Weebleman

Buckle in for this ones price folks.

@Decimateh game of the year generally runs from mid November one year to the same the next year. So it would need to move to 2028 to avoid having GTA in the mix.

@Coletrain im off to Disney in July and im already prepared to be annoyed at the mobile phone crowd

@Millionski I think its the manner its being done in to be honest. Apologising to every blue tick xbox account that says something negative is very different to promoting things or pushing a brand.

They should hire the person who did fall guys twitter back in the day.

@Coletrain tell me about it. My eldest is turning 18 this week and every photo she is in she does that mouth pucker like she's holding a f*rt in. Drives me nuts.

Still hope for my two boys but I know it will get them sooner or later.

@dskatter none of them would me my preference. I'd rather she had a plan in place that her and her team created. Instead its just constant 'heard' and what not on social media.

Im genuinely not sure how i feel about a CEO of a massive company seemingly taking advice and actions based on the vaccum that is twitter comments. This appears to be her go to and its not good.

@Banjo- its scary how deep thats ingrained in my brain that I instantly hear it.

Xbox had exclusives (and still has far more than the few its put on other platforms) yet consoles sales are poor compared to other gens, and indeed competitors.

Would you rather retain exlclusives and probably sell a few more consoles, or have the company keep multiplatform and make more profit from their software/MT's and DLC than they would from those additional console sales?

Its a tough spot they're in because they clearly wasn't selling enough boxes/subs to end up going multiplatform in the first place. I somtimes wonder if folks want exclusives back because they simply dont like them elsewhere. A lot of folks in the comments calling for it are the usual xbox faithfull (not all mind you) who, lets be honest, are a minority in the grand scheme of things. Same with any platform, the majority of sales are from folks who dont comment on, or even read, gaming sites like these.

Where as from the business perspective, the money they make off multiplatform sales will likely keep a lot of xbox studios financially viable.

Which would folks prefer. Exclusivity with lower profit margins, or multiplatform with more sales.

Edit: For the record, I do think consoles should have exclusives as thats their main USP. I'd just rather have them making more games sales so their studios keep making games i enjoy.

"Growth slowed down and subscriber loss accelerated after the pricing and SKU changes last year. Since our price reduction we have seen acquisitions grow and retention improve, which is a good first step."

The interesting part in this for me is the bit we dont get. While numbers have grown, are they back to where they were before the loss. We will likely never know but if I lose a quid and find 50p, I'm still down by half.

I have a feeling helix was announced earlier than planned to turn the negative tide a bit at the time.

@Qozmyk 100% on the money with that. The thing folks think will pull the brand back did nothing to move the brand when they had it. Obscene amounts of money to swallow up more ip's, including one of the biggest out there couldn't move the needle.

What would bringing them back change when nobody cared they were there in the first place.

@Banjo- i have a feeling they won't listen 😂

@Banjo- to be fair pal, I think the console war is already long done.

@GoldenPants probably the most accurate comment any of us will ever read right there pal. We could have been diving into pools of cash like scrooge mcduck by this point.

@IOI one of the most ridiculous lines in a statement I've ever read.

I get a feeling that her hard choices comment is gonna be more about xbox players expecting exclusives back and not getting them.

The only meaningful action from her so far is a gamepass price reduction (to a price still higher than it was and without the game they paid literally billions to get). The rest is just corporate nonsense to get attention. Posters on lifts, stickers on office walls are classic corpo moves so people percieve changes. You are still xbox, despite discovering caps lock.

Asha could have walked out at any point and said the games announced as multi platform will stay that way, but all future games will be exclusive. Absolute quick win. No loss of development costs that have already been used.

She hasn't. It's always we hear you. Heres a dashboard update. Heres a logo. Heres something else that will make you feel listened to.

As always with folks who run these things, its what they dont say that usually ends up being the reality.

Happy to be wrong. Happy to bet I'm not.

@Millionski its truly mental isnt it. It has absolutely sucked all excitement out of new consoles for me personally. Mainly because you know they won't be making next gen only games for a very long time as they just won't shift the numbers they need them to.

@abe_hikura yeah its hard to argue with your points. If anything i was being conservative with those prices. I wouldn't be shocked if helix was easily over a grand for exactly the reasons you've highlighted. The only way it gets cheaper is if they dropped all the third party stores and make a full fat console. Either way it won't shift massive numbers, so they may as well go all out with an expensive machine and recoup their costs on the ones they sell.

Pretty grim time for console fans.

@Millionski I reckon PS6 will be 749 to 799 at launch. Simply because they will want it to feel cheaper than 800.

Helix im gonna go 900 plus minimum. I wouldnt be surprised if they go 949 or 999.99 for the same reason above. Sounds cheaper than the price you are pretty much paying. They will sell it as a premium machine and, rather than have an 's' model, they will just push the full screen experience across cheaper PC's.

Obviously all just my opinion and with the state of things at the minute they could massively exceed that.

The main thing for me is I dont think we need another gen. Most will stay with what they have now because they will be priced out of upgrading. I get why xbox are keen to start another gen but I think it will backfire if they push it out while prices are ridiculous. Games will be cross gen for a looooong time and most will just pick the cheaper, current gen options their mates have.

If anyone can look at this and still think helix is gonna be cheap they are in for a shock. PS6 will be lower hardware and even that will be eyewatering.

We could be in for a painful ride folks.

@themightyant yep, agree with everything you say there. Its a chore at points and if it wasnt for wanting to see where the soundtrack went, id have deleted it in a blink.

@themightyant the gameplay for me was the weakest part and i struggled similar to you. The soundtrack however, my god, its worth playing through for that alone. Absolutely superb and i cannot emphasise that enough. Literally carried me to the end of it.

That is a weird list beyond one and two. Oddly though, its the stuff after one and two I think there is more chance of happening. Those games go exclusive and the studios will start to shutter as we know they aren't pulling enough in money wise.

My guess is somewhere in the middle like exclusive content on xbox.

@HonestHick man, you show me a car with a vinyl player and I'm sold 😂

@HonestHick well, vinyl was one of the top selling music formats over the last year and while they dont have cd players, never put it past the kids to surprise you on what they will lean towards.

Like I said though, its shrinking but id put money on there being an optional drive add on for both machines next gen. Hell, Helix is a PC. Within hours of that machine landing in someone's lap, someone else will have figured out how to stick a drive on it.

While I understand you may prefer digital and have moved on, and i would highlight i didn't disagree with you, folks have differing opinions and prefer the opposite. You dont need to mass produce them, Sony seemed to just make for demand when the pro released as it was a pain to get one.

Then theres preservation and, as the commentor above mentioned, not all places have internet capabilities that we do.

Im not saying it won't go, I'm just saying it'll become optional before it does.

@HonestHick to be fair, that small percentage of PS players buying physical still equalled multiple millions of game purchases. Its definitely shrinking but dont think that just because the percentage is small, the amount it equates to is also.

Edit: 70 million physical games sold in the last year on PS

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2026/05/physical-game-fans-beware-digital-downloads-hit-an-astonishing-85percent-on-ps5-ps4-last-quarter

I mean, if its a tier of gamepass for subscribing to Discord, with different benefits, its still another tier of gamepass as its another option to access a different level of it regardless of who the sub is through.

@Shinato2024 I have a small, itchy rash on the back of my leg. Im not one to complain normally but since you asked... 😉

@demian true story 👍

That is a lot of AI focused people. Kinda feels inevitable where this is heading unfortunately.

@Millionski I think the reason things like South of Midnight, Indiana Jones, etc... didn't sell well is because they didn't launch day and date. They are more one and done if you know what I mean and, as they'd already been out elsewhere, most had played them through on a cheap month of gamepass, read spoilers, watched playthroughs and so in. Sales would probably have been higher had they dropped at the same time. Which is the puzzle really.

Hold off, smaller sales and possibly more console sales; Which they tried and didn't shift consoles.

Launch same day. Bigger software sales, less consoles.

I personally feel they will go with the 2nd option, which is why they are already highlighting Helix as a premium machine and focusing on the core fans. They know this machine won't sell to the masses. Only the hardcore fans are gonna plump up the price it will be and they will get a solid PC from it with back compat.

The rest of the money will be made from software sales.

@somnambulance I mean, its not impossible. If anything these days, never say never eh.

I just feel that while some brands can do that, its very different in gaming. People who have moved on from xbox have spent hundreds of pounds on a competitor and are now in their loop. The more the xbox brand dips, the bigger the mountain gets to bring them back, let alone bring new folks in.

Word of mouth is a powerful thing. I see it with my kids. They have friends over, play a game and then their parents ask us at school what it was as they have asked for it. Then thats another sale for whatever it was they were on and, 99% of the time at the minute, its on PS/Switch (he's not on the steamdeck yet 😂). Our series X has essentially become a retro box for my library or back compat stuff that only I bother with occasionally. Great machine, dont get me wrong, but thats just how it is at the minute.

When you arent selling boxes, that loop gets smaller or chances are they already have spent x amount of pounds on a competitor. Casual folks will play where their pals play and thats where the majority of sales come from. As we see with the focus on core fans from xbox now.

Before other folks same I'm being all doom and gloom, I'm not. That's just the reality of where xbox is at the minute. Outside of places like this nobody really cares about it. I want them to get back on track as we need them to make the others better and I like what they bring to the table. I just dont see how they ever get back there.

@somnambulance the problem with letting things crash is that it damages your brand. No company intentionally ruins the brand to build it back up again.

Just reading more of this and its now been an over 30% decline in the last two quarters for hardware. It would have been three but the 1st quarter was a 29% decline. They are horrific numbers.

I would also like to highlight Nadella for ultimate corporate speaker with this beauty, '...that empower every business to eval-max their outcomes...'

Like he's coming up with new pokemon or something.

I hate when these companies try to make new metrics of success. 'Yeah, yeah, our profits have plummeted.... but look at all these hours! We could buy everything with these hours!'

Corporate nonsense.

None of this holds relevance for me about the future of xbox. Elevator doors, motivational window stickers and email addresses. Great work.

Im going for very late 2027 or early 2028, depends when in 2027 those dev kits go out as I dont think they will want to launch with no new games again.

Also, this whole where the world plays being squeezed into every answer annoys me. It feels like watching Boris Johnson just saying get brexit done in response to every question.

Im still not convinced but I'm open to being wrong. They removed the sole reason they spent 70 billion from Gamepass, and despite lowering the price, its still a price increase.

And lest we forget, Matt Booty is still in the mix and he has a hand in everything that tanked the brand prior to Asha.

Its gonna take more than slapping a sticker on an elevator to turn this ship around.

@AI-Generation stick that on your elevator Ms Sharma!

@AI-Generation on it! Would look nice in one of the staffs offices. Pride of place in there i think 😂

I mean, i can make a sticker saying I'm a 6 and half foot, toned model, it doesn't mean its true.

If they dont look at the mess this has caused already for them, then i have zero faith in them. The whole ABK saga because they thought call of duty would bring people flooding in, and they've now had to remove it to bring the price down because it clearly didn't.

If that's not the biggest red flag in the world right there regarding acquisitions then I dont know what is.

This is all positive news but that nugget about focusing on player hours over growth says a whole lot without actually saying it. All companies want growth. Its great if the folks who already own them use them all day, every day, but if the install base isn't growing then theres only so much you can make from your audience.

@Coletrain if you paid for this you'd only be allowed to yell at them for 10 hours.

Good. I hope they do. We need competition to make both Sony and Xbox better for us. Its that simple.

Lovely to see some positivity coming out of xbox news wise. I get a feeling they will soon offer something similar to PS Plus where new games drop much later but you still have a good catalogue for the price. In turn this encourages competition in price between the two.

Good news for gamers all round really.

@GeminiX53 essentially the PS Plus model. It feels like the whole 'day one release is unsustainable' comment from Sony may have an air of truth about it.

Exclusives won't go back as they tried and it didn't shift the needle. They tried timed exclusivity and that just impacts sales on other platforms. If the likes of starfield had released day and date on all platforms, it would have sold through the roof on PS. Instead folks either subbed to GP for a month and tried it, or read its was a mess/dull and lost interest.

Xbox are struggling to sell boxes. Their next box is going to be niche as hell and expensive. Exclusive games simply wont sell enough or pull in enough new subs to cover costs to make them. Its that simple. Then we lose studios and everyone loses full stop.

Its funny seeing all the folks who were saying exclusives are an old mindset and nobody wants them, now saying MS/Asha are making the right decisions.

The gymnastics are dizzying.