MinervaX76

Makes total sense. I honestly was expecting the return of the $1 deal to be a “seasonal” thing to encourage growth during slow periods.

UBisoft was doing the same with their UBisoft+, only they put it in their fine print how long their $1 offer would last for (not long enough for the launch of AC: Mirage).

There are things we can accuse MS of being greedy about, but complaining about this $1 deal being only available then there are no strong new titles in the service is a rather entitled take. It’s bad enough that so many whine about not every damned game landing on the service. Now we going to whine that what is basically a free trial isn’t a permanent thing?

I bought:
My 360 specifically for GTA4
My XBOne X for Red Dead Redemption 2
My PSX for FF7
My PS2 for FFX
My N64 for Mario 64
My Wii U for Mario 3D World
My 3DS for Zelda Link Between Worlds

My Xbox Series X and PS4 are the only consoles I ever bought without any specific game in mind.

My PS3 was given to me as a gift, so was my Wii and Switch. My GameCube was a hand-me-down.

Edit:
My Atari 2600 was also a hand-me-down.
My NES was a Christmas gift, as was my SNES.

@GamingFan4Lyf Was mostly saying it because of Sekiro, that will technically come under MS umbrella once the ABK acquisition closes.

@Wheatly You are talking about the closing paragraph that links to a 2022 article when it was unknown how long the marketing agreement with Sony was. The Sony agreement is the quoted reason. Today we know "a number of years" ends one year post the launch of this year's Modern Warfare 3. It might actually end sooner if Sony manages, since they seem to want the full 30/70 split over the agreement now that MS will be the one getting the 80% cut (the higher royalties earned by ABK under the marketing agreement).

@abe_hikura And how different is that from Series X|S? It's the same code, each console simply runs with different profiles that enable/disable features, potentially lower res assets, etc, but the code is the exact same.

@GamingFan4Lyf

But it was published by Id Software. Raven Software was bought by Activision in 1997.

Having publishing rights does not automatically give the publisher ownership. For example, as part of the exclusivity deal, Dead Rising 3's publishing rights are on Microsoft's court. Capcom cant really get that single entry on PlayStation without MS agreement, and it's not like they didn't want to. They remastered every Dead Rising for PS4 except 3.

Sekiro is another game that comes to mind. Was published by Activision, but the IP is still owned by From Software. It's a game that will likely require additional negotiations to go into Game Pass, depending how the publishing contract was written. Basically, if the subscription service rights were not specifically written into the contract, they don't have those rights.

@Wheatly where did you read anyone claim CoD games would not come to GP for two years? When the whole thing started, Sony had the marketing rights for CoD for a couple of years. This is their last year.

Sony wanted to scrap that marketing deal, but given the timing its likely they got stuck with it. Either way, we are talking just one more year tops. Not as bad as having the game entirely skip the platform for a year, as it was with Deathloop and Ghostwire Tokyo.

@GamingFan4Lyf Raven Software never belonged to iD. As far as I understand, they were contracted to work on Quake 4, but Hexen and Heretic was their own doing. They did license the doom engine to make the game, but it was their game.

@GamingFan4Lyf it does not matter who developed it. Quake is an IP that belonged to iD and was owned by Zenimax/Bethesda.

Hexen as an IP is owned by ABK.

@abe_hikura

Larian was adament they wouldn't ship without coop on any platofrm and MS certain this was a tech problem with a tech solution.

Yet, they shipped the Steam Deck certified version without split screen coop. Any statement that they would not ship without coop on any platform likely was them saying they would not ship without it on Series X. So long a version of Xbox can have the feature, they will ship, just like non-Steam Deck PCs can run it fine.

@Wheatly

So now we can't even expect all first party titles day and date with retail release?

Phil is talking about the time from closing acquisition to finally being able to put their games on GP. Once dust settles, do expect all ABK games to start launching on GP day one (minus any early access anyone feels like whining about.)

@GamingFan4Lyf

Even still, not every Bethesda game is on Game Pass PC: Hexen and Heretic are still only available for purchase.

Although Bethesda has the publishing rights for Hexen and Heretic on PC, those rights very likely do not include the rights for subscription services.

Those games actually belong to Activision, having both companies under the Xbox banner means they might finally enter Game Pass.

I have a Series S and a Series X. The Series S is the one in a room where I would ever bother with split-screen coop. I still am perfectly cool with this direction.

The S is the equivalent of an undocked Switch, or undocked Steamdeck, and some features simply are too much to ask of the device.

That controller should make fans of the PlayStation “2d first” design happy.

@NEStalgia Highly disagree with that take. For years, even before they unveiled their streaming initiatives, MS has been talking about the power of the cloud as something that would help games. Streaming is the extreme implementation were everything, even graphic rendering, is offloaded to the cloud, but that’s just one application.

Remember when they were hyping Crackdown 3 and it’s “revolutionary” server side tech to offload physics processing to the cloud? It ended falling apart (in part because the owner of the tech was acquired mid development) but it was the biggest “power of the cloud” campaign I can recall in gaming.

I dare bet the Kojima cloud based project with Microsoft is similarly so. Not a streaming-only game, but a game with heavy focus on cloud based processing and offloading.

When we talk streaming, we are talking about game streaming. When we talk cloud, we mean anything that is offloading processing to remote servers. It just happens that streaming is one of those things.

@NEStalgia I understand if that’s what you mean, but that’s not what MS means at any level in their corporate structure and I deal with them on a daily basis.

Subscription services, server technologies on the backend, that’s the core of MS “cloud” infrastructure and strategy.

@NEStalgia they are not giving up on cloud. Cloud is a big umbrella and MS is all on that thing. They just don’t see much potential on the game streaming side of it. Multiplayer? Cloud saves? That stuff is still on their bag. You want to play CoD, buy it or subscribe to GP. Want to play it multiplayer? Then you need GamePass Core unless all you want is Warzone, either way, micro transaction revenue will come their way.

MS already stated the only part of the Xbox business that is not really turning a profit is actually the streaming stuff, at the end of the day.

@Kaloudz I don’t think they have the same rights as MS. In theory, UBisoft can sub-license to others, like Sony. MS can’t continue to sign streaming deals, thought the ones that were already signed will be honored.

So, if Netflix was to start streaming games tomorrow, UBisoft could in theory license to them CoD.

Isn’t the existing MGS2 and 3 HD via BC running at 4k?

@Kaloudz I’m sure the permission was part of the agreement itself. I don’t think UBisoft has its own cloud streaming backend so the game will likely still be using xcloud to stream the games, you just will end up being able to do so regardless if you only pay for GPU, or UBisoft+ (to play multiplayer you still will require either GPU ot GPC).

Too tired to look this up but I called this!!! I said many times that should they be forced to divest some rights in the UK, they would sell those rights to UBisoft!

I think this is a good counter to Sonys plates. I recall stating a while back that Xbox should at least make official custom decals, but this sounds cooler.

Now… where is the Forza one?

@mousieone that’s why I ask, I don’t know and was too lazy to look it up. Just remember it was a former blizzard employee.

Is this the same clown that said all YouTubers covering Xbox news were paid by Microsoft?

I know a lot of people are exited for this but as someone that has not played the first one, I’m very indifferent and a lot more excited about Alone in the Dark.

I have no titles of the top of my head but know that some BC games I already own (that can run on One|Series) I had to go buy on the 360 storefront, so I’m sure there are at least a handful (unless those got added more recently.)

@Kaloudz What i would like is means for a banned account to permanently lose access to online. As if, I own x game, and i get banned from online, it wont be fixed because I sign up with another account and keep the game there.

I think that could be done easily by banning any console that is set as Main/Primary Console of a banned account from jumping online, or any console that currently has a banned account signed-in.

By online I just mean online multiplayer/matchmaking.

@Kaloudz I don’t think anyone should lose their convent over behavior. Losing access to play online is punishment enough.

@Kaloudz I thought that at first (too lenient) but sounds like different offenses come with higher number it strikes. Maybe hate speech can jump you from zero to 4 (maybe) while quitting matches because you loosing or feeding might get you a single strike.

@Kaloudz same. UBisoft has a nice list of games coming up soon, if they keep it up a steady flow of games and premium DLC, I might actually keep my UBISOFT+ subscription going indefinitely. If not, we’ll I can always cancel and renew when new games show up!

My one worry is I might not be done with Starfield even after a month!

For me it’s a means to resume playing games if I don’t have immediate access to a console, or to try a game off game pass before downloading it. In those cases, I always ended up streaming from the console itself.

Don’t think anything would make me stream more games other than losing access to my console for long periods of time. Like mid-move, during some long trip, etc.

I guess i would stream more if my purchased library was also available, not just GP titles.

But disappointed. Yes, we can play the BC version, but BC has some limitations, like, BC games tend to have a habit of quitting when they go to the background (because the 360 would quit games when you went to the dashboard).

Still good we can play the game, but I would have appreciated a native port.

@GamingFan4Lyf

While I'm certainly not all doom & gloom regarding the Series S, I do think Microsoft needs to rethink "feature parity at launch" requirements between Series X and Series S

They already allow for some variation in feature parity. The Series S is not required to have the same performance modes as the Series X, for instance, nor things like same level of detail in worlds. I could see them extending the list to things like "split screen" specifically at some point, but even then there is no telling if the publisher would be willing to do that. Some might still be stubborn, like all the publishers that insist on forcing 1440p games at 30fps on the Series S and refuse to sacrifice visual fidelity to offer 60fps.

@eduscxbox

By the way, Baldurs Gate 3 is playable on the weaker than Series S Steam Deck, and developer are trying to get it upgraded to Verified by Valve.

The Steam Deck version does not support split-screen.

@themightyant

You can't just leave all optimisation on lower powered systems to the last minute, assuming you will be able to get it to work on blind faith alone. They laid their own bed.

About a decade and a change ago I worked on an indie game, nothing big, very minor stuff, but the game was entirely developed and play-tested on a computer. Once the game was complete, naively we thought "OK now we just export this to mobile and ship it on iOS!!!" The idea was that we were going to wait until the last minute necessary to pay for Apple's dev program, and the Unity pro needed at the time to export to mobile.

Well, we did this and the game ran like at 4 frames per second on an iPhone 3Gs that was already a couple years old but still in wide enough usage to ignore. We had to spend 3 more months entirely re-implementing big chunks of the game systems to account for many unforeseen limitations. 3 more months might not sound like much, but this was a very small project, and it took about 4 months to develop. That nearly doubled development time. The issue was not that the target was weak, the issue was that we didn't take the target platforms into account from the get go.

Baldurs Gate 3 is an early access game, that has been developed "in the open" for quite a while. I doubt the split screen was even a thing during all of that development, then they decided to port it to console and throw split screen in there. That's not a trivial thing, in many aspects it can double memory and CPU requirements. Unlikely to be the same thing, but I still would not be shocked if they didn't bump into similar things my tiny team bumped into when we tossed a PC game at an iPhone 3Gs.

Have not sat down on any of my consoles recently, been playing FFXIV on PC. I rarely buy any digital games if I’m not sitting in the Xbox already preparing to play some game.

This is, I guess, why engagement is so important a metric for MS (or anyone) as it increases spending opportunities on the platform.

I already voted 0 but might jump tomorrow and see if there is anything on my wish list on sale.

@Trmn8r didn’t you read how this all works? Even MS does not have the resources to keep audio of every single player. This or not unlike recording a clip of what just happened in your game and uploading it to YouTube, only here you are uploading it to Xbox support.

Hell, unlike a YouTube upload, this is restricted to the last 60s of in-game voice chat, not even Party chat.

FFXIV is my most played game on PS5.
I would had always prefer to play it on Xbox, and I'll very likely be switching to the Xbox version once the expansion launches. Not likely to buy the Xbox version until then, though, unless they do a very good sale.

@Trmn8r or i could report them and try to make sure they don't keep berating other players AND block them.

"Big brother" is not always listening. Players are listening, and they get to tell "big brother" about it, with receipts.

@Trmn8r if someone attempts to lure me into committing verbal term of service violations, i can just block them, because there is little else I can do about that.

If someone in my party start throwing insults and bigotry, I will report them using this tool. I won’t let them just move on to do the same to others if I can help it.

If it’s a group of friends, I’m sure no one should be worried about getting reported, and if someone is, then they need better friends, or likely they themselves consider lines were crossed and friendship over.

@Trmn8r if someone bites you, mute them or block them.

As you say: we play to relax. Tolerating being harassed and insulted is not relaxing. Too many players consider their fun to just come out of harassing others, or simply think everyone else should grow a thicker skin because they don’t want to stop being [bleeps].

No, chats should not be private. The second anyone starts talking to a stranger they should stop expecting any level of privacy.

This is not Xbox always monitoring, this is giving players a tool to be able to record what happened without having to be constantly recording every single game they play, something they already were able to do before.

@Zenszulu biggest difference between this and console EA play is that console EA play does not bring games until a year later. UBisoft+ adds all games day one, with all DLC as they are released.

Maybe compared ro game pass, it’s not that great of a deal, but it’s a good deal for anyone that is enough into UBisoft games to want to buy them day one. For those players, it can be huge savings, although ideally not a “subscribe and forget” thing. Just keep subscribed as long as one plays games, unsubscribe whenever one is done.

@Lightning720 a lot of people here miss that this is not a new service. This is not Xbox Console version of Ubisoft+. It is just an added feature to Ubisoft+ (that allows play on PC and streaming via Luna) to allow members to also play their games on Xbox.

EA Play is part of Game Pass, but their equivalent to this (EA Play Pro) also costs $15 a month to get all games day one, with DLC, but is only available on PC. EA Play on Console is basically 1 year old games, not exactly that far from some of their older games already being added to Game Pass.

Devil's Advocate time: I didn't see much value on this service because I already owned most the Ubisoft games I cared to play, and their expansions. Add to it that Ubisoft's output has been a bit slow lately.

There is a lot of awesome stuff coming up during this fiscal year, though. I already had decided I'm not buying more Ubisoft games and instead subscribing to this service, but not until games start to show up, mainly: Mirage and Frontiers of Pandora.

I'll simply subscribe, play for that month, and unsubscribe whenever there are no more games or DLC for me to play. I dont need to own these games, I just want to play them, and Ubisoft+ seems like the cheapest way for me to do so.

Bonus points: I will be able to play the games either on PC or on Xbox with cross-progression.

I was going to pay the full amount, but I'll definitively be playing Mirage for a pound, I guess.

@themightyant

Agree lines between gens are thinner, especially on the graphics front, but this has been amplified due to the mid-gen consoles last gen.

I don't personally think the lines between gens is much thinner given the leap from PS3 to PS4 was similarly small. You are right, though, that mid-gen consoles did smooth out the curve, making it harder to notice the difference across gens.

At the end, though, gens are usually way more differentiated not by the power, but by evolution in game design, as well as a few things that just were not possible before. The biggest leap ever was the introduction of pixel shaders in the X360/PS3 generation, something that we didnt see in real action until mid-gen (compare how amazing Halo 4 looks compared to Halo 3.

We will never see another leap of that visual magnitude, I don't think. Ray tracing has the potential to do that, but it is still in its infancy and we are getting gradual steps. By the time its making a big difference, we will have seen plenty of iterations, so there wont be any single giant leap. Wont ever be as incredible as the leap into pixel shaders.

Things we can expect to make huge differences are more in the game design department. Larger areas thanks to higher memory pools, faster transitions and more complex open world experiences thanks to faster storage solutions and technologies like Direct Storage, and way more natural procedural animation techniques thanks to more CPU processing power. Characters that move more organically and react more realistically to the world around them, etc. Still, all of this will be gradual, and has been going on for the last decade and a half.

I just hope devs stop designing above the specs just because of how amazing a static screenshot can look. I will be extremely disappointed if we fall back again on a 30fps standard.

@themightyant as @Balta666 stated, it’s been hard to get your hands on Xbox series x in the US for the last 12 months. It did seem to improve after the showcase. The UK (nor EU) has never been a strong market for Xbox, American countries always been a lot more friendly towards Xbox, though. So, in the west, it’s been a lot more supply constrained.

I do expect Starfield, Forza, ABK games in GP, all of that should boost the games going forward, but I doubt MS cares to try catch up with PS on console sales. So long they have a healthy gaming business, they don’t mind it being split between console and PC users.

@AverageGamer different quarter, but continuos sales of those across multiple platforms (pc, switch, and PS for Minecraft) likely contributed to that 1% growth. Being off-quarter means they didn’t add that many sales, though.

Surprised at seeing any growth given the only “big” game released so far has been RedFall.

Next earning report will be very interesting, post the release of Starfield.

@Cashews not only does Nintendo push their Nintendo Online + “Expansion Pack” (ie: premium/ultimate tier) but they are the only ones that force you into that membership if you want to play any of the games offered in its library.

@CutchuSlow technically, no. They have a lot of voting power, but they don’t actually make all calls in a vacuum. They do have enough voting power to threaten the CEO out if they are not satisfied with their work, but at the end of the day the CEO works for all the shareholders, not just the majority one, and must look out for all of their interest.

@Cashews Facebook only renamed the parent company, though, not the product. Technically it’s never a great idea to have a company named after your flagship product, because it becomes much harder to be taken seriously when you try to branch out or diversify your busyness models. Also risk catastrophic stock price drops if the flagship name product stars to show its age and die off. Like, imagine if Apple was named after the iPod.

@NEStalgia Musk is not against AI, he is against “it moving forward too quickly”, which is simply code for “I want to get into AI but everyone else has a head-start so I want the government to put regulations to slow it down so I can establish a company and catch up”.