Kevw2006

@JayJ That's because critics give balanced reviews based on the overall package and most users seem to think a game can only either be a 0-1 or a 9-10 and will give a negative review because of a single feature they don't like. That and review bombing is a thing. I'm sure you think Starfield deserved all those 0-1 user scores it got...

@Cikajovazmaj Absolutely spot on there. The microtransactions in GT7 are that insignificant that I forget they're even there until someone brings up the review comment. If a game must have microtransactions then it's definitely the way to do them.

@Darude84 I get a feeling a lot of people just skip the actual review and just look at the score.

The FTC seem to be on the warpath at the moment, going after Amazon too.

@BAMozzy I don't see anyone in here saying that they are okay with Embracer or Tencent snapping up devs and IPs either. Much the opposite in fact as Embracer are often cited as an example of how too much consolidation can be a bad thing with how they have managed their studios lately.
Although if you do need a reason as to why people seem less resistant to it then it's simply down to the fact that Embracer and Tencent are far more likely to keep things multiplatform. It's probably why there is far less scrutiny on their acquisitions by the regulators too. Would you not rather Tencent owned Insomniac than Sony, for example?

@ZuneTattooGuy Are you saying your internet has never gone down for a period of time, not even once?
I don't particularly have a problem with an always online requirement requirement and if my internet does have an outage I'd just deal with it and play or do something else, but to suggest that the consumer is at fault is just wrong.

@iplaygamesnstuff I highly doubt the FTC would blame Microsoft for it if it wasn't actually their fault. Microsoft's lawyers would have a field day with that and they would be quick to counter the FTC's claim with proof it was them.

@Kaloudz Completely agree, there's no way that it was intentional if it was from Microsoft's end. I know most of it is outdated now but so much information being revealed to competitors won't be helpful for them at all. And if it was at Microsoft's end then someone is in BIG trouble.

@Tharsman My take from that letter was that they are very much in favour of hostile takeovers, just not on this occasion. If it's not something your business would do as a general practice you wouldn't even mention it.

@Kaloudz That was misreported, it wasn't a 1000% increase in sales. It was a 1000% rise up the Amazon chart.

@Fiendish-Beaver Starfield was never going to release on PlayStation as soon as Microsoft bought Bethesda. We already know that one of the first things they did was put a stop to development of Redfall on PlayStation. Nothing Sony or any regulators did had any effect on that.
Speculation will exist as long as Microsoft don't confirm publicly that TES:VI is exclusive, I don't see what they get by not confirming it at this time.

@Lup I'm not exactly sure why you're laughing that, it's quite refreshing that Sony are so transparent about the exclusivity period for games as most others don't do that and make games appear like they are full exclusives.
Bear in mind it's not for Sony to announce releases on other platforms either so they are pretty much providing all the information that they can.

@Cashews Usually when a company suffers an increase in costs the increase usually ends up getting passed on to the consumer. Whether it's increased prices, less games available through subs or just lower quality games, one way or another it's the consumer that always ends up taking the hit.

@Fiendish-Beaver I think that Spiderman 2 will have the same problem you mentioned TotK has. I've already seen a few comments from people saying it just looks like a big expansion too.

Let's not pretend that PS exclusives don't get review bombed either. Fanboys aside reading through the reviews it seems that the mentality from many these days is that a game is either a 9-10 or a 0-1 and there's no in between. It's fair enough to have issues with a game or it not be for you but scores should still be awarded fairly based on the quality of the game.

@HonestHick My bad, I was sure I read an article that said it was for both but you are indeed correct it is just the series X. However, on doing a bit of additional digging it seems that it is being slightly misreported as it isn't a 1,000% increase in units sold, it is that it has jumped up 1,000% on the sales rankings.

@FatalBubbles The 1tb Series S just released too so there was likely people holding off and waiting for that to release and others that upgraded. Although I did notice that Series X was much more widely available on Amazon so MS probably ensured there was a large drop of stock in preparation for Starfield releasing.

@HonestHick Don't forget that game pass users that bought the premium edition upgrade also had early access so not every one of those 2 million players were paying $100. It was only on Steam where every player would have bought the premium edition.

@Darylb88 Stats can be skewed and game pass absolutely does that. For example 1m players sounds like an impressive number but considering there are 25-30+ million game pass subscribers that have access to the game at no extra cost but only 1 million were playing it, that means that 24 million plus players didn't even bother to try it out.
For clarity Starfield has had a very successful launch, I'm only giving an example on how easily you can put a twist on stats to change the picture.

@GunValkyria Most players won't, but there are always those out there that will. Just look at the woman that flew for 7 hours to find Pluto.

@Dsswoosh To be fair most other games that have invisible barriers those barriers are usually neatly hidden by things that look like the edge of a map and not just randomly in the middle of a wide open area that it looks like you should easily be able to walk across.

@Kaloudz The last time I checked Amazon UK the series X was showing last one available when you went to buy it and now they seem to be much more readily available so I assume that MS have quite smartly dropped a considerable amount of stock in preparation for Starfield releasing. The only real outlier is people upgrading to the new 1tb series S from the old one might skew the figures slightly but either way it's still a console sale.

@SacredPYRO I find that the lower scoring reviews can often be more worth reading than the higher scoring ones as they will often go into more details about the issues that particular reviewer had with the game and you can decide if that's something that would bother you too. A 10/10 review that glosses over issues isn't overly helpful. But if those issues didn't bother the reviewer to mark it down then that's fair enough too.

@Kaloudz You haven't lived until you've tried a battered mars bar. It's so wrong but tastes so good.

@Cashews Or they just start dishing out suspensions for griefing and false reports.

@BAMozzy The main issue I have with using number of players as a metric is that without any sort of context to that data it's meaningless. I could download a game and play it for five minutes and decide I don't like it and then delete it. If that five minutes I've played are counted then the results are skewed. If a game is available as part of a subscription service then I am far more likely to download or stream it just to try it out and see if I like it. Now I'm fully aware that I could also do this when I'm buying a game outright too but if I'm paying a premium price for a game then I'm also much more likely to stick with it and maybe end up getting into it than I would if I've downloaded it for no extra cost. Until we start getting figures stating that X amount of players have played for over y amount of hours then number of players played is a worthless figure.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner Following this announcement I'm beginning to wonder if they didn't believe they were going to be able to fix the problem so it was either drop split screen for series S or no Xbox release at all.

A sensible move but I think this will be a very rare occurrence, if it even ever happens again at all. It's likely only because BG3 has reviewed so high and been so popular that MS will have eased their stance. Larian going on record and stating that the Series S was the issue probably forced MS's hand a bit too.

@Lightning720 Ah so you're in agreement that making a baseless claim without any meaningful evidence to back it up is"utter nonsense", then my job here is done. Sometimes a nonsense statement needs an equally nonsense response to make a point.
Funnily enough I have seen quite a few people on this very site claim that Sony did pay the developers off and even claim that they requested BG3 be delayed on PS to coincide with Starfield. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But I don't really see what it would achieve.

@Lightning720 That's going on the assumption that other games haven't been delayed on all platforms and not just on Xbox.
That's exactly what my whole point is, it's just as baseless to say almost all games have released on Series S without any issues as it is to say that Starfield was delayed because of Series S because we just don't have enough information. But in that example you can't say with any more certainty that Bethesda didn't have problems with Series S as I can say that they did.
One thing I do know for sure is that Microsoft are never going to admit that Series S has caused them problems on any first party games. Both Halo and Forza have had split screen dropped after originally being announced which seems like an awful coincidence following the BG3 issues but Series S will never be cited as a reason for it.

@Lightning720 Have they though? Other games have been delayed with vague reasons given, was starfield's delay partly due to Bethesda struggling with Series S? We'll never know because they wouldn't admit it but that doesn't mean it wasn't. It's only because Larian came out and said they had an issue on series S that we knew it was a problem there, we have no idea whether it has actually been a problem anywhere else so can't say almost all games have released without issue.

They won't drop the Series S for this generation as that would be a PR nightmare for them. However, I don't see them going down the same route again for future generations. Phil's comments in his interview lead me to believe that it's more than just a couple of developers that have had problems with the S. If delays to Xbox versions become a more common occurrence the deeper into the generation we get then I can't see Microsoft risking it happening all over again.

If people are having to resort to complaining about something as trivial as a menu screen then you're probably doing something right.

@PhileasFragg I doubt it's being widely used anymore. Companies don't usually do these things when there are millions of people still accessing it, it's normally when it's not really worthwhile keeping it running anymore.

@aredde2203 I'm well aware of what the word means thanks but you've missed the point of what I was saying. I was responding to a poster that was claiming that the Xbox version was superior when it's highly likely they haven't even played both versions to be able to make a fair assessment on that.

@XboxTheBestBox It's because of the diminished state that they went so heavy on the b/c to try and give Xbox another selling point. If they decide it hasn't been successful or worth it then they'll drop any further investment in it. Microsoft are a business and they are only going to put any further effort into it if they feel like they're getting something out of it.

@XboxTheBestBox That will depend on if Microsoft feel they have got enough return from the investment that have already put into it and whether enough people are making use of backwards compatibility to make it worth their while. They aren't going to put a great deal of effort into it if say less than 5% of their user base are actually making any use of it.

@PopularCorpse None of the points in my post have anything to do with the developer at all. Unless Rockstar are somehow mysteriously responsible for hardware sales and console power and also made the comparison video from the article.
My points aren't aven against Microsoft either for a matter of fact.
I never disputed that Xbox had released more powerful consoles, I just said that the difference was so negligible that you could hardly call it dominant. Also note more powerful and superior are two different things, more powerful is factual but superior is a matter of opinion.

@Romans12 Dominant hardware? Such a strange perspective when Xbox hasn't outsold PlayStation in a single generation. Even PS3 eventually overtook the 360. If you're talking purely about performance the differences are that negligible that calling it dominant is laughable. Also the video above is comparing the Xbox One X to the base PS4 instead of the PS4 Pro so not even a fair comparison.

I get that they are under quite a lot of pressure at the moment and he's probably fed up of being bombarded with such questions, but his responses come across as really rude and arrogant.

@Romans12 Got a source for those almost £50 million game pass subscribers? And since you compared it solely to the highest tier of PS plus then that will obviously need to be £50m game pass ultimate subscribers of course so no counting gold being rebranded game pass core and banding those subscribers in.

@Fenbops I agree, I'm sure Microsoft's lawyers would be all over them if there was any hint that they were lying about the Series S causing and issue and Sony had just paid them off. They just wouldn't stand for it.

@Fragslayer That isn't strictly true, it is steam deck verified but not with split screen co-op enabled. In order to play split screen you need to trick it into thinking you're not playing on steam deck, and reports from those that have tried it suggest there's a reason it's disabled on the verified version.

@Moonglow You know what also isn't mentioned on the BG3 website? Any reference to an Xbox version. Why? Because it hasn't been officially announced yet. You can't delay a game that hasn't even been formally announced yet.
Larian have done nothing wrong, they have simply made a PC game and then looked into what other systems they could port it to. PS5 was clearly an easier port that they were able to do quicker as they only have one set of spec to work towards. There hasn't been any mention of a Switch version but that doesn't mean that they haven't looked into it, or are actively working on a port.
It's MS that have added an additional hurdle for developing for Xbox by having two sets of spec to meet and demanding feature parity across those two sets of spec.
We don't even know if this is something that hasn't happened before, part of the reason Starfield was delayed for a year could have been due to them having problems with the Series S. MS or Bethesda aren't exactly likely to come out and say it was but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a reason. There's plenty that goes on behind the scenes that we're completely unaware of.

@Moonglow Not going to dispute game pass possibly having a bigger impact but is game pass ultimate really a more popular service than PS plus essential? Last estimates show game pass as having between 25-30m subscribers and the last stated figures for ps plus were 47.7m subscribers. Bear in mind that Battlefield is only available on game pass through EA play, which requires ultimate so not all 25-30m subscribers will have that and it was available on regular ps plus that ALL 47.7m ps plus subscribers have access to.

@Moonglow It was just one of the regular monthly games on plus so once it's added to your library it's yours as long as you subscribe bit you only had one month to claim it.

@Somebody The PS5 version was delayed by a week for further optimisation as they are aiming for 60fps. I have my doubts that it's even going to run particularly well on it if that is the case

@BAMozzy Baldur's Gate is first and foremost a PC game, it's been in early access on PC since October 2020 and the PS5 version was only announced earlier this year. It's likely that it was developed for PC and is then subsequently being ported over for console. When they started development PC is probably all they had in mind and consoles were an afterthought.
It should also be noted that it hasn't even been formally announced for Xbox as yet, only just that there was no exclusivity clause preventing it and it was something they were looking into.

@Somebody The MS developers were stated to be assisting when the problem was first reported. It sounds like even with their assistance they still haven't been able to fully resolve the problem as yet.

@Somebody They also stated that they are a fairly small developer so don't have the resources to work on multiple platforms all at once. If I was guessing I would say that when they came across the co-op issue they diverted most of their focus on getting the PC and PS5 versions released and then they can place more focus on the Xbox version after they release. I saw a quote somewhere that said they had a small team still working on the Xbox version.