BacklogBrad

Since 3rd party exclusives have dried up, the prospect of missing out on the small handful of 1st party games is not really a factor for me.

I am currently leaning towards just picking one console next gen to compliment my pc. Helix has a huge advantage so far with gamepass and access to my pc store libraries. The 4-5 exclusives I would actually want to play from playstation doesn't justify the $1000 buy in. Their console needs something other than the predatory retail practice of exclusivity. If they dont want to sell me those games where I am at then I guess I won't play them and there are thousands of other games to play.

Really hard to get excited for yet another remaster/remake. I feel bad for all the people who's first halo experience will lack multiplayer. Since I will probably still have a gamepass sub when these release, I might give them a playthrough but anything else remotely interesting will get priority over these.

Just making the master chief collection available on switch2 and ps5 would have made so much more sense. It would also benefit xbox owners as the multiplayer would get some much needed fresh blood.

I played it on pc game pass and the performance wasnt great but not awful either. I didnt do a full playthrough so I dont know if I would have gotten the late game crashes that were reported. Overall it was a pretty decent remaster of my all time favorite game. Still recommend just playing the original for a couple bucks rather than this.

Not sure if focusing on the small "core fan" group will lead to higher revenue. Good luck with that.

Seems like more corporate talk.

@GeeEssEff yes those are also way overpriced. Zero interest in any of them.

Terrible thumb stick location, over pricing, and limited compatibilty make this an obvious pass for me.

Sticking with the xbox and 8bitdo brands as my main controllers on pc.

I have only played a couple matches but I enjoyed it so far. I agree it probably doesn't have legs to keep a player base but there is at least some potential here. I dont know how committed double fine or xbox will be to bringing content to it longterm.

I like the xbox one era logos best. The green is much more pleasing in that iteration instead of the puke green of some of the others. I think the 2026 and 1999 logos are the worst of the bunch.

The elephant in the room is that it is still microsoft/Satya with the final say in everything xbox does. Asha will still need to hit all the same targets laid out by MS leadership when Phil was boss.

Asha is very good at corporate speak but below the surface I suspect it is 99% business as usual.

So this person sold their xbox because they believed the bs narrative that xbox is/was dead then bought back in at the much higher price point? Also roughly a year before a new gen arrives.

Its wild how much stock people put into online narratives and corporate speak.

I dont know what else there is to learn about exclusivity. They already saw how exclusive games did not move xbox ones or series x/s consoles.

It will come down to fewer and safer games with the exclusivity windows or full multiplat with more willingness to accept risk leading to more games overall. I will champion the full multiplat route until I'm blue in the face. Give the games/ip their best chance to succeed by selling them everywhere.

Build your own plan would be a huge improvement to the service. I feel that ultimate is bloated with stuff I dont want. Letting us pay for what we want would do a lot to bring back the "best value in gaming" reputation that gamepass used to be known for.

Im split on this.

This makes me way less likely to play call of duty, which sucks but GPU is a tolerable price again so thats nice. I will be dusting off my series x and s now that I will have ultimate again instead of just pc gamepass. Gamepass has lost two of my go to games for when I only have time for a quick session (COD and MLB the show).

I would have loved to see $19.99 be the price even if it required a few more cuts (fortnite crew, in game benefits, etc.)

But I will gladly take the discount. I will be going back to ultimate in a couple weeks when my pc gamepass sub runs out.

It would be more surprising if the chip wasnt used for any other device. I have been expecting the xbox branded other devices this whole time. Its a pretty safe bet.

Full multiplat, day 1 everywhere. Zero first party exclusives. Give every game a chance to reach its full potential. Call of duty is the only true "system seller" they own and cannot legally make it exclusive.

A true "system seller" nowadays means it needs to be good enough to convince someone to spend roughly $800 to play it. That is not realistic for any title. Halo infinite, hi fi rush, starfield, Indiana Jones, etc. we're all highly rated exclusives and they did not convince anyone to buy an xbox. An exclusive halo or gears game will not turn around the xbox sales and the game itself won't sell well. Nobody wins in that scenario.

I dont know what I would pay for a monthly subscription that only gets around 3 new games added to it every year. I wouldn't want to spend much.

Seems like it would just make it cheaper for the people that sub for 1 month, play the one game and cancel. It would take away a lot of the reason to stay subbed longterm and give players an even cheaper alternative to buying the game.

I doubt this plan makes it to the market.

This is why day and date is so important. Even though a lot of people have access to it for the first time, it is still seen as an older game compared to actual new releases. Would you rather spend the $70 you saved up on a brand new game that everyone is talking about or a game that came out 3 years ago and almost no one is talking about anymore?

This is also why playstation games didnt go down very well on pc. There are newer/better games in the limelight so no one really cares about that game they missed a year or two ago.

Timed exclusivity is not as bad for a games performance as full exclusivity but it is still harmful to the title.

Exclusives are not the answer. I cant think of anything that would sink an xbox franchise faster than making it exclusive to the xbox platform. The takeaway from management would be that low game sales means low interest. This is a one way street to fewer single player titles from xbox.

We are in an era where one miss from even a multiplat publisher means jobs are lost and possible studio closure. Limiting xbox franchises to xbox consoles would magnify that risk. Games would be given lower budgets, zero risks would be taken in development. Many, many games would not be green lit at all. Exclusives provide a worse experience for gamers.

From nearly a decade of industry wide praise as the best value in gaming, to their own CEO declaring it too expensive.

Gamepass needs a remodel. They got carried away with the bloated attempts to add value to justify each price increase. Now it is full of "perks" that go unused by most. Go a la carte model with each gamepass feature and let us build our own subscription.

Neither Premium or Ultimate currently meet my needs. Premium is missing the core feature of day 1 games while Ultimate has so much crap I dont ever want to use that it is way too expensive for what I get out of it. My solution was to just go with pc gamepass, which I love, but my consoles are collecting dust.

I understand their reasoning and the impact of gta but I would have much more respect for them and the game if they went for it. This will always be a game that chickened out to another game to me (they are not alone there). I want some confidence from the publishers.

David is saying screw that, Goliath is there.

Make having a pc gamepass sub eligible to play the old games with gold games on my console. I get the do you own this game message because it doesn't recognize that I have an active xbox online subscription but I pay nearly $20 a month for an xbox subscription on pc.

The concerning thing for me is that they might mistake the rage bait on bluesky/X as legitimate "fan" feedback. Hopefully the engagement grabbers arent able to hijack the overall consensus of what the average xbox fan wants.

Hopefully the achievement notifications on the pc app are updated as well. I was seeing a glitch where they were taking up 40% of the screen. Sometimes they are super delayed or i dont get an onscreen notification but it did unlock. There seems to be some stability issues there.

I like call of the sea. I will check this one out on GP.

Hardware wise they haven't aged graciously. The 4 OG xboxs I have owned had disc drive failures that i either replaced or turned into modded systems. I wouldn't touch any of the few remaining launch 360s either but my 360S is still running like a champ.

I guess the One wins by default but they might not be old enough yet to show us their longterm flaw.

A side comment on the 360 games will always be playable on discs, disc rot will inevitably happen to all your discs making them unplayable. Emulation is the best long term solution to game preservation.

Looking back, it doesn't seem like day 1 was ever worth it for me. I have found way more enjoyment buying/collecting the games and consoles at my own pace.

The Helix is interesting since we won't have to worry about locking ourselves into one ecosystem and be at their mercy for nearly a decade.

The decision to exclude pvp multiplayer makes less and less sense. Aside from your co op partner and a few cutscenes, how often will you be able to enjoy the different skins in a 1st person campaign?

@Pigrotto with a pc you dont have online fees so you save roughly $120 per year. If you figure the console life to be around 7 years you are looking at about $800 in online fees per console. You can also usually find the games cheaper since you arent limited to the one gatekeeping storefront of the traditional console model. Then there are always used parts to consider with a pc build.

Pc is more expensive at the initial build. Long term I think you can come out closer to even or maybe ahead especially when it comes time to upgrade and you only need a couple components instead of a whole new build.

The correct answer is probably kingdom come deliverence 2 but I have really liked minishoot adventures and want to spread the word on that little gem.

I love the game and franchise but if this is a paid upgrade I am probably skipping. I am not a fan of re-releases with minimal enhancements. (I am assuming that it is just a visual upgrade until i hear otherwise).

It would need to be closer to a full remake to buy into it again, the warmastered edition is already great.

If it comes down to deciding between two $1000 consoles then personally it would be an easy choice to go with the one with access to steam/epic/gog as well as the console library. Now that 3rd party exclusives are almost non existent, I dont see the value in a $1000 playstation. At $500-$600 I could justify having it as a secondary console just to play the exclusives. Since we are lucky if sony releases 2 AAA games in a year, I think I am just going to skip the whole works in the future and just be a pc/xbox/nintendo user.

Setting the stage for the ps6 to be a cool $1000 (or more).

Play anywhere should have been the marketing slogan. Simple and clean without claiming that your Samsung phone or whatever is actually a Microsoft product.

Play xbox, play anywhere.

An annoying hitch in the current configuration is that having pc gamepass means I cant play the old games with gold freebies on console that I claimed way back when. Apparently, paying for xbox gamepass on pc doesn't count as an active xbox online account.

Xbox is churning out good games lately. Outer worlds 2 didnt get the praise it deserves, that is a really good game.

Partnering with Netflix sounds like another excuse to raise the price but hopefully they do introduce some cheap tiers. They will need to redo it anyway when helix merges pc and ultimate onto the same platform.

I would love to see it be an A la carte, check which perks you want and which you do not type of pricing method.

Fun game and one of the only times battlefield had a good campaign (i like this one even more than bad company 2). Im surprised the servers were still up, 11 years seems like more than enough of a lifespan. It had a good run.

I am hoping for a detachable drive, I think we will be lucky if we get that.

It would be a major blow to the back compat initiative if all those discs were unplayable. It wouldnt really be living up to the 'play your games your way' motto they have.

It would be sick if they made an official xbox external disc drive that made the discs playable on pc but probably unlikely.

I probably won't use it very often but it seems kind of neat. I see some potential in this.

Starfield is awesome. Hopefully ps5 users enjoy it. Its looking like it will sell well on the platform.

I dont care what people say, the xbox one was sweet, even at launch. I was still paying for cable/sat TV at the time and I loved having everything in the xbox.

And it was a reliable console which was a huge improvement over the 360 disaster.

Personal Xbox Computing Device, PXC.

Xbox One would have worked better here. They sound closer to the all-in-one box dream than ever before.

Im currently spending more on pc games than console games. That will only increase when my second favorite platform, xbox, becomes a pc hybrid.

I am still curious how gamepass and the online fee are shaken up when the next xbox comes.

Play Anywhere is one of my favorite features on xbox. They probably should have just ran with that as the slogan. It didnt help that they released the ad well before the idea came to fruition.

Pc gamepass and cloud streaming are great features too but they could have marketed the whole works better.

A future where your xbox library is available to you on a wide array of devices like console, pc, mobile, cloud, etc is a much better future than your library living and very much dying on a single device that will only be manufactured for a set number of years.

@Gemini53 depends on what foreseeable future means to you. A new game in the next 5-7 years is probably not happening but I bet they return to it before too long.

They are probably going to learn that horizon cant sustain interest with new releases every 3 years either. A new location with the exact same gameplay will eventually run out of favor with everyone but the most diehard fans. Fortunately, I am still looking forward to another title but I'm already trying to mentally prepare myself for the same old party bros and "isn't social media cool" vibes. If it wasnt for gamepass, I think I would be waiting for a deep discount on this one (and the last one) and racing games are one of my favorite genres.

Im really hoping it means my xbox library will be playable on pc. I've been wanting that for ages.

I'm pumped for xbox mode in april! I have been waiting for that a long time.

Sounds like xbox helix is coming along nicely too.

Such a weird inclusion with ultimate. I imagine if you play fortnite enough to want the membership bonus then you probably arent taking advantage of the 400 other games on gamepass. I selfishly would rather see this dropped from ultimate and save a couple bucks.

I would be shocked if there was just one single device. I suspect at the very least there will be 3rd party devices carrying the official xbox logo. There will most likely be options. I wouldn't mind a steam deck approach of 3 different tiers of the same device.