near instantly, pick a game. Play my games. Everything’s works. The UX is just sooo much better.
I have had both PlayStation and Xbox consoles every generation since the inception of both and every generation I just find Xbox more inviting. Maybe it’s some form of dyslexia but I also have never internalized the PlayStations button labels. Every time it tells me to hit a shape I need to look at the controller.
I bought a PS5 and there's almost no games for it that aren't already on steam.
It's incomprehensible to me how Sony could win the console war when all the AAA games on PlayStation are either from somewhere else or are painfully cinematic.