Coletrain

@kuu_nousee if it's not being marketed in the States then they really have just moved on now. Giving up in your home market is crazy!

@donv2135 just speculating. Restructuring could mean anything really. Usually means layoffs I spose

I feel like Xbox marketing is non-existent outside of the US anyway. It's pretty bare bones in England and UK is an actual market for them.

Could this be a nod towards them restructuring in readiness for a next gen reveal in 2026?

@NishimuraX could be. PC gaming and Xbox will both live on either way. I just don't know how a more powerful series X gives Xbox any advantages without a point of differentiation, and this seems to be the only end point that people can see.

Unless online becomes free. That could work too...

@NishimuraX have you considered that the pc console could become a possibility? If you think of the handheld PCs right now, a big lump of the cost is in the windows licence, right?

So, if the next console doesn't need a licence, a) because windows made it; and b) because it's running the same OS layer than the new Rog Xbox handhelds will use, so it can be done at cost. Still would expect £700-800, but not a four figure sum, because it could just not bother giving you access to a desktop mode.

It might seem a bit dystopian, but when you think of how carefully worded Sarah Bond's AMD announcement was, it's feasible

@TheCityPop you 100% can from the ROG. The next Xbox, who knows...

@VoidPunk Pure XboxPC?

As with above comments, stupid to release the game in this state. Be useful to know whose idea it was to release before the product was ready without proper beta testing, because they would have known full well that the game would lead to layoffs without a delay. Utterly bonkers management

@NishimuraX I agree. Recently ish I did really enjoy both Indiana Jones and South of Midnight, but I have fonder memories of cocoon, tunic and sea of stars. E33 is my current game and as an RPG fan it's utterly essential

Series X for most things, ROG Ally for play anywhere indies and cloud gaming. Although for the love of everything holy I want xcloud to come out of beta soon. Playing expedition 33 on its series s settings without the ability for performance mode is a total non-starter on cloud

@NishimuraX for sure. Outside of astro bot they've lost that playful, original edge and become a AAA HBO drama factory.

Thank god for emulation, eh?

I like game hubs it's cool seeing stuff at a glance.

Anyone using any game discs at the moment? I'm sure the X button was an eject disc prompt

@16BitHero so id heard good things about the first 3, but you need a good PC to play some stuff like half life alyx right?

Anyway, it's cool that you've enjoyed it so much, s'what gaming is all about after all 😀

@Master_Cthulhu70 my feelings on PS exactly. I loved them for so many years, but at the moment they've lost sight of what makes PS games special. Hopefully they make a bit of a comeback end of gen, but for now Xbox better suits my game tastes

@16BitHero what sort of stuff are we talking here mate? I think I've seen about 2-3 games where things are unanimously positive in reviews i.e. good game, no motion sickness etc.

@themightyant I wasn't questioning if they'd sold 20 millions units or not, just stating that I think they're awful and have no mass market appeal (a failed experiment if you will, PSVR certainly hasn't lit up the world.) There are only two things in this world that give me motion sickness, and that's VR headsets and the Irish Sea in winter.

Terrible idea. VR headsets just haven't taken off and for good reason: they're awful, play restrictive amounts of games and induce motion sickness in most users.

If the tech was good it would have been mainstream by now

I think it's just AMDs way of saying that they're already the market leader in APUs, and we're going to make them better. Unified memory is a given in a console, if they become good enough to be prevalent in the PC space then stupidly expensive Nvidia GPUs could be finally reasonably priced!

This would be amazing. The boost stuff they did at the start of the series gen was awesome (if a bit limited)

My takeaway is still that steam and epic are coming to console, and that the new Xbox app is the going to be the great unifier.

I still have concerns about how that would work on a standard 60hz TV without VRR which most people have, because it means somewhere optimised settings need to be encoded for every game based on what the console detects

@Ricky-Spanish well said mate. MS studios seem to be figuring out unreal engine 5 really quickly and using it a lot, so expecting a lot of excellent visuals for the next two years from them 💪

@FraserG this might need updating, recent reports are starting to come out that it's jumped up to #13 or #11 on top paid charts 🎉

@Balaam_ could also be for PC users who don't want to spend 2 grand upgrading their old rig now that newer games using RT and GI are struggling to run on/can't run on them. IF it lets them take most of their existing PC library with them.

I could see it swaying a few PS users too, not enough to sell the more hardware than Sony but enough to even the numbers a little

@Kaloudz agree with @Medic_alert the SD is excellent but tops out at 15w, so once a game gets too much for it then you just can't play it. With the ROGs or other handhelds you can typically have up to 25-30w through them (plugged in helps too) which helps massively with performance on more modern titles.

I want to see what this new Xbox app thing does though, because the main draw of steam OS over windows is that games (generally) run using either less power or need less power for the same performance!

That's got to be a massive hint. I mean "not locked to a single device" is already what's kinda happening with xcloud and the new Xbox pc app for Xbox Rog ally, but the "or store" part is the bit that could GENUINELY convince ps players to make the jump.

A lot of us have stated before that a better series X just doesn't move the needle

Awesome. That back compat commitment can be put to bed now and we can focus on the more fun stuff, like what the heck it's even gonna be!

@Kaloudz here's how I think it'll work based on rumoured specs of the chipset:

Indies: great
2D games: excellent
AAA and newer titles: good-ish but at 720p for decent performance and likely running at 25w TDP so maybe 1h30 battery life for them.
Xcloud and remote play: excellent (especially if you do it via Edge and download better xcloud), uses hardly any battery and runs for hours

@crackeastwood yeah gutted I missed out on another over serious 3rd person action game 🥱 wake me up when Sony starts innovating again

@crackeastwood congrats on naming one of the extremely few games Sony released this generation that wasn't a sequel, remaster or remaster of a remaster 👏 SoM was excellent, Returnal looks trash

@Fanat1c they probably could do 60fps for series s at a low enough resolution, but if that impacts their vision too much, looks awful and/or isn't cost efficient to do why bother?

@Questionable_Duck I actually thought FFXVI would come out at its sale price (think it was about £34 on ps5 usually, digital that is), so yeah I'm in the camp that £50 at launch won't have helped it's cause. Death stranding at £17.50 was a no brainer for me

@PsBoxSwitchOwner no excuses on my part, I'm supporting it. I hope the sales do improve for them, but yeah I fully accept that most huge FF fans probably already have a ps5 for this stuff. I would like to know the port cost though, it's a much easier measure of success/failure and as always it's just going to get spun into a "Xbox players don't buy games" story for a few days

@PsBoxSwitchOwner depends how much the port cost, whether MS paid towards it, what the final sales figures end up at really doesn't it?

Also probably to be expected, they need to get some good will back with Xbox buyers after keeping FF stuff away from the system for so many years. I'll keep supporting them anyway, love FF stuff

@RagnarLothbrok so £1m. Not a bad start if you ask me, it'll probably go on sale quite quickly too given that it's been out a couple of years already

I think 30fps for cutting edge games that need a lot of memory bandwidth is perfectly acceptable on the series s, and I hope most owners would think the same. Wasn't that long ago we were all debating how the hell FFXVI would run on a series s, and hey look it works at 30fps, go figure!

@Herculean same mate. Just added a Rog ally into the mix coz I needed a new general PC anyway, but the switch comes with me on holidays and the Rog is mostly YouTube and cloud/remote play gaming at home.

I know what point the guy is making, I just wouldn't personally feel comfortable bringing an £800/$900 handheld with me anywhere ha

@M4DUBUS yeah but unless you can afford a 70 series or above you're looking at 1080p gaming, ok the RT and GI are better on lower spec GPUs but I wouldn't say that visually consoles are that far behind. And over 60fps only massively matters when you're on k&m or twitch shooters. Series and ps5 will be fine for a while

@Fishysensei and you know what, you probably didn't miss a thing! Last gen consoles still had awesome visuals just didn't all have 60fps.

Xbox PC merges with Xbox console 2027 and they have an optimisation team in place for TV level 30/60fps optimisations. That is not my prediction it's my wish!

@xeofate I've played a little bit at my mates house and it just feels and looks so so good, jealous!

@xeofate nice! Can't wait for rebirth to come to Xbox, can play it on Rog ally but it's a big screen game for sure!

Finish off SoM this weekend, 11 hours in so probably not too far to go. Then next week moving onto E33, so bloody excited for that one.

Happy weekend and gaming folks!

@johnedwin to be honest mate I'm a fan of all 3, but I think Sony dropped the ball hardest this gen by trying to make a load of games their fans didn't want. Xbox trying to unify their console and pc experience is ambitious and it probably won't work for a while, but it's the most interesting play

@BAMozzy oh ok, well if your point is that it won't be better for Xbox gamers then yeah, of course! But just anecdotally, I played through Mafia definitive edition on the Rog, 900p, 40fps through Radeon chill and 18w so still needed to be plugged in after about 1h15 - the UI and text were tiny, character models look super small, and it just isn't a good way to play those kinds of games IMHO.

Now playing indie titles or emulated stuff, it's a beast. I love that functionality. It just doesn't outdo the switch YET but yeah the new Xbox app layer looks promising for efficiency. My wishlist would be bigger screen and that the z2e chip can run things at 17w comfortably. Big ask though!

@BAMozzy you're off tangent here for a lot of this. There's no question PC is a better ecosystem than Nintendo (like you said, I certainly wouldn't want to play COD on a switch 2 over a PC or series console), but it's not a better handheld gaming system. They've had to shove an 80wh battery into the ally x (and now Xbox ally x) to get it even close to a respectable battery life.

Here's the hill I'm willing to die on in summary: the switch 2 is doing the same battery life or better with a quarter of the battery size, has a bigger screen, is hyper optimised for small screen gaming and has a better form factor. The Xbox ally in particular doesn't move the needle here (I picked up my Rog ally for £320, so price alone isn't the main factor), as it's just not capable of running new games natively at a satisfying level. The switch 2 is, and it's going to be very selective about it.

@CaptainCluck YouTube premium is my favourite sub by a mile 🤣 so good not having to skip ads every 10 mins. They really got us by the short and curlies with that one

@BAMozzy yeah, again I totally agree with you and everyone else that's commented that the ally is a more open and diverse platform. But it's not a good handheld/portable device. It's heavy, you need to plug it in to get the best of it, and the battery life is bad for newer games in most cases.

I see your argument and for you, a PC handheld is a much better fit, no doubt. But let's not pretend that having open platforms is some kind of boon for the handheld market, I'd still much rather have those storefronts on a plugged in device AKA a gaming PC. For me, Zelda and Mario games have that magic that your typical game just doesn't have. It's crap that it's within a walled garden, but I'd sooner play them than protest against the practice. And they do this in a lightweight form factor that makes actual sense.

I like this kind of discourse, and I hope that the Xbox ally x is everything you want it to be and more mate.

@Kidfunkadelic83 I'd love Sony to come back to the likes of sly and jak (my profile picture might give away my favourite franchise of all time.)

I started to get disillusioned around the latter half of the PS4 lifecycle when everything was serious and/or intense. Then they do something amazing like astro bot to give us false hope!

@BAMozzy that new Xbox app layer could be a game changer, until I see it then I still think switch 2 is a better portable (and I stress portable because you're obviously right about choice, storefronts, free online etc)

I think you have to compare them on a number of factors, and for the price switch 2 will order some special gaming. Do love steam Indies though, there are some real beauties hidden in there

@SmokeEmAll I'm mid 30s and love Nintendo games, not ashamed one bit. I have a Rog Ally, it's just a pain being tethered for newer games. Like it when something runs at 7 or 10w