Gabrie

I think support for traditional consoles is very low.

I am increasingly convinced that in a decade or so, this industry will be very different, and who knows where businesses like Nintendo, which are too locked into their own device, will end up.

@Godot25 Yes, all consoles are gradually declining, and in general it seems that the new generations are not very interested in them.

But it's one thing to decline gradually, until perhaps one day in the distant future we'll be playing on the cloud, on mobile phones or who knows where, and quite another to do what Xbox has done: in a matter of two years, it has killed off its console when it was the core of its brand.

I don't know how Xbox PC and Xbox Cloud will fare, but it's unlikely to do worse than the console.

I played it again to unlock some achievements and I thought it was pretty good even today. It's a game that was made with a lot of love.

But I couldn't complete it, games from those years were definitely more difficult xD

@Lup You can change it somewhere in the settings. I have them set to appear in the upper right corner.

@BDK71 I suppose it depends on the country. Where I live (Spain), Xbox no longer exists. In stores, there are only Xbox controllers, and they are in the PC section.

In fact, I am commenting here because the Xbox communities in my country have disappeared

Are there still consoles for sale in the US? Unfortunately, we haven't had any Xbox products in stores in Europe for years

I don't play any EA games on Xbox PC, not until they add achievements someday

Given the state of the industry, this news comes as no surprise at this point, but that doesn't make it any less sad.

I wouldn't do it to my console, but it's really cool xD

@IronMan30 I would say it's the other way around. Switch 2 is the most closed platform there is; outside of that device, it's impossible to play its games. In fact, I avoid buying digital games from the Nintendo store because I feel like those purchases will easily be lost in a few years, as I don't see it as very feasible that they can be transferred to other devices. I feel the same way about PlayStation.

In the end, I only have digital libraries on Steam and Xbox, as they are the only places I am confident will still be around in the future (although I'm not entirely confident xD), since the software is not tied to a single device.

It's a great feature. Not only can you share your purchases between your PC and Xbox console, but also your achievements, saved games, time played... Oh, and you also get the game to play on the Xbox cloud.

The big problem for me is the lack of support. At least for now, many games never get to use it, and I don't understand why.

@GamerScore200K If I understand correctly, this would be for some kind of free or low-cost subscription. If you pay for Ultimate, I doubt you'll see any ads.

It's a very good indicator that those 100,000 players are on Xbox, meaning that between Xbox Series, Xbox PC, and even Xbox Cloud, the ecosystem still maintains a significant number of active users.

For me, the big problem with Hellblade 2 is the enormous expectations placed on it. It was announced spectacularly alongside Series X, and from that moment on, we all imagined it as an ambitious hack & slash game, a great exclusive and a vital part of the new Xbox's identity.

It ended up being a short, cinematic, multiplatform experience. It was quite disappointing.

But if you play it without those expectations, it's a pretty interesting game, very much in line with the first one.

Now, I don't think we'll see a Hellblade 3 anytime soon; it's not a title that fits very well with the current Xbox lineup of huge IPs and big profit margins.

It makes sense if you have a good internet connection, because you could get a device that, although old, can play many current games and the entire Gamepass catalog from the cloud.

However, if money is no object, I wouldn't recommend a console to anyone today, whether new or old, Xbox or PlayStation. A PC is currently a much better investment.

@themightyant True, although I think the share button is one of the least interesting additions to controllers in their history, I can't count the number of times a guest has accidentally pressed that button in the middle of a game xD

I never missed it on the Elite 2, and honestly, if it were up to me, I think the new controllers should remove that button.

@themightyant If I remember correctly, this is the same thing they did with the Elite 2 and the Xbox Series: they released the controller first and then the console later.

It will be interesting to see what new features this Elite 3 will bring, as it will surely give us clues about what new features the new console might have. For now, what seems to be an open secret is that new controllers will have Wi-Fi to connect directly to the internet.

@Neither_scene I go even further and am even more "pessimistic". I think that Xbox Next, PS6, and Nintendo Next will be the last video game consoles, at least as we know them.

In 10 years, I believe that all gaming devices (consoles, if we want to call them that) will be powered by a common operating system: Windows, SteamOS, Android... and traditional closed video game consoles will be seen as launching a phone today like the old Nokia phones compared to all the Android and iOS models.

Here in Spain, I would venture to say that they have sold close to zero units. And it's not a problem of lack of demand, but rather that they have simply disappeared. For about a year now, there have been no Xbox, consoles, games, or accessories in stores. Only controllers are available, usually located in the PC accessories section.

This is one of those remakes that didn't make much sense. Well, it made sense from a commercial point of view; it was obvious that it would sell well, but the original GameCube version still looks great, and modernizing the controls would have been enough.

It depends entirely on the hardware it uses. If it costs $1,500 but has a GPU equivalent to an RTX5090, I'm willing to pay for it. In fact, I would probably buy it on the first day.

But if it has a small, mid-to-low-end GPU, which is what all consoles have, I don't think I'll buy it unless it costs less than $500-600.

The Grinch is 1500G quick and easy, in case anyone is interested xD

I think that current consoles are what Nokia phones were before iOS and Android came along. I imagine that in the future there will be multiple consoles and gaming devices from a wide variety of manufacturers, all running Windows, SteamOS, Android, etc.

They know they have to position themselves so as not to miss the boat, but I think they are doing it too abruptly, excessively ignoring current users and showing a terrible lack of tact and communication.

I recently played FarCry 6 on Xbox Ally via the cloud because my girlfriend was watching TV.

The experience was a nightmare; it was really difficult to get good shots because of the input lag.

It's sad, but the truth is that sales are much better than I expected. At least in my country, they're not even on sale anymore. There's no Xbox presence in stores, no consoles, no games, nothing, so I was expecting a figure closer to a few thousand.

I think Microsoft doesn't care. They'll release their console in 2027/8 and price it at whatever it costs to manufacture. If it's a ridiculous price and two tech geeks buy it, they won't care in the slightest.

The Xbox Series is hardly being manufactured anymore, with very few units sold each year, and they don't seem to care.

I don't know if it's true, but it sounds a bit like the placebo effect to me.

I have around 500 friends from my X360 days, and I've never deleted the messages from my inbox (I don't know if they get deleted automatically over time), and I don't have any noticeable performance issues.

I guess they're referring to specific games, right? Maybe games that read your friends list or something similar.

I'm not surprised. The press is a business these days; it needs traffic and clicks, and few things generate more traffic than Xbox sudden and controversial moves.

What's more, following the purchase of Activision, Xbox releases 8-10 games a year, almost triple the number of games released by PlayStation. If you want to write about the big releases each month, you can't avoid mentioning Xbox.

Not many, I'm afraid. Gamepass means I don't have time to play any more games.

I've also got everything on PC, on Xbox PC, nothing on Xbox Series. For me, this console is already finished. In general, I think consoles are finished for me. When I built my PC with a 5070ti, the difference in performance and visual options compared to any console is so big that it convinced me to abandon consoles.

Well, I suppose the purchase of Activision-Blizzard can't come for free. After all, it wasn't Xbox that bought it, but Microsoft, and now all that investment has to be recouped.

On the one hand, Xbox has become one of the largest video game businesses in the world thanks to this purchase, but on the other, it will be under enormous pressure to repay that “loan.”

Time will tell whether this purchase has been for better or for worse. In the short term, at least, it seems to have been for the worse.

In my experience, I would say that the most common mistake that exposes your account to problems is using the same password and email address everywhere. Nowadays, we need to create a thousand accounts for each service or website, and it is almost impossible to remember a different one for each site, so I see people using the same one all the time.

This is a serious problem. Security is not the same for Microsoft services as it is for your local store's website. But if the password is the same, all they need to do is hack the second one to gain access to everything.

From experience, I would say that the big lesson here is that if you have valuable things linked to an account, use a unique password for that site.

@nomither6 Honestly, I don't know, but I don't think that's the way to go. I don't know what the industry will look like in 10 years, but I don't think traditional consoles will still exist, nor will exclusives. All we can do is wait and see if the decisions Xbox has made make sense or not in the disruption that is coming.

He has done great things for Xbox. I think he is really a gamer like us. I just hope that the executives with their heads buried in Excel spreadsheets will allow him to go back to being who he was and get Xbox out of the hole it is in right now.

If the GOTY awards are based on votes from the press, there won't be any Xbox games, as most media outlets are businesses sustained by promotions and advertising, and Microsoft has already made it clear that it has no intention of spending money on marketing, at least not in the traditional sense.

However, this shouldn't matter to us gamers.

It's a strange game, as if they weren't sure what they wanted to do with it. However, I had a great time playing it. I think it's a good game and could have had a chance with a little more support.

I think the purchase of Bungie has been the most unsuccessful acquisition in the history of the industry. It's quite sad, as this studio was one of my favorites during my childhood.

I hate creating accounts other than Xbox to play games. I think that if you buy a device called Xbox, you shouldn't need any additional accounts or registrations and should have everything under a single profile.

That said, I just registered to get the little suit...

For me, between D or C.

Even so, I think Xbox has an increasingly worrying problem: many projects seem to have no problem skipping the Xbox Store. Some of these games will probably arrive later (which is still a problem), and others are Asian or very niche games, but it's clear that for many developers, Xbox is not a priority. This, added to the fact that Xbox already does everything multiplatform, leaves the platform in a really bad situation.

Someone at Microsoft should bang their fist on the table and wake up the management, or things at Xbox could reach a point of no return.

@AverageGamer I don't think the younger generations buy consoles. Depending on how long the next generation of consoles lasts, I fear there will be no more traditional consoles. I think there may be devices like the Xbox Ally or the Steam Deck, which don't need to sell many units, but I don't think there will be tradicional consoles with games developed specifically for them in 10-15 years.

My nephews, who are now about 8 and 6 years old, don't use consoles. I gave them a Switch (they're not interested in Xbox or PS at all), and they've turned it on two or three times. When it comes to video games, they can't take their eyes off their phones and tablets

I think that when the current generation that buys video game consoles gets older, traditional consoles will not survive, unless they become niche devices that don't need to sell many units to exist.

@AverageGamer I'm not really sure there will be a PS7, or an Xbox after the next one xD

I think they have a lot to improve. This generation, RayTracing has been smoke and mirrors, along with the Playstation SSD, a pretty pathetic marketing gimmick.

However, the technology is real, and when used to its full potential, it is spectacular. Let's hope that it really translates into significant improvements in future hardware. On PC, there are already some games that manage to dazzle at times thanks to RayTracing, but we are still far from the revolution it promised.

Thanks to DirectX libraries, I think it should be easy to run Xbox and X360 games on Windows, even Xbox One and Xbox Series games if there is enough power to do so.

However, licensing may be a challenge. I don't know to what extent the original console licenses allow the game to be run on other devices, such as a PC, without anyone having to pay for it. If we look at it as simple backward compatibility, without having to recompile the games, perhaps the licenses are still valid. But no matter how much Microsoft wants, a PC it's not exactly a new Xbox...

@PsBoxSwitchOwner As far as I understood, shadow drops have worked really well for Microsoft (usually), so I wouldn't be surprised to see another one in the January/February developers preview.

Anyway, I don't know if I would consider this Skyrim a shadow drop. I see it as simply the expected free update for those who already had it on the first Switch.

In my opinion, this model is not worth it. The Ally X is the interesting one, but that model is currently sold out.

@dskatter I suppose that's why they do it; it's a small investment to gain more visibility and perhaps improve sales of the game.

I wish they would do the same with Indiana Jones, although when a game is designed to be played in first person, it's difficult to modify it to third person and have everything work properly.

@dreadful Indeed, I have the same impression, the market is oversaturated. Either you do something very special, or your studio will most likely end up closing.

Xbox Series S is significantly more powerful than Switch 2, so it's to be expected that games will run better on it. Even so, Switch 2 has some interesting tricks up its sleeve, such as DLSS.

In any case, since I built my PC, I have the impression that all consoles are quite weak, even the most powerful ones leave a lot to be desired compared to a good PC. Today, I think consoles are all for an audience that is not looking for the best in visual quality.

For me, it could be useful for generating achievement guides, for example. I often look for guides to help me clear achievements when I play a game for the second time, and it's sometimes difficult to find accurate information.

But this is only if they manage to make it work well. Currently, AI tends to imagine erroneous information when it's scarce, and it could be even worse.