Neat. Call me when they do something important like officially state gamers legally own their Xbox platform digital purchases in perpetuity.

The specific games on offer weren’t always spectacular, but the Games with Gold principle of being given ‘permanent ownership’ (or as close as that term applies with reference to digital media, anyways…) was vastly superior to the ‘pay us monthly and own nothing’ gamepass subscription model.

When all is said and done and you’ve shelled out thousands of dollars across multiple generations and you take a step back and realize you own nothing, something went very horribly wrong.

I’ve heard this song and dance before. A few times. Once again, nothing specific is mentioned. She’s at the plate taking practice swings and we’re supposed to be impressed? Make a statement. Lob just one out of the park so we know you’re for real. How about you pluck that low hanging fruit, something to the effect of ‘Starting in 2027 all digital purchases made on Xbox platforms are yours to own in perpetuity. They will never be removed from your account whether the games themselves are delisted from storefronts or not. You legally own and control your digital purchases on Xbox platforms.’

Boom. Instant PR win. Instant influx of brand confidence.

Gears 1. It was good at the time, technically impressive if a bit oversaturated and heavy on the bloom effects. I didn’t care for the character designs, with their ginormous tree stump legs that would dwarf any steroid injected Olympic cyclists, and those obvious ‘dialogue exposition during slow walk so the game can load’ sections are a bit of a chore, but for the time the game was generally speaking quality stuff.

I’m loving the sudden burst of intelligence permeating the comment section with people abruptly realizing the whole ‘multiple storefronts’ idea is utterly incompetent and an effective death sentence for the Xbox brand ecosystem. Glad most everyone’s up to speed on this.

So we’re all in agreement here? The McRib, McDLT, Onion Nuggets and Arch Deluxe aren’t selling so the menu should only be Quarter Pounder, Quarter Pounder with cheese, Double Quarter Pounder and Double Quarter Pounder with cheese. Right?

Ok? So flip that switch in the Xbox backend and make things so we can play disc games offline and locally download any digital games to play completely offline (minus and GaaS stuff, obviously). Problem solved.

Not being able to play disc games offline is absolute BS

@MrStark Would you have that same peppy answer if you were affected by the outage? Would you have that same peppy answer if someone hijacked your account and you lost access to every single one of your digital purchases? Just curious. Can’t tell if you’re that shortsighted or if you’re just one of those people who doesn’t care about the turmoil of others as long as it isn’t happening to them.

Already own everything I would want, either here on Xbox or elsewhere. Great deals though if you still need to pick something up.

Looking at this list, it’s kind of shocking these aren’t already available. It would be nice to see these officially on pc, if for no other reason than for preservation purposes.

My launch 360 puts my PS4 Pro to shame in the noise department, and that’s no small feat. That’s after a thorough tear down and clean out, btw. It was a mess of a design from the beginning, though astonishingly I’ve never had any red ring issues. Might be because it received very little playtime by comparison that gen. Anyway my other Xboxes are very quiet and unintrusive, just like a good console should be.

@fatpunkslim In a rare occurrence, I mostly agree with that sentiment—although I will push back slightly on the “since even on CD you don’t fully own the game” part.

You are technically correct, yet also irrelevantly so. The only way for a platform holder to take my disc away is to literally come to my house and physically attempt to take it away…in which case myself and my two friends Smith & Wesson simply wouldn’t allow that to happen. So in practical terms, owning a game on disc (provided the full game is complete on-disc) is legitimately true ownership.

@MrStark So long as it stays attached to ONLY the free tier, I agree. Now taking bets as to how long until they find a way to shoehorn ads into the tiers they don’t belong in.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner I know it’s just a typo, but there is no “comparability” when it comes to how these two platforms handle backwards compatibility.

It’s ironic too; one has a robust, phenomenal BC implementation and not all that much worth revisiting, while the other is sitting on a mountain of gold and has a garbage BC program that does as little as possible (and half of what little they do might disappear if the next console doesn’t have a disc drive).

Ah Xbox, the ‘1950’s vacuum cleaner salesman’ of the gaming industry. Knock on your door, nonchalantly slip a foot across the threshold as they have you distracted with their pitch, then lo and behold you can’t shut the door anymore.

@asdfghjklz Think that’s bad? Over on PlayStation, whenever the console gets an update it used to tell you exactly what the update did on the update screen. They’ve since removed that and now it shows you a QR code. They actually think that creating extra steps by making you pick up your phone, scan the code, then read what it does on your phone screen is a better solution than the simple, obviously fine way it previously was. Freaking incompetent.

Also, Chief looks like a construction worker or crash test dummy with this skin

My RX 68005 is ready

It’s a nice feather in their cap, but it wouldn’t have changed the present outcome. Better than not having the award though.

Uncoincidentally, the average intelligence graph has the exact same correlating downward trend.

Units sold
Units sold
Hours played 🫠

Edit—incidentally, two of these launched pre-Gamepass, one launched into Gamepass.

Nearly every major movie/tv streaming service I’m subscribed to has absolutely butchered their UI’s over the past year or two. They don’t seem to understand we want more information at a glance, not less. Between GIGANTIC TILES THAT TAKE UP SO MUCH SCREEN REAL ESTATE YOU CAN ONLY SEE ONE OR TWO TITLES AT A TIME and things like forced autoplaying previews that are a horrendous distraction while you’re trying to browse, these companies are slaughtering perfectly serviceable user interfaces.

I mention the above only to draw attention to the fact that one has to tread a fine line between a good UI and one that gets driven into the ground. The new poster style layout on Xbox treads that line well. It is technically less info in that you don’t see as many games onscreen at once, but it isn’t such a diminished amount that it really makes a difference. It’s cleaner, arguably more legible, and importantly still provides plenty of info at a glance. I think they’ve done a good job with the redesign. Best scenario is still providing access to either layout, as is always the case with these types of things.

I miss the glory days of spamming “a, enter, back, a, enter, back” to grind out those 100 search points in like 30 seconds. I don’t use Microsoft’s crap search engine for any reason other than these rewards, so every second it keeps me here is agonizing tedium. If I want to actually use the internet, I’d pick a better search engine and throw on a few extensions that block all ai, all cookies, all ads etc.

There are essentially two ways to address the elephant in the room; they could either

A) Repeatedly vocalize and push out social media posts detailing how fine everything is and how there’s no cause for alarm

B) Say nothing and release another smash hit in the same amount of time it took to make Doom 2016, Eternal and Dark Ages, while simultaneously iterating on iDTech to create a real next gen showpiece, thereby silencing all the naysayers with incontrovertible proof everything is indeed fine.

They seem to have made their choice.

I’m going to assume when the word ‘exclusive’ is used in connection with Bethesda IP like Elder Scrolls or Fallout that it specifically means Xbox console exclusive (i.e. not on PlayStation) because these particular games have PC roots going all the way back to the very beginning, and attempting to lock out PC players would be a sales death sentence.

Will they be lazy, sloppy releases that don’t fix any of the innumerable game breaking bugs and endless glitches like the garbage Oblivion Remastered, or will they actually put some work in to untangle the spaghetti code and deliver a vaguely polished experience?

Press ‘X’ to doubt, but mash ‘A’ to hope. It would be nice if this somehow forces Sony’s hand and then in turn gets the entire industry back on the righteous path where customers retain full control and permanent ownership of what they spend money on.

The OG. I remember being blown away by how fluid and perfect the in-game control was, and utterly underwhelmed by the cookie cutter protagonist and lack of any real character development. It’s a great game but a mixed bag; it plays better than any other console FPS of the era by a colossal margin, but games like Metal Gear Solid, certain JRPG’s, or even something as basic as Zelda games had outrageously more well developed characters. I remember thinking to myself after that epic warthog driving finale “This is one of the best playing games I’ve ever experienced, although I don’t really care if what’s-his-name gets replaced in a sequel.”

I spy a few gems here, but I already own everything I would want from the back catalogue. Heh…”own”. Some are merely digital rentals, but I do actually own some for real on disc. Idk whether Ikaruga ever had a physical release on Xbox but if it did, I missed it. I’d dearly like to add that to the library.

Wait, is this the update they made a big deal about teasing, the one they thought we’d really love? This stuff is ok I guess, but I was under the impression we’d either be getting or at least hearing about the rumored ‘disc digitization’ system they’ve supposedly got in the works. This here is all small stuff. None of this is bad, but it’s like ‘whoop de doo’ 😐

What’s with the little hand pointing down beside Gotham Knights

“We have been working to restore access to your purchases and reached out with the next steps.”

Totally unacceptable. This should already be done, the guy should already have his stuff back. Additionally, this is yet another reason in the pile of infinite reasons why replacing live person customer support with worthless ai is bad for consumers. Imagine this poor guy being bounced around phone menus and being fed useless ai generated advice that goes nowhere.

This falls into the Marathon pile of games for me in that this could have been a great single player, narrative driven adventure, but they went in a multiplayer-centric direction I have less than no interest in. Instant pass

@Fiendish-Beaver I typically align with you in solidarity on many of the posts you make, but not this time. I don’t like any horde mode implementations they’ve done, not since the very beginning.

The very idea of a bolted on extraneous mode that doesn’t move the story forward reeks of cash-grabbiness to me. It’s literally running around in circles doing nothing but shooting, dying and repeating. It’s like standard multiplayer in that it’s brain dead fare. Low IQ stuff. If I’m not being engaged and feel like I’m moving toward a discernible narrative goal, it’s like I’m wasting my time running around in circles.

Personally, I was hoping for a 100% pure single player narrative focus and exactly 0% incompetent death match style add on irrelevant fare. The fact they seem to be doubling down on the low effort, money-making aspects of the Gears games makes me leery this won’t be the epic (pun intended) return to form the series so desperately needs.

If Sony doesn’t reverse course on stealing my right to own, I doubt it’ll be buying their machine this time around.

If it’s all going all digital anyway, why would I spend more money for less freedom in either Sony or Xbox’s ecosystems when I can get games cheaper on Steam with a fairly trustworthy promise I’ll retain control over what I buy, or else just buy from GOG and straight up own the digital code?

We’re living in the Bizarro world.

Xbox is doing half decent as far as physical media is concerned (half decent as in they haven’t outright stated they’re killing the format), and the majority of Xbox users probably don’t care about that. Meanwhile they’re slaughtering teams and destroying countless employee’s lives and there’s tremendous outrage over it.

Aside from Bungie and Bluepoint, Sony is doing half decent at keeping their employees tenured, while at the same time they’re in the middle of trying to outright steal customers’ right to own what they buy.

These two situations should be switched. Sony should be preserving discs and laying off utterly useless people like Hermen Hulst and teams that don’t produce (MediaMolecule cough cough), while Xbox should be the ones providing the type of job security that a $3 Trillion parent company can offer, while attempting to kill physical media and strip everyone of ownership rights.

If true, this is freaking awesome and I hope it sets a precedent of some kind.

~Xbox Series X pricing SKU~

•Series X 1TB All Digital: $599.99

•Series X 1TB Disc Drive: $649.99

•Series X 2TB Disc Drive: $749.99

•Series X 1TB Terrarium Edition: $899.99

The ‘we have GTA6 marketing partnership at home’ controller

The history buff in me loved the main parts of the game set in the West Indies with all the political strife, piracy etc going on.

The tech buff in me loved the exceptional water physics and then-newish SSR implementation, along with the suitably highly detailed assets (for the time).

The gamer in me hated that stupid cheesy Abstergo crap that was an unnecessary attempt at tying all the disparate AC games together. They should have left all the modern day sections on the cutting room floor and made each AC game a bespoke experience. The gamer in me also found the combat to be, well, pure crap. It’s bad, no way to tiptoe around that. The gamer in me also found the trophy/achievement lists to be mostly fine, with the exception of the god awful online-server-dependent public event achievements. Those are finnicky, unreliable to trigger, add nothing to the experience and should have been excised like the tumor they are.

All in all, I’ve played much better games but I’ve also suffered through far worse. It’s decent enough to play through once, for the story.

Pick Your Poison: Pay money for a couple of crappy ports on PlayStation, or play worse versions of those same games for free on Xbox.

Good. Press down on Sony’s throat and force them to follow suit. The way Xbox has handled physical media in the past two generations has been something of a cancer on the industry, but at least they’re trying—which is more than anyone can currently say about Sony right now.

Good grief, if you were on the fence before about whether ray traced lighting makes a difference, just look at these videos. They did the best with what they had to work with, but this lighting is flat and hideous. Objects aren’t grounded in the environment, there’s a mismatch between indoor/outdoor light levels, and ambient occlusion is either pitch black or nonexistent depending where you look. We’ve come a long way, fellas.

Not sure why this decision took so long. Avowed was a garish, static, underdeveloped RPG. They should have canceled the first one to put them to work on this way back when.

“…all achievements in the title must be achievable”

This needs to be enforced about a trillion times more than it is right now. Easy win. Low hanging fruit. Publishers/Developers should be forced to include backup methods/redundancies to unlocking all achievements, including online server required ones in the event those servers go offline. No glitched achievements or unattainable achievements should be the order of the day, not a ‘pie in the sky’ hope.

Something isn’t adding up.

When speculation arose that gamepass was hemorrhaging cancelled subscribers due to the price hike, people with connections in the industry painted a picture that it could have been in the ~10million+ range. Thus, operating under that assumption the expediency of Asha’s price drop is explained. Now we’re being told here they only lost about 4million-ish people? That’s bad, obviously, but not ‘call a board meeting and lynch the previous management’ bad.

So either this new circa ~4million figure isn’t accurate, or what gamepass needs to be in order to be profitable—or even to be worth keeping alive—is rapidly growing so far out of reach that they’re scrambling to keep the structure alive before the whole thing crumbles to pieces before our eyes.

@CaptainCluck My first thought exactly. I read the headline and immediately lamented “They’re still fixated on that ‘X many players’ mumbo jumbo?” 😩

All good suggestions above, here’s one I’d like to add: Kill copilot entirely. I don’t want some trash ai getting in my way and impeding my every digital move whenever I navigate a Microsoft product. I know what I’m looking for or trying to do; your worthless ai is simply an obstacle in my path. Kill it. With extreme prejudice.

@NishimaruX That’s not what trolling is. If anything, that more suits the definition of engagement bait. His comment would have to be deliberately disingenuous or so far beyond the realm of plausibility that it could be quickly and definitively proven false to qualify as trolling.

I’m not sure there’s a 1:1 direct link between these layoffs/studio spinouts and the Gamepass effect, but there’s certainly an argument to be made it played a large role in how things sadly turned out. Thus, not trolling.

“Focus on key franchises” —so does that mean they’re actually going to fix the steaming pile of broken crap that is oblivion remastered, or just let it rot in ‘spaghetti code purgatory’ after taking players’ money and running?