6 ms·

I hate the fact that Xbox One killed Xbox's momentum so much that people are dismissing or not recognizing some of the things that Xbox has going for it right n

I hate the fact that Xbox One killed Xbox's momentum so much that people are dismissing or not recognizing some of the things that Xbox has going for it right now with Xbox GamePass and cloud gaming. This is a transitional generation, but Xbox is positioned a lot better than most people seem to understand if they only travel in the areas where console wars is the religion of the day again. I've been replaying Halo 1 & 2 again and just remembering the infancy of console online gaming and how fun it was as compared today were its either absolute silence or mute worthy trash.

anonymousab 2y ago
> recognizing some of the things that Xbox has going for it right now with Xbox GamePass and cloud gaming Or they don't recognize them as inherently good things. Game pass has potentially cannibalized "real" game sales on the platform and primed its userbase to "just wait for it to come to gamepass"; with the gamepass honeymoon developer deals drying up, this has had dire implications for third party support going forward. Xcloud has been a mixed bag - you can find countless reports of it lagging behind PS cloud streaming and various PC cloud gaming vendors in performance (latency) and image quality (though I personally haven't seen much difference between most of them). For a lot of us, the current generation Xbox platform has been doing everything just as bad or even worse than it was with the Xbox One - they've stopped iterating on backwards compatibility, they've pushed Gamepass above all, and they've spent unbelievable amounts of money on M&A instead of building up their own existing studios and releasing more new original exclusive games. The quality of some of their major trumpeted releases has also been incredibly suspect, despite repeated claims of high quality from their internal tastemakers before release. The dumb social media console war stuff has unfortunately gotten in the way of some important self-review and introspection that the Xbox team should be doing. As a longtime Xbox fan, it has been tremendously disappointing to see.
dleslie 2y ago
It's funny that you should note that they are doing positive things in a transitional era, only to finish off by noting that you are playing decades-old games on their hardware. While I am a fan of GamePass, and I own two XBox One consoles, I have no desire to own a Series console or the forthcoming refresh. Everything I want to play I can play on the One or via Cloud; but more importantly: the difficulty of discovering compelling experiences in this era of XBox is too damn high. There are too many straight-up _bad_ indie games swamping GamePass, and too many B and AAA quality games that are phoning it in.
dagmx 2y ago
The Xbox team have just had terrible leadership choices. The One was a miss from the beginning , trying to be more than a gaming console and falling short on all fronts. The name didn’t help either. Then they picked an even worse name for the Series X and and Series S. while implementing a necessity for parity. confusing the market and holding back devs. The 360 was effectively a flash in the pan IMHO, helped by a significant misstep on Sony’s part with the PS3 design, and Nintendo moving to create their own market with the Wii that effectively made it a companion console rather than a competing one.
- jwells89 2y ago
  With the One they also made the mistake of trying to permanently tie discs to consoles in an attempt to destroy the used game market for the console, which got leaked pretty early on and led to Microsoft and the Xbox brand taking a massive reputation hit, even though they quickly backtracked. For that generation, a lot of people who would’ve otherwise bought Xboxes instead bought PS4s out of principle.
  - CBarkleyU 2y ago
    That E3 was crazy. Anyone remember the video that Sony posted on "how to share games with friends" while the Xbox debacle on locked discs and always online was in full force? (it was literally a guy giving a game disc to another guy) This is why I am still against the MS acquisitions. Imagine that whole debacle happening but you're still forced to buy an anti consumer console, because God forbid you like to play CoD, Fallout, Starfield...
    - Lammy 2y ago
      Now Sony just lock the entire disc drive behind online activation instead: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps5-disc-drive-set-up/ https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps5-disc-... “Internet connection required to pair disc drive and PS5 console upon set up.” Cue defenders “but it's only once and then it works offline!!” like that will make a difference in the far future once the activation system is dead and gone.
bluescrn 2y ago
Any game developer could have told them early on that Kinect was next-to-useless, despite the technology being interesting. Even operating simple menus was problematic. You could point, but had no buttons to click. It was never going to work beyond a few niche cases (dance games and simple minigames).
- musicale 2y ago
  > It was never going to work beyond a few niche cases (dance games and simple minigames). It really is superior for dance games.
andrewmcwatters 2y ago
I’m sad for kids who don’t get to experience high-quality couch multiplayer. Also making an account for every little stupid thing. No you don’t need account systems. At least make them opt-in.
philistine 2y ago
It's not that people are not recognizing the good things about it. There's this underlying theory that we had one chance at a digital game library. The PS3 and Xbox 360 were way too early for people to get attached to their digital purchases; after all, few large titles released digitally day and date with their disc versions. So people bought a few indie titles digitally, but they still had a big disc library. But the PS4 generation was the digital generation. The majority of sales were digital then (probably not dollars-wise, but certainly units-wise). So the theory goes that people have this large lock-in with PS4, which leads to them directly going to the PS5 without looking at the distinguished competition's offerings. I'm not sure I agree.

anonymousab 2y ago

> recognizing some of the things that Xbox has going for it right now with Xbox GamePass and cloud gaming Or they don't recognize them as inherently good things. Game pass has potentially cannibalized "real" game sales on the platform and primed its userbase to "just wait for it to come to gamepass"; with the gamepass honeymoon developer deals drying up, this has had dire implications for third party support going forward. Xcloud has been a mixed bag - you can find countless reports of it lagging behind PS cloud streaming and various PC cloud gaming vendors in performance (latency) and image quality (though I personally haven't seen much difference between most of them). For a lot of us, the current generation Xbox platform has been doing everything just as bad or even worse than it was with the Xbox One - they've stopped iterating on backwards compatibility, they've pushed Gamepass above all, and they've spent unbelievable amounts of money on M&A instead of building up their own existing studios and releasing more new original exclusive games. The quality of some of their major trumpeted releases has also been incredibly suspect, despite repeated claims of high quality from their internal tastemakers before release. The dumb social media console war stuff has unfortunately gotten in the way of some important self-review and introspection that the Xbox team should be doing. As a longtime Xbox fan, it has been tremendously disappointing to see.

dleslie 2y ago

It's funny that you should note that they are doing positive things in a transitional era, only to finish off by noting that you are playing decades-old games on their hardware. While I am a fan of GamePass, and I own two XBox One consoles, I have no desire to own a Series console or the forthcoming refresh. Everything I want to play I can play on the One or via Cloud; but more importantly: the difficulty of discovering compelling experiences in this era of XBox is too damn high. There are too many straight-up _bad_ indie games swamping GamePass, and too many B and AAA quality games that are phoning it in.

dagmx 2y ago

The Xbox team have just had terrible leadership choices. The One was a miss from the beginning , trying to be more than a gaming console and falling short on all fronts. The name didn’t help either. Then they picked an even worse name for the Series X and and Series S. while implementing a necessity for parity. confusing the market and holding back devs. The 360 was effectively a flash in the pan IMHO, helped by a significant misstep on Sony’s part with the PS3 design, and Nintendo moving to create their own market with the Wii that effectively made it a companion console rather than a competing one.

jwells89 2y ago
With the One they also made the mistake of trying to permanently tie discs to consoles in an attempt to destroy the used game market for the console, which got leaked pretty early on and led to Microsoft and the Xbox brand taking a massive reputation hit, even though they quickly backtracked. For that generation, a lot of people who would’ve otherwise bought Xboxes instead bought PS4s out of principle.
- CBarkleyU 2y ago
  That E3 was crazy. Anyone remember the video that Sony posted on "how to share games with friends" while the Xbox debacle on locked discs and always online was in full force? (it was literally a guy giving a game disc to another guy) This is why I am still against the MS acquisitions. Imagine that whole debacle happening but you're still forced to buy an anti consumer console, because God forbid you like to play CoD, Fallout, Starfield...
  - Lammy 2y ago
    Now Sony just lock the entire disc drive behind online activation instead: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps5-disc-drive-set-up/ https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps5-disc-... “Internet connection required to pair disc drive and PS5 console upon set up.” Cue defenders “but it's only once and then it works offline!!” like that will make a difference in the far future once the activation system is dead and gone.

bluescrn 2y ago

Any game developer could have told them early on that Kinect was next-to-useless, despite the technology being interesting. Even operating simple menus was problematic. You could point, but had no buttons to click. It was never going to work beyond a few niche cases (dance games and simple minigames).

musicale 2y ago
> It was never going to work beyond a few niche cases (dance games and simple minigames). It really is superior for dance games.

andrewmcwatters 2y ago

I’m sad for kids who don’t get to experience high-quality couch multiplayer. Also making an account for every little stupid thing. No you don’t need account systems. At least make them opt-in.

philistine 2y ago

It's not that people are not recognizing the good things about it. There's this underlying theory that we had one chance at a digital game library. The PS3 and Xbox 360 were way too early for people to get attached to their digital purchases; after all, few large titles released digitally day and date with their disc versions. So people bought a few indie titles digitally, but they still had a big disc library. But the PS4 generation was the digital generation. The majority of sales were digital then (probably not dollars-wise, but certainly units-wise). So the theory goes that people have this large lock-in with PS4, which leads to them directly going to the PS5 without looking at the distinguished competition's offerings. I'm not sure I agree.