Talking Point: What Do You Want To See From Xbox In The Second Half Of The Year?

Less focus on the potential next gen and more focus on pushing current gen to its absolute limits. I still think current gen has a lot more to give.

More games added via retrocompatibility, less games skipping the console, Rewards on my region, all of the free-to-play games that are on PS (I guess this is the same as the second point), less games skipping my region.

I think that's it.

Wouldn't hurt for a brief update on projects long in the oven (SoD3, PD)...

I want to see the pc integration continue and see that pc app keep getting improved. I eventually want a big picture type of mode that makes the gaming experience on pc to have a similar UI to xbox consoles.

Every time I see Sarah Bond I can't not think of her bs interview after Tango Gameworks was axed. Less of her would be a great start.

I'd like a proper next Xbox reveal so that we have a proper understanding of exactly what we will be getting, and when.

I'd also like to hear that they are working on Gears 6, and Gears Tactics 2, and also a release date for Gears of War: E-Day.

Games? I get that Xbox has been on a roll with it's first party and Gamepass and that messes with perception, but the back half of the year feels rather light.

@Fiendish-Beaver Gears Tactics 2 seems like such a perfect "fill the gap between mainline releases" title that they just ignored.

Agreed with everyone that Xbox needs to be more transparent. Hiding console sales basically guarantees you’ll be seen as a failure. Allowing games like DA:Failguard and Assassin’s Creed Badows to hide sales is also a very poor look when they need you
To let them on your platform.

@Fiendish-Beaver
It will be a PC with an Xbox badge playing PC games and not an Xbox console.

I hope I’m wrong, but I’m sure that is what are getting, it’s all pointing in that direction.

1) Do not close any talented studios via mass layoffs. Hands off Double Fine!

2) Zero Game Pass price rises or messing about with the Core to Ultimate conversion offer. That would be appreciated.

3) No nerfing of Microsoft Rewards points. It’s already not as good as it was in its prime, let’s not degrade it any further.

4) I want to see more OS updates that focus on QOL additions to the home screen, dashboard, store, games & apps etc. Don’t stay still, keep improving the Xbox OS. I hope Xbox Ally doesn’t consume all of their focus, leaving XSX forgotten and unloved.

That’s about it I suppose, I’m not being too demanding here I feel.

No layoffs and studio closures..

A payment like gold, just for multiplayer only.

@Zeta No for the consumer not staff buddy!

I would love some old Activision games to come back if Microsoft can sort out licensing for them like the transformer games and Deadpool other than that a couple of top quality games added to gamepass and a lot more call of duty games added to gamepass just for the campaigns alone!!

I'll take more of Sarah Bond. Other than that, nothing. Kinda moved most of my gaming to my PS5 pro. I figure any new game from Xbox will eventually make it's way over there and it will be the best version by then. Cheers.

Guaranteed physical releases entirely on disc, without any ‘internet download required’ BS

Even if it’s only on PlayStation where people actually buy physical media, and even if they have to mint two discs, if that’s what it takes. I don’t lease digital code I can’t own, and—how do I put this—it would save me the effort of having to buckle my swash to play something.

I am pretty happy with their lineup. Grounded 2 and The Outer Worlds 2 alone are big releases for me. I put so many hrs into the first Grounded with my wife. And I love FPS/RPG hybrids. Both huge wins!

Less redundancies so they can keep up the amount of games they're releasing without relying on AI to make them all.

@VoidPunk I agree with some of the stuff here, like "cancel all ports to PS/Nintendo," "focus on creating smaller AA games," "put all Blizzard games on Game Pass ASAP," etc., but (and I mean no offense by this), some of the things you listed here are kind of baffling.

Like, Microsoft is legally obligated to release CoD Black Ops 7 for PS4/5, they can't cancel the PlayStation ports and make CoD an Xbox exclusive.

And it makes literally no sense to stop all cloud services (that would include cloud saves and cloud gaming) or cancel the next Xbox. Cloud gaming is not being treated by Microsoft as a replacement (at the moment) for native gaming, it's an addendum. Xbox players shouldn't have less choice on how to play their games.

Also, cancelling the next Xbox would be devastating for the Xbox brand, and would tank their console division even more than it already has been. If Microsoft were to axe the Xbox Series X/S successor right now, they would have nothing to compete with the PS6 against. The PS6 would crush the Series X/S in sales, and since the Series X/S would be far more underpowered, some developers may skip Xbox entirely to focus only on PS6 and PC. It would be a repeat of what happened during the 360 generation, where Xbox got a head start over the PS3 and got a lot of defacto Xbox exclusives as a result.

And, for the record, these consoles take nearly a decade to make. Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc. usually start working on their next-gen consoles almost immediately after releasing their current-gen systems.

Btw, why the hate for Starfield and Avowed, when Avowed in particular got mostly positive reviews on Steam?

And lastly, what do you mean by "de-politicize everything?" and "cut all ties with SBI?"

Anything you're specifically hoping for?

Yes. I want Microsoft to be more like Sony and Nintendo and just say sweet f**k all. And just like that, no one is going to be confused 😅.
They to have a relatively steady flow of first-party games with GamePass also being fantastic. So no more talk about next gen please ...just more great games.

News about the ecosystem and clarify details about the future of the platform, which is more tense, confusing and complicated than ever.

@Ricky-Spanish as a consumer, I benefit from them having a diverse studio base, producing more variety of games for my monthly subscription.

I’d like to see something great from Rare. Not talking about Everwild or Sea of Thieves - I’d love to see something innovative and creative to rival Mario Kart or AstroBot. Don’t think it’ll (ever) happen, but that’s what I’d like to see.

Some fresh original exclusive games would be nice.

Hades 2, please come to Microsoft already

What I expect from Microsoft and Xbox is not the ROG Xbox Ally X or the next generation Xbox, but the release of the Lost Odyssey remaster and the announcement of Lost Odyssey 2, and that's it.

@Titntin I’m just celebrating my Steam to Xbox guarantee so I am not going to push it. Haha but yeah they need less talk and more showing cause i think lot’s are confused with the future. I’m not. It’s easy to see they are combining Console and PC while improving cloud. Cause as i have said many times before the distant future of gaming is PC and Cloud. That is where players will be and also the easier access points to reach more people around the world. It’s how they get there that has been a little muddy. Overall I’d like to see them slowly show what the next gen Xbox is capable of, which i think we will see as they try and build some hype leading into the reveal which i think is for sure coming in 2026 with the console in late 26 or 27.

Better be 27 otherwise they'll have to wait a year for me to buy it 🤣👍

@Questionable_Duck

Tbf, Sony never signed the agreement MS presented them with so while they are obligated to release it on Steam and possibly the Nintendo eShop, the only reason they would have to is because the FCC might (key word might) get in their case. If they could get away with it they would massively benefit by not doing it.

I partially disagree with cancelling the next Xbox. It wouldn’t be forever only for a few years. The Series X currently has 8 exclusive games. That’s games that aren’t on the Xbox One or no longer exclusive. Of the 8, 6 were financial disasters with only Flight Sim 24 and Stalker 2 making money. I think focusing on fleshing out the library of the most powerful console in history would help boost sales. This is my opinion anyway.

Starfield is insanely boring and sold disastrously low for how long it took to develop. The player base is less than games a decade old after only 1.5 years. It’s another stain on the Bethesda legacy and unlike say Fallout 76 which they worked very hard to fix, Starfield has been abandoned. Actually it’s less than abandoned as they released one of the lowest rated AAA DLCs I've ever seen.

Avowed just sucked and didn’t even break 500k sales (based on rough estimates). @kmtrain83 I was joking about removing it from GamePass but it was just awful. To be fair I should have included more games like Redfall to be offered refunds since it isn’t fair for those who load paid for a broken and boring experience. And that’s the thing these games are so ruddy boring that even modders left.

As for SBI they have become brand poison. MS should refuse to put any game they are involved with on GamePass due to their polarizing nature. Not on their store just GamePass which is supposed to be highly curated experiences.

Also I don’t have a rebuttal for Cloud gaming other than it’s just a money pit gamers don’t want and statistically don’t use aside from saves.

TL;DR MS still has the best console in history on the market and can and should spend the time to give it the unforgettable library it deserves. That’s why I’m so passionate about talking about it.

Thank you for your well written response.

1. Maybe a game of the year contender, for the first time in over a decade?
2. Less souless 7 out of 10 games.
3. Stop letting Sony money hat all the actual good 3rd party games to keep them off xbox.
4. Stop calling everything an xbox until it can actually play xbox games. A Playstation is more of an Xbox than a quest 3.
5. Figure out what your actual plan is then stop doing ***** that makes you look like liars.
6. Hire a team that is passionate about Halo and give us a good traditional Halo game every 4 years. Hire a team that is passionate about gears and give us a new game every 4 years. Stop making these games to b fir everyone, they should be adult themed, gears should be dark and Gritty. Drop all woke ***** across the board, including making all female characters look like men, if I cannot make my own character in Fable and I am stuck looking like what ever that was in the reveal trailer, I am out.
7. Release an Elite controller 3 that does not have trash build quality.
8. Make consoles with a focus on gamers. How is it that I could set default controls like inverting the Y axis at the system level on 360 but I have to do it on a game by game basis for the last 12 years. Hire someone like Jay Allard or Mark Cerny who at least seems to know what gamers want.

But in that they won't do any of that and will double down on churning out more 6 and 7 out of 10 games while jacking up the price of gamepass and slapping xbox stickers on fridges and toasters, I am probably out.

Probably the only thing that will keep me on their hardware will be if it is a cheap standard PC that I can access my 500 xbox games and steam, GOG and Epic, but for a cheap price other than that I am going PC and will pick up a cheap XSX as a back up to still have access to my Xbox library.

@Zeta 🤷🤦✌️

@VoidPunk They are hiding the sales because they are probably bad how does showing game sales help you enjoy gaming it's nonsensical!
I don't understand gamers obsession with game sales and console sales surely you would want some great games out rather then know the sales numbers??
Plus I agree starfield was aggressively dull!

@Isolte I get that but the decision makers already know the numbers anyway!
Some gamers are more obsessed with the sales numbers more then actually playing games for some reason!
The question was what would you like to see from Xbox in the second half of the year!!
And he wants the numbers games and subs do to be more transparent 🤷 haha it's crazy to me surely he would want a release of a new game he could enjoy of a series he likes rather then a statement of game sales released ha!!
I really hate all this sales talk crap all the time like it should matter to the average Joe consumer like us I want new games not game sales records to read!!
It's actually really funny when you think about it 🤦🤠

@Isolte I do understand the use of game sales records though for the company but they are not very important to me a consumer with my own finances to worry about before some faceless billion dollar companies 🤷

@Isolte I understand that but surely people would know if a game is popular I'm not against numbers coming out for games sales we never know the sales years ago and got on fine it's just a silly obsession some people have nowadays to help them justify the product they bought!
For me personally it's not important I don't enjoy a game any more or less if I know the sales!
People say the new doom did terrible but I loved the game it's amazing fun to play!!
Great game

@HonestHick I wouldn’t celebrate the steam to Xbox guarantee just yet. What we have at the minute is windows running pc games you can launch via an Xbox shortcut. It is not an Xbox running steam or it’s games. You need steam installed in the background to buy/download games first. That won’t necessarily translate to a console running steam games. It might but it’s no guarantee as of yet.

I want falcom games on Xbox, but seems unlikely.

The reason to fully understand the sales numbers for consoles, and have accurate Game Pass subscriber numbers, @Isolte and @Ricky-Spanish, is so that we can see how Xbox compares to the PlayStation in these things, but more importantly, so that we can assess (or have people in the business assess) how well Xbox is doing and what the likely future holds.

Right now it is impossible to gauge whether investing possibly a £1000 in the next Xbox is a sensible decision because we don't know whether Microsoft will continue supporting it for an entire generation. We don't know for certain whether Game Pass subscriber numbers have fallen off a cliff or have gently plateaued. Knowing how the Service is doing would again give us an insight into its longevity.

In other words, if Microsoft have only managed to sell 30 million consoles this generation, and then bring out a £1000 PC/Console hybrid that doesn't really play into either of those things well (which is a strong possibility, particularly with the PC side), then you don't need to be an industry insider to know that the next Xbox isn't going to sell well. Likewise, if Game Pass subscriber numbers are falling, and console sales are poor, then it becomes possible to assess whether the Service is something that Microsoft will continue to support, or abandon in a few years time.

Knowing (or surmising) that Microsoft are likely to withdraw from the console market, and/or end Game Pass within a few years will allow us to make an informed decision as to whether to invest our money into the next generation. Conversely, knowing that these things are doing well, gives us confidence in buying into the next generation of Xbox.

Truthfully, I don't think that many honestly believe that the Xbox is selling well, and few people probably believe that Game Pass is growing, let alone growing well. This is the reason that Microsoft don't tell us these numbers any more, whereas, of course, when things looked better, they did. Not knowing just how bad things are does make it difficult to know whether Xbox is the right choice during the next generation...

I think a lot of people think that playing a Steam game on an Xbox will be like playing an Xbox game on a current Xbox, @Weebleman. Yes, having Steam on an Xbox will give you access to far more games, massively more in fact, but getting a game to run on Steam is not as straightforward as the plug and play of consoles. It has got better on Steam, but it is not as easy. For starters, an awful lot of (particularly older) games on Steam do not support a controller, and you can absolutely foresee people buying a game via Steam only to find that their controller ceases to work in game.

I'm also curious to know how big this new PC/Console is going to be because there is a high chance that it won't fit in the cabinet beneath your television.

The way I see it, I think we will be getting a really, really powerful console, but a budget, entry-point PC. If Microsoft sell this thing for £1000, then it is impossible that it is as good as a fairly decent gaming PC, for which you would expect to pay at least £1500, and will be nowhere near as good as a decent, high-end gaming PC, for which you would pay anything from £2000 and up (my mate paid £4500 for his, and it's a year old now, so doesn't even have all the most recent tech inside).

In all honesty, the less the next PC/Console costs, the higher the red-flag should be raised when it comes to PC gaming because the less it costs, the less capable it will be. Thus, when you see people say they expect this machine to cost £500, then they will be sorely disappointed either with what they get, or what it can do, but more likely with how much it costs...

@Fiendish-Beaver I can't argue with the Beaver 🤗
It's probably more of a pet pev for me all the talk about game sales and profits for these companies I just annoys me I don't know what to say ha!
I much prefered back when this wasn't something the average gamer cared or talked about it was just about the games.
But I do understand why it's important when it comes to the next gen decision.

@Fiendish-Beaver steam games are already optimised for various set ups. There’s no guarantee that those games will even run on the next Xbox. So many folks seem to think this is evidence of Xbox running steam and don’t understand what is actually happening beneath the hood.

The big take away from all of this is that it’s looking more and more likely that the next Xbox will run windows, Xbox will be reduced to an overlay launch screen with a sticker on a third party box, and nobody wants that.

I saw a line somewhere that said while MS are trying there hardest to be everywhere, they run a significant risk of being nowhere in particular. Thayer about sums up my feelings on them at the moment.

@Ricky-Spanish who’d have thought we would miss the days of arguing about single frame drops and imperceptible differences in resolution. I much prefer those arguments to people bickering over a giant companies wealth.

@Weebleman Yeah exactly I couldn't care less about sales myself some of the games I've enjoyed the most weren't amazing sellers!!
If sales were the be all and end all call of duty would of won game of the year ten times over already!!

@Ricky-Spanish

Obfuscation is a tool used to hide the results when the devs ignored user feedback. It’s why BioWare kept touting players and not copies sold.

@VoidPunk I really don't care about sales no matter what I'm sorry ✌️

Same thing Im always hoping for: Banjo-Threeie and Crash Bandicoot 5

Adding more games to the back compat program is definitely up there!
Though I think the original Xbox's library needs it more than the 360's.

Aside from wanting bethesda to do more with starfield and to give an update on TES6 I only hope that MS is working on an xbox OS. a way for PCs to play xbox games (even if digital only). I want to see them keep investing in the PC and 3rd party publishing space.

@FraserG Would love to see Transformers Devastation re-released and a Sequel to it, by the same group of people that created the first along with the third Cybertron game. Also wouldn't mind Transformers Prime.... More backwards compatibility - overseas games as well - Japan. Would like to have less games skipping over Xbox and just being available for PS and Nintendo I.e. Arcade Archives from Hamster and all the Cave shmups (Xbox 360 Mushihimesama HD, Futari, etc.) ported to Xbox One and Series xls.
And please don't rush games out for them to fail like Red Fall, which actually is not a bad game but because of the rush to release it, doomed it ...

Better games, better transparency, better staff direction on projects.

If we see more State of Decay 3, Everwild, Fable, perfect Dark sure. But otherwise most of those don't interest me it's just interesting to see them finally happen then in development for so long.

@smoreon Agreed, plenty to add, the amount of PS2 games even to PS+ or purchase even by third parties just makes me wonder why many of them held back on Xbox versions at all.

Why did Atari not offer Battle Engine Aquila for Xbox, but did PS2? It's just weird. Source code or licensing or whichever.

I get the licensing costs, source code, performance, plenty they had worked on or more focus on what exists already and improving platform to platform but even still.

To maintain them or they didn't want to work on any more sure, but even ABK games could have been offered but nope. Waited for COD OG Xbox games to be offered, nope. Only COD 1 for PC/expansion and World War 2 Xbox One. How exciting.

Even Blinx 2, but nope got only the 1st game.

Also offering the originals not just MCC versions is also a factor if people want to put their disks in an license check but oh well. I guess we just have to keep our 360s around for OG Xbox games, the licensing and effort just won't compare at all even if they did I think let alone the amount of companies or licenses/IPs even relevant anymore or willing to bother with them nowadays.

@SuntannedDuck2 Yeah, it was a great program (and played a large part in my buying an Xbone in the first place), and it's too bad they haven't continued it further.

Back compat doesn't involve native ports, so lack of source code shouldn't be an issue (on Xbox or PlayStation), but some work would be involved in testing and troubleshooting (plus the 360 games, at least, reportedly have some form of recompilation involved), so I suspect that MS simply doesn't think it's worth it to pursue more games.

Obviously, offering compatibility with 20-year-old discs isn't making them any money, but since most of the games are available to purchase digitally, you'd think that would offset the costs decently enough. I don't know- I've bought a bunch of these games digitally, but maybe that's not really something that other people are doing.