@theduckofdeath There's a reason why people buy a console.
I always bought an Xbox for Halo, Gears, Forza and Fable. I buy PlayStation for games like Uncharted, God Of War, Gran Turismo and I buy Nintendo for Mario, Zelda, Smash Bro's ect

There is a difference between hands all over something and hands completely off. No one was going to rush to Game Pass or Xbox over the games I listed. Flight Sim is a PC game, no one cares about it on console. Same with all of those RTS games that they released on console. South Of Midnight released on Switch and PS5 and sold less than 20k copies. They need to make games for mass appeal. There are already tons of indies that do the crappy smaller games, and MS doesn't have to fund those studios for 6 years while the games are being made.

South Of Midnight took like 6+ years to make and could be beat in 5 hours. It was repetitive and scored in the 70's in Metacritic and only 1 million Game Pass subscribers played it.

Those aren't winning metrics. Phil Spencer should have been trying to get games made that people actually wanted to play.
Some teams released decent games, but if you were honest, these games were never driving anyone to Game Pass or Xbox.
Keeper
Kiln
South Of Midnight
Avowed
Hellblade 2
Pentiment
Grounded
Grounded 2
Hi-Fi Rush
Redfall
Flight Sim

They should have been focused on the big games all along.

said a lot of nothing

This is the problem entirely, Microsoft could technically make every Xbox 360 game backwards compatible and available to anyone who owns the game. The PROBLEM is that they couldn't sell the game without permission from the originally publisher. Which is why we probably won't see any new games added.

As soon as I saw Kotaku I knew it was *****.

@BIG3 E-Day ended on a cliff hanger too lol

Kait Diaz should get the Poochy treatment from the Simpson. "I have to go now, my planet needs me"

Note: Kait Diaz died on her way back to her home planet.

I'm not for AI in every aspect of game building, but holy cow do we need games built quicker than every 5-7 years. The Xbox 360 generation saw 4 Gears games, 6 Halo games, 6 Assassins Creed games, 3 Dragon Age games, 4 Saints Row games, 3 Dead Space games, 3 Bioshock games, 3 Mass Effect games and 4 different Forza games!

@Banjo-
Pushing even more into it, why pay for a studio to sit around 6-7 years to make a game for a ton of money when you can money hat something and pay far less.
To grow Game Pass or a platform you need titles that draw crowds. No one was buying an Xbox or getting Game Pass for Hellblade 2, South of Midnight, Kiln, Pentiment, Grounded, Avowed or any of that stuff. Not that all of those games are terrible, but they just aren't going to be looked at as anything but filler and Game Pass already has a lot of that.

@BacklogBrad She's focusing on the hits. What has Rare done since Sea Of Thieves? What has Halo been the last decade? Where's the next Fallout or Elder Scrolls?
She's got these studios that haven't produced in a position to be better watched and enabled to produce content.
What have Xbox fans lost out on? Double Fine did crap like Keeper and Kiln, we got South Of Midnight, a 6 hour game that played like an Xbox 360 game from Compulsion, and it took 6 years for Ninja Theory to put out Hellblade 2, and even with 30+ million Game Pass subscribers they couldn't get 2 million people interested in playing their game!

I like what Microsoft has done. It sounds cold, but how long do we let 343 make bad Halo games? They've proven they can't make a great one.
Activision tend to hit their goals and ship on time and have plans for the future all figured out. It felt like 343 had no clue what the future was.
Same for Rare, they did Sea Of Thieves in 2018 and NOTHING since. Them being under better leadership could lead to new Banjo or Conker games. Obsidian was already Bethesda-lite as well. Turn 10 was DOA after the mess that was Motorsport.
Get the hits out and restructure.

A few things.
Physical disc drive.
No other PC stores.
I just want a regular, subsidized console.
Price has to be what a console should be. None of this $1500 nonsense.

@EvenStephen7 Phil was a bum. Took Xbox from 2nd place to 4th place. Spent 100 billion dollars and sat up on a stage talking about how they couldn't beat Sony or Nintendo regardless of what they offered. Took away all reasons to own an Xbox and then advertised that you don't need an Xbox.
Donnie did some stupid things too, like focused on Kinect, cancelled a ton of games that could have been awesome like Kameo 2, Rare Kart Racer, Halo MMO Ect

If they remove day one games they'd better bring a ton of exclusives.
Forza
Halo
Fable
Gears
Elder Scrolls
Fallout
Doom

@BacklogBrad I think what's left of the Xbox playerbase all uses Game Pass and so pulling it completely would kill off what players you have left.
I also think it's obvious that they've pulled back the amount of day one games and big 3rd party games going in. It's mostly been indies and small games lately and of course the Xbox first party stuff.
They originally predicted 70 million subscribers by now, so it's clearly not as successful as they hoped. 70 million subs is much more sustainable than 28 million.

Netflix works because it has so many subscribers, but the big shows and movies have to attract viewers. If there are 35 million Game Pass Subscribers and your game only attracts 1 million of those subscribers, that's a failure. You need to make games that people want and that draw gamers in. Weird, quirky titles were never going to work that way.

Sony was afraid because Concord flopped. I don't think the game has to be huge for Xbox, I think Kojima carries credibility for Xbox and that is important as well. He's also huge in Japan where Xbox has struggled, so this could be a big win for Microsoft.

0 hours and it'll always be 0 hours. I'm happy Cloud Streaming is dying. We kept hearing how it was the future and to just accept it, but I never saw a situation where people paid $70-$100 per game with the only option to stream it. Turns out cloud gaming is more expensive for companies to do than just putting out hardware lol

Try to keep my launch Series X as clean as possible and it's still running pretty great.
I also have a Series S, so I would just use the Series S and see if a repair shop could fix my Series X.
I don't plan to buy next gen consoles for a while, if ever. I firmly believe Microsoft and Sony will support the current consoles for the entirety of next gen.

@Rangers420 On the other hand they were spot on with Forza Horizon 5 selling 5 million units on PS5 when no one else was even remotely close to that number. Seems like a lot of people have said AA is closer than most other estimate sites.

It's not a shock, Halo like Gears Reloaded are old games and even with fresh pain they are obviously made for older hardware and wouldn't appeal to newer gamers and most people who want to play them would have already played.

This continues to bode well for Halo going back to exclusivity, which it should have never left in the first place.

@PeteyPiranha and failed, and killed their own brand and console in the process.

Reloaded was never for Xbox gamers. Same with Halo Campaign Evolved. Those games were all about introducing PlayStation gamers to those franchises.
We had Gears playable through backward compatibility already and also had a remaster from 2014.
Halo has the MCC and Halo Anniversary already.
Microsoft was just trying to bend over backwards for PS5 owners and it failed IMO.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner It's 300k. And for the first introduction of Halo, it's not a good look. Certainly not worth ruining the Xbox brand and console over. The entire Project Latitude has been a massive failure.
People only have so much time and money, spamming releases into an ecosystem that already had a ton of content was always going to be like spitting in the wind.
Fable is releasing the same time as the next God Of War, of course PS5 owners are going to stick with God Of War and Fable will underperform.

@AgentGuapo
Graphics (GPU): Xbox Series X has 12 teraflops (52 compute units); PS5 has 10.28 teraflops (36 compute units).
Processor (CPU): Xbox Series X runs an 8-core AMD Zen 2 at 3.8 GHz; PS5 runs an 8-core AMD Zen 2 at 3.5 GHz.

@carlos82 The base PS5 is far weaker in almost every way. The problem is that most developers work on the PS5 versions first and work back. Can't blame them, but it does make Xbox versions the worse for wear.

@Qozmyk 1% in the US which according to data there is around 29 million PS5's sold here. So, that would be 300,000.

@betterthings Sounds like the Xbox version will get a patch. A game that should never have been on PS to begin with

@ZeD Base PS5 is weaker than the Xbox Series X, by a significant margin.

According to Circana, only 1% of PS5 owners loaded up Halo on launch day. Even though it's #1 in the store, it doesn't seem to be doing as well as Microsoft likely though.
I'd imagine Halo will go back to console exclusivity completely now.

This is an awesome game! Although, if you're not into Telltale Games style games you won't like it. There's no actual gameplay per say.

Seems like a fair remake, but it's still a 25 year old game that was designed for 25 year old hardware, it might not click with new people.

They should be exclusive, the PC/Xbox combo will sell a lot of copies and doesn't need PlayStation.
God Of War would sell more if it were on Xbox too, but at the expense of Sony's own console and store. Without Elder Scrolls and Fallout being exclusive to Xbox, what's left? Halo? Gears? Is Forza going back to exclusivity? Fable? Doom? There's not a lot left.

It's not difficult to predict $1000+ consoles won't sell very well.....
I predict the current hardware will get cross-gen games the entirety of next gen. Both companies will need to use those older consoles to make up for lack of new sales. Imagine 3 years in and a PlayStation not at 20 million yet? It's about to become a reality. I think the Helix was always never going to sell more than 10 million lifetime.

People want simpler times like those. Nostalgia is huge right now and pages like that cater to those warm fuzees.

@InterceptorAlpha The studios will survive, how is that worse than them closing down?

Xbox 360 I have over 1000 physical games for and still own them.
Xbox One I have over 250 physical games and still own them.
Xbox Series X I have over 200 physical games and still own them.

If there's no physical option on Helix I won't buy it. I can't see how they'd have backwards compatibility with everything I currently have if a lot is disc based. Many of the best backwards compatible games like Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 are disc only backwards compatible.

@ToxicRageDude You realize Steam sales are because there's so many different store choices on PC, right? Also piracy is a huge issue on PC, so if they don't keep prices down, people will just steal the games anyway.

The case with PlayStation is that Sony will 100% own their own store and will dictate prices as high as they can. Where else will you go? There's also the problem of DRM, Steam is all DRM, you can't own a digital game anymore. Sony also has the worst customer service in all of gaming, so getting a refund on a digital game is almost impossible.
I don't game on PC for many reasons, and lack of a physical product that you own is one of them.

Companies will wonder why console gaming will be DEAD. $1000+ consoles.
Less choices.
No physical option which will raise digital prices.
Worse games.
What does ownership even mean at this point?
Bring on the game crash!

@fatpunkslim That was an interview from May actually, which was forever ago now. Fact of the matter is the Marvel license is expensive, the studio hasn't produced anything in 6+ years, the game is overbudget and delayed and it was supposed to be backed by a new Blade movie which was also cancelled.

@AI-Generation No one could afford it, and if you were looking to sell as a publisher you'd want all the studios you could get to make it as worthwhile as possible.
FTC wouldn't let Apple or Google get Xbox or more importantly Activision.

@fatpunkslim No one is mass adopting a $1200+ piece of hardware. It doesn't matter what you get for the price. Technically, the PS3 was a steal for $599 at launch, but no one was spending that and Sony had to lower prices repeatedly to get people to buy one.

@Balaam_ Game Pass isn't free, people were paying $20-$30 a month for it. They had a built in audience of over 30 million subscribers and yet only 1 million people bothered to play the game.
Perhaps the game wasn't great or appealing to the majority? If you have a constant revenue stream of between 500 million and 700 million dollars every month, you don't need to sell millions of copies, but South Of Midnight failed every metric it could. It sold less than 20k on PS5 and Switch combined. It didn't lure people into Game Pass and even Game Pass subscribers passed on it.

@themightyant I've never even heard of that site, can't find this anywhere else...lol

@themightyant I don't know what she'll do long term, but for right now I've enjoyed a lot of the announcements and they've gotten me excited for Xbox again.
First console updates in over a year
Exclusive games are back
Actually communicating and being transparent
Lowered Game Pass prices
Cancelled Copilot on console
Feels like she knows Helix isn't a platform for mass market, I believe she's going to release a standard console that is

I don't know what's going to happen, but I at least have a reason to play on my Xbox, which I didn't under previous leadership. I believe they are trimming the fat and trying to get down to the amount of studios where exclusives can be the norm. They are about to close studios and have a lot of layoffs at most studios. You don't lose devs if you play on making everything multiplatform. In fact, you have to hire even more devs to do that. So, I believe she understands what needs to be done.

Is it smart to close these smaller studios that were taking 6 years to make games? I say it is very smart. They can money hat smaller games for a fraction of the price and not have to pay to keep studios running for 6 years.

She seems very intelligent and understands that the fans are basically her boss. Without us, she has no job.

@themightyant No one ever said there wasn't a version of E-day for PS5, people were suggesting it was a decision to pull it the night before and that wasn't true. It was something done about a month before the show. She tweeted out a picture in the same outfit on May 22nd at the Xbox set and that ended up being the reveal of Gears as exclusive. Every game at that show was coming to PS5 under previous leadership

@PWR3700 In particular I was talking about smaller games. Scalebound was a big 3rd party AAA game. They will want to money hat some smaller stuff to fill out some voids. That's a cheaper option than paying to own multiple studios for 6 years.
I hope they invest in games people will actually play, because South Of Midnight, Hellblade, Kiln and Keeper weren't great. If you can't get people on a sub service of 30 million to even try your game, it's not a good look.

@PWR3700
Do you remember Asha's memo about 3rd party exclusives?
Why own and operate a studio that takes 6 years to make a AA game when they can just money hat similar games and save a ton of money? They will still have a lot of those smaller exclusives, but won't have to pay for the entire studios for 6 years to make a game.

@themightyant I am trusting Asha until she gives me a reason not to. She hasn't lied yet.
Where as Phil Spencer and his team lied a lot. They lost all trust because of lies.

@beltmenot What have they done that was successful in the past 10 years? What have they done that couldn't have been money hatted if needed and not require paying an entire studio for 6 years to create?