Balaam_

I like that there’s an entire year long window to claim this stuff. Nothing worse than arbitrary claim dates that close way too soon when there’s no reason for it.

Apropos of nothing, I happen to be in the middle of watching DigitalFoundry’s most recent video, ‘Best Gaming Hardware 2025’ and Richard Leadbetter just said with reference to the (Xbox) ROG Ally X: ”Istill don’t really see it as an Xbox console, I see it as a PC handheld.”

I’m of a similar mind. PC handhelds aren’t Xboxes, they’re PC handhelds. A tv is not an Xbox, it’s a tv. My phone is a phone. A car with a media screen is a car with a media screen, a pc is a pc, a ham radio is a ham radio. My Xbox Series X is, however, actually an Xbox.

This entire marketing gimmick reeks of desperation.

@dskatter You’re 100% correct, but I don’t think that’s what @iluvgames is referring to by the word ‘production’. I think the statement was meant to be understood that design discussion, feature set, bells&whistles etc are all being planned and prepped with AMD and hardware manufacturers, with actual fabrication to happen in the future. Thats my guess as to what the person meant, because like you said there’s zero chance they’re actually building machines at this moment to hoard them until 2027 lol

I wouldn’t drive to an IMAX theatre only to sit in the parking lot watching a movie on my phone, and I have less than no interest in streaming anything to any other screen besides my nice tv the consoles are already hooked up to. Who are these people that prefer a lesser, inferior experience? I get if you’re traveling, on vacation etc and don’t want to lug a console around with you but that’s a niche use case and Microsoft wouldn’t be pushing streaming this hard just for that occasional purpose.

There’s a crucial point not being brought up and discussed here.

Both Nintendo and Sony are selling more, but that’s within the context of them both continuing to make more consoles because they intend to continue to sell more. All the sources I’ve read/heard chiming in on the console sales numbers for Xbox—whether reliable or unreliable—have all expressed a similar notion, namely that hardware production has slowed to a trickle (if not outright ceased), and that Microsoft has been selling off the remaining stock at these inflated prices to recoup what they can.

If true, this certainly alters the perception of these figures. This isn’t a case of 2 million consoles sold wherein Microsoft continues to build more as they aim for an upward trajectory; this is a fire sale, this is them bailing out of the plane and pulling the chute with no clear indication they’ll even waste their time making more machines. That’s a downward trajectory.

I sincerely hope they’re both pushed back. Let’s actually extract some value from these current machines first, I mean real current gen only experiences and not the ‘last gen but better’ up ports we’ve mostly seen so far. We need a good solid year or two full of games that literally could not run on a PS4 before anyone even thinks it’s time for PS6.

Nothing is computationally ‘free’. All this stuff comes with a performance price. Usually it isn’t noticeable, but if these platform holders actually cared about the end users they’d give us more fine grain control and let us turn these things off.

10 years from now we’ll all be reading the same article all over again, except it’ll be someone who jailbroke the NextBox Magnus and excised the ai functionality like the useless tumor it is and—lo and behold—the thing will run faster.

Oblivion Remastered, for one reason.

There were rumors prior to release of a physical copy in the works, so it didn’t make sense to waste money on a digital license now only to potentially be able to buy an ownable copy later. Playing it on gamepass softened the eventual blow of Bethesda/microsoft’s anti consumer, greed based decision to only put a worthless few GB’s on the “physical version” instead of doing their job and minting two discs if that’s what it takes.

I ended up not wasting money on a digital license and skipping the blatant lie of a “physical” release entirely. For once, Gamepass proved useful to me.

Oblivion Remastered (shocking, I know, but you can actually finish this bug filled, glitch riddled mess of poorly optimized code. There is a credits screen; you aren’t doomed to eternal crashes and soft locks).

THPS 3+4

Unless I’m forgetting something, those are the only actual Xbox games I’ve finished (as per the article title). I’ve played more, but I’m either taking them at my own pace to savor them, they were so awful I abandoned them, or else I’m chipping away at achievements which can take time.

I counted 9 games in the 11-25 list that deserve the top spot more than E33. People think I hate the game, I don’t. It simply isn’t GotY material and it’s irritating to watch an unwarranted amount of praise be heaped on something when a number of better games are snubbed. It’s 2011 all over again.

Nope. E33 is good, maybe even great—but it takes more than just a great game to wear the mantle of GotY. If none of the other high level contenders released this year then perhaps this would earn the spot, but there are 4-5 more worthy titles on this very list that should sit in the number one position.

But maybe all this unwarranted hype is a blessing in disguise; I’ve long lamented the trend in RPG’s of turn based battles falling out of favor and shifting to real time battle systems in an attempt to chase the modern audience. Perhaps we’ll finally see the pendulum swing back the other way. If that’s partially due to the success of E33, then it has my thanks.

Bought 18 games (no I have not gotten to all of them yet…) and 90% were physical, full game on-disc. Only game I went digital with was Oblivion Remastered, because of the lazy, self-serving, anti-consumer way they botched the “physical” release.

@RegnumSolipsi Unlikely. If this were still 5~ years ago when it was assumed to be an Xbox exclusive, then perhaps. But look at how well the Spiderman games did on PlayStation, and Wolverine and Marvel Tokon are poised to do just as well. This proves one thing, that there’s a market for high quality Marvel related games over there. And by market I mean real quantifiable metrics, i.e. individual unit sales.

Assuming Arkane does their usual job and Blade launches in the same ballpark as those aforementioned games as far as quality is concerned, it’ll sell on PlayStation at the very least. That’s enough of a reason for Satya squinting through his greed goggles to not cancel it.

This article is framed in an odd way. What’s ‘the catch’? If the game is good and the roadmap looks good, you’d want to buy this. That way, you’d own it and be able to play it whenever you like without worrying it’ll be taken away from you. No downside, no catch.

A ‘catch’ is something like paying a monthly fee simply to rent it, only for it to be removed and your access revoked, with you being left unable to enjoy it.

THPS 3+4. It’s such a fantastic remake that kind of just came and went without much fanfare or acclaim. The trophy/achievement list is excellent, great visuals, the new levels aren’t half bad and the control is nearly flawless (as long as you’re playing on a controller with a better Dpad than that abomination on the Xbox controller…).

I think the last bowling game I played on console was Wii bowling. I’d be interested in trying this just to see how accurate the physics are and if the presentation does justice to the rich heritage and pageantry of the sport. Is there a special seating section cordoned off and designated specifically for Bowlers’ Wives?

Not to defend anyone who deserved to have their account banned, but regarding the instances when it was unwarranted: This is yet another reminder why buying physical media to secure permanent ownership is superior to digital rental services. Of course, if the platform holder makes anti consumer decisions like choosing to not put the full game on disc when there is no reason it can’t, then that does complicate things.

Out of every high level gaming executive that ever worked for any of the main platform holders over the years, from Atari all the way to the modern era, there is no one I’d be more fascinated to hear from after their retirement than Phil Spencer. We’ve heard some really eye opening stuff from figureheads like Steve Balmer and Shuhei Yoshida, but I doubt any of that could compare to the behind-the-scenes knowledge Phil Spencer has been privy to.

I eagerly await his retirement, not because I want the guy out of his position or anything like that, but simply so that he can spill the beans and start talking about the chaos and pure absurdity that’s been going on with the platform since toward the end of the 360 era. I want to hear all about the reasoning behind countless inept decisions, the endless flip flopping strategies, the self sabotaging corporate mandates and the eventual torpedoing of the entire platform many gamers cherished since 2001. All that stuff needs to come out, and when it does it will irrevocably change a lot of people’s perspectives on just how negative an influence the trillion dollar parent company had on a brilliant little gaming startup called Xbox, which had been lovingly nurtured into being by a group of people passionate about the hobby and who really knew what they were doing.

I’d wager not, unless there’s some secret project close to release that we aren’t aware of yet. Fable has the most potential, but also the highest likelihood of failing to meet expectations. Forza will be awesome as always, but it’s ‘just a racing game’ and historically won’t be in contention for GotY. Clockwork Revolution looks so bad I’m plugging it for the golden raspberry, and Gears will probably be great but sadly the series hasn’t been relevant for quite some time. The changes they’re making to the Halo remake are far too incendiary and controversial for it to be in the running as well.

I’m not really a fighting game person (aside from old school Tekken 3), so I haven’t played this. But with the way the title is worded—is MK only available through gamepass? As in you can’t buy it à la carte? I wasn’t aware that was a thing, and that makes me even less apt to ever support the service. The day my ability to even buy a game digitally (let alone physically, which they seem determined to take away from gamers…) is the day I jump ship entirely.

Why does he look so chunky in that first picture? Maybe this is why they added sprint to Campaign Evolved, so he can lose some weight.

Between major 3rd party games skipping Xbox for what feels like generations now and the whole ‘Xbox is 3rd party now with no exclusives’, I’ve found my Xbox console playtime shrinking with each passing year.

People can try to scrape the bottom of the barrel of excuses as much as they want, but at the end of the day why would I play Xbox games on Xbox where I can’t play Sony first- and third-party exclusives when I could just do all my gaming on PlayStation and get both? PC oriented players might have a different outlook, but a PlayStation and a Switch(2) as a compliment is the obvious path for the console first gamer.

Sounds like the same generic public facing corpo speak we always hear from game studios, except it’s the Coalition and we all know they’re enormously capable and highly skilled. In this case their quote does indeed get me excited!

I bet whenever the wrap up does arrive, no one will outdo Jez Corden in the ‘Goalposts Moved’ stat

@Shinato2024

Quantity ≠ Quality.

‘[Insert game] is now available on more devices for more players in more places!’
≠ an inherently better game.

As a fan of facts, figures and statistics in general, it makes me sad to not get an Xbox year end wrap up. But I get it. Looking at things from their perspective, if there’s no money to be made from it and no way to use it to shove ai down people’s throats, why would they bother with a wrap up?

I scrolled slowly down the first portion of this article, then scrolled through the second half at blistering speed. That pretty much speaks for my gaming tastes and sensibilities right there.

@GamerScore200K it’s a lot of the same old, same old yeah but there are some absurdly great games on this list. If you think Alan Wake 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, DoomDA, Death Stranding or FF16 are “crap”, I can’t imagine what you’re playing. You either have access to true god tier games the rest of us don’t even know about, or you’re a ‘gamer’ who actually just plays stuff like Fortnite and Roblox.

Mine would have been oblivion if it weren’t a flat out broken pile of stuttery, janky, bug filled glitch riddled rubbish. So my vote went to THPS 3+4, which somewhat surprisingly came out nearly flawless (once the awful Xbox controller was swapped for the one the series was built around). I doff my cap to those guys, they even went the extra mile and cleaned up the achievement list compared to Vicarious Visions’ tedious, grueling list for 1+2. There are some combo challenges that pose a significant difficulty spike for new players, but for veterans from the PS1/PS2 days it’s smooth sailing. Fantastic collection of games all around!

So very tired of them beating that old ‘more games for more players’ drum, as if that somehow equates to a higher quality of game.

I’d rather a game be phenomenal and in less places than simply mediocre and widely available to everyone. Ideally it would be both quality+availability, but that perfect combo seldom materializes. For many devs it’s either pick a side and get more funding and tech assistance from the platform holder, or go wide and be everywhere but without that extra support. I’d rather play a better game even if it means I must do so elsewhere than an inferior game that meets me where I already am.

@ILuvGames not sure if you’re trolling or not, but if you’re for real then that’s awesome news. Bioshock is a ridiculously good game, and I very much liked 2 and infinite (to a lesser degree). As for Arkane, I’m once again not among the popular opinion; I think the systems and player agency in their games was always top tier, but I hated literally everything else about them. Setting, characters, plot, and especially the hideously unappealing visual aesthetic. But having this pedigree folded into the Bioshock formula would be a dream come true nonetheless.

Single player > Co-op > PvP

This perfectly encapsulates why the original Xbox is my all time favorite Xbox. Even if many of these were only prototypes or glorified tech demos never intended to be released, there’s more ‘magic’ in this list of unreleased games than in the entirety of the 360’s actual catalog.

I wish other similar GaaS games would adopt the mantra expressed in the quote about non-expiratory bits’n’bobs.

I booted up Fallout76 the other day and saw a neat looking store item in someone’s base. A quick search revealed it’s either no longer sold in the atom shop or else it rotated out and who knows if/when it’ll return. This is utterly incompetent design. Do they not want my money? I was intending to buy the item, but I can’t buy something that isn’t for sale. All games with a relevant in-game storefront should always have all items available perpetually until the day the servers shut down.

Just another perk of permanent ownership, I love it.

Alan Wake was the entire reason I got a 360 and is far and away my favorite game on the system (perhaps even that entire generation). As long as Remedy doubles down on what it does best—compelling, single player narrative driven gameplay without any multiplayer garbage—I don’t really care what they do and I’m convinced it’ll be fantastic whatever they come up with.

I tell ya h’what, that’s a handsome controller.

Can’t wait for this one. Been on my radar since the debut trailer, looks unbelievably good.

There’s something to be said about the overall presentation of DoomDA, but the fine grain detail is rather lacking. You don’t have to look too closely to find some shockingly low resolution textures and low poly models, and I’m talking about the X version here not the S. Personally I’d give the award to Death Stranding 2, Alex’s ‘holier than thou’ PC raytracing supremacy attitude be darned.

THPS 3+4 dominated a lot of my time, but playing on pc with a Dualsense was a necessity. The Xbox controller is a joke for a game like this, the awkward triggers and awful dpad rendering it nearly unplayable. It’s blatantly obvious the series was originally built around Sony’s controller from the very beginning. But once that problem was solved, the game itself is fantastic and endlessly replayable.

Still voted for Keeper in the top spot though. It’s a crime a game this uniquely good was sent out to die by management with little to no advertising or marketing 😠

Well that’s a letdown. I didn’t have my glasses on and thought the article title said CEO. I got super excited for an immediately brighter future for Xbox, but my hopes were dashed when I realized it’s just about the CFO 😞

“Our whole focus is on delivering player satisfaction and delivering player value. And we’re always going to be listening to what people want there.”

Corporate BS. If the sentiment were true, they’d be catering to the millions of us who derive satisfaction and value from permanent physical ownership. Full game, on-disc, no online check-in or internet downloads required, commitment to future consoles with integrated dedicated disc drives. Why not meet us there? Because there’s less money and less control for them, that’s why. Which makes the quote a lie. It was never about ‘meeting players where they are’, it’s about meeting wherever most of the money is.

This is one of a few more deserving games that should have taken the GotY crown instead of the ‘good, just good but nothing more’ E33. Reminiscent of 2011 when the lesser game inexplicably took the crown that year as well.

That 60fps makes all the difference in the world.

@rhyno_888 you can’t be serious

Played FO76 for about 5hrs yesterday. Game crashed to dashboard 8 times, inexplicably reset some option settings (stick sensitivity, Y-axis inversion etc) to default, the final boss of the daily op got stuck in a wall and became unkillable which forced a restart, and the game is still a choppy stuttery mess. Instead of hocking new merch maybe they could have used that money to pay Bethesda’s (rumored) tech support devs to fix some of the glaring issues with the actual game(s)?

These are corporations so it’s not as though they’d communicate in any other fashion, but the corpo speak is tiresome.

“…for some of you, the Franchise has not met your expectations…” —by some, you mean the overwhelming majority?

“To be very clear, we know what you expect…” —then why didn’t you deliver what we expect the first time? Why push out what you evidently know people don’t want only to backpedal now?

Not really sure who to root for here. I’ve had Netflix for ages. Their UI went from being perfectly user friendly to a massive downgrade making browsing nearly impossible because of GIGANTIC TILES TAKING UP THE ENTIRE SCREEN. That, and the fact Netflix has less and less ‘real movies’ and more and more of their own stuff (which I feel is of significantly lesser quality) makes me want to unsubscribe.

I’ve never had Paramount so idk if that service is user friendly or a clunky, janky, nearly broken app like Hulu/disney+. This seems like a loss for everyone no matter who buys WB, since if the ABK acquisition has taught us anything it’s that these tens of billions of dollar splurges mean inevitable price hikes for the end user.

@neillaw I was thinking about that earlier. Pro is significantly more capable than the X, in fact the power delta between them is greater than that between base PS5 and the stronger X. Yet somehow Blubber team coded the game so poorly it runs worse on Pro. In pure technical terms this shouldn’t be the case. It’s straight up lack of skill at optimization.

And of course they passed the blame onto Konami who is too lazy to address it, so nothing gets done about it. All we have are 4 mediocre console versions, all flawed, where the X is the least stinky poop of the bunch. That’s no win; we all lost.

Both versions look rather poor without the RTGI the game was clearly arted around. The fallback lighting is flat and dull and ruins the presentation. That said, the framerate on the S is surprisingly smooth and makes a world of difference—those stutters and frame time spikes on Switch 2 are really noticeable. Between the two, I’d prefer to play on the S for that reason alone.