TheGameThrifter

@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?

@Tasuki It's 100% the right move to trim the fat. These studios make smaller games that don't sell well.

People are going to freak out, but Ninja Theory, Double Fine and Compulsion haven't produced hit games.
Microsoft is paying for these entire studios and hundreds of employees and that adds up. For smaller games like these studios create they could just money hat the game itself and spend far less money than having to pay for entire studios to operate for 5-6 years between games.

Compulsion and Double Fine are my guesses. Neither would be a shock to be honest.
Compulsion did South Of Midnight after 5 years and it didn't do very well and was avg on Metacritic.
Double Fine did Kiln and Keeper but both were massive flops and they are very niche. Can easily buy smaller titles to fit into Game Pass a lot cheaper than buying entire studios.

Louise O'Connor should have been gone ages ago, she was behind the failed Everwild, couldn't get a game out in over 8 years and somehow got promoted!

@MrStark I mean 35-40 million Series consoles have sold. There's hundreds of millions of PC and access through cloud gaming. How is that not enough to make exclusives? That's far more screens than Switch 2's 20 million sold or even 90 million PS5's sold. Yet, they both get exclusives.

The fact is every game they were making was being made for PS5 as well. They can't afford to take a loss by canning 8 PS5 versions that are finished or almost finished. They are already taking losses on Gears and Clockwork.
In the future it's obvious Halo won't be on PlayStation and only Service based games will be. Next Fable will be exclusive as will a lot of other games.
Sony is only giving PS owners 1-2 first party exclusives a year currently anyway, I think MS can match or beat that and still have a good amount of multiplatform games from Activision.

@Skinny-Pete Switch 2 has only 20 million sold yet is viable? Xbox Series consoles are at 35 million or more by all accounts. How is that not viable? lol

Just a quick reminder that Sony uses their 30% cut from sales of Xbox games on PlayStation to do stuff like this. Most people don't care about Play Anywhere either, as PC gamers tend to stick to PC and console gamers stick to console.

@Kaloudz Halo and Gears are multiplayer and there's no way they should be on PlayStation. Forza just proved it's a console seller, so why put it on PlayStation and get nothing in return?

@Tasuki Phil already took away exclusives, why dump him if you're going to do the same thing that already wasn't working?
She clearly says exclusives are important...lol

@RadioHedgeFund Who hasn't played Halo before? Putting your mascot on the competitions platform which is using their 30% cut to buy exclusive content to keep away from Xbox owners isn't smart. The biggest problem with Halo is Halo. It hasn't been good enough to keep players active regardless of platform.

@Millionski Sony is making enough mistakes that any competent leadership could take advantage of them!

Phil Spencer was so full of crap!
The only time they've had console selling games was holiday 2021 and Xbox broke all console sales records thanks to Flight Sim, Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 all launching back to back to back!
Now, a great 90+ rated Forza Horizon 6 is selling consoles because it is amazing!
All of these games should be console exclusive!

EXCLUSIVES OR WE RIOT

@RadioHedgeFund Why would they bring a dead games multiplayer to PlayStation and Switch?

Terrible timing. This game should have launched as an Xbox exclusive last year. We know the original delay was strictly to work on the PS5 version....

@Skinny-Pete I own every Xbox and over 1000 games on my Series X.
Since Feb 2024's "just 4 games" lie however, I've stayed away from buying games on Xbox. I'm waiting to see what they announce in terms of exclusives in June.

@ILuvGames PC is littered with cheaters and hackers and people stealing games. There's rumors Microsoft might not even allow other stores on the platform because it's counterproductive. There's no such thing as a hybrid, either it's an open system or closed.

I'm all for them keeping certain things on pc exclusive as well. Who on a console gives a crap about Flight Sim or Age of Empires? Just like PC gamers obviously didn't give a crap about Hellblade 2, South Of Midnight, Gears, Avowed, Outer Worlds 2, Doom, Halo, Forza Motorsport and 99% of their games.

@Hammers72 That handheld has sold poorly, very poorly. Majority of Xbox games aren't selling well on PC either. Why keep supporting a platform that isn't buying the product? lol