5 ms·

It was pretty rich seeing armchair video game industry analysts act like the new CEO was gonna usher in a new age for Microsoft's gaming division because she go

• whizzter 3mo ago
  The pandemic and scalpers really destroyed peoples apetite for the "new thing" when this generation came out, and with that boost missing studios saw little point in going exclusive perpetuating the vicious cycle, it's just in the past few years that there's really been exclusives for this generation that didn't also support older consoles. And even then, already the PS4/XbOne generation added stratification making it more "PC-like" with the XbOne-X having heftier hardware (not to mention it being PC-like compared to PS1/PS2/PS3/Xbox360), that then continued with the Xbox-series-X and Xbox-series-S. Consoles aren't specialized hardware for "magic experiences" and everyone knows this, it's just another "device" that happens to be connected to a TV with a controller where people are gatekeeping software availability.
  • maples37 3mo ago
    Microsoft also didn't do themselves any favor with that naming scheme. In the current generation (I think?), you have: - Xbox X - Xbox S - Xbox Series X - Xbox Series S Compared to: - PlayStation 5 - PlayStation 5 Pro or: - Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Switch OLED - Nintendo Switch Lite Anyone who's literate in English (and knows that OLED means "nicer screen") can immediately rank the PlayStations and Switches into "good, better, best". But with the Xbox, how is anyone supposed to know which one is which? Is the Series version better or worse? Is it a whole new generation, with whatever backwards-compatability implications that a new generation brings? I need a chart and I probably still won't be able to tell you if you ask me in a month.
    • hbn 3mo ago
      Slight correction. Last generation was the Xbox One (already a confusing name because some people thought that was referring to the original first Xbox) A few years into the generation they updated the Xbox One, putting it into a smaller form factor called the Xbox One S, and at the same time released a spec bump model called the Xbox One X. I don't believe any of these are still available for purchase. The new generation has the smaller/lower-powered Xbox Series S, and the higher-specced Xbox Series X. Leaving the overall generation with seemingly no name, other than "Xbox Series" I guess? But yes, the names are terrible because S and X both refer to consoles from last gen and current gen.
      • Gigachad 3mo ago
        You could hardly come up with a worse naming scheme if you tried.
        • dannyw 3mo ago
          AMD's Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 would like to have a word with you.
      • aczerepinski 3mo ago
        As an anecdote of how bad the naming is, I own one of these, but couldn’t tell you which one.
    • bobbob1921 3mo ago
      This is absolutely correct, I game on Xbox pretty much every day or every other day, I have been with Xbox since 360 or whatever the first one was called. I am still constantly confused by the naming. There also was another revision to the top of the line Xbox series X and the Xbox series X digital edition. I can’t imagine someone looking at the naming scheme pre-release and saying yes, let’s go with that.
      • DanHulton 3mo ago
        I mean, the first one was just called Xbox. (Tiny rant - and even THAT name sucked. Internally, since it ran on DirectX (already a name that only a mother could love), it was called the DirectX Box. And rather than come up with a real name, they got attached to their lazy idea and shortened it to Xbox. They have made miserable naming choices for this thing since day one. Since BEFORE day one.)
  • Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
    > Consoles aren't specialized hardware for "magic experiences" and everyone knows this, it's just another "device" that happens to be connected to a TV with a controller where people are gatekeeping software availability. Arguably; Sony and Microsoft have both played it safe for a long time, with their consoles mostly being "just for video games", but it wasn't always like this. Current-gen has VR additions, but the previous generations had things like Kinect, the PS camera addon, things like that. But they seem to have given up on fun things like that, they were innovative but probably not a sweeping commercial success like idk, subscription services. Nintendo still makes their stuff unique though. The Switch is great, portable, detachable controllers for multiplayer and wiimote-like interaction, etc.
• MisterTea 3mo ago
  > And between graphics almost certainly at the point of diminishing returns, and hardware prices like they are right now, I can't imagine there's a market to sell something more capable than current gen consoles. I haven't bought a console since the Xbox360 and Wii. But I have a friend who still games pretty heavily and is low income. He can not afford the latest PS5 and is still on a PS4. We were talking the other day and he said "I love consoles because they are simpler and cheaper than a PC but now I can't afford either. The graphics aren't getting much better so what am I paying for? What happened to $400-$500 consoles? Remember when consoles were 200-300?" Of course those last few prices were 90/00's but I agree, the cost of a new console is quite insane for not much gain.
  • WorldMaker 3mo ago
    $200 in 1985 (NES launch price/date), adjusted for inflation is just shy of $600 in 2026. RAM and GPU prices are really hurting the consoles right now, but compared to inflation benchmarks up until about 2020 they were considerably below inflation.
    • WarmWash 3mo ago
      If there are next gen consoles, they will likely be over $1k with current memory prices.
      • Narishma 3mo ago
        At those prices consoles would no longer make sense. I don't think there would be enough people who could afford them to have a good enough install base for AAA games. And non-AAA games don't need any more hardware than what we already had last gen.
        • schnitzelstoat 3mo ago
          They are talking about purchase plans like Klarna etc. and like people have for their iPhone. Because it's going to cost as much as an iPhone.
• tracker1 3mo ago
  To me, the graphics abilities have been there for a decade... what we need are better games and gameplay. More fun games without gotcha, pay to win, loot box efforts. Too much effort is going for dazzling graphics at the expense of overall gameplay. How many people are still playing CoD, WoW and so many other games from over a decade ago? How many refreshes of Final Fantasy have we seen? The graphics can only carry you so far. There's indy adventure games with SNES level graphics that have millions of daily users.
  • wincy 3mo ago
    This is where Nintendo is at. It’s hilarious how much fun me and my kids are having playing games like Animal Crossing, Super Smash Bros, Mario Party, Pokemon Pokopia, and the surprise smash hit has been Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. My kids make all the neighbors and have them get married and laugh about it and it’s just such a goofy concept. The graphics are good enough that you no longer notice there’s graphics, just the art. Switch 2 is a fantastic console with an astonishingly fun first party library, and Nintendo just over there doing their own thing like they’ve always done.
    • disgruntledphd2 3mo ago
      Nintendo are basically the only people who held out against in game spending, for which I salute them. I spent a few years in and around the industry and there was so much insanity around the need for in game monetization that it just made things much worse. And because the game studios didn't care about it, none of the money stuff worked, making executives even more upset. All to catch some vision of F2P money which is an entirely different business that these companies couldn't possibly support. It's very sad for the industry overall (this particular decision is MS killing stuff off because the margins aren't good enough to funnel more cash into GPU gods).
      • johnnyanmac 3mo ago
        Nintendp dabbled briefly with it. But they know their audience and very much did not want to risk any PR hit by associating too closely with the typical gacha/lootbox model. They saw the Roblox/Fortnite smoke long before most of the industry and turned off very quickly. But there's one specific statistic to why Nintendo can keep doing what it does in a way no one else can: 98% retention rate. You get into Nintendo and you basically never leave. Even for Japan, that's well above the 70% retention rate you'd expect. Keeping that kind of institutional knowledge for an entire career makes them really good at what they do, and the unfortunate decades of Japan's economy meant they were less tempted by amassing huge loans or risks on experimental stuff. Maybe they didn't become trillionaires, but it means they amassed a huge war chest and can weather storms that US companies are currently in the middle of.
• llm_nerd 3mo ago
  When she was announced it was broadly assumed that she was being brought in to kill the division. But then she did some minor, pandering actions and suddenly everyone was "oh boy! A new era of xbox!" Only it was all a ruse to ensure people didn't jump ship too quickly and make the bleeding too heavy. They want people to keep pumping money into a platform heading to the graveyard.
  • sometimes_all 3mo ago
    > Only it was all a ruse to ensure people didn't jump ship too quickly and make the bleeding too heavy You go when we tell you to go! Not before!
• 0x457 3mo ago
  Don't forget gifting of translucent Xbox.
• torginus 3mo ago
  I had the sinking feeling from the start, that a total stranger was brought in to do a butcher's job.
• pibaker 3mo ago
  > Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the intervention from marketing and HR in their products. Gaming is like cuisine. Can it be art? Sure. But most people will never visit a Michelin starred restaurant in their whole lives. They go to McDonald's and their local equivalent. Mainstream games have been like McDonald's for a long time. It's not about being a thought provoking artistic expression. It's about engineering a predictable entertainment experience that the average Joe can enjoy while being half checked out after a day of work the same way he enjoys a Budweiser or a Big Mac. Of course, no critic will ever be caught praising McDonald's for its culinary artistry. But it doesn't matter. People will keep spending money on it, and the business continues. Same deal for gaming.
  • ColdStream 3mo ago
    Thus the yearly Call of duty titles.
  • doctorpangloss 3mo ago
    i don't know, it's hard to generalize about audiences this big.
• pikseladam 3mo ago
  she had already choosen the coo as a scapegoat :)
• ramijames 3mo ago
  It's not just appetite. The market is crazy right now and people don't have money to drop $600-800 on a new console.
• msftgreed 3mo ago
  > Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. That's the thing -- for a while they had figured out gaming. The xbox and 360 were solid consoles with lots of great internal and external games. Halo was incredible. Then the company did the thing that Amazon did, Blizzard is doing, and all the big tech companies do -- they thought their big war chest meant they should make bigger games. Budgets ballooned, game timelines extended. Now they are stuck with games and studios with 10 year dev cycles trying to create the biggest, the most incredible, the most expensive games. There's SO many devs out there making incredible games for fractions of the cost. It's a shame Microsoft (and others) keep thinking that reaching for bigger means better outcomes. No one wants "the game only Microsoft can make", everyone wants another great Zelda. Or Gears of War. Or Satisfactory. Or Mina the Hollower. Or UFO 50. Or Animal Well. Hell, people want a game about shelving 3000 books in an Arcane library. Let games be smaller, more exploratory, more creative experiences. Let your studios get weird with it. Let them explore spaces and take risks. Stop sinking tens of billions into games. Start sinking tens of millions into them.
  • caconym_ 3mo ago
    I think another big issue they have is their insistence that most (ideally all?) of the people working on their games should be temporary employees. When your most valuable studios get out of the business of providing secure and sustainable employment, you lose the ability to build institutional expertise. When you treat your creatives like a commodity, you'll get generic assets and writing regardless of budget. When you focus on everything but the games themselves, it shouldn't come as a surprise that your big franchises degenerate into undifferentiated revenuemaxxing slop and unique new projects that might get people excited die on the vine. Overall I think western AAA game development is dead. The executive class killed it with their greed and incompetence, and as long as these huge corporations are allowed to keep buying smaller studios/publishers and shutting them down a few years later, nothing is going to change.
  • operation_moose 3mo ago
    AKA "we just passed the 8th anniversary of the Elder Scrolls 6 announcement trailer" Also worth noting Skyrim first came out on the 360; an honor shared by GTA5, but at least they have an imminent release.
• djhworld 3mo ago
  > Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. I feel they kind of did in the Xbox 360 era. Maybe it was just down to luck because Sony dropped the ball in the early years of the PS3 and Microsoft got the jump on them a bit. The 360 was amazing looking back on it, Xbox Live, trying out innovative ideas like 1vs100, attracting lots of publishers to the platform for games, Xbox Summer of Arcade. I was a big OG Xbox fan but even then I knew deep down it was never going to catch up to Sony with the PS2. Then the 360 came out and it was brilliant. Sadly they threw it all away with the Xbox One and while recovered some credibility somewhat with the Series X, it's definitely not the same as those golden years of the 360. Maybe the 360 was an aberration in Microsoft's history and the years since then have just been a regression
  • dannyw 3mo ago
    Xbox Live Arcade, and the accessibility it bought for smaller studios and indie developers was massive. You could say it's just a response to Steam and the PC gaming indie scene, sure, but the 360 era is definitely one where Microsoft hit all their strides. Then they ruined it with the Xbox One.
• jasondigitized 3mo ago
  More capable than current gen consoles is going to be local AI. Calling it now. It won't be as much about graphics as it is about selling some notion of human like NPCs and smarter enemies and some other use case they can sell to the masses.
  • andrekandre 3mo ago
    > human like NPCs and smarter enemies and some other use case they can sell to the masses. npc ai has been capable of being much more realistic for a long time, and smarter enemies as well; if enemies in a game are too smart it stops being fun which is to say enemy ai being too stupid or not realistic enough is a non-problem and current-gen hardware is in no way a blocker to such aims anyway
    • dannyw 3mo ago
      ~Turing-test-passing NPC AI already exists in lots of multiplayer games to hide queue lengths or dwindling player counts.
• naikrovek 3mo ago
  >It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the intervention from marketing and HR in their products. truth. far too many MBAs in that company. "Let's monetize Solitaire!!!!" Only an idiot would even come up with that idea, never mind follow through on it.
• websap 3mo ago
  Microsoft is not an engineering company any more. Just look at their products. They placed ads in the start menu and file explorer. Azure is one of the worst clouds when it comes to features and reliability. Microsoft is a dying company, and they are trying not to end up like IBM, but their fate is inevitable.
• danpalmer 3mo ago
  > It's more art than engineering I'd say games can be either art or hype. Call of Duty is not art, really, it's hype. In the same way that no one thinks Marvel films are moving film forward, but they are hugely popular. GTA is somewhere in the middle, being mostly hype driven, but based on solid "art" in good gameplay. Indie games tend to be art over hype. Microsoft can't do the art because it's too big, too safe, and it can't do the hype because it's not cool.
  • Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
    It can be art even if you don't consider it artistic. CoD is an example of military art. Marvel is American blockbuster art translating American comic book art to the screen. They are their own kind of artistic expression and achievement, even if you personally don't consider them art.
    • account42 3mo ago
      This is reductionist to the point of making the term useless.
    • dannyw 3mo ago
      Mass culture isn't the same thing as art.
• zemo 3mo ago
  huh, I'm not sure where you saw that reaction, the reaction I saw was universal condemnation of the appointment of Asha Sharma.
• u2rarmchair 3mo ago
  I mean, here you are too declaring a XBOX defeat. You are no better than those armchair industry analysts. The 10th gen hasn's even properly started, we don't even have rumors of WHEN it will be. Not saying that I disagree. I absolutely agree. I think Xbox is downright moronic to buy Bethesday on a promise of Starfield being a massive hit, and after it hilariously fails, they throw out a bunch of studios just so they can focus on their next thing even more. It's just, come one. You have to see how ironic and conceited your opening paragraph was.
• flohofwoe 3mo ago
  > Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. They had it figured out perfectly in the Xbox360 generation (and for PC games by the late 90s), but I guess that the MS Games and Xbox divisions had a lot more freedom and were more decoupled from the Microsoft org chart back then.
  • dgellow 3mo ago
    The gaming world also evolved a lot during that time period
• philistine 3mo ago
  Console generations are a cultural construct. And just like the bit wars of the 90s, they are cultural constructs that cannot explain the current situation. We have not left the PS4 era. Both Sony and Microsoft use modern CPU and GPU in the PS5/Xbox Series that can 100% replicate the previous console. They use the exact same online store, ushering in a modern era where old devices will lose access to the store, but the store's never gonna close. All of this makes the use of generations to describe console gaming obsolete. We don't talk about generations in phones, or laptops. Same thing with gaming.
• asdaqopqkq 3mo ago
  PS should move back to Japan, yen is cheap and the dev salaries are cheap.