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Microsoft is an empty shell of a company drifting on the momentum of it’s achievements from 20 years ago. It’s another victim of shareholder sharks and MBAs extracting value instead of engineering and innovating. It’s taking time to die, but it’s getting closer. There’s hardly any Microsoft products that are worth a damn these days.
After Xbox one, I was unable to understand what the next version was.
And when people can’t even name the product, then yeah.
Microsoft just messed up the whole naming convention after the 360 I think. You had the Xbox “one” which was a name people often used to refer to the original Xbox. Then you have an Xbox One S. Then Xbox series X which is a genuinely terrible name. Oh, and the Xbox series S which is not the Xbox One S.
Sony to their credit got it right from the beginning. Simple 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. No medals for guessing what the name of the next Playstation will be.
Every time I see the names of the Xbox lineup my brain just feels tired and kinda shuts down.
I am never going to remember it.
Were the authors aware that everyone is broke this year and the “deals” to be had were previous mark-ups going down slightly? The game is rigged, we are all aware these “sales” are nothing more than a sales gimmick and very little of worth is available by an actual deal. No one is even trying to hide that fact anymore, and the populace is broke and fed up with all the stupid games we get forced to play
The article reports that Xbox didn’t have any deals, at all. Playstation is reported to be cheaper than it’s pre-hike price.
I guess they consider their murder of non-subscription self-hosted multiplayer to be complete enough that their rent-seeking game service can survive without the need for hardware walls for the proverbial garden.
I love seeing those videos about game making up until 5th and 6th gen, how creative developers were, managing console hardware capabilities to bypass limitations and find other ways to render faster, wider, more colors, or fit more stuff in less space, pushing the system to its limits… am I wrong, or is the modern game industry just about using an unoptimized engine to make games, not optimizing shit, releasing games that don’t get close to reaching the full hardware potential, and then releasing a next gen of hardware even though the next gen games would probably run even better 2 gens ago if devs had half of the talent and problem-solving skills of past devs?
It’s a bias you have, because there are no nostalgia driven docs about current work. If you watch Game Developer conference videos you see lots of "we had to be creative to…"moments.
I don’t discard it, but how much they have to be creative on technical aspects today unless it’s to port a new game to older gens (do they even do that?), it just seems the hardware has so much power and potential they barely tap on it before the industry release new hardware, so they don’t even have to care about optimization.
Such a shame. With all the Digital Foundry coverage of the launch Xbox 360 recently I’ve been getting into ally nostalgic for the system. Such a shame Don Mattrick messed up the Xbox One launch so badly it’s effectively killed the brand today.
Xbox is dead outside of being a different logo for windows. I think it’s obvious to anybody remotely watching the industry that all they really care about is game pass at this point. Even at the game awards, they were essentially absent outside of a game pass ad, and recently put a finance guy in charge of Zenimax.
I would love to say this won’t end well for them, but they probably crunched the numbers and determined they could continue the same revenue with minimum effort. Enough people will probably stick around on game pass, even after the recent hikes, to keep it as a solid revenue stream.
I sold my Xbox six months ago after it sat collecting dust for a year and a half, glad I did.
But what if we cram it full of AI bloat/spyware? Could we entice you then?
- Microsoft, probably
