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@jFug I’m gonna buy it on PS5 just out of spite (and Dualsense features tbh).

Hopefully they don’t close the studio before they push the update.

Xbox is dead, the sooner we accept it the better, they’ll keep making consoles that nobody will buy for a time (just like Surface devices) until they get tired and their platform is so irrelevant that they’ll pull the plug overnight just like they did with Windows Phone.

And btw, Microsoft Gaming isn’t going to last long with these type of decisions, they could end up ruining Bethesda, Activision, and Blizzard even more alongside Xbox just like they did with Nokia.

MS really is all-in on their tutorial on “how to ruin and utterly destroy your brand in less than 6 months!”

Well of course, of all Microsoft studios’ portfolio Tango was the least deserving of a closure, and I also think that Xbox fans are just discouraged with the brand, it really has been disappointment after disappointment since this generation started, I can’t believe what I’m saying but we were better off at this point of the Xbox One generation than we are currently.

This generation for Xbox has been disappointment after disappointment after disappointment…

Hi-Fi Rush is the best Xbox game since Sunset Overdrive imo, the one that has received more critical acclaim by a long shot, and what does MS do? Empower the studio to encourage them to keep making great games? Nah. Remove the exclusivity, treat it like a low-tier game and close down the entire studio. F*ck this Microsoft.

Yeah because we’ve never got in a situation like that with Microsoft right? /s

In fact since last year there’s an ongoing miscommunication with MS as Xbox is indeed moving multiplatform while claiming it’s only a few games when we all know there’s more coming if not all.

Having basically 4 publishers I’d expect so!

The fact this game comes out in less than 3 weeks and there’s not even ONE advertisement for it is just baffling.

I honestly think Microsoft should let go the entire marketing department for Xbox as they’ve been failing or not even trying for over a decade, just let the Activision team run the marketing for all Xbox, they’ve proven to have wildly successful marketing campaigns every single year when a CoD drops.

@Ricky-Spanish Absolutely no, I owned several Windows Phones and it was much better than Android phones at that time specially on mid-range phones, the problem with it was that it didn’t get support from major developers starting with Google itself, not having YouTube, Facebook, and several must-have apps from that time really hurt the platform.

So when Microsoft started porting their own apps to Android and iOS without getting nothing in return it eventually killed the platform as customers saw no point in getting a WP as their must-have apps weren’t there but they were on Android/iOS plus all the MS apps that we’re previously exclusive to Windows Phone, exactly the same dilemma we’re getting at with Xbox right now, why should a customer get an Xbox when it doesn’t have Sony’s must-have exclusives but the PS5 has them plus MS own games, why should a customer choose the platform with less games? And yes I know Game Pass is a factor but it doesn’t seem to be driving console sales at all.

@Ricky-Spanish It won’t matter if those consoles don’t sell (and they won’t cause all games will be eventually released on all other platforms), we’re literally reliving Windows Phone yet again, in the last few years Microsoft swore multiple times they had multiple phones and software in development and that Windows Phone wasn’t going anywhere, then they started doing things like releasing MS Office for Android and iOS (when it previously was Windows Phone exclusive), obviously hurting their platform and getting nothing in return as Google nor Apple launched any of their apps on WP, exactly the same thing happening to Xbox porting games and receiving nothing in return, that situation dragged for years until they literally cancelled everything overnight.

Microsoft’s actions speak much louder that their words, and their actions are screaming Xbox customers’ “you don’t matter, the moment we get more money from selling games on other platforms ours is done for”.

It’s good for the games and players but if this ends up becoming a successful strategy you can bet every single Microsoft gaming title will eventually be on PlayStation.

@GeeEssEff You’re tripping, it may give you more points for buying things but there’s almost no way to earn points without buying stuff, only a couple 50 points campaigns each month and only if you have PS+, it’s nowhere near comparable to MS Rewards.

It ain’t what it used to be but there just isn’t a better Rewards program to get free games or sub, my latest use case for my points is to use them for one month of Ubisoft+ or Game Pass when there’s a notable game launch, I essentially get to play those games day one for free and later buy them on sale if I liked them.

@Yorozayu Because it’s real, I admit the concept of it sounds absurd, but it’s true, most gaming journalist have preference towards PlayStation or just dislike Microsoft/Xbox in general, and it shows in both game reviews and journalist opinions basically wishing Xbox was no more, just look at how many of them literally made up rumors about Starfield and other games coming to PS5 and leaving the Xbox platform for dead mere weeks ago.

Let’s face the facts, the game will be amazing, like I’m 99.9% sure it will be a 9/10 experience at the very least, but it’s an Xbox game and people already have a very different expectation.

I’ve read TONS of people expecting Hellblade to be God of War and anyone who played the first game knows this is just not the case, so the game is going to get hate for not being what they expected, get hate for being a rather shorter experience, get hate for being announced 5 years ago, get hate for being a digital-only game, and of course, get hate just for being an Xbox game; none of which affects the game’s quality but you know gaming journalists and the Xbox tax.

Played for more than 2 years at least once a week with 360+ hours played but when they dropped the seasons I dropped the game entirely, I was very patient with it but this meant the devs were moving on to something else so did I.

What happened to this game is just sad, the gameplay is easily the best of any modern FPS and yet the lack of content at launch irreversibly killed it, it should’ve been in the oven for at least another 6 months and it’d have launched decently, but I have no idea how they planned to drop it a year earlier when it released with so little content.

And while the campaign is fine, they left it in a cliffhanger that I’m not sure we’ll ever see the next chapter of this story instead of pivoting to something else entirely, just like what happened from Halo 5 to Infinite (as 5’s story was just BS).

I honestly expect it by Summer 2026, it wouldn’t be a Rockstar game without a delay, and for what will be the biggest game of all time they should take as long as they need.

It’s not my type of game but I’ll give a try.

Games, games, games, in two generations Microsoft hasn’t been able to replicate the feeling of getting so many good and some exclusive games on Xbox, those years in which we got Halo 3, Mass Effect, Gears of War and Bioshock have been the best time ever at Xbox.

If Hi-Fi Rush has very good use of the Dualsense I might pick that up.

@GuyinPA75 They literally just said CoD will come to Game Pass day one, we just don’t know if that’ll begin this or next year due to a previous deal with Sony and Activision.

@BacklogBrad If I’m not mistaken the marketing deal already expired, meaning Microsoft can market CoD for Xbox beginning this year (takes me back to 360 days), however the agreement for keeping CoD off Game Pass day one is still in place until the first day of next year. Correct me if I wrong tho.

@Zenszulu Maybe not in 2024 due to the agreement with Sony, but I’m pretty sure that expires on January 1st 2025, so maybe 2024 CoD will arrive on Game Pass a couple of months after launch but 2025 CoD will be day one.

No, Ubisoft titles get insanely cheap very fast so it’s always better to wait a couple of months and buy the game or if you REALLY want it just sub for a month and buy the game 6 months later for no more than $20.

This just proves that gaming journalists are a**holes when it comes to Xbox, they made up all those rumors just to make it seem as the platform was getting phased out when it’s just porting 4 games to other platforms.

However, Phil never said they’re going to stop at 4 games and I do fear that every time a game gets announced the question will inevitably come up if it’s going to arrive on PlayStation/Nintendo.

Honestly the game itself ain't so bad, for me it's around 6-7 having already finished it, however it's definitely not what anyone could've expected from the same studio that made the Arkham Trilogy.

@InterceptorAlpha And what about Xbox users who have invested hundred or thousands into Xbox hardware, games and services? We just f*ck ourselves?

Honestly my expectations are below zero at this point, I just wanna know what happens to my digital library.

@Lup Worse, like the Stadia library.

@Kaloudz Sure, keep telling users to spend hundreds of dollars on a console for a service to save on renting games that you can play on any other platform…

@Netret0120 Honestly you should before keep investing into this ecosystem.

@GtotheGrizzle We’ve been hearing the same thing for 5 years and we’re still far away from consoles or physical hardware being phased out for the cloud.
And even if that happens the same issue will translate to that market, why should I pay for Xbox cloud if PS cloud has more games (even Microsoft ones)?, with this move Microsoft isn’t giving up just in their console but their entire ecosystem.

@Kaloudz I will make you a very simple question, why should I and millions of Xbox users keep supporting and investing on the platform if the owner (MS) is not even willing to bet on it?

@Lup Until MS decides that they don’t need to keep Xbox around so your digital library will be stuck on a platform they’ll no longer support.
It’s not about games coming out on X o Y platform, it’s about them giving up on the Xbox platform.

@GtotheGrizzle Most subs from Game Pass come from Xbox consoles and if said consoles are not attractive to the public because it just has less games as the competition it will not sell subs either.

This is it for Xbox, I can’t genuinely believe that when they could’ve compete for real with a strong lineup of first-party games and they just give up their entire ecosystem for a quick buck selling games on other systems.

And make no mistake, even if Microsoft doesn’t have plans to end gaming hardware this WILL kill the platform, it already gets less games as both the other consoles and it’s only going to get much worse.

Microsoft’s incompetence really is sometimes so hard to believe, they’re essentially ‘Windows Phoning’ Xbox and some people here still wants to make it sound ok…

@Banjo- You really are very optimistic if you think that Xbox users will stick to the brand after Microsoft shows zero confidence in it…

Anyway, I do hope you’re right and I’m wrong but I really think this will be the beginning of the end for the Xbox brand and once it starts there’s no going back.

@Banjo- Right now in the current market conditions most third-parties do release on Xbox with some (big) exceptions, but with less interest from users and developers there’ll be a snowball effect that MS won’t be able to stop, for many developers there’s just won’t be any point in porting their game to Xbox where it’s gonna sell 3 copies, and Game Pass isn’t enough to keep a whole platform going as this generation has shown.

I don’t actually think MS wants to get rid of consoles but this move is a life sentence for their ecosystem even if they or you don’t currently realize it, the moment they announce just one single exclusive game losing the exclusivity it’s over, all the conversation for every single new Xbox game announced will be about when will it arrive on PlayStation or Nintendo, rather than hyping up the Xbox platform.

@Banjo- The problem isn’t about MS stop making consoles, is about dwindling support from third-parties moving forward, a problem that the Xbox platform already has but will be made much worse if they abandon exclusivity as the platform loses value and interest from users and developers alike.

This will only result in the Xbox being the console with less and less games while the PS5 will get every single game on the market including Microsoft ones, leaving us with no reason to support the Xbox platform.

I don’t think with this move Microsoft actually wants to get rid of Xbox, but they ARE effectively killing the platform even against their own expectations, this will have a snowball effect that MS won’t be able to control, there’ll be less interest from users and developers alike in the platform until it isn’t worth it to have the console around anymore, I’m not saying it’ll happen tomorrow or next week but the writing is on the wall right now.

Either way all of this is made 100x worse by the fact that no one at Microsoft dares to show their face right now.

@XboxistheBestBox That’s the thing, Xbox isn’t capitalizing in Sony’s mistakes, and with Jim Ryan they’ve made a lot, honestly I don’t see how they care about the consoles if they don’t have any type of marketing for the consoles (not even one single ad), if the OS and UI is still the same as Xbox One, if there’re broken things such as captures that they refuse to solve and so many other things that show how little Microsoft cares about the console itself.

They should focus way more on consoles as we are more than half the base of subscribers of Game Pass, which is the only metric they seem to care about, and tbh if they dropped their own hardware I wouldn’t subscribe to Game Pass or use another Microsoft product/service ever again.

It’s honestly disheartening to see how little Microsoft cares about the Xbox hardware, seriously how tf are they expecting a decline when both Nintendo and Sony sell consoles as hot cakes and the generation has not even peaked?
How can they say this when GTA 6 is going to drive consoles like crazy next year, or as they now own CoD they could do a big marketing push for people to now associate the franchise directly to Xbox as in the 360 days.

Even if it isn’t their top priority there’re many ways to save this generation and at the very least sell more consoles than last gen, but Microsoft legitimately don’t care and I’m increasingly worried about having invested so much in the Xbox ecosystem, making me wonder if I should have gone with the PS5 as my main console instead…

Ugh until summer to get that mission? Seriously now we’re talking about an 18-month exclusivity for a mission? Smh…

Absolutely, the current controller just feels outdated compared to the Dualsense, it’s basically the same controller from 2013 with a few teaks, it’s time for a new one with modern features and hopefully quieter buttons as was rumored.

This was bound to happen after the merger but still disappointing to see, not even a month into 2024 and already 5000+ people have lost their job in the gaming industry…

I really hope we get at least one date, but honestly I'm not expecting any.

You know what? Xbox should get rid of being able to capture gameplay altogether because it’s such a stupidly convoluted disaster compared to any other platform, let’s just list the issues I can come up with:

• Captures are still based on the 2013 software for the Xbox One, meaning it’s dated in so many ways.
• You can’t capture more than a minute of gameplay, just impossible unless you connect a specially formatted drive.
• If you connect a drive then the captures won’t save anywhere else, and the type of file is not compatible with many other devices.
• Pictures and videos in HDR get saved in another type of file that’s also not compatible with most devices, so they’re useless outside the Xbox network.
• Captures get deleted from your internal storage and now also from the Network, so if you don’t have a OneDrive account with plenty of storage (paying MS yet another sub) there’s no way to backup your captures unless you do the whole mess with a USB Drive.
• Now you can’t upload whatever you want to the Xbox network even if you’re only keeping it for yourself because Xbox will analyze it and ban you if they find something they don’t like.

I know consoles are no longer the priority for Microsoft but they should have better software for it, with this and the cloud saving issues we’re still having the same issues we had back with the Xbox One, as if they haven’t learned anything at all.

@OldGamer999 Just accept it, Xbox will never sell consoles as much as Sony or Nintendo, it’s not even a goal for them anymore, their strategy goes beyond selling consoles but that doesn’t mean they’ll abandon consoles either.

I don’t know about you but I get excited to know more about the games I want to play, not about the console sales…