What, Exactly, Is Xbox Thinking?
What, Exactly, Is Xbox Thinking?
The future of Xbox seems on the precipice of major change. Rob and Patrick unpack how we got here.
Article by Patrick Klepek & Rob Zacny.
They are thinking we'll turn all of those PS users into gamepass customers. We will ship the next console as a cheap SBC with a gamepass subscription. They solve piracy, manufacturing and shipping costs and bend the customers over a barrell in one move.
Sony will be forced to do away with discs too to stay competitive. MS will be able to claim they are multiplatform in the face of the legal issues and that they are for preservation because they will have a select few titles.
The players will own nothing and the prices will eventually increase.
Do yourself a favor and horde as many roms as you can now. Support gog and steam as alternatives to gamepass.
If they believe the amount of people with reliable (!) broadband connections with good enough peering to their data centers is as big as the customer base owning an xbox, they might have an ugly awakening.
Most people will not move just to get a better latency that can still suffer from external influences. Waiting in a queue because the available machines in your nearest data center are all in use because it's a holiday and everyone is gaming also gets old fast.
Vimm is :goat:
Permanently Deleted
This whole thing is so bizarre to me. People have complained endlessly over the years about game console exclusivity. I personally think it's bad for the consumer.
And now that MS is talking about putting their experiences on other platforms, people are upset with them? That they've somehow lost their way, that the brand is dying?
Seriously, have I lost my mind? What's going on?
And now that MS is talking about putting their experiences on other platforms, people are upset with them? That they've somehow lost their way, that the brand is dying?
Those people are "invested" in the xbox eco system I would assume
Yes. Basically, our investment is tanking and it sucks. If I could go back, I'd just have bought a PS5. Oh well. It's better for everyone else I guess
I think it's not the same people. People who complain about console exclusives generally aren't the same people who buy into console war bullshit.
Yeah, in the long run this could be good for the industry.
That said, if I'd bought a series x on the promise of many years of high quality exclusives (a promise Xbox explicitly made) I would probably be a bit upset in the now...
It's shaping up that a ps5 is gonna be just the flatly superior console, and Xbox owners will be stuck holding the bag
I'm only nervous that Microsoft will stop developing Xbox's. If we're eventually forced to move to a digital only system, I want some kind of guarantee that customers can always access the games they paid for. Otherwise I think sharing games with other consoles is a great idea as long as the added development doesn't eat into the games overall quality
This one is simple! You see, they stop selling games to their customers. Instead, you can get monthly access to their catalogue of games. Then you don't have to worry about owning them. Sometimes less (for you) is more (for them).
The 21st century has been repeated instances of "the man behind the curtain" getting completely caught in the curtain, yanking it down, causing a small fire, pissing himself a little bit, and then standing up, waving his hands and yelling at the gathering crowd "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" while the fire begins to grow.
The world wouldn't be so frustrating if it wasn't so clear that so much of leadership (corporate, especially so) has no fucking clue what they're doing, certainly no more in depth clue than their own workforce, and they've been coasting on things like stock buybacks for the better part of three decades. They continuously fail but they use their absolutely massive wealth to constantly shield themselves from liability, or any responsibility really, from their near-constant fuck-ups that piss off consumers, poison the environment, and harm workers.
Anyway, much like with their constant fucking-with-the-consumer on Windows 11, they're just barrelling down the "fuck the people who invested in our hardware ecosystem" path because "fuck consumers, amirite?" They mostly cater to other businesses now, which is part of why it's a lot easier/cheaper to get a Windows license than it used to be (although that's been changing). This is the same with so many businesses now, they mostly just serve... other businesses, that's where the real money is... because they've bled the US consumer dry and so they're prioritizing corporate clients, who have deep coffers.
It's much like what's going on at Warner Bros, where shitcanning a movie and deleting it entirely is more "cost-effective" to a movie studio than releasing it. They don't give one flying fuck how much it pisses of consumers or the people who made it, all they're worried about is the numbers in WB's and their own bank accounts. They couldn't give less of a fuck about what's in consumers bank accounts or the laborers and artists who made the films bank accounts.
They've fully insulated themselves, the aristocracy never left. They just use the power of money to control and influence the power of the State instead of being a King themselves. They're simply dictators of their own little feifdoms.
The worst part is how many of The Aristocrats live up to the worst versions of the joke.
I find these kinds of articles fairly useless until Microsoft announces what their actual plans are. Until then we’re all just speculating based on one tweet from Phil Spencer and some unverified rumors.
It's all about publishing something, even if it's hollow click bait.
Insider trading
Xbox is a brand. It isn't sentient at all, let alone capable of thought.
It's common in English to refer to a collective like a company or government as though it were an individual. I think it's just a simple short hand really.
Eg "The whitehouse said today...." We know that the whitehouse (a building) doesn't have the power of speech and that really means "a whitehouse spokesperson working in an official capacity on behalf of the government said today".
Really the headline should be something along the lines of "what, exactly, are Xbox business strategists thinking?" But because of the common knowledge of how this shorthand works they can just use the headline they did.
There's probably a fancy linguistic name for it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah. There’s no way they could have meant the team of people at Xbox. No way.
MS is thinking it helps their legal argument if the FTC comes sniffing around their 2k layoffs from Activision/Blizzard