On your side by side, isn't the green one from last gen, and the current one is the white logo on black background?

@FatGuyInLilCoat Phil did not think Sony or Nintendo were going to put their games on Xbox. The very idea of that is beyond hilarious.

Not seeing a bullet point about firing the incompetent Aaron Greenberg and bringing back edgy marketing from the peak of the brand.

@FatGuyInLilCoat disagree completely and you can find comments from me years ago saying what happened to Phil would happen. Before the 4 games announcement he was a lame duck. He was kept on board as the fall guy while all the bad news kept coming. Literally said it would happen, and it's exactly what happened. Satya and Amy's dogsh** decisions like buying Activision and going multi platform laid on his shoulders and people would just go with it. Years later here we are.

GOLF WITH YOUR FRIENDS 2 YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

@Evilinsane is this satire, lmao.

I'm paid up until July and then have another year from Phil himself so I admittedly haven't looked closely at prices in a while. But for some reason I thought when Ultimate went to $30, premium was introduced at $20. It's kinda welcome "news" to me that I was misremembering and that premium is only $15. I think that's an ok price - the original price of ultimate.

@GeminiX53

It's the exact thing you asked for. I quoted it. Move goalposts wherever you want, I'll be right here where we started still having a laugh my man.

It's the exact thing you asked for.

Now make up some new argument.

Almost none. ABK was bought for its mobile stable, and MS attempting to open their own mobile storefront to compete with Google and Apple. All momentum on this has seemingly stalled after their lawsuits and from what I can tell no one seems to be talking about it. More people play CoD on mobile than on PC, PS, and Xbox combined. Candy Crush, Hearthstone, Diablo Immortal, etc. CoD on game pass is an afterthought in that $69B purchase. Xbox in general is an afterthought. We know from the FTC trial Phil did not target ABK, Amy Hood did to redirect the gaming division to mobile which she sees as valuable and a growth space vs consoles which she does not.

This is genius! Remove the day one AAA titles... reduce the price... maybe even give it its own tier name - something like "Xbox Game Pass Premium?" I think you're really on to something here! Microsoft, hire this man!

I know you've been arguing about "first party," but I think the more interesting conversation is about the word console. If this thing runs multiple storefronts and/or has OEMs making them, it's a PC imo.

I didn't expect this but it's extremely welcome. I haven't played a Call of Duty game since the first one on Xbox 360 - even after they became available for free to me as part of game pass.

Mt Rushmore of game devs no matter what internet commenters spew

This should be packaged in a fanny pack.

Sorry UK people I know that means something else there.

The only ex playstation exec I would want to hear from is Kevin Butler.

Everything exclusive is the only path where Xbox survives. Anyhing else and Microsoft just becomes a publisher and possibly keeps the Xbox name around as a cruel joke.

I don't understand how anything she implies she is tackling here isn't already solved for next gen, where it was planned years before her arrival to scrap Xbox and just have Helix pay PC games.

An I misreading this?

@Balaam_ whatever controller you are using has cheap toy battery life compared to my Xbox controller with Eneloop Pros.

Never got around to Revenge of the Savage Planet. I enjoyed the first one, wish I had the time to play the sequel, would have been fun co-op with my wife.

I got one of these years ago but haven't seen one since.

@Fiendish-Beaver I think timed exclusives are a total folly. There are very rare exceptions, like FH5 on Playstation. But FH5 is a generational game, the single highest rated video game of its year.

Playstation tried timed exclusives (to PC after the window). All signs point to them retreating from this strategy back to full exclusives. Why? Because it's lose/lose.

The point of exclusives is to prop up your platform by having things, you know, exclusive to it. When everyone knows your games are coming out elsewhere later, it's not exclusive. You lose nearly everything you gain from making a game exclusive. It's not a game you can't play elsewhere - it's a play early perk.

On the other side, the idea is that you are going to pick up sales on the competing platform. Unfortunately the competing platform sales always suffer for two reasons. The first is the hype has died. All your advertising from a year ago is a distant memory. People don't care about the game anymore. Additionally, among some pockets of people who might have otherwise bought the game, there is resentment - why wasn't this on my platform to start? I'm getting sloppy seconds?

I have always felt this way, and from the start of Xbox's downfall, told people that if there is a period of timed exclusives for Xbox games it will be a very temporary window, and games will go to Playstation day 1 as soon as possible. Xbox will not advertise games for a platform with 20 million people, and then release it on a platform with 90 million people a year later. There's no universe where it's the long term plan. You go full exclusive, or you go multi platform, there's no middle ground win for a platform holder. The recent developments with Sony have just made my beliefs here concrete.

I do want to be clear that I don't think MS is going exclusive again. I am pretty sure Xbox is dead. But if they wanted to get back in the game, it would be expensive, just like the original Xbox. That's why I said it would be like starting over. To answer your question are there enough Xbox gamers to buy games? Probably not. Were there in 2001? No. You're in the phase where you need to spend a ton of money to build market share. I don't see them doing it. But that's what it would take.

@Fiendish-Beaver Yeah I don't think we were on leaderboards or anything that I remember but we mastered all the maps, I'm sure it's the game we played most as a group. The game really went from OK at launch to an all timer after all the changes and IMO it's the first one to surpass Gears 2 horde for me. Some of the launch stuff was pretty funny though, all those 4 JD + engineer runs where rounds lasted .5 seconds, stupid but fun. But of all the many changes, bringing back frenzy was the most needed. I hope E-Day comes out of the gate swinging this time.

Hopefully more than a few of those 30 minutes are dedicated to horde mode!

I know why they had to do it, but I feel like all this pre reveal chatter is going to hurt Helix's hype in the long run.

@Fiendish-Beaver I t think that's a fine point, and sort of reframes the entire scenario though. If that is where we are at and Xbox is dead (I do agree with this), then exclusives shouldn't even be discussed. The only thing I can think of comparable would be Valve making Half Life Alyx exclusive, bit that's 1 game and they were trying to push a niche product, not wind one down.

But if we are going to talk about exclusives (and I don't personally see this happening, like you I'm one of the OG doomers here), then you are talking about spending a lot of money, and you wouldn't do that for no reason. It would be part of an enormous push.

@Fiendish-Beaver I'm not comparing Forza on Playstation vs Forza on Xbox. I'm comparing the gain from selling games (including Forza) on Playstation to the loss of pure profit they get from having a dominant platform and taking 30% from every 3rd party game sold on it. That's why I specifically quoted that section.

I think Microsoft will choose to continue to put their games on PlayStation even if that hurts sales of the Helix because I believe the sales of their games will bring in more revenue than they lose as a consequence of selling fewer Helix's.

This is what I disagree with. Every Helix not sold is a person not in the MS ecosystem. That's a person not buying all their 3rd party games on Xbox. That's a person not buying all their microtransactions on Xbox. 30% of GTA sales, 30% of GTA online microtransations. 30% of Roblox microtransactions. That list is endless. All of that is the best kind of money, risk free, pure profit. And my point was that in my estimation, what they've lost by selling out their ecosystem, going from 90M to 20M customers, is a much bigger loss than what they're gaining. (and to be clear, I don't think they're going to hit anything close to 20M next gen). And the only way to get back on top of that mountain is by taking the losses and making everything exclusive. Yes, they would be in the red. They would basically be a newcomer in the industry again. Breaking in is hard an expensive. That's where Xbox is at.

This is a difficult conversation to have in text and in a news comments section because it's not a simple A vs B, it's a chain of events looking backward and looking forward.

Are they high with these prices LOL

. I don't think this is true. I don't believe being a 3rd party publisher is more desirable than being a platform owner that just sits back and collects 30% of game sales as pure profit with no risk.

If this rumor is true (and being from Jez, I doubt it) then that would all but confirm I'm right. Microsoft's path to Xbox reclaiming its spot as a relevant console would be VERY expensive, and they sure as hell won't do it for the love of the game. They would do it because it's potentially more profitable.

Think about how much money they are probably in the red vs Xbox 360's almost 90m sold. 30% on the gta games, the mass effects, etc. 30% on all the dlc with that enormous customer base. Vs what, 70% of their Forza sales on Playsation?

I see their transition to 3rd party as a sad surrender, not some kind of more profitable 4D chess victory.

Lol, no CoD or Forza WHILE WERE IN THE PIE IN THE SKY RUMOR PHASE.

What a total waste of everyone's time.

Hey, we might bring back exclusives - but just the games no one wants. Hifi Rush and South of Midnight type games will be Xbox exclusive again, but not Forza. Incredible how this company can be so incompetent.

Man, I wish we had concrete numbers to see exactly how abysmally Xbox and Game Pass are doing. They bled out 3 million subscribers between 2022 and 2024, and things weren't even THAT bad at that point. I think under 30 million subs is easy money, and they could even be under 25 million at this point.

The amount that GTA is disruptive to the industry is incredible. Rockstar truly stands alone.

Loved both but I spent much more time in 5 than 4 so that's my measuring stick for which one I liked more.

I did miss launching into orbit at every roundabout in 4.

This would be wonderful if it undid the price hikes - but we all know it won't.

Nothing negative, but nothing has got me excited. Nothing that tells me Xbox isn't being sunset. How about an entirely new dashboard that doesn't focus on ads? We used to get those several times a generation. New color achievement pop-ups... These would be acceptable minor patch notes in between major updates like we used to get.

The venn diagram of people who have Series S as their primary console and people who watch Digital Foundry is 2 circles that do not intersect at any point.

The sad fact is we're on borrowed time if we get anything but exclusives.

HDR dashboard guy is my Twitter spirit animal. I've been banging that damn drum since the beginning.

Can't wait to get sucked back into this game with my buddies.

I was playing Towerborne with my daughter and when she got an achievement the notification was pink. Kinda neat but not an Xbox is saved" moment, lol.

Just making up a bunch of crap? FH5 has 3x-4x the players that FH4 has on Steam both currently and peak over the last 24 hours. FH5 is the 13th most played game on Xbox, FH4 nowhere to be found.

I can't tell if this is massively overconfident incompetence or just decent trolling, but either way it's unwelcome.

Rechargeable AAs for me, nothing beats Eneloop Pros.

Endless Legend was a very good game, actually all the endless games are. I was just playing Dungeon of the Endless the other day. Wish I had time for this one.

Original Xbox, not hamstring by planned obsolescence. However the disc drives are total a** and you'll probably need to replace the original.

To answer the question in the title, no I do not remember call of the sea.

@Indicus I really should check out the Mercs DLCs, I've heard they're great. I loved both of the Clans DLCs.

M2AF this reminds me of much better days

I've been more of a PC gamer most of my life but of day 1 consoles I want to say every Sega console minus Saturn, Xbox, and Series X.

Probably won't get to it due to a lack of time unless the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. I enjoyed the base game, but not anything I'd ever return to (in that form).

Sounds like everyone who bought King of Meat is getting a refund. Imagine thinking that is cheaper than a simple end of life plan like releasing a dedicated server mode when the game shuts down. Ross Scott doing the Lord's work with the Stop Killing Games initiative. And things are picking up steam fast now, UFC-Que Choisir suing Ubisoft in France is terrific news.