The PS5 and Xbox 2 thread - it's happening

[TedNugent]

Just fucking die already Microsoft.

How many of you are on Windows 10 right now, and are you ready for loss of security patches next year?

 

[Zarniwoop]

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.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

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]

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.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

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.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

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]

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...

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

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.

 

[TedNugent]

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.

Critically, is Gamepass actually making money for Microsoft? Is it making any money for publishers and developers?

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.

Did they really? Christ, that's depressing. I'll admit, I was kind of jaded by the retrospective hatred of D3 and the consistently shrinking subscription numbers of WoW retail and classic.

I also find the push to re-release expansions in Classic absolutely mindbending. What is the point of classic if the original servers bleed out when they release a new expansion? It's like retail from 10 years ago. It was very telling when they stopped publishing subscription numbers.

Apparently, Blizzard explained this themselves:
https://www.wowhead.com/news/reflec...zzard-reveals-subscriber-trends-at-gdc-338238

It even got to the point where they started reflecting on it, and apparently pushed their lead narrative designer, Steve Denuso out the door. Basically, Steve Denuso and some other idiots ruined the game.

I guess the plan is just to keep releasing classic expansions in conjunction with retail, and apparently this is working to prevent sub fall off alongside the classic+retail sub bundle:

Again, kind of depressing actually.

Eh, suffice to say, Diablo 4 was kind of a "fool me once, shame on you," type of situation, I'm one of those that probably are not coming back to these shysters, but it seems I might be in the minority. Just worth noting that they aren't exactly maintaining 10+ million active subscribers like the good old Wrath days.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Yeah, Xbox Game Pass makes money. Back in 2021, just on consoles, Game Pass made $2.9 billion. Their user numbers are up from then.

Phil Spencer said last year they spend over a billion on bring third party games to the service.

 

[TedNugent]

Yeah, Xbox Game Pass makes money. Back in 2021, just on consoles, Game Pass made $2.9 billion. Their user numbers are up from then.

Phil Spencer said last year they spend over a billion on bring third party games to the service.

Well,

https://www.polygon.com/24108700/phil-spencer-interview-2024-xbox-exclusives-layoffs

But first, for context, Spencer talked about how things used to work when budgeting and greenlighting a video game. The Microsoft exec has been producing games for long enough that he can remember when the financials were relatively straightforward. A publisher could set a sales goal (say, 800,000 units), set an earnout goal (how much money they want to make), and set the price of the game (usually $59.99). From there, a video game’s publisher and/or studio could set a budget.

However, the financial calculus has changed. In 2024, most games are sold across multiple storefronts, often steeply discounted mere weeks after release or included as part of subscription services on launch day. Plus, the games themselves take many years to create with the help of hundreds, if not thousands, of team members, sometimes spread across the world. All of this adds up, and as Spencer says, it can cost “$300 million to build a video game.”


Spencer explained how this cost forces three substantial problems: one for all big-budget games, one unique to console exclusives, and one that spans the entire industry.

---

1. The cost “really reduces the risk that publishers are willing to take.” Where previous games needed to sell a few hundred thousand units to justify their cost, new games may need to sell many millions of units. “If you’re a publisher, you know that’s a pretty big number in a world that already has a lot of video games coming.” said Spencer. “How are you going to establish this thing? Am I willing to take the red on new IP — on a new kind of game — when the earnout risk is that high? I think it impinges on the creativity of this industry, which I don’t love. Creativity is like the cornerstone of what we should be about in gaming.”
2. This cost is particularly prohibitive for exclusives that can only reach so many players. As Spencer explained in our conversation about the perils of exclusivity and walled-garden consoles, these games need to make additional money to justify the console maker subsidizing the cost of the console. As Spencer explained, “[The case for] exclusivity gets pressured as the cost of the game goes up.”
3. According to Spencer, the console market has not grown in the past year. Though Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch consoles continue to sell, Spencer notes that many console gamers are simply upgrading — or, to put it another way, they’re not new to the market and won’t contribute to growth. And without new customers, “everybody else’s customer is your success state,” said Spencer. “You can’t succeed unless you draw in customers from other publishers and other platforms. And because you’re not finding new customers with the games that you’re building, everybody’s kind of fighting over the same-size pie.”

---

These problems have had a very real, substantial, and immediate human cost. The industry has seen consistent and mounting layoffs, including a particularly rough start to this year. Shortly after Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, the company announced it would be laying off 1,900 workers from its gaming division.


Polygon asked Spencer if the ABK layoffs were part of this wider trend, or if there was something unique about the layoffs as they pertain to the current Xbox business.


“It’s a little bit of both,” said Spencer. “But I’ll say the thing that has me most concerned for the industry is the lack of growth. And when you have an industry that is projected to be smaller next year in terms of players and dollars, and you get a lot of publicly traded companies that are in the industry that have to show their investors growth — because why else does somebody own a share of someone’s stock if it’s not going to grow? — the side of the business that then gets scrutinized is the cost side. Because if you’re not going to grow the revenue side, then the cost side becomes challenged.

Maybe that's not such a great thing

This comment though:

Meanwhile, other press from MSFT, as recent as January:

"Xbox content and services revenue increased by 61 percent at Microsoft during Q2, largely driven by the Activision Blizzard merger.

Overall, gaming revenue increased by 49 percent to $7.11 billion, with 44 points of net impact from the Activision Blizzard acquisition, to become the third-most lucrative product offering for Microsoft (behind Server and Office). Microsoft CFO Amy Hood suggested that growth matched expectations."

But we can't fund a AAA game for $300 million. Greed greed greed

ActiBlizz is their third-most lucrative product behind Server and Office, lol.

By the way, interesting, I think, how Windows box product used to be an enormous profit driver for Mickey, and now they are driving everyone, especially business, deep into the subscription model.

 

[lycanwarrior]

If I had to guess, the indie game market "bubble" is likely next to pop unfortunately.

 

[911 Jumper]

 

[Tehdagah]

https://www.windowscentral.com/gami...hetic-and-need-to-be-scrapped-we-pay-for-this

Microsoft has fired thousands of customer service employees in recent years, and replaced them with AI.

Tldr; people are getting unfair bans on Xbox due to Microsoft's broken AI moderation system. Even saying "free company" in Final Fantasy 14 can get you banned (???)

 

[911 Jumper]

 

[Tehdagah]

Is this good or bad?

 

[911 Jumper]

Is this good or bad?

Could mark the beginning of PlayStation moving back towards being more Japan-centric, that rumoured PS portable might be a way of semi “resetting” the platform and moving things back (my speculation, of course).

 

[Caim]

Is this good or bad?

Could mark the beginning of PlayStation moving back towards being more Japan-centric, that rumoured PS portable might be a way of semi “resetting” the platform and moving things back (my speculation, of course).

Apparently he wants to increase profits by releasing more PS exclusives on PC.

He also wants to kick Bungie in the nuts for fucking up their development timelines.

 

[The Decline]

Is this good or bad?

Could mark the beginning of PlayStation moving back towards being more Japan-centric, that rumoured PS portable might be a way of semi “resetting” the platform and moving things back (my speculation, of course).

Apparently he wants to increase profits by releasing more PS exclusives on PC.

He also wants to kick Bungie in the nuts for fucking up their development timelines.

Someone tell him he can increase profits if he kills off the US branch.

 

[911 Jumper]

Apparently he wants to increase profits by releasing more PS exclusives on PC.

He also wants to kick Bungie in the nuts for fucking up their development timelines.

Totoki's a finance guy (he describes himself as being “obsessed with growth”), and the only person that has a higher rank than him is Sony's CEO himself. So I'm not surprised he wants more PS games on PC. It seems like it's his way of putting SIE in recovery mode and just trying pull in as much money as possible via software.

Of course, more games on PC means there are fewer reasons to own a PS5, so I expect PS hardware sales will continue to take a hit. Sony missed its last hardware sales target by about 4 million irc.

Totoki is only going to be there for about a year. So I think he will just trim things down, reduce the bloat, etc. His remarks about Bungie were interesting. I think behind the scenes at Japan HQ, they are probably thinking which western studios to restructure or close next. Seeing London Studio go didn't surprise me. Most UK-based studios are garbage. The best ones are all dead. Perhaps Media Molecule will be next.

 

[DemonKing]

Interesting take on Phil Spencer:

https://www.videogameschronicle.com...r-may-be-remembered-as-the-man-who-killed-it/

...he has spent ten years and gargantuan amounts of money taking Xbox from third place to third place, and that is not the market’s fault.

 

[deuxhero]

Was Phil Spencer behind the always online and always Kinect for Xbone? I'd without hesitation give that person, whoever it was, full credit for killing Xbox as a brand as it never recovered from that unforced error. All the best titles could have been exclusive to Xbox Series while it was the cheapest and most powerful console and it still wouldn't have come back from that level of fuckup. As a reminder they only confirmed the online only thing at the launch event because they were specifically asked about it in response to the rumors: MS fully intended to hide it till launch because they knew it would be hated, and even after they walked it back every Xbone had to have online activation with region lock.

 

[911 Jumper]

Nah, Kinect and Always Online happened under Don Mattrick

Phil Spencer was responsible for the following (taken from his Wiki page):

Since taking over both Xbox and the Gaming division, Spencer has advocated for cross-platform play, as well as launched key initiatives, such as reintroducing backward compatibility to the Xbox platform, the purchase of Mojang and Bethesda, the further development and support of Minecraft, the introduction of Xbox Game Pass, launching the Xbox Adaptive Controller, an increased focus on PC gaming, porting some Microsoft published games to other platforms including the Nintendo Switch, the launch of xCloud, and increasing the number of first-party development studios.

Phil Spencer took over Xbox in March 2014, btw, a few months after Xbox One's launch (Don Mattrick left Xbox in July 2013).

 

[deuxhero]

Then I 100% blame Mattrick for the death of Xbox.

 

[Ezekiel]

Horizon Zero Dawn - Walk is a toggle.
God of War - Steam users say no walk button.
Returnal - No walk button.
Days Gone - Walk is a toggle.
Spider-Man - Don't know if it's toggle or hold. Already have on PS4, not buying on/for Steam.

Coincidence? I wanna read Sony's PC port requirements.