“And here’s the thing — maybe it will work,” she added. “Xbox has a deep portfolio. [Oblivion Remastered] was obviously a huge success, and they can continue to outsource that work to external companies and make a lot of money releasing their older games — older games from an era when Xbox knew how to build them.”
Shots fired. Despite Microsoft constantly claiming Xbox is here to stay and they’re working on the next console, it’s very clear they’re trying to transition off hardware back into Windows so they don’t lose that too since Linux is dominating the handheld market. Even if they do make a new console, theyll put as much effort into it as the Xbox One.
Microsoft is trying to make Xbox into Windows: Where 3rd parties make the hardware and then license the platform from Microsoft. It’s a vastly more profitable model. Especially if they get all those end users signed up for a subscription service.
The problem is that the world thinks of “Xbox” as a console (and a specific kind of controller). To pull this off Microsoft is going to have to re-brand Xbox entirely by making people think of it more like a game-specific app store that runs on Windows and special handheld hardware. It won’t be easy.
There’s a bigger problem with this plan though: No real coordination with the Windows OS team. Windows on handhelds sucks. The past twenty fucking years of Windows development has been almost entirely focused on improving enterprise features with very little attention paid to end users or gaming.
Growth in Windows gaming has come despite Microsoft’s investments. Not because of them. In fact, I’d argue that if it weren’t for Steam, Windows—as a gaming platform—would be a fraction of what it is today.
Don’t get me wrong, though! I love this new Xbox roadmap! Windows gaming has been holding back Linux desktop adoption for far too long. The latest benchmarks that show games on SteamOS vastly outperforming the new Xbox-branded handhelds pretty clearly demonstrates all that bashing of Windows by Linux nerds was deeply accurate.
It turns out that Linux on the desktop really is superior! 🤣
the xbone was the last console I bought. Soured the pot so bad on what I enjoyed about console gaming. I already had a PC, but still enjoyed the couch casual sessions that seemingly don’t exist, and haven’t for over a decade
Why should they be focused on it? Xbox is now just a slimmed down Windows pc. You can play the exact same games on a pc, with access to the same storefront.
What’s the problem exactly?
Microsoft’s original plan was to own the living room the way they own the office space. Not just gaming, but all your movies, TV, shopping, etc. could be done through the XBox.
Kinect was a particularly big jump in that regard. There were demos of AR-type stuff where you could see yourself wearing clothes you might want to buy. You could move around and the clothes on screen would move with your body. There’s some promo videos of that, but nothing concrete ever came of it.
Now they have slagging sales for two generations, and a AAA industry that struggles to make a real hit and is laying off a lot of people. They can’t even hold onto the core gaming market much less get their tendrils into the rest of the living room. They then release a handheld that’s basically an upgrade of an existing handheld that wasn’t selling very well, but now with XBox branding.
Is this a problem for the rest of us? No, not really. There’s plenty of alternatives, and we don’t need to care. Is this the result the money people at Microsoft envisioned when they started this ~25 years ago? No, not at all.
The end goal of all of that is to sell software. If they can do that without supporting a massive pipeline for selling custom hardware, that makes sense.
Wait I thought stock buybacks and hollowing all our dedicated talent didn’t have consequences?
Was funny when they said they needed more original games like Hi Fi rush after firing the people that made Hi Fi rush.
The problem at this point is not so much that they don’t have games - they have released plenty in the past few years and most have been received positively.
The problem is that they released those games too late, and by that point, the ship had already sailed. After a streak of disappointing years with the XOne, they needed strong titles to pair up with XSeries. Instead, they released jack shit for an entire year, and after that the disappointment just grew further with the likes of Halo Infinite, Starfield and the weird vampire game nobody asked for.
By that point, everyone already got themselves a PS5, a Switch, a gaming PC or a handheld device. Xbox needed to show their fans they believed in their mission and were capable of delivering strong titles on their platform, but everyone saw their releases and said “Meh”.
The strong titles eventually came, but by that point they had already decided to port them over to the competition to offset the cost, and everyone saw the writing was on the wall for the platform.
Spencer can go on stage spewing whatever bullshit he wants, but nobody outside of the most diehard Xbox fans believe that the platform has a future - and it’s very hard to convince people to invest on your platform when it’s not certain how many more years it will be supported, and whether your store will remain accessible or shut down a few years down the line.
It doesn’t help that the One S is an underpowered cheapo console, but that MS demands that all Xbox games must run on the One S with a pretty high FPS. You had major developers delaying or cancelling their Xbox release because they couldn’t get it to work on the One S.
The PS5 killed Xbox for me.
The PS5 killed console gaming for me. Scalpers selling it for 1200 bucks sealed the deal for me to get a PC.
The PS4 killed Xbox for me.
I ended up buying ours from the local priest. Still don’t understand why he had one when all the stores were out of stock for months on end.
It was to attract all the kids for the diddling. …
/s … god I hope /s
Part of the problem might be that I literally have no idea what their current console is called? Whoever was in charge of naming the last threeish xbox consoles should be fired out of a cannon
Yeah, totally agree on this. If you put the last two names in front of me and asked which was newer, I’d have no idea. The new one has multiple versions too so it makes it more confusing.
I mean, after the 360 they had XXXbox sitting right there and they acted like they were too good for it. Prudes.
Microsoft suck at naming things in general. It’s a problem across every single branch of the business, people keep calling Office 365 0365 because Microsoft insists on calling it O365 and people think that’s a zero. Also the name makes no sense anyway, why not call it Microsoft Office Online?
Then we have Microsoft Azure, except they renamed that to Entra despite the fact that both names are stupid. Then of course there is the entirety of the Windows OS lineup.
Don’t know what you mean. Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X all make perfect sense and leave zero grounds for confusion at all
They had all that free marketting from people assuming the third one would be the 720 and they ditched it in favor of calling it the Xbox One, which everyone was already using for the name of the first Xbox. Still baffled by that one.
I can’t think of a single company worse at naming products and services than Microsoft. They have an abysmal track record. Some examples off the top of my head, all of which make web searches near-impossible:
- They renamed Office 365 to just “365” (and then “365 Copilot”). The mind boggles.
- They named their light extensible code editor “Visual Studio Code”, despite the fact that they had a long-established IDE (for code) called “Visual Studio”.
- They called their application framework “the .NET framework”.
- They called the replacement framework “.NET Core”, and after a few major versions, changed to calling it “.NET”, but it’s totally distinct from the .NET framework.
- They called their ninth major desktop operating system “Windows 7”, then followed up with “Windows 8” and… “Windows 10”.
- Their native web app replacement for Outlook is called “New Outlook”.
- They recently renamed their Remote Desktop app “Windows App”. I have no words.
deleted by creator
There’s also Microsoft PowerBi. Just a wonderfully descriptive name.
You forgot about Teams (New)
My favorite is still Microsoft Zune… Which was a music store, music subscription service, a desktop app, and a physical media player.
It’s like they want their stuff to literally be unsearchable on the internet. Renaming Remote Desktop to Windows App is a prime example of this. Good luck trying to search for that and get what you want.
One would almost think they are having a laugh, but no it’s for real (I don’t think are intentionally trying to come up with such comically stupid naming policies).
Yeah, sometimes I wonder if they do these bad names for the free publicity of people complaining about them. But then there’s plenty examples where the name isn’t just clunky, but rather actively confusing for potential users…
Remember when they named their voice assistant after a video game character?
That was probably one of their most sensible naming decisions
Well, everyone say hello to the $1000+ PlayStation 6.
What’re you going to do, buy an Xbox? Build a PC with a GPU alone that costs almost the same?
No Xbox means Sony gains a monopoly on the console market. Unless Nintendo decides to actually compete with regular hardware again, which they won’t.
What are you talking about you can buy a PC for less than the price of a PS5 and it will be better than the PS5. The advantage of gaming consoles has always been that it’s plug and play. You just turn it on and there you go.
Sony aren’t going to create a revolutionary GPU that’s only available in the PS6. They might try and charge $1,000 for it but they will always be other options. Where do you think they get their components from? They don’t have their own fab.
Nah, I’ll just keep gaming on a cheap Linux PC and fuck ever buying a console again. Honestly at this point a 5 year old GPU gives you access to 99% of all games ever made, why spend so much to play 4 shitty ‘AAAA’ games a year?
It sounds like your monitor sucks, if you’re wanting to play at 4k or high refresh you need to upgrade let alone if you want both of those things
Yeah I absolutely do not care about that. I also won’t bother to get a 4k TV until I get some banger clearance deal or something because it does not fucking matter. I grew up on tube tvs dude, anything that isn’t fuzzy is golden. Most of what I’m playing is either indie or ancient, and seeing giant pixels in perfect clarity does nothing to improve the experience.
Okay but you are in a tiny minority
Well yeah because they screwed up one of their main franchises. All they had to do was leave Budgie alone to make Halo games, but no.
Bungie didnt want to make halo games anymore though
Well too fucking bad, cause Halo is the only thing they’re good at. They should have sucked it up and kept iterating on Halo 3. That game was peak Xbox.
Hey MDK deserves another one.
Do you mean Max, Doc, and Kurt, or Murder Death Kill?
They can just be another Sega.
Makes sense honestly. I am incredibly underwhelmed with my series x.
“There is literally no reason to buy this handheld,” Fryer opined of the ROG Xbox Ally. "
You want access to games or services that are either better or only available on Windows without having to deal with the desktop Windows interface. That is literally the reason to buy it. Game Pass and popular live services can woo plenty of people over.
Gotta say, from the few times I’ve come across her channel, she seems like a shit-stirrer, and right wing rage baiters seem to love quoting her.
But what is the long-term plan?
To transition to a world where “Xbox” is the brand slapped across Microsoft’s Windows gaming endeavors and they mostly serve as a Game Pass purveyor and the largest third party publisher by market cap.
Where are the new hits?
This one is really surprising as a question, because if you could will hits into existence, everyone would do it, but for a publisher of their size, they’re doing more in recent years to create new franchises than most, even if they then lay off the team behind Hi-Fi Rush. South of Midnight came out this year; Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, and Grounded all came out of Obsidian as well as the much smaller Pentiment; and Clockwork Revolution got a sizable demo on display just this summer.
F tier click bait. Literally nothing informative was said in here.
With the rise of game streaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna I predict that the console market is basically over. I honestly don’t expect Microsoft to release another console and if Sony does it’s almost certain to be the last. Nintendo may stick with it longer since they just released the Switch2 but they seem to be prepping for it with the digital key thing.
It sucks for the players but it makes fiscal sense for the Publishers and Console Makers (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) if there is an industry wide pivot to game streaming where players are required to pay every month. I know that some games don’t lend themselves well to this, yet, but it’s blatantly obvious (at least to me) that this is where the industry is headed.
We’ve already reached the end of “Console Exclusive” games and I think what comes next is “Streaming Platform Exclusive” games. I think what comes after that is the Publishers establishing their own Streaming Platforms for their own games.
This is precisely what has happened with the rest of the entertainment industry and there’s no reason I can see for gaming, which is a subset of that same industry, to do anything else now that the streaming technology exists.
Steam and GOG will end up pushed out of the market or they will also become Streaming Platforms, just ones that cater to a different set of players.
Streaming has plateaued, and I don’t see anyone overcoming that plateau. The console market is coming to an end, but the transition is to PC gaming, not streaming, and we can measure that.
While this is bad for the market, it’s also entirely expected.
Xbox have been producing sub-par hardware with names no one can remember and barely any exclusives, it was only a matter of time.
To other Europeans : do you know anyone who owns an Xbox ? I’ve only ever had one single friend in middle school who had a 360. I’ve never seen any other model outside of an electronics store.
Their current gen is hamstrung by the existence of the Series S, and the utter lack of features in their controllers (no gyroscope or any motion sensors ? No advanced rumble ? No touchpad ?). No one who is serious about controller gaming buys an Xbox controller, especially because of the lack of gyro.
Their dedication to digital-only and pushing the games pass also alienates anyone who wishes to play physical games and/or offline.
I think that xbox controller are the best controllers for PC, so I don’t need all the advanced features, but otherwise, you are right.
Their market is now clearly gamepass + Windows. Microsoft is banking on their market share to sell gamepass and capture the market.
