Exceedingly rarely. I buy to own, which means physically whenever possible. For most of this generation and much of the last, even that wasn’t viable as hardly any Xbox games are actually fully on the disc anyway (let’s not even bring up mandatory online check-ins), so that turned me away to other platforms when buying time comes.

But there are instances of games that are only available digitally, or where physical versions aren’t really feasible—and in those instances picking them up as they rotate out of gamepass is great, especially due to that discount.

All I gotta say is Brad Rossetti’s big tease better be more interesting than this

Digital to disc?

You pop a blank disc in and it burns a copy of your digital license??

I’m super happy the tech is finally here, but that “Can’t wait to see what developers create with it” quote is poorly worded. It’s an upscaling tech to improve visual clarity, nothing is being ‘created’. It’s like looking at a blurry painting and then someone hands you a pair of glasses. The painting hasn’t changed; your visual acuity has.

Asha yells at [the majority of the Xbox fanbase who are completely disinterested in] cloud

Ubisoft would be a lousy fit. Their respective games’ play styles are polar opposites. Pretty sure a Dishonored 3 with Ubisoft waypoint markers, ui clutter and hints suggesting how to accomplish each mission would piss off all of gaming.

Stupidest thing I ever saw. I would never want this, and aside from maybe Ted Nugent or that idiot dentist who shot that protected Lion, I don’t know who would.

Lmao

That appears to be too short a comment.

To reiterate, LMAO

@Fiendish-Beaver Seeing Bloodborne on your list made me do that meme with the black dude who’s smiling at first then ‘wait a second…’

I sincerely hope you haven’t waited until now to play it. Bloodborne is my favorite game released since 2015 by several orders of magnitude. In a way I envy you, as I’d love to relive the experience of playing it for the first time again. Or maybe you’re like me in that I bought the collectors edition, then the NA version, then the PAL version, and even paid to temporarily license the digital version…

I was there for the midnight launch and over the next few months sampled everything here except for the sports games.

@somnambulance I hear you. I have less than no interest in any version of WoW, but it’s incomprehensible Xbox didn’t immediately get to work on a console version just for the sake of the money. I bet every money grubbing, anti-consumer suit over at Sony would sell their firstborn to own this IP.

More than 100, less than 150. I have several times that over on PlayStation, as when they originally introduced the platinum I found that more incentivizing so focused most of my efforts there. But now we have Mythics. And Sony is continuing to piss off the hardcore userbase—myself included. If my discs are being taken away and my ownership and security is in question, and they’re not the only ones with a platinum anymore…maybe I can finally start focusing my efforts back on the platform that started it all when it comes to achievement hunting.

I’m no mass effect fan, but I’d rather play a single player narrative driven rpg than run around in circles shooting other people in some braindead multiplayer slop. Methinks EA made a bad choice here.

Whether or not they make this exclusive will clearly define how committed the suits are to the brand. Gears is great but has lost a lot of steam over the years, and clockwork is a throwaway. ES6 is about as big as it gets, and we’re going to see if they feel the brand is worth risking this or if they’re deliberately not putting all their eggs in one basket as a contingency.

Good selection, but pretty much everyone except all but the most casual gamers probably already own most of these. Seems to be a very tactical goodwill gesture

I’d like to see Otogi 1+2 get ‘achievementized’

The “How our fall will be looking” picture encapsulates a bit of what’s still wrong with the dashboard. The giant tile in the bottom right shows 3 games (GTA6, MW4 and FIFA) that are already installed . Therefore it serves no purpose other than to clutter the screen. Why is it still there taking up space? It should be aware of what’s installed on a system and either updated to reflect different suggestions or else removed entirely.

The real question is whether Microsoft/Xbox would be so magnanimous if these recomps were instead 100% coded by humans with zero ai involved. Methinks not so much.

It’s definitely an incentive to be sure. The jury’s still out on whether the other platforms will make their own initiatives, but I’m not holding out much hope. Particularly for Sony. Although stranger things have happened. They said a machine learning based upscaler like PSSR was impossible on PS5 due to lack of dedicated hardware, yet here we are.

I have much more invested as far as collecting goes on Sony and Nintendo’s machines, but unless they capitulate and bow to consumer’s Right to own what they pay for, I’ll go where my Ownership is least under attack (aside from pc, that’s a given).

Phantom Blade looks phenomenal, but I won’t be playing it before these awards (or even this year) so I’m not counting it among the entries on a personal level. I’ll grab the physical copy next year. As for the rest of the nominees, there are some super high quality titles here. No real duds. It’s even hard to pick a front runner; it should be an interesting battle for GotY.

Hopefully they make the most of this stay of execution and find someone willing to throw them a lifeline.

I played a few CoD campaigns over the years and most of the ones I played were alright. I wouldn’t mind giving this one a try, but to answer the “If not, what’s stopping you?” question posed in the header, it’s simply the fact that it’s tethered to a launcher requiring you to be online to initiate even the single player portion of the game. That’s garbage. I do not want to deal with that, and I won’t. I want a disc with the full single player component of the game on it (ideally), or at least the option to buy it digitally and boot it up like every other normal game out there. No server dependency, no launchers, no Activision account nonsense, no BS.

Buy game. Install game. Play game.

Dear Netflix, maybe take some of that $500 million you offered and pay someone to design a UI that isn’t absolute trash.

NO ONE WANTS GIGANTIC TILES THAT TAKE UP SO MUCH SCREEN REAL ESTATE THAT ONLY ONE THING IS ON SCREEN AT A TIME

I can’t even browse Netflix on anything but my phone because the ui is so bad. I end up finding what I want on my phone and casting it to the tv instead of just using the tv or console apps.

@Fiendish-Beaver *throes not throws. But I do largely agree with your sentiment.

Fans keep pestering Asha like kids in the backseat of the car begging for Mcdonald’s. I’m waiting for her to snap and tweet ‘We have Mass Effect at home!’

I can’t see there being this extreme number of ‘please Sony, take away my consumer rights and let me pay you for the privilege’ dullards out there, so I’m inclined to believe it’s almost entirely due to GTA’s imminent arrival.

My father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate works at Colecovision and he said it cost upwards of $600 million

🤣

It says my comment is too short, so I’ll reiterate my original reaction as I read the part where they’re charging you for the ‘privilege’ to not play your own game natively on your own machine: 🤣

I liked a lot of the ideas and what they were trying to do in some of BioWare’s earlier titles, but the ME games never hit for me and their latter stuff was trash. I’m assuming it’s a ship of Theseus thing, where most of the people that made the studio good in the first place had long since left and they were BioWare in name only for a long time. I wouldn’t want these folks to lose their jobs, but it was hard not to see this coming.

I’m not big on subscriptions but this is a massive step in the right direction. I do use subscriptions for things I’m nowhere near as invested in as I am with gaming, like tv/movies, and I’ve often wished for these streaming platforms to take an approach closer to how this à la carte approach from Xbox is being described. I doubt I’d ever back the Gamepass model completely, but I could see myself getting more use out of it with this potentially new iteration than I ever have before.

Always hated the blades look. It isn’t uniform or professional looking, it’s the same concave design as the launch 360 itself. Bulged at the top and bottom and squished in the middle. Hated the opposing convex PS3 design as well, although the XMB was a thing of beauty. Quick, logical, uniform and intuitive. Now that’s an interface.

Awesome news. Idgaf about the handheld stuff but having better image quality on Series X would be fantastic, and this just might keep the S from getting any blurrier and uglier.

My physical copy is on the way. Played the demo; aside from the crap voice acting (which thank god can be turned off in the settings), everything else was pretty much exactly what I want from an FF game. Pristine, gorgeous pixel art, honest to goodness Turn Based Battles (😃) and solid gameplay mechanics. No gacha slop in sight, which was another concern given the game’s crappy mobile origins. Thankfully the team seems to have successfully excised all of that stuff.

Random wish that doesn’t seem too random since Asha has really been on a roll lately: One of the scant few PS exclusive ‘launch window’ indies shown off in one of their early shows was a game called Little Devil Inside, and it looked absolutely awesome. Then no one ever saw it again. I don’t think it was cancelled (checked in now and then and haven’t read anything of the sort), and as far as I know it’s still in development. It would be great if Asha could swipe this right out from under Sony’s nose and actually get it across the finish line and to market.

There is no poll option for collectors who never pierce the cellophane and leave them sealed…

“Senior Business Strategy Manager” sounds exactly like the type of position to be erased and replaced once ai becomes 100% fully accepted, integrated and ubiquitous. I’m quite sure the wunderkind that is ai is more than capable of executing the strategic business decisions this Brandon guy is supposedly tasked with.

@Onlyboxmatters Not sure which is applicable, so I’ll give both replies.

A) that gave me a good laugh, well done

B) I hope your head injury heals quickly

$3 or whatever for Fallouts 3 and NV are a great price if anyone out there somehow managed to never have played these since 2008, but that eye watering Fallout 4 price is flat out extortion. Do yourself a favor and avoid that; it’s highway robbery.

That PC Gamer review is pretty scathing, skewering pretty much everything I dislike about CoD as a series. Almost makes me want to try the single player. Almost.

There are a small number of genuinely impressive games on the S, given the severe limitations of the hardware. I don’t own an S and would never buy one under any circumstances, but I regularly watch Digital Foundry content and other YouTube videos and reviews that include S coverage, so the games that have impressed me are ones I’ve viewed through that lens. I don’t recall any titles off the top of my head, but there are some examples of truly skilled developers performing coding miracles on the inferior machine.

If people are actually willing to blow $1,200 bucks on a (comparably) weak handheld, navigating through a clumsy and awkward interface to access their games from different storefronts, then sit there hunched over a screen waiting for the battery to deplete, maybe a $1K-$2K monstrously powerful Helix with a vastly improved interface will do better than everyone thinks.

@JustinSane Take off those nostalgia glasses bro. GTA 4 and 5 both ran terribly on PS360 machines. Slightly better on 360 on average, but still extremely poor. Frequent sustained sections ran in the mid 20’s, and at blurry barely HD resolutions. I wouldn’t bet on the Series S version being “just fine”. The X will be, but you better prepare yourself if you intend to play 6 on the S…

Risky gamble. This needs to be an all-or-nothing venture or it won’t work for a variety of reasons. Personally I’d love nothing more than to see that classic yellow “ONLY ON XBOX” rectangle plastered on countless games; it would give me an incentive to reinvest in the platform more than I am. I have my doubts it’ll happen in any meaningful way.

Maybe focus on old technologies that have been changed for the worse?

There used to be this thing game consoles would read called a disc, and the full game would be contained on it and it could be played entirely offline. Sometimes games would be so large it would take two or three discs to contain it (!), but that was immaterial to manufacturers because they cost pennies to make. The best thing was that despite what the most extensive, over engineered EULA might say, consumers actually really did own and control that disc by virtue of the fact the only way corporations could attempt to rescind your ownership would be to come to your home and physically take it from you…which they know wouldn’t end well. Thus, true ownership.

That’s my submission. A form of media the buyer retains full ownership and control over after purchase.

She’s right, but it’s also humorous to watch how the same problem manifests on both sides in completely opposite ways.

PlayStation desperately needs to revive some of their old abandoned IP they’ve left dormant for far too long, while Xbox needs to stop resting on those tired old pillars of Halo-Gears-Forza and bring something new to the party.

Why no 0/10 score options for those multiplayer modes? They’re devoid of any entertainment for me. I have better things to do with my time than pointlessly run around in circles. 1/10 makes it seem as though there’s still some inherent value in them, a 0 would more accurately reflect their worth.

Good stuff, but we aren’t quite where we need to be yet. We need that legal guarantee of permanent ownership that cannot be interfered with. That’s the holy grail of consumerism. Keep inching closer Asha; I’m fine if it takes longer than expected, just as long as we eventually get there.

$4 for Robocop is a steal.

@Fiendish-Beaver I know exactly what you mean regarding the disparity in quality between E-Day’s single player (main game) and that superfluous tacked on multiplayer/wave survival crap.

It’s hard to judge a game like that when those two disparate halves can’t be separated. The Mona Lisa is an exquisite work of art, but idk how I’d feel about it if they pried off the frame and the bottom half of the painting underneath was her sitting on the can.

I’ve never played World of Warcraft in my life. With the upcoming release of World of Warcraft: Forever, it might be the perfect time for me to continue never playing this game.