Zenszulu

I remember when the Rewards used to be fun and actually got you playing specific gamepass games that moth and trying to earn certain achievements. Many times as a result it would get you enjoying the game through to completion long after you did the rewards quests.

I mean you could argue a Switch or Switch 2 is playing anywhere since it is able to be both portable and dock with a TV. You can also make the argument that any Steam capable handheld is the same if you also have a decent PC and then the upcoming Steam Machine and that has cloud saves that you can sync across those devices.

It will be interesting what happens with the next Xbox console and if it will have an optical drive at all and if it doesn't these games would be locked out to those who don't have an older Xbox with a drive.

I got the original Xbox a little after it launched but I already had a Gamecube and PS2 at that point. I wanted an Xbox because each of the systems had exclusive games that generation that made it worth owning each one. I got Halo and Dead or Alive 3 with it and not long after Panzer Dragoon Orta and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I remember my first thoughts on the controller being that despite it's size it was really well suited to shooters but it wasn't so hot with fighting games and general action games. Although I do recall getting it from Woolworths since in the town I grew up in that was the only place that sold anything like that and the next nearest place was several miles away. There is nothing like that left in that town these days not even a CEX surprisingly.

I'd be more curious if the rumours of them being as much as 70% down year on year in the US are true as that is where they sell the bulk of their hardware.

@fatpunkslim the Xbox branded ROG ally isn't even produced by Xbox so they won't be making any kind of profit from it to factor into their sales. It is probably also only a very limited niche market that is buying it so if the sales numbers were in any way significantly both Asus and Xbox would have mentioned it by now.

Games like this even free ones that are designed just to basically give away easy achievements kind of ruined the value of them. Now all kinds of marketplaces are full of easy low cost games just designed to inflate peoples achievement scores not really showing who is the better gamer just who has the most time and money to play them all. Admittedly I went through a period several years back on Playstation of trying to platinum every game I played and in the end it sucked the fun out of the experience as I was no longer enjoying the games I played and it became a case of me choosing what to play next based on how easy it was to get every trophy.

Currently I am not willing to spend a penny on a new Xbox console after this generations confusing marketing from them and not being sure what direction they actually want to take since they tend to change direction every year or so.

This is one reason why I am very wary of having everything I own stored online to one single account across multiple services regardless of it is Microsoft, Google or anyone else as one wrong person gets access to those accounts and you lose it all. Although any personal things like family photos I keep backed up on some kind of physical storage and not on cloud storage.

Not that much this year. One all the Gamepass subscription time I had stored up expired at the end of last year I pretty much started using it less and less and only for older games. I spend the majority of my time on the PS5 when I do play since I have a larger library of games on there. I also probably play my Switch more too.

Just checked this out and it's not showing for me in the UK all of the prices are showing full price.

@Decimateh The two things aren't mutually exclusive a game franchise can have the most people playing and be played for the most amount of time on a service and people can also cancel their subscriptions. It's not evidence that people were lying at all as you seem to think it is.

I mean there are only so many ways you and design a simple cube shape anyway. People are just comparing two things that are the same shape and being surprised they look they same. It's like comparing two round balls used for different sports and then coming to they conclusion they are in fact both round spheres.

Can it really stand shoulder to shoulder with something if a large part of what made it become such a favourite with people at the time is removed? All that tells me is they don't actually know the reason the game was so loved and as much as people remember the campaign the vast majority of people played it for years after because of either split screen multiplayer or lan connected games. That is what elevated the game as the successor to goldeneye in that regard as far as console fps went.

If anything the music in the trailer helped get me interested. Seems to be going for a Doom/Fear hybrid look too.

When I was younger it used to be all the time. Now as I am older I will usually play through a game once and move on usually because of time and the fact I have access to far more games these days.

The reason they have become believable is people have lost any faith in Xbox in general this year. It's almost as if those working there are oblivious to their own words and actions causing people to lose faith with them. You can blame people spreading rumours all you like but when you are also sending mixed messages on what your overall vision is don't expect your existing customers to always be happy as a result.

If this is true would this just not further put off potentially new customers if they hear that people already subscribed will gets lower price than them? It would make it seem they are preferred customers over you. That would pretty much prevent any future growth in those markets if there was going to be any to begin with.

This kind of makes sense for any game with multiple games modes. If you only spend time time playing one mode or want to remove the campaign mode after beating it then more games should do this going forward.

Rewards used to make Gamepass pay for itself as in a 3 month period you used to easily be able to earn enough points to get a 3 month Gamepass Ultimate gift card and still have many points left over. Even though they nerfed it last year it was still possible to do it every 3 months. I wonder how this will effect the amount of subscribers in total too as I am curious how many people actually used the rewards this way.

This is one of the problem Microsoft seemed to have. They were expecting everyone to rush out and buy an Xbox and subscribe to Gamepass because they made all of these third party acquisitions. These games were never system sellers on their own as they usually sold equally across all the platforms they were on. The reason they sold so many is pretty much everyone had the chance to play them. It may shock some people but if all you console is offering as a selling point is the same games you can play on the others but the others offer a huge library of games that you can't then people will go to the ones with more choices.

It is difficult to completely accept this as a definitive answer. They have said one thing multiple times only to do the opposite after. Do I think there will be a console with the name Xbox on it in the future? Yes but I feel it will be a branding only and it will be PC hardware makes like Asus that are making them and it will be essentially just an operating system. In a way kind of like the 3DO model. So definitely this console/pc hybrid that has been rumoured.

It really depends on how much time you spend playing games and how many you get through. If you have the time to play several hours daily and play through multiple games a month it's good value for you. Adding a load of extra games and other perks is all well and good but you have to find the time to take advantage of it. Sometimes too much as part of a subscription isn't great value if you don't really use much of it.

The problem with this is services EA Play and Ubisoft+ and even the Fortnite thing would probably attract fewer customers. All those services agreed deals with Microsoft to be a part of the top tier and probably got paid up front doing so that kind of thing would never work as they would be relying on you essentially subscribing to them separately for them to get any money from it. It's nice in theory sure but it ultimately wouldn't work for those things as they would be no different to a normal subscription model except you are managing the payment through a gamepass account.

This is up there with telling people who don't have an always on connection that they still have a product for you with an Xbox 360. When you're doubling the price of something the value instantly diminishes. You can add as many extras as you like on to the higher tier but if they aren't what the customer wanted to begin with it isn't actually adding value just people paying for extra that they will never use.

Ah the old we wanted to save you money but we decided against it. The only way they would have even considered this though is if it was going to be heavily pushed and advertised as an Xbox console to the mass consumer market. Since it was never going to be that and it was always going to be marketed towards the tech enthusiast as a niche product I can't believe it was ever a serious consideration.

Is it good value for what you get yes very much so. Comparing it's used price to a recently released system that is far more in demand that the Series S has ever been is a bit of a stretch. Value can be very much subjective on what you can get out of any kind of hardware so just simply being a lower price and having access to all those games doesn't always make it the best choice for value for everyone. The other reason why the Series S is so low in price used is because no one seems to want one and you can go into any pawn shop or CEX and see several systems all lined up on display often for months and they don't shift fast even at the prices they are. You could make this exact same argument against any older harder compared to newly released hardware. It's great that you got something you wanted at a low price but it almost sounds like an article that is trying to convince people not to buy a Switch 2 because it is new and costs more than an old used console more than anything.

My Xbox account is about 18 years old at this point nearly 19. My first achievements are dated all the way back to the end of 2006 yet I need to now prove I am over a certain age. In principal I get what they are trying to do but it is going beyond protecting people and starting to dictate what they deem appropriate to view because they don't feel anyone under 18 or their parents can regulate stuff themselves or handle certain topics.

@Kaloudz in that case you may actually get some enjoyment out of the later entries even though they have little connection to the source material and the scripts on some of them were meant for other movies and just had a Hellraiser plot added to them.

@Kaloudz as someone already said the first two movies are worth a watch maybe the third one but even that isn't great but after that they just get really bad.

@RZ-Atom you very much are criticising them for not showing an interest in how the gameplay is. They are your words. That isn't their focus. It is solely about the tech power the games. You can want full representation on everything about the game but you are obviously going into watching their videos knowing you won't get that. I read the context of what you wrote perfectly fine you just don't seem to realise that what you said is what would be considered criticism of it for some reason.

@GameOverScreen they aren't biased at all they simply report their findings on how it runs on particular hardware. If it runs better on an Xbox they will say and they have done many many times in the past. Just because you ignore those times and are for some on reason annoyed that they dare point out a game runs better on something other than Xbox hardware doesn't make it true. You are the one that comes across as a fanboy hoping they get shut down because the information they have gathered doesn't say what you want it to.

@RZ-Atom they aren't reviewing the gameplay and the game itself though that isn't their purpose they are doing tech analysis that is literally why they were set up. You are criticising them for not doing something that they aren't aiming to do in the first place.

From the OG Xbox both of the KOTR games from the 360 Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon and GTA 4.

Just curious but have the studio released anything else in the 13 years this game has been in development?

@Balie3000 They have had a revival in recent years with not only a new movie but a new series on Paramount+ so there is a good chance some do.

It feels like longer. I forgot they existed since they stopped having them on the Xbox store under the hardware section. Admittedly I don't check it often and only used it to redeem some points for a new controller.

I don't see this as great. Wasn't a fan of the latest Motorsport as it felt lacking any kind of personality almost like it had it's identity ripped out from it. But it was always a good rival the Gran Turismo and was definitely a reason to get an Xbox is you like racing games. I can understand that the Horizon series has probably started to overtake it in terms of sales over the past several years but for the studio that made the series to be turned into support for an offshoot of that series seems like it would be hard for anyone left there to not struggle with that. That's if these is anyone senior left.

It's not my kind of game so no.

It seems like every game that has been announced as being in development now has to have some kind of confirmation it is still a thing. I would say there are probably many games that Microsoft has in development that haven't been announced that get cancelled but then they also have a tendency to announce them so many years in advance now it's hard to tell.

I imagine the amount of time the game has been in development has been good for her and other voice actors too probably getting more money each time they have asked them to record new stuff with no potential release date on the horizon. If that were me I would want that job to keep going too. I know that may sound negative but I am sure it is a common thing with voice actors especially if they have been used since the early days of the development of a game they will usually have a good amount of dates booked for work.

So he is saying it was fake but it wasn't extra super fake? By the sounds of that he is admitting what they did have was barely fit to be shown off to begin with. This is why I am against showing trailers years in advance of a game even possibly being released as there is a high chance that what they are showing isn't actually a game

So if that one was a fake trailer and the original teaser years ago was also just a mock up and had nothing to do with any kind of actual work done all I would say is a game with that little progress in 7 or so years deserved to be cancelled. What could two separate studios have been doing all that time to show such little progress?

This one really is sad. I can kind of get it since the game has been in development for several years now and progress seemed to never move past the very early stages. Saying that though it seemed like there was finally direction after the big gameplay reveal and now nothing.

This is the problem they have switched their focus so many times in the last 4 years it's hard to know what they want. First they started by buying publishers expecting everyone to flock to Xbox and Gamepass because they own all these Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard games. Then it's just countless different things with the play anywhere stuff and everything being an Xbox, third party releases and all the rumours around their next consoles also having access to PC storefronts. They are confusing their customers as to why they actually need an Xbox at this point.

I get that this will give greater choice but I can't see how this won't impact Microsoft's sales even further when it comes to software considering those PC centric store fronts often offer games at far cheaper prices. When I buy games on my PC the Microsoft store or Xbox app are probably the last place I go to buy the game and it is often only something I use for Gamepass games.

It's not really a surprise. But then many big games on subscription services probably have much lower completion rates now because people will often try stuff they normally wouldn't and if they don't like what they see then they will simply stop and uninstall it.

The seem to be up and down in revenue in all different sectors of their business. Since they started running TNT sports in the UK they have apparently suffered huge losses on that too. Although from what I have read the reason BT wanted to get rid of it was because they were losing money every year due to the huge amounts of money they were spending and not getting the number of subscribers they needed to match it.

WB is one of those that has themselves spread way to thin by trying to do everything related to media in some way and they are suffering with all of it.

I remember a time when consoles always dropped in price multiple times during their lifespan and were a fraction of the price the were when they launched by the end of their life. Now have been seeing them not only maintaining their price throughout their life but now going up.

I stopped my Gamepass subscription last year but that was because I went back to PS Plus. I didn't see the point in having two similar services at the same time. It's the same as subscribing to steaming services I don't really subscribe to multiple ones at the same time because then I won't use one and waste money.

At the same time I don't rely on subscription services as the only way I play games more of an addition to what games I buy or to play stuff I would probably never buy normally.

@FraserG I did see the update just saying at the time I checked it last night it was still the same. I will be curious if they extend the time period due to the error as we are only several hours from the time it's due to end.

It seems to be letting people install the game but not actually purchase it. It will be interesting to see if this gets fixed by tomorrow.