Balaam_

The amazing backwards compatibility program is the (positive) thing I’ll most remember him for. What a superlative initiative. That’s the kind of thing I’d want on my tombstone.

Well, your roots are a dedicated console that puts gaming and (gaming alone) first. Physical media with the full game on disc, integrated disc drive, one sku instead of multiple machines, and oh yeah permanently exclusive first party games. Do that and you’ll recapture the interest of many a hardcore Xbox fan. Continue to do what the brand has been doing and you’ll continue to hemorrhage users who will flock to other platforms offering what they really want.

I like the tagline under article title, “What does that mean for the future?”. My first thought was ‘What does that mean for every fanboy and grifter claiming this wasn’t true?’ if it turns out this is indeed the reality of the matter?

I firmly agree with both of his tips, and I also believe neither Satya nor Asha cares about those priorities in the least. Seamus’ advice won’t even be considered.

This is public facing corporate bologna and unless her entire personal goal and motivation in securing her position at Xbox was to “take on challenges” with full intention to immediately quit once that was done, this mentions exactly nothing about why she’s actually leaving.

shudder

Valheim? Is she serious? The sheer amount of gaming diamonds in the past 40 years to pick from, and she chooses a ring pop?

So great stories are created by humans…which are subsequently fired en masse to pave the way for Satya’s AI infested future. That’s a contradiction of terms.

What “transformative technological era” is she talking about? Shoehorning ai everywhere possible, including places it doesn’t belong? Or disincentivizing people to align themselves with your own platform by sending your formerly exclusive games to the competition? Is it shooting your own digital storefront in the foot by allowing a better alternative (Steam) on the NextBox?

I’m not so sure the gaming industry is in this “transformative technological era” Microsoft is so eager to point at. Absurd ram prices and stupid corporate mistakes aside, both Nintendo and PlayStation are doing pretty much the same as they’ve always done: try to make solid hardware, try to make compelling exclusives to lure people into the ecosystem. Doesn’t sound like a “transformative technological era” for gaming, sounds more like one company trying to pivot to right a sinking ship, then claiming it’s what everyone’s doing.

Had to count the number of fingers in the photo just to make sure it wasn’t ai

@BIG3 permanent erasure > hiding.

Sony doesn’t allow this either and it’s a major drawback in both trophy and achievement systems. Whenever someone unlocks an achievement Xbox collects their relevant data automatically, so allowing the end user to permanently remove a game from one’s achievement list has no bearing on those metrics. It would solve a whole host of issues—everything from glitched achievements to server shutdowns to badly designed lists with too harsh criteria for unlocking. There is zero intelligent reason both platform holders shouldn’t have enabled this feature from the very beginning.

Putting the AI boss in charge of Xbox is the final nail in the coffin. The brand is dead. They will push that ai slop HARD when Magnus launches.

Not quite sure this qualifies, but Thank Goodness You’re Here is utterly fantastic. It’s not as obscure as many other small titles that are often overlooked, but it’s not exactly going to light the world on fire and be the next Twitch streamer sensation either. In any case, if you haven’t played it yet do yourself a favor and please do. The moment this receives a physical copy I might buy two.

Here’s what would happen:

Newly restructured team “GreenPoint” would craft an astonishingly awesome remake of a beloved past Xbox IP. Then Microsoft would be stupid enough to shut them down as well. Which is better than the current situation since we’d at least get one more game out of them, so I say go for it.

@interceptoralpha ha, you posted the same thought while I was writing mine.

Played every Bluepoint game, from their great work on MGS HD collection on PS3 to this titanfall port to Shadow of the Colossus to the superlative Demon’s Souls. Never really interested in Killzone, and tried Horizon for about 20mins but just couldn’t get into it and ended up dropping it. Conclusion? The worst Bluepoint game was more enjoyable than the best game Hermen ever attached his name to. Pity it wasn’t Hermen that got shut down instead.

I’m hoping he means classic in the sense of ‘amazing story, memorable characters/gameplay’ and not in the ‘classic Bethesda game with ten thousand bugs, glitches and crashes to dashboard before you even get out of the tutorial’ way.

They didn’t optimize for Pro’s more powerful hardware so it looks the same as the Series X version. Gee who would have thought.

This is turning into Xbox’s Little Devil Inside.

Game looks awesome (as always), but the color scheme for the Forza logo in the corner of the video trailers has me worried. It’s that same hideous color combination used throughout FH5’s UI and menus, and it’s the most atrocious thing I’ve ever seen. No one paints their house fuscha and yellow, and for good reason. I hope to god it’s a placeholder and they choose a less garish color for the full game. You may think it’s a small nitpick, but seeing that grotesque combo constantly as you play the game really racks up; every combo multiplier, score tracker, subtitle, banner, corner marker, flag and bunting becomes a visual aberration🤮

@Gemini53 I’m with you 100% in regard to keeping my old hardware and physical copies, but that bit about ‘so much for digital preservation’ isn’t reality.

Publishers and platform holders never intended digital purchases to benefit the consumer, it’s literally all for their own benefit. Always has been, always will be. It’s about stripping control away from the end user, and about retaining as much power and profitability as they possibly can. The only true preservation is either DRM free (think GoG) or a physical copy that no one can legally take away from you. People who buy hardware without disc drives or who have succumbed to the digital first mentality only feed the machine, then these same people complain about things like delistings and server shutdowns. They are the architects of their own demise.

Percy chugged up alongside Thomas, grumpy as usual.

“Cheer up Percy,” Thomas chided, “the developers put their audience first and have confirmed there will be a physical copy for permanent ownership.”

@PressR2 with enough cutbacks to image quality, lods and other effects yeah. Personally, I’d never want this compromised an experience. A game this good deserves more, I wouldn’t play on anything with capabilities less than Series X.

Game has a lot of stuff going for it. It’s a single player narrative driven action platformer, not multiplayer live service slop—that alone should earn it a reward. It’s got a nice visual aesthetic which is no guarantee in this day and age (Fortnite, avowed, that hideous horizon hunter gatherers game). It plays well, has a well designed achievement list and has an unusual bayou setting. It’s technically sound (cough Bethesda cough) and well polished. It’s not my favorite game ever, or even in the last couple years, but it should have garnered more praise than it received.

I expected all of these to be at least temporary exclusives, but not 4Loop. That’s surprising. Looked awful and I doubt any Xbox player is missing anything here, but it’s strange that Sony wouldn’t send this one over knowing a live service multiplayer type game thrives on the largest install base possible. Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise, in that it’ll tank faster and they’ll go back to making the single player epics everyone actually wants from them.

Black Ops 7 being included in this “Excellence” awards list based solely off ‘player engagement’ reminds me of the episode where Homer took home the prize in “The First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence”.

Ah, the old ‘left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing’ scenario. Yes, that’s a good sign things are progressing smoothly 😆

Easily my favorite of the 3 main entries. In a way, the Fable games mirror Xbox’s foray into the gaming market like a microcosm. Fable 1 was quirky, imaginative and offered something genuinely new and intriguing—much like how I felt about the launch of the original Xbox. Fables 2 and 3 felt like corporate suits got their grubby fingers in the mix. The sequels lost much of the charm and felt like the product of market data analysis meetings, as if a series of checkboxes were in mind during development. The soul was gone. Felt the same way about the 360 as a whole, as if it was targeting the ‘mainstream audience’ from the very beginning. It was no longer a passion project from a group of hardcore enthusiasts—the soul, that fire that made the first Xbox so appealing to me was gone.

Man, even how the special editions are named is confusing. I’m no CoD fan so idk if it was always called that, but when I hear “Vault Edition” I don’t think call of duty—I think Fallout. Maybe Fable will get a special ‘Covert Op Mil Spec’ edition to keep the cycle of confusion going 🤔

To be clear, the free upgrade is for anyone who already bought the last gen game for permanent ownership, it isn’t just for the pay-to-rent’ers.

@Fiendish-Beaver some smart guesswork, but like the other user I’ll push back at the GTA adjacent stuff. That would be extremely foolish to send something out to die so close to the launch date.

To take it a step further, Publishers won’t just wait for the average consumer to save up a bit of money after spending on GTA, they’ll want to wait for people to have a bit of extra time as well. GTA is going to monopolize so much of the casual gamer’s playtime we probably won’t see anything noteworthy released for at least a month after. Maybe not even before 2027. It’ll still fall under 2026’s fiscal year so no troubles there, and it’ll let people breathe instead of pelting them with something they’ll just swat away in order to play more GTA.

@dskatter I feel the same way, game is a bug-filled, glitch-riddled pile of load screen infested spaghetti code. But —I’m really interested to see actual numbers on this thing, not evasive terminology like ‘player engagement’. I want to see sales figures and this is how we’re going to get them.

One thing’s for sure, this will either go very well or very poorly for Xbox.

I don’t think there’s a scenario where this ‘all storefronts’ mentality equates to a nothing burger, a ‘neither here nor there’ outcome. Either multiple storefronts will draw in a massive influx of new users to the platform, lured in by their de facto platform of choice and slowly enticed into the xbox storefront, or Microsoft will have built a machine to drive people away from their own Xbox store and hold the door for them while they waltz on over to Steam, GoG, Epic, whoever else they let set up shop.

In other words if Burger King all of a sudden let people buy McDonald’s off the menu, it’ll either become a fatty’s fast food paradise or all the McDonald’s fans will keep buying McDonald’s, the Burger King fans will start buying McDonald’s, and Burger King will drive itself right out of business.

Huh, it’s Play Anywhere. How about that. So this means someone can either play what turns out to be a fantastic game in multiple places or what will be a decidedly average game in multiple places or what will be a trash game in multiple places. Play Anywhere is incidental to what should be everyone’s focus, the game . This would be like hyping up a new tv show based more on the fact it’s launching into multiple streaming services at once rather than based on the merits of the show itself.

Not a fan if there’s no direct analogue for people who prefer to only play on one platform and would rather buy-to-own than pay-to-rent. This feels predatory, very discriminatory by nature, as if they’re forceably trying to corral people into a subscription-gated prison that does not benefit the end user but the company vision at the expense of the end user.

Sales are always worth checking in the off chance you can grab a great deal, but more often then not I’ve already own everything that might be listed here. That’s what happens when you buy physical at launch to support the studios you care about and to prevent greedy corporations from exerting too much control over your personal ownership rights.

I think devs having more interest for the Playdate than Xbox cloud gaming is hilarious. I forgot what the playdate was, it’s that little yellow handheld with the crank 🤣

Also, why is PS+ listed here? That’s not a platform, that’s a service on a platform. Even if they stretched the definition so thin that they want to call it a platform, then where’s gamepass? Is gamepass so unappealing to devs it didn’t even make this list? You can’t say ‘oh that’s factored in whe they listed series X/S’ because again, they segregated PS5 and PS+ and they also segregated the Xbox consoles from Xbox cloud gaming. So…where’s Gamepass?

@Questionable_Duck well the good news is Sony will probably actually make an Xbox port before they ever patch the PlayStation version to a proper 60fps 🫠

Why is OD here, that’s not a Microsoft game

Edit—wait, forgot these publishers bend the definitions quite far to include anything published by them in the list, as if it’s the same as an in-house first party developed game.

Nintendo as a company does a handful of things, but their gaming division is far and away their focus. Shut down everything else and spin it off and they’d be totally fine.

Sony’s other divisions are either doing mediocre or are tanking, while PlayStation is propping up the company. Close it all down and spin off PlayStation and they’d be fine.

Microsoft is a ~$3 Trillion-ish dollar company with fingers in endless pies, and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Meanwhile, their Xbox division is floundering. Spin off the Xbox brand and it’ll be dead before it hits the ground. This is a management problem first and foremost; and whether you want to point fingers at Phil, Matt & Sarah or Satya, Amy & the C-suite goon squad, this is why the brand is on life support.

@Shinato2024 are you referring to the past few PlayStation years (or the ones when they released multiple exclusive GotY contenders per year)? Or is this an attack on Nintendo and all their exclusive top sellers they practically crank out on an assembly line? It’s…almost as if there’s no correlation to exclusivity and the amount of releases a platform holder puts out in a given timeframe🤔

Dated, but fun. Running around in circles repetitively shooting at other people in multiplayer always felt like a low-IQ thing to me, but the creative level design (particularly when considering hardware restraints of the time) and puzzle like nature to the level progression rewards competent thinking. Fun, but not something I’ll replay on a regular basis.

I think we’ll get a verbal description of the machine’s capabilities, but no actual pictures or even a CGI depiction will be shown. I suspect it’ll see a 2027 launch and we’ll get images shortly before that time (not counting factory leaks which may or may not happen. But probably will).

Reading this article immediately after the one recently posted about the two games skipping Xbox is like hearing about a problem and then learning one of the explanations as to why that problem exists.

Talos 2 has been out since November 2023. The metacritic score didn't all of a sudden shoot up, as if it was a garbage game at launch and only just now became highly rated. Anyone with an Xbox could have bought it between 2023 and now, but this very article is catering toward the countless players who don’t buy games and instead think ‘I’ll just wait for it to hit gamepass’. Now maybe the two cancelled games from the other article were never going to go into gamepass, but that’s immaterial. This is a systemic problem. People are conditioned to ‘wait for gamepass’ and have shown they’re more than willing to do so, and thus games will inevitably end up skipping the platform in favor of prioritizing other marketplaces that they will see sales and profits in.

TL;DR: You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Either buy the games you want to play to support the studios, or ‘wait for gamepass’—but don’t cry when they skip the platform.

@DaddyDuder I wouldn’t categorically agree in that there are some astonishingly impressive looking games on series X that are 1440p (or less), and that’s an understandable tradeoff for how much visual detail those games are pushing.

The problem here is this is not one of those games. Highguard doesn’t look anywhere near good enough to be running at only 1440p.

Alan Wake is easily my favorite 360 game (the reason I eventually bought a machine). The Remaster has its issues (no HDR? Are you serious?) but not including an up-res’d American Nightmare was a real missed opportunity. If you’re a fan and somehow never played it, pick it up here. It’s a bit more arcade-y but quite good nonetheless.

I’ll have to take a look at Windows central’s article on the game, since the part clipped and cited here makes it sound like the Xbox version of FF7R is the best ‘just because’. There’s literally zero actual explanation or tangible reason given as to why the article writer makes this claim, which is kind of funny. Here, let me try: “The James Bond films are on multiple streaming services, but the ones one Netflix are quite easily the best versions.”

Xbox’s framerate boost and backcompat programs were the best things they’ve done in the past…I don’t even know how many years, and it’s nice to see other publishers updating their stuff now and then. Still, I wish all publishers put as much effort into this area as Xbox does. Or did.

When we consider all the slop that somehow got greenlit and made it to market, this is even more inexcusable.

I’d kill to know how long the battery on this thing would last if left powered up with just a gameboy cart playing. I think I forgot to turn off my original gameboy 35 years ago and I bet it’s still on.

The $200 Collector’s Edition does not even include the game. I’ve decided to hold off until they release a $400 Special Edition with no game or merchandise, just an empty box.

Well written article, but we have diametrically opposing viewpoints.

This is the moped to your family car, a side piece, nothing more than an appetizer to the main course (be that a series X or a desktop pc with some actual grunt). My very first thought was ‘You had to play this thing for 8 hours a day? My condolences.’ I can’t imagine anyone choosing to sit hunched over this mediocre screen when you could be basking in the glory of the same games running and playing better on more capable hardware.

I don’t know, maybe my perspective is too specific. I simply want to have the best possible experience I can afford at any given time while I’m playing a game. I want as few compromises as possible. A portable has one use case, wherein you are physically unable to be where your hardware is and yet still have some available time to play a game. Train, schoolbus, airplane, hotel room, that type of scenario.

I will never understand the type of person who has a console/pc sitting right there and inexplicably chooses to turn this thing on. It’s like leaving the Lamborghini in the garage to take the moped out for a spin 🤷‍♂️