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The PS5 and Xbox 2 thread - it's happening

Zarniwoop

TESTOSTERONIC As Fuck™
Patron
Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Messages
18,651
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Europe is PlayStation land, and they mostly just seem to play EA soccer video games. Unless you’re trying to sell a soccer video game Europe largely seems to not really matter.
Ironic considering you could play that shit on a Wii? I would think that sportsballers would tend to the Xbox.

The nice thing about Sony is that they actually had decent first and second party support. God of War, Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Gran Turismo. They had some decent teenybopper adventure and kids games. Of course, the amount of software was nuts back during PS2 and PS1 era. The shelves at the gamebox stores were like a fucking ocean of PS2 DVD cases. Most of which was shovelware, but still. If you wanted to fill a dump truck of mediocre games, PS2 got you.

Does it even matter at this point? Consoles already destroyed PC market with complete consolization, even if they are gone all 'modern' designs will stay.

Lol that wasn't evil console's scheming, their inferior CPUs, or anything like that. That was your beloved PC developers selling out and abandoning the PC out of greed when it was completely unnecessary to do so, spearheaded by the equally greedy Microsoft. This ruined PC and console gaming both. This exact event. PC developers and manufacturers in their evil greed. Nintendo and Sony and whoever else in the console sphere of influence had fuck all to do with it. Initially at least. At some point they responded to PC devs invasion of the console market and it wasn't pretty for console gaming either. A race to the bottom.

Just look at PC gaming today, going pretty strong in terms of popularity. Consoles on the other hand have dipped somewhat. The xbox and sellout retard games were completely unnecessary. They could have doubled down on PC gaming in 2000, but no, lets just ruin everything out of greed. Fuck em all.
Modern consoles basically are PCs, just with mediocre specifications. They are using AMD integrated graphics and x86-64 CPU with standard RAM and SSD, nothing stupid or zany.

People forget, the PlayStation 2 didn't have a GPU, and the Playstation 3 was some kind of monstrous hydra with a 7 core in-order processor. Most console processors now have out of order logic processing and standard multi core CPUs. Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are running the same kind of hardware that runs in a desktop.

That's also been kind of a godsend because I remember before the PS4 and Xbox One were announced, AMD was sitting around 3 dollars a share, and now they're nearly at 200 dollars a share, mostly because they have pretty much exclusively been manufacturing console graphics. Same with the Steam Deck, the Asus ROG Ally, and the MSI handheld. It's all AMD hardware. That's been a big deal considering that Intel and Nvidia were kicking the shit out of AMD for like a decade in the desktop market. It was one of the few things keeping their only competitor in the game with an ample cashflow, and they even have an advantage over Intel in that their integrated GPUs have been significantly faster even when they lag in raw CPU performance compared to the top end Intel chips.

That standardized hardware has also made consoles less of walled gardens and made it much easier to do things like....porting the entire Uncharted series, Ratchet and Clank, God of War, Last of Us, Halo, etc etc to the PC. It's made console and PC porting back and forth as well as cross platform development much less hellish. That's why, frankly, Microsoft could easily transition to being a software publisher and not lose much....if they end up sinking in the hardware market, oh well, they literally own Bethesda and Activision.

Microsoft has also been a pretty decent steward in the sense that they allowed Steam to thrive, Microsoft games generally play nice on Windows, and they don't seem to be bothered by PC gaming in parallel with Xbox, even encouraging it with GamePass. Also, the original Xbox basically was a PC, it had a Pentium 3 and an Nvidia GPU (hence why Half Life 2 and Doom 3 ported so easily, despite the relatively shitty hardware specs). I absolutely loathe Microsoft as a company, and I refuse to run Windows these days or buy an Xbox, but I don't recall them ever getting in the way of my gaming. It is, after all, the reason why 95% of Windows lemmings will never switch to MacOS or Linux, and Microsoft knows this...

Microsoft has always been a software company. It's right there in the name.

Their money has always come from making the OS normal people use, apart from US West Coast faggots (MacOS) or programmer nerds with a lot of time on their hands (Linux), and Office.

Nowadays its "cloud" shit like Office 365 and Azure. They are building enough datacenters to cover the earth in a few years. The hardware division, xbawx, and all gaming related stuff has always been an afterthought.
 
Joined
Nov 23, 2017
Messages
4,014
I wouldn’t say the Xbox was an afterthought. It more a long game play from Microsoft. The Xbox was originally meant to be Microsoft’s in to controlling the living room like they already controlled the office space and PC. They were making video games consoles as a means to enter the living room space, and their hope seemed to be that the Xbox would be the machine you had in your living room that your TV would eventually run through.

There biggest move towards that was the Xbox One, incidentally the way they rolled that out, combined with rumors of things that never ended up happening, torpedoed all the momentum they’d amassed during the 360 era. Although by 2013 cheaper options like Roku and Blu-ray players with streaming capabilities killed the idea of some $500 piece of hardware being the media control center of the living room...and now you’ve got free streaming services with “channels,” and the ability to pull of any local news broadcast from around the US.

Xbox now is about Xbox Game Pass. Although Xbox was always been all about subscription models since seeing how much money they were bring in with Xbox Live. And controlling the living room was originally about them working out a way to get a share of that old cable/satellite money. Maybe somewhere now the road with phones and tablets are more powerful they’re return to controlling the living room that way. Although I think in the very near future the battle for the living room will be VR where people can watch and play things on gargantuan virtual screens.
 

fizzelopeguss

Arcane
Joined
Oct 1, 2004
Messages
814
Location
Equality Street.
The Xbox exists to fuck with Soyny.

They'll never, ever make their money back from the Activision buyout, it was purely spite to deny CoD revenue to playstation. They went full retard in panic and paid through the nose for bungie, so much that they're now gutting their own developers to balance the books.

MS nearly got away with it until the CMA cucked the deal and forced concessions.
 
Joined
Nov 23, 2017
Messages
4,014
Call of Duty was never leaving PlayStation. Being on PlayStation brings in billions of dollars for Call of Duty every year. That anyone even thought CoD might leave PlayStation was stupid. Even the Sony people saying Microsoft was trying to take CoD away from PlayStation didn’t actually believe Microsoft was going to do that.

King was also a huge get for Microsoft in that deal too. People tend to not think about them because they’re mobile, and PC and console gamers don’t give much of a shit about mobile, but King brings in billions every year and I’m fairly sure they don’t spend anywhere near what the other studios do that make about as much or much less.
 
Joined
Nov 23, 2017
Messages
4,014
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-...t-inclusion-actions/help-customers-feel-seen/

Questions to Consider​

  • Are you telling new stories or sharing new perspectives within the product experience?
  • Do all of your characters/player depictions look the same?
  • What steps have you taken to ensure characters are represented respectfully and authentically?
  • How have you validated assumptions you have made about your audience to check for blind spots or unintended stereotypes?
  • Would you feel proud to show a member of a community how their culture/character is depicted within your experience?
  • How are the wide range of customers depicted within your products, content portfolio and communications?
  • What process have you used to validate how different groups of people or cultures are represented in your experience?
  • Are you reinforcing any negative gender stereotypes?
    • Are you unnecessarily introducing gender & gender barriers into your code or design?
    • Are you creating playable female characters that are equal in skill and ability to their male peers. Are your female characters equipped with clothing and armor that fits their tasks? Do they have exaggerated body proportions?
    • When the story allows, do you show male characters who display a full range of emotions, including joy, sadness, and vulnerability?
  • What % of screen time (on screen presence, speaking lines, heroes) is held by different gender/racial identities?
  • Do you have a process to review key decisions with the lens of Helping Customers Feel Seen?

The thing that’s funny about this is people aren’t buying Microsoft’s games. Microsoft can’t sell games. So why the fuck would anyone listen to what Microsoft has to say about getting customers? If Microsoft is telling you how to reach a wider audience you should be doing the opposite of what Microsoft is saying.

 

TedNugent

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2013
Messages
6,333
The Xbox exists to fuck with Soyny.

They'll never, ever make their money back from the Activision buyout, it was purely spite to deny CoD revenue to playstation. They went full retard in panic and paid through the nose for bungie, so much that they're now gutting their own developers to balance the books.

MS nearly got away with it until the CMA cucked the deal and forced concessions.
I don't understand why anyone would try to buy Bungie anyway.

They haven't really done anything since Halo, which they were making for a decade. Destiny is....really, really lame.

The fact that Sony gutted their own first party development studios is even weirder, since they're the only thing of interest on PlayStation. They stopped being the de facto mass consumer platform after the 360 stole their thunder and became the standard for multiplatform releases. They no longer can point to a massive exclusive third party library like they had in the PS2 days. On the PS3 especially, it was almost entirely about the first and second party releases. God of War, Resistance, Ratchet, Little Big Planet, Uncharted. They actually had a good case with a handful of these titles, and that's why many early 360 adopters and Wiitards eventually dipped their toes in once the PS3 was actually affordable.

I still don't understand why either of these companies are bothering with these massive acquisitions of shitty third party publishers. Even the Activision acquisition seemed like a huge mistake. I doubt Mickeysoft is ever going to make back their initial investment. What do they have to troll Sony with this on, exactly? They now have the albatross of Blizzard? Are they just going to monopolize (some) Call of Duty DLC packs or something? If you preorder it on Windows first, you get a free technicolor neon baby poop skin for your AK47 and an extra team deathmatch warehouse map? Anyway, Steam is going to take their cut on their storefront regardless, and so is Sony...
 
Joined
Nov 23, 2017
Messages
4,014
I’m not getting the thinking of you guys when it comes to Call of Duty. Microsoft doesn’t give a fuck where you play Call of Duty, just that you are playing it. Warzone pulls in a few billion a year. King pulls in a few billion a year. The influx of studios they got in the Activision deal can be used to flesh out their Xbox Game Pass service which is making a few billion a year and growing.

Call of Duty is big enough that they view it like a platform. Just like they view Minecraft as a platform.

The albatross of Blizzard makes no sense either. They’ve gotten a lot of bad PR. And they’ve been doing a lot of stupid shit. But they announced back a couple months after Diablo 4 came out that they reached 12 million players. So it probably did pretty go for them despite all the problems.

If Blizzard was smart, they’d just go back to something like the first Diablo (one hub area with a big dungeon to explore) with the series. They could turn those out every two or three years, spend way less money than they have been developing Diablo games, and still sell to as many people as they already are. This thing where they’re piss away seven years developing a Diablo game is fucking stupid. It’s even dumber when it’s been designed to be something that hangs around for years, lots of people hate it, and Blizzard seemingly has no idea how to fix it.
 

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