TrollOfWar

@DJKingaling I remember getting to the end of FF7 on PSone. I couldn't get past the final dungeon as all enemies felt like boss fights. A friend from back then, who was a huge FF7 fan, told me that I apparently messed up the leveling of my characters and I am missing crucial materia. So he intended to show me the end of the game via his own save game. After 50 minutes trying to defeat the last boss, he lost and we gave up. Had to look up the ending online. A big disappointment. 😅

@Coletrain @WildConcept6 @Pat_trick
The truth about Xbox Series S "holding back the generation" is kind of in the middle:

1. What defines this generation?
4K resolution, 60 frames per second, ray-tracing and faster loading speeds? Visual fidelity was alread strong last gen. In that regard the Xbox Series S doesn't push the generation forward as most games big-budget games are 1080p / 30 fps without ray-tracing. The 10 GB RAM is a restricting limit, where other devices (PS5, Series X, Steam Deck) have 16 GB.

2. Development challenges:
On the one hand univeral multi-platform engines like Unreal Engine, Snowdrop, Frostbite, Unity, Anvil, Decima, etc. make game development easier, reducing the need for expensive proprietary engines developed in-house. On the other hand studios might lack in-house talent which knows how to optimize the engine for lower spec hardware. So these engines should already support Xbox Series S by default, but teams might lack the costly talent or time to implement custom optimizations for Xbox Series S, when the game's scope grows.

3. Priorities & Scope:
In the past few years many indie studios were established. They often design games with big-budget visuals and large scopes, with high-end PCs as the target systems. Only at a late stage they start thinking about console releases, at which point optimizations for lower spec hardware like Xbox Series S becomes difficult. Best examples are Black Myth Wukong and Baldur's Gate 3, which both had PCs as their target and required more time to optimize the game for Series S. But even PS5 and Series X didn't offer a perfect performance in those cases.

4. Optimizing for Series S helps other systems:
There are several cases where the optimizations for Xbox Series S and Steam Deck helped the Xbox Series X, PS5 and PC, such as Baldur's Gate 3, Final Fantasy 16 and now Battlefield 6. So Series S can help to improve this generation.

I think this generation was oversold. Many people were expecting 4K ray-tracing at 120 fps on all games with photorealistic visuals. Most of the ray-traced games don't run well, Unreal Engine 5 is very resource demanding. While I get the cost/benefit issue of having to optimize for Series S, I think it's limitations helped to keep the performance on PS5 and Xbox Series X in check.

This is just how Larian Studio explained how optimizing Baldur's Gate 3 for the Xbox Series S helped to improve the performance on other systems.

These low-level optimizations take time, but in the long run the performance of games benefits on all systems and helps to make games accessible on more low-level platforms including Steam Deck, Switch 2, etc.

@Banjo- Yes, but the challenge I see is that most people will choose to wait for a discount rather than paying the standard price, as they already waited 5 years. So be prepared for initial sales to "not meet the expectations". 😉

For whatever reason, you cannot preorder the standard edition on Xbox af the moment, which is $39.99 on PSN. I assume most people on Xbox and Switch already own the original FF7, so they would prefer the standard rather than the Digital Deluxe Edition.

@Banjo- It's cheaper now at $59.99. It used to be $89.99. It includes the original FF7 game (Xbox and Windows). But the PS5 version is frequently discounted at $34.79 on the PSN store. See: https://psprices.com/region-us/game/4546676/final-fantasy-vii-remake-intergrade-digital-deluxe-edition

@Banjo-

That said, instead of a fully priced shadow drop like XVI, they should do like they did on PC and offer a 30% discount for pre-orders when they release Rebirth and Remake on Xbox or anything to give it a boost and make up for the late release, as they also did when they released the Pixel Remaster bundle on Xbox.

Sorry to disappoint you, but the preorder page is up on the Xbox store and there's no discount. It's the same price as on PSN.

@themightyant Thanks for adding more context. It's all good if Sony/PlayStation helped make the Remake possible in the first place. Without them Death Stranding also wouldn't exist.

The baffling thing about FF7 Remake is how it was known from the beginning that it's only time-exclusive to PlayStation, but it never released on anything other than PC. It's weird. But Square Enix is known for doing weird business decisions (like releasing Octopath Traveler 1 on Xbox but not PS and Octopath Traveler 2 on PS but not Xbox, and releasing Kingdom Hearts 3 on Xbox and KH 1&2 only a year later).

@RegnumSolipsi That's impressive, you have quite a lot of achievements unlocked in Sea of Thieves. Good job. 👍

@RegnumSolipsi I love Sea of Thieves, spent over 2000 hours playing it over the past 5 years. But it's such a time sink. 😄

Data East Arcade Collection 1 on Evercade: Gates of Doom, Sly Spy and Wizard Fire

@Sindayl I am also curious to know if Sony's exclusivity deals are less lucrative than what they used to be. It was leaked a few years ago that for the Rise of the Tomb Raider's 1-year exclusivity, Microsoft paid $ 100 million (that's a budget which could fund an entire game) and I can imagine that Sony might have paid similar figures for certain deals. Usually these deals would cover the "lost sales" from the other platforms. Now that Xbox console are less relevant and not competing with PlayStation anymore, how much is Sony/PlayStation willing to pay to keep games off Xbox?

@masofdas After seeing the success of Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring, I believe Final Fantasy could as well do 10m+ sold units, but a lot of factors would need to fall in place, one of them being a multi-platform release.

It would need to be fresh and bold, a completely new gripping, immersive story without any previous baggage. It needs to exceed the trends of the moment it releases and needs to build up a positive hype like never before.

It's not an easy task, but smaller dev teams managed to achieve that.

@Questionable_Duck I don't know what the internet made up, it was just my expectation that there might still be some contract between Square Enix and Sony for the exclusivity of the entire trilogy. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake has been in planing since that PS3 launch demo, so I was expecting some contract to cover the whole project.

But I am happy for all players. Better late than never. 😉

Well, color me surprised. I expected Square Enix to have some PlayStation exclusivity deal for the whole remake trilogy signed, before they decide to release their games multiplatform. Though the wording in the Twitter message is very awkward, as they don't mention a simultaneous release.

Now I wonder how successful they will be in convincing players on Nintendo and Xbox to buy the remake games. 🤔

@andrewsqual

FFVII Remake is the best FF game in years because they focused on a making a GREAT GAME FIRST on one single platform before multiplat crap. And the same with Rebirth.

So you are trying to say, that FF7 Remake could only become a successful game, because it was developed exclusively for a single platform? Then why did Forspoken or Foamstars fail? Why did Destruction AllStars fail? Why did Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring , Split Fiction, Hollow Knight, succeed despite being multi-platform?

Stop trying to create utter lies and false narrative. ALL you are doing and others here are doing is pre-empting the flop it's going to be on Xbox and are already making the excuses. And THAT'S a truth.

By writing things like that, you became part of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It has been almost a decade without any mainline Final Fantasy games on Xbox. Those who care about the franchise moved to PlayStation and PC. For those left on Xbox, who haven't experienced the game on other platforms, the game will need to impress them. Having someone tell them, they are "creating utter lies and false narratives" won't convince anyone to get excited for this game. Don't you agree?

And why would it be 19.99 lol?

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Integrade has frequently been discounted to as low as $15.19 since January 2024 on the PSN Store. Those who are interested and have been waiting 6 years for the game to release, can wait another 1-2 months until it's at a lower price. It also worked in Death Stranding Director's Cut's favor when it released on Xbox at half the price, selling many units.

Hopefully it does well on Xbox and Nintendo, even though having to wait 6 years is quite a long time.

I hope that Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection also releases on Evercade. 😄

@Coletrain Of course it would be a poor move by Square Enix if they didn't offer the 2 games bundled. IMO they should also release the games at a discount for a limited time (like Death Stranding Director's Cut did on Xbox).

@Questionable_Duck

I assume FF7 Remake Part 3 will be on all platforms day one

I personally wouldn't bet on it. I guess Square Enix probably signed a time-exclusiv deal with Sony/PlayStation for all the 3 parts when they initially started with the first one, or the contract was updated when the Integrade version was released on PS5.

That would have happened before Square Enix decided to release their games multiplatform and now they need to honor those contacts.

@Coletrain

My big big question here is whether there's any point picking up remake intergrade when it comes out. When Rebirth released on ps5, if you pre-ordered it digitally you got remake intergrade for no extra cost, so I'd prefer that route really

Hmmm... Final Fantasy 7 Remake has been given away as part of the PS+ Essential subscription for a month, so for many it was more like they saved the costs of getting the Integrade DLC content.

@Sol76

Funny how MS talks about game preservation when they still release owned ip’s like the Forza (Horizon) games with licenses that expire after a couple of years and they delist them never to be seen again

Microsoft/Xbox always talks about the technical side of game preservation, not the licensing challenges.

That being said, I do wonder how the 2015 released Need for Speed game is still available for purchase on Xbox, while FC 24 or indeed Forza Horizon 4 (2018) are not anymore.

Would love to play Project Gotham Racing again. PGR4 was my first game on Xbox 360. Such a good game.

Regarding Marvel games, I remember from the Insomniac Games leaks that apparently PlayStation has exclusive publishing rights for certain time frames around the release of their games. I wonder if it would impact the re-release of Activision published Marvel games.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner

But everyone on this site says don’t believe this analytic company.

Not only on this site. And people should be skeptical of what Alinea Analytics shares.

But in this case you can check other websites which share player statistics like trueachievements.com / truetrophies.com or exophase.com and calculate yourself, based on the total tracked userd per platform and users per game, how well the game did. Helldivers 2 sold more units in 1 week than Death Stranding Director's Cut in 10 months on Xbox. While Kojima Productions didn't directly share how man units exactly they sold on Xbox, they did share that the total number of players grew from 19 millions to 20 millions 5 months after the Xbox release.

Helldivers 2 on Xbox at this point might have possibly sold more than 1.5 million units (at full price).

@Jaxx420 True, marketing was way more aggressive in the 90s. In my opinion, it feels like gaming is now past the "edgy teenager" phase and is finally becoming mature.

Oof, another 80-90 million dollars of development is a tough spot for a game which probably already spent several hundreds of millions in development hell. And that's without the marketing budget.

I would have loved to see Crystal Dynamics finish the game without The Division. Could have been a cool game.

Hopefully this doesn't stop Xbox from developing new Perfect Dark games with a clear vision and a more moderate budget.

@Jaxx420 Well, the "console war" did take place between PlayStation and Xbox. Ken Kutaragi (former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment), Kaz Hirai (former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment), Shawn Layden (former CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment), Peter Moore (former vice-president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business), Phil Spencer (CEO of Microsoft Gaming) and Matt Booty (Head of Xbox Game Studios) all gave some comments or had emails leaked (in case of Matt Booty who was thinking of "spending Sony out of business" ) over the years where they did acknowledge the rivalry.

But as soon as Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) took over the control of Microsoft's gaming division by acquiring Activision-Blizzard-King, he seemingly ended the console war from Microsoft's side.

Since Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he has been shifting the company's strategies and has emphasized working with companies and technologies with which Microsoft also competes, including Apple, Salesforce, IBM and Sony. In contrast to previous Microsoft campaigns under Nadella Microsoft embraced Linux and are making their products, like MS Office and Teams available on all platforms, where those products would have been Windows exclusive before.

I guess that same open approach is now being applied to Microsoft Gaming.

@ButterySmooth30FPS

Massive change on this website from the "LOL! Suck it, ponies!" of 2022-23 to the, "Can't we all just get along?!" of 2024-25.

Some people grow up and change. They learn how pointless the "console war" debates are and move on. Let's celebrate playing together. 😉

@Medic_alert

But as hardware becomes more generic and PC like and all games start to be shared then where's the competition?

Game quality, successful franchises and subscription services.

Microsoft has been in the top 10 charts of the sold games on PlayStation with multiple games for several months. Sony's games are now competing with Microsoft's games on their own platform.

@Fiendish-Beaver

... and Microsoft stopped fighting the minute they announced that they were porting 'just 4 games' to the PlayStation.

I think Microsoft gave up way sooner, precisely at the point where they acquired Activision Blizzard King.

They now have 2 of the biggest multiplatform game publishers. Business wise it wouldn't make sense to make their games exclusive to Xbox when the games cost so much to create and market.

@ILuvGames Thanks. It suits my profile name, as it's a play on both God of War and Gears of War (and the console wars).

Wanted to generate a picture of a Helldivers 2 soldier and Marcus Fenix, but Google Gemini has no clue what they look like.

Love it! Crossovers between Xbox and PlayStation games next. ❤️

EDIT: Oh wait, we already have Halo ODST in Helldivers 2. What a time to be alive! 😄

@Balaam_ Might be Ben is implying that it's related to PC, as Battlefield 6 will only release on current gen consoles (PS5 and Xbox Series S|X) which support ray-tracing and PC. There was a controversy around Doom: The Dark Ages requiring a ray-tracing enabled graphic cards on PCs.

There's the debate wether people should move on and upgrade the hardware, as it helps advancing technologies and helps game development with the usage of more dynamic lighting. Digital Foundry had a discussion about the "forced RT" in Doom: The Dark Ages: https://youtu.be/HCqS_uZ0G4Q

Probably a reasonable decision, given that they want to target a large player group rather than sell new expensive hardware.

I understand some might feel underwhelmed by the visual fidelity advancements of the current gen (we got major advancements in other areas, like better streaming, faster loading and a lot more 60 fps games). But hardware is becoming increasingly expensive and unaffordable for many casual gamers.

Based on the beta which many of us played, great art design and a masterful usage of "old" graphical technologies, applied to destructable large-scale environments is a good balance, helping the game feel "current gen" and competing with games of the same caliber.

It's a bit disappointing that it isn't a full remaster with upgrade visuals of the whole trilogy, but hopefully Reloaded does well enough to pave the way for the other 2 parts in the trilogy.

@Kaloudz I could see Rare releasing some smaller titles similar to how Obsidian Entertainment released Pentiment.

I think Rare is highly regarded in under Xbox. They've supported Xbox in many crucial moments have proven to be quite versatile: They provided several launch titles for the Xbox 360 with Perfect Dark Zero, Kameo and Viva Pinata, they helped the Kinect camera with Kinect Sports and Sea of Thieves is one of the few ongoing successful live-service games which was developed internally rather than being acquired by Microsoft.

The former studio head Craig Duncan is now the head of Xbox Game Studios. I don't think he'd allow a studio he was part of to be closed that easily. But Rare, like many others in the industry, doesn't have the luxury anymore to spend a large amount of time and resources on a project without any results.

@Millionski

Usually when I say this, people jump at me saying is not a souls-like...but it is: harder difficulty, bosses where you need to memorize animations, you have to dodge/roll. the only good part is the skill tree and many abilities but the level design itself is poor.

Would you call the Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry series "souls-likes"? They have those points which you mentioned like hard difficulties (hard to master), tough bosses where you have to memorize their animations/attack-patterns, dodge/rolls. Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry predate the Demon's Souls and the "souls-like" genre.

I think a game requires more than a hard difficulty, tough bosses and dodge rolls to be associated with the "souls-like" genre. It needs lightweight RPG elements, a currency form (souls) that you can collect to level up, but lose a certain amount when you die, a checkpoint system (bonfires) which help you save and level up, an Metroidvania-like interconnected world where you can unlock shortcuts and loop back to earlier areas.

I haven't played Black Myth Wukong yet, but it sounds more like a classic linear action game with a high difficulty similar to Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry.

@Fiendish-Beaver In case you're interested, based on the stats on trueachievements.com, somewhat more people have played Gears of War Reloaded than Helldivers 2 on Xbox in these few days since release. But of course a large majority of those players got Gears of War Reloaded for free of they bought the 2015 released Ultimate Edition.

Personally I think there was no classic "exclusivity deal" between Sony and Game Science. Probably there was some "partner dev support" where Game Science seeked out support from Sony PlayStation to get the game running on the PS5. Would be interesting to know if there were any conditions tied to that support.

The problem is that Game Science is quite terrible, not just with optimizing their game, but also terrible at public communication, which all added more fuel to the conspiracy theories about an exclusivity deal:
1. They shouldn't have removed the Xbox logos from their trailers in 2024 if they were intending to release on Xbox anyways.
2. They should have reached out to Xbox if they needed dev support, just like other multi-platform developers do.
3. They shouldn't have publicly blamed the Xbox Series S for the delay (even if that was the case)
4. They shouldn't have stuck to that "20th August" date for the Xbox release. Outside of China nobody knows what that date means and a serious business would rather try to get their product out as soon as possible while the marketing hype is up, rather than wait a full year for that specific date to come.

This makes them look like amateurs.

So it basically took them exactly 1 year to find the Lumen settings in Unreal Engine 5 to turn it off for Xbox? /s 😄

Well, better late than never.

I'm surprised it took this long for Microsoft to make their cloud streaming offer cheaper/ more accessible, but it's a step in the right direction.

@smoreon I played through Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox Series X 3 years ago and that game often looks better than many new release thanks to a strong art direction. Same with the original Ninja Gaiden Black and Dead or Alive 3 which look great upscaled to 4K.

As I am getting older I seem to enjoy simpler experiences more than the current over complicated "everything is an RPG" AAA games. So those backward compatible games are perfect for me.

@Fiendish-Beaver I understand that it's fun to discuss and speculate about Sony's and Microsoft's business strategies and their success and failures on these forums and of course numbers help a lot.

Personally I use the numbers from websites like trueachievements.com or exophase.com to calculate the percentage of the people who played the game compared to the total number of registered/tracked users per platform and then apply the percentage to the estimated number of sold consoles from vgchartz.com. The method is definitely not perfect, but gives you a rough estimate about how a game is doing and it's much better than an estimate based on review numbers on a platform's store front (as it was done by Alinea Analytics for the Final Fantasy 16 on Xbox and reported by PushSquare).

But please keep in mind, these are just numbers and no matter what other people try to tell you, the numbers often don't matter that much. What really matters in the end is, if a game is fun for you to play. 😉

@Fiendish-Beaver

Would 100,000 on the Xbox be considered good?

The game has been only out for 1 day on Xbox so it's hard to say.

At the same time as the Xbox release the game also received a large content update which got lapsed players to return. On SteamDB you see the daily active players going from 60K on the weekend to 160K today. Probably something similar happened on PlayStation.

But it's worth considering that today is Wednesday, the mid of the week. Many will start playing on the weekend. Probably more people have bought the game who haven't started yet.

100 000 Xbox players would already be enough to make the release profitable, but I suspect it might have sold more than 200K copies on Xbox already.

Happy to see that the game is doing great on Xbox as well.

I remember enjoying Cold Fear quite a lot back on the original Xbox. It plays like Resident Evil 4 but with more refined controls. The first section on the ship rocked by stormy ocean waves is brilliant, but the second half on the rig is forgettable.

@fatpunkslim

I’m surprised the graphics are this bad — I thought PlayStation players were more demanding when it comes to visual quality.

It's because graphics alone don't make a good game. Helldivers 2 is a fresh experience which is fun to play in co-op and most players don't care if the graphics look dated.

Some of the best selling and most played games currently have dated graphics (like Minecraft, GTA5) but it doesn't matter.

I bet many of us would have been happy with the Xbox 360 and PS3 if we had only gotten full HD, 60fps and fast loading via SSD as the only upgrades

It's amazing what talented developers were able to pull of on limited hardware with outstanding creative designs and practical solutions around limitations.

#BuyEvercade 😁

@FraserG Sorry, I guess I missed it. 😉

It's worth to mention that there's a demo for Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, for those who want to get a good impression:
https://www.xbox.com/games/store/shinobi-art-of-vengeance-demo/9pnvpkftm8bs

The more players the better. A PS5 release would also make sense.