TheGameThrifter

@Mazitron Xbox as a console has never been more bleak. They have some decent and good content finally, but it's all going to the PS5 and even Switch/Switch 2. That's no way to keep your hardware alive and thriving, especially when Sony just pulled back to exclusives and Nintendo never left them.

Why would people buy an Xbox when you can get both Xbox and PS5 exclusives on a PS5 and only Xbox games on an Xbox?

This game reminded me of an Xbox 360 game because of the limited and repetitive nature of it. Also, it only sold like 20k copies on Nintendo and PS platforms combined. I bet they lost money on ports.

There's no way Helix as a rumored $1200+ machine is the main reason Sony changed strategy.
We know the PC numbers on Sony's games didn't make much money. We know their PC gamers were getting pirated by the millions.
We know Sony's PC games were getting a lot of bad press due to how poorly the games were running on PC.
There was no upside to putting games on PC anymore.

I'm sure Microsoft originally thought Helix running Steam was genius because it would eliminate exclusives, but all it did was kill any reason to buy anything from the Xbox Store.....

Playground Games has carried Xbox for 2 generations now. The only consistently amazing series they have.

Mentioning the PS6 like it won't at least have the option is insane. Millions of people buy physical media and backwards compatibility with the past 2 generations where hundreds of millions of physical discs were sold. I guarantee the PS6 at least has the option to put in the disc drive.

@SMJ I don't care if you believe me, and there's no Xbox exclusives. Anything that comes out on Xbox currently will come out on PlayStation as well. There needs to be full on exclusives and they need to advertise into that.

@johnedwin There's millions of people who don't like PC gaming at all and will never game on a PC (Like me).
Exclusive games, great games that people actually want to play. Good pricing, go back to getting 3rd party deals and content.
There are ways they can compete because Sony is literally crapping the bed themselves! Any competent company could have beat them this gen.

I have almost 500,000 Gamerscore, have had every Xbox day one. I was buying between 20-30 new games per year and subscribed to Game Pass Ultimate.
Since they did the "just 4 games" thing in Feb of 2024, I have bought 0 games on Xbox and no longer have Game Pass. Without exclusive games, there's absolutely NO REASON to own an Xbox console.

89 is my guess. I think we saw some reviewers tired of the same old formula with Horizon 5. I think 6 will still score amazingly well, but now that they're co-developing for PlayStation as well, I think it waters it down a bit too.

Black Flag is awesome. I'll definitely be playing it because it's 100% better than any recent Assassins Creed game.
I love gaming, but most new games aren't great, that's why they keep bringing back the older games.

Why was it never NOT at the forefront to begin with? You literally have people buying a $400-$600 console and many paying hundreds a year on top of that for Game Pass and to play online. They should have been treated like kings from the start!

They must have lost MILLIONS of subscribers when they raised the prices last year. Old leadership should be embarrassed.

@Sol4ris I mean he helped lead the attack that killed Xbox in the first place. Those early PS4 moves were brilliant and he's been right a lot.
Also, we have no clue how many people sub to Game Pass, but Asha Sharma's recent comments suggest a lot un-subbed when they raised prices 50% last year.
Game Pass is clearly going the opposite direction now.

It just doesn't look good or fun. Not to be a downer, but this won't last a year.

@FuzzieGinge88 Majority of the games they put on PlayStation have utterly failed to sell. Only 2 games sold well. Some games probably didn't even make the money back from the cost to port.

Very simple, everything should be exclusive except Activision games. Let COD and all the Activision games FUND your Xbox exclusives. That's how it should have been in the first place.

These poor sales for 96% of Xbox games on PlayStation prove that it wasn't worth killing the Xbox brand for. The only GREAT game Xbox has made is Forza Horizon 5 this generation and so it sold well. Just goes to show you need GREAT games first and foremost, but there's just not a lot of room on PlayStation gamers play list for 10+ Xbox published games a year in addition to what they already have.

@HonestHick
The ability to turn off Quick Resume was talked about by Phil Spencer 4 years ago, but was confirmed to be done in a 2 week time period after Sharma took over.

The Achievement thing was talked about by Phil all the time, just like everything else and yet nothing was ever done. A 14 month period where no console updates were released.

He killed Xbox exclusivity.
He sat by and didn't speak up when they add DRM to Xbox One.
He lied about "Just 4 games".
He lied and said Bethesda was about exclusives where Game Pass exists.
He lied when he said not all Xbox games would go to PC.
He lied when he said Xbox games would only go to Windows.
He said Phantom Dust remake is still being made (seriously, he never admitted it was cancelled).
He said Sony uses their share of Xbox game profits sold on PlayStation to kill Xbox, yet still puts every game on PS?
He came up with Game Pass, which effectively taught people to NOT buy games.
Raised prices twice on Xbox in the past year.
Tried to raise game prices to $80 last year.
Raised Game Pass prices 3x in 2 years including a 50% raise last year.
Cancelled Fan Fest.
The Activision deal was PHIL SPENCERS IDEA.
He promised all Activision games would come to Game Pass, still hasn't happened.
Cancelled so many games....Perfect Dark, Fable Legends, Scalebound, Everwild, Blackbird and more!
Closed a ton of studios.

Xbox One did 60 million in sales, Xbox Series X/S less than half of that because Microsoft gave up 2 years into the generation.

@themightyant They stayed far away from mentioning exclusives.

As Sidious would say.......DEW IT!

@HonestHick Actually we have confirmation from the team building the updates that the original update was done in 2 weeks time. Phil hadn't done any console updates in 14 months!

Let's please stop giving him credit unless it's credit for ruining the brand.

Everything but Activision games should be exclusive to Xbox. If people want to play badly enough they'll get an Xbox or game on PC, cloud or whatever else. Xbox should absolutely have exclusive games.

@duncanwarrior99 Because it's quite obvious they lost a lot of subscribers when they raised prices 50%.

It's nice to finally get console updates again after the last one was like 14 months ago. Why did it take so long to do things for console owners though?
It really makes Phil and Sarah look bad and even more so like liars because they kept saying how important console is, but spent no resources on consoles!

It's funny because people swore up and down Phil and Sarah cared about the console and console gamers, yet in 1 month Asha Sharma has done more updates and features than those two did in the past 2 years!
I'm not sold on Xbox just yet, really depends on if they bring back exclusive games, but at least they are acting like console gamers exist again.

The problem is perception. Cheap phone games have ads and the quality of those games is horrible. Microsoft is trying to make premium games that feel and play premium. Having an ad based tier makes those games feel less than they are and could make the games appear cheap to other gamers.

That's cool that it is your opinion but I disagree 100%!
With XBLA, we got the best of the best in terms of indies and they had a seal of quality about them. Now, anyone can publish a game and there's so much shovelware and spam it's hard to find the actual decent indies.

@darylb24 The problem with that is that Microsoft is all in with AI and couldn't care less about Xbox. They are better heavily on AI and AI alone.

@Weebleman Wouldn't that completely kill the need for their console even more so? People say they only stick with Xbox currently because of Game Pass. If it were on PS as well, that would officially be the end of it IMO

@NeoRatt How can they give a lower priced console price and also force the things they are trying to force like PC? PC and Windows comes at an expensive and requires far more RAM than a console because a PC is doing a lot more things including running antivirus, which Helix will also run. These things bloat the OS and mean they need a lot of memory. Which is why they couldn't offer the same thing at a reasonable price.

@jesse_dylan On the plus side it's only a $30 game and it pretty awesome replayability!

@jesse_dylan Great game btw, my personal GOTY last year.

@jesse_dylan Dispatch is a small dev team and they obviously weren't going to do an Xbox version right away. That's the issue with low install base for a console, developers aren't going to prioritize it.

@fatpunkslim I disagree with almost everything you've said.
The more consoles you sell the more software, subscriptions and microtransactions you can sell.

Let's not kid ourselves into believing Xbox on everything has helped in any kind of way. We already know the people using Xcloud are already in the ecosystem through console or PC. There's no huge gain there.

The only people saying console sales don't matter are Microsoft, and even new leadership disagrees with that. We see how fast the new CEO has put out new updates and even advertising because console sales are hugely important.

PS5 sales are already pretty amazing IMO, beating the Switch 2 which is the fastest selling console in history already. When GTA6 releases with those PS5 bundles, I think PS5 numbers will greatly surpass PS4 sales numbers. There's still over 50 million people on PS4's according to Sony. And a large contingent on Xbox One's will likely upgrade to a PS5 for GTA6 alone.

So, is Xbox dead? As a console it is 100% dead. You can't have a platform with no exclusives and survive. Microsoft wants to offload fans to PC so they can stop hardware altogether and have your library (or most of it) on PC.

@fatpunkslim When people say Xbox is dead they are talking about it as a console. Which, going by sales numbers and the fact that Microsoft's next hardware is just a PC and not traditional console, it's easy to see why people think it's dead.
I don't know one person who believe the Helix is a mass selling piece of hardware, from all accounts it looks like it'll sell less than the Wii U.
They bought 100 million dollars worth of publishers and studios, so they will obviously have a footprint in that realm. Just like EA, Ubisoft EcT

@Balaam_ Who would want to work for a guy who thinks they can never compete in the first place? I always disliked that he was so down like that. Imagine a coach for a team saying they can't compete with other teams? It wouldn't go over well.

@FarmDog08 That's cool, and games are super subjective as to what people like. The problem is what amazing games have they released that people can't stop talking about or that blow up in sales? I've liked a few, but not paying monthly to play those. Nothing GOTY worthy either unfortunately.
if they did first party only they could maybe get Game Pass on PlayStation and Nintendo platforms in a way I guess.

@FarmDog08 They would need amazing games for people to be interested in that. So far, they've just had some decent and good games, nothing the masses would drop money on for extended periods of time though IMO

Zero chance! I mean Avowed, Hellblade 2, South Of Midnight and others never even had a physical edition. Even things like Forza Horizon 5 that they release on PS5 have no physical versions.

@NeoRatt I say this all the time to people, he needed to think of gamers that like things he doesn't. For instance I don't like Souls types of games, but I understand the need for them to be on Xbox because others do like them.

@GuyinPA75 I've been an Xbox guy since day one. Bought an OG Xbox on day one and every Xbox since on day one. Phil was always kind of a snake to me. He was in the room when they were coming up with Xbox One and never spoke out about the issues. He just benefited from the issues and took over.

I feel like his ideas have mostly hindered Xbox as a whole. I have also heard he wasn't a fan of hardware and at one point was pitching just a streaming box and he was against a lot of games. He personally killed Sunset Overdrive 2 and Alan Wake 2 because he didn't like the first games in the series of those. Both would have been Xbox exclusives at the time.

He also turned down Marvel in 2014 to make exclusive Superhero games for Xbox, and instead they went to PlayStation.

He also famously turned down Genshin Impact.

@GuyinPA75 He's not preventing updates to Xbox though. I'm not a fan of him, but I'm not going to blame all of Xbox's problems on him when Phil Spencer has done nothing in over a decade. Took Xbox from 2nd place to 4th place and wasted 100 billion dollars on IP that have not won awards or changed peoples perceptions of Xbox in general.

@Fiendish-Beaver I don't think it took 4 years to implement this and I don't think they were holding back this basic feature for the 25th anniversary.
No Xbox updates in a year.
Cancelled Xbox Brooklyn redesign.
Cancelled Xbox Sebille controller with haptics.

It's more than clear Phil and company wanted nothing to do with consoles.

@Fiendish-Beaver The main feature was requested 4 years ago and Phil Spencer publicly said they'd do it on X. There hasn't been a console update in a year! All updates were PC, mobile or Cloud during the past year.
It's clear Phil and Sarah didn't have any love for the console.

@GuyinPA75 So, you're suggesting Phil Spencer as CEO of gaming couldn't implement simple updated features to the Xbox consoles?

@Cakefish Phil was always the problem. No way does the CEO of Xbox not have any power or wiggle room. People were giving him a free pass for over a decade!

Phil Spencer said he was going to look into this 4 years ago! We haven't had a console update in a year now.

I'm not sold on Asha Sharma by any means, but the fact that she implemented something in 2 weeks when Phil Spencer did NOTHING for consoles over the past year is still interesting.

This game will close within a year. I think taking risks is cool, but this game looks like something no one ever asked for.

@eduscxbox There was no map in the cities, you could only slowly walk from your ship to other places, it was 30fps and had constant load screens, doors were glitched, ships were glitched, enemies were stuck floating randomly. Now all of these things are fixed. For someone like me who played day one, this is like a completely different experience.

@GeminiX53 I understand the less buggy part, but the overall quality of life changes are so huge it will feel like a new game. This is the game Xbox gamers should have gotten from the start.