Zenszulu

Booty man here says one thing and does the opposite it seems. Surely the more small studios you have the greater amount of smaller games can be made. It's starting to look like the only games they want are first person RPGs or shooters that have massive budgets everything else is deemed unable to make them money.

It should be called the COD tax

That's really sad of it's true but then Microsoft only seems to want to fund huge projects now that they can make money from that way smaller ones don't seem to stand a chance now.

A gaming subscription service is fine but if it's your primary focus of essentially selling new games to customers then it's going to cause issues down the line unless your subscribers goes up at a steady pace. Sony new this and refused to adopt the model of putting all first party games on at launch. I'm not saying they are bad value especially for offering a range of games you may not have purchased to or missed from years gone by. However, if you as a publisher are relying on it to get all of your latest games being played then you will start needing a drastic increase in subscriptions to make up for even more games being added day one to make up for the potential loss in sales. If it's a game that you have already made all or most of the development costs back from game sales then it's not as much of a risk.

I said last year they should never have announced this game since it wasn't even in the concept phase and the teaser was made by people who weren't even set to be working on the project. Since then it seems progress has been nearly non existent yet they continue to be funded over studios that actually produce content and good stuff at that. If it ever comes out then it has better be a masterpiece because you would hope the higher ups have seen something to continue funding.

What makes little sense is buying up all of these studios and publishers with a high back catalog of games and ips and then having them only concentrate on two or three games that are currently guaranteed to make them the most money by being multi platform. All this talk of them wanting all games to be multi platform even from Sony isn't so there are no longer exclusive games it's simply because they will no longer be making original exclusive games for Xbox.

Anyone who previously thought this would increase the amount of exclusives for Xbox while having the bigger games still be multi platform are probably no longer thinking that and I would seriously doubt that very few people are interested in Xbox hardware going forward as a result.

Buying two publishers was never going to end well Bethesda alone was fine but when you buy one of the largest ones in Activision-Blizzard then the previous acquisition becomes less valuable unless it only produces big sellers. You would think with all these extra studios they could have dozens of games in development all at once but instead they somehow will be making less. No wonder they seem to think all games should be multiple platform it's because they don't plan on making any exclusives themselves anymore.

Well I tend to only have a few games at a time downloaded anyway as I used to find I would download games and they would sit there for months until I eventually just deleted them anyway and speed is never an issue for me as I have a 1GB download speed.

Well I have been using it since I have returned to Xbox a couple of years back and when I realised it could be used for getting Gamepass for nothing I pretty much went all in on using it. So it has paid for itself and I just got to a 100 week streak last week so I guess there is nice way to round out it's closure for me. Still I earn about half of what I used to a month which used to be between 23 and 26K so it is still about enough get Gamepass ultimate every month. Anything else I currently have saved is a bonus and some people seem overly entitled to the older amounts which is crazy when you consider it was free. Still more may be added when they fully switch over in the next week of so.

Surely actually buying the game is the tip in and of itself especially at full price never have I thought to myself "I just payed for and beat this game and enjoyed it so I'll give them even more money for nothing in return".

That's like going to the cinema and after watching the movie they ask you if you liked the movie enough you should consider leaving a tip. No one is going to do that.

Is it surprising when in general they are struggling to shift consoles? They even purchased Bethesda and at first chose to keep those games recently as exclusive under the hope that something like Starfield would get more people buying a console but that didn't work. The reason third party publishers are usually successful is their games sell well even across all platforms on their own they usually aren't system sellers. You are essentially removing half of the value of what you paid for. Rather than making new games and marketing your system to get people to buy it they went the route of relying on a subscription service and relying on the work of others in the past to get new users. It wouldn't have been so bad if last generation they had a larger marketshare. So these persistent rumours don't surprise me and I can imagine many publishers even larger ones are struggling for sales on Xbox due to most of the focus being on gamepass.

Resident Evil games feel at their best in smaller enclosed spaces where you feel trapped at times so wouldn't an open world make that much harder unless it's a complete city that has been over run because I can't imagine too many open world settings that would suit RE games.

Well I only have a few games downloaded at a time that I plan on playing and rarely if ever fill the storage. People often seem just fill up their storage with games they never get around to playing and then end up deleting them to make room for they next game they wont play.

It was always a matter of time before they stopped just handing out money like that. As it was last year I still earned over £250 worth of rewards points even while they were needing stuff. It's been a nice bonus that made playing game pass essentially pay for itself for year. At the same time if it drops to a fraction of what it was I won't see it as a loss since it was free to begin with. Only thing I am currently curious about is what else will be changing as the move the rewards over to the achievement section what will actually be gained.

I'm on a 97 week streak so I may take a final picture in a few weeks as it closes and I just manage to get to 100. As long as the points total is like for like can't imagine it will be too different. I know people have complained about less points but I still average over 20,000 a month even in February.

Unless it is a game that is significantly different in terms of a remake that will be a different experience from the original I may give them a miss. With remasters it has to be something that isn't already available on the current or previous generations with little to no enhancements other than a resolution and texture increase. If the remaster is something that keeps the look of an old game but makes certain aspects about how it plays more modern like what Nightdive do then I will be much more interested.

If you want to put something that looks like a 360 on a shelf then you can get a used non working one for a fraction of the price of this.

@BacklogBrad they also made Crash 4 so they were obviously going to make them at one point going forward.

@BacklogBrad well they were still making Crash games as well so it's not like they just stopped making games that were making money either.

I'd be interested in what this means for the Spyro and Crash games since they had a good track record with them. It almost seems like Microsoft will have all of these IPs and not enough studios to make more than a small handful of games that they know will sell loads.

I have to say I am impressed that a fighting game that was launched with the Xbox One is still getting updates a decade later. I always wanted to love the game after playing the original way back when it came out but I got burnt out on fighting games by the early 00s and haven't been able to get into them as much again. Probably doesn't help that I seem to suck at most now.

@OldGamer999 definitely won't be any time soon don't expect COD games to be day one on the current generation of systems that was one of the things that Sony was negotiating against to prevent it so probably not even the next generation either.

I watched the trailer and some how I'm even more disappointed than I expected from something that is apparently GOTY contender. I am sure it's fun and everything but I can't see it appealing to most people.

The further you go down the messages the more seem to have been deleted. Do we really need to argue over why the plastic box you play games on is the "best"?

Games don't have to be multi platform at the end of the day if they make enough by being exclusive on a single console. Like it or not when Xbox brought Bethesda they were banking on some of those games they chose to keep exclusive to get more people buying a console to play them but it hasn't panned out that was as Bethesda games have more value being on as many platforms as possible since that is how they got their value to begin with.

Sony is under no obligation to port any of their games to other systems because some of those games are coming to PS5. The only exception is the MLB game which was in the contract to have it available to as many players as possible.

I don't as using the console to run apps is less power efficient than a streaming device or any kind of TV set top box.

@UltimateGuru probably not since you aren't paying to pre-order it.

I have about 30 or so 360 games that are backwards compatible but admittedly since the Xbox One launched I only have a small handful like 5 but at that point I mainly got stuff on PS4 physically. Since Gamepass launched I haven't picked up a single physical Xbox game as I usually only done that for the system exclusives and since they are already a part of Gamepass I don't feel the need currently while I am subscribed.

@The-Chosen-one that is still enough if artwork is decided to be plagiarised or derivative for the sole purpose of making money then yes that is enough to win if a court decides it. Regardless if it does go to court or not it is still a solid enough argument that they were created similarly enough for the very reason of getting noticed and selling more even if the games themselves play nothing alike.

@Gloki_junior Why is it more of a Sony thing to do? All large corporations tend to do similar things after mergers due to many factors many can be simply down to the fact they have too many people doing the same job as each other and a large workforce in certain cases is not necessarily productive or cost effective in certain roles. As some one has also mentioned this isn't the first time recently Microsoft has done this.

Well I gave it a try and it's definitely buggy. Even trying to create a character avatar wasn't working properly for me as every thing I selected wasn't showing on the model but apparently it did actually take effect when I gave up and started anyway. Even the game itself is very glitchy and buggy so I can imagine the experience now won't be anything like the final game or I hope not anyway. So I'll give it a miss for now as I feel early access stuff like this isn't always representing what the final game will be and may take away my enjoyment.

At this point Microsoft is a third party publisher that also happens to have a console on the market

Last month will probably be the final time I get clear of 20,000 points then and it was only just. Oh well. As long as I get enough monthly to claim gamepass monthly it's fine.

@GuyinPA75 surely more people playing the game that is already free to play would create interest from Microsoft and Bethesda than one person picking up copies of a game. It's not making more people take interest in the first game enough that anyone is playing it more so it's not very successful.

Why would one person buying used copies of a game suddenly make them make a sequel? I mean it's not like Bethesda get money from it anymore and if I recall it's free to play on stream these days and no one plays it. So seems like this one guy what's them to make a sequel only he will play.

While games like Mass Effect 2 and Batman Arkham City got better critical praise overall the the originals I personally feel the first games were better because of the lasting impact they had at the time and being a huge step forward and I played both a huge amount at the time. Like several others have said the two Mystwalker RPGs are up there for me too Blue Dragon got very poorly received at the time for being too old in game design but that is what tends to happen with each new generation the older style gets seen as bad for a while.

@CharlieChooChoo I am pretty sure I recall reading that too that the Series X was already their pro console for this generation and they just released it at the start of the generation rather than wait. That is the very reason why the Series S is the base model for them and they want all games running on that.

@outswimmingtheflood I was just coming to say something very similar. It feels that this version of Forza plays it very safe even to the point where it comes off dull in terms of presentation.

I already stopped doing the daily achievement on this after it dropped from 50 to 5 points as it has dropped from around 1500 a month to just 150 and that didn't seem like it was worth my time. Now if they do keep adding things to slow collecting point more and more people will just stop using it. I can't say I want to have to put the effort in to keep using bing multiple times a day to get a few points at a time. I get they are probably also doing it to get people to do it naturally throughout the day with bing as their default search engine but only way that will happen is if they actually improve bing rather than try forcing people for some points.

If you keep predicting the same thing every year eventually over time it has a chance of becoming true.

I'm really not surprised as I recall they had two different trailers at one point that seemed not contradict what it was aiming for. It was in development for five years and what they finally had to show for it was a completely different kind of game than they were claiming they were making and one that was pretty empty from what I seen. The reason it failed financially is they suddenly tried to get the money back they spent from people just expecting them to buy something that isn't in any kind of playable state and not what they have been promising for years. Once people started sharing videos online they must have realised no one would buy it.

Taking any chance you to create an article with GTA 6 in the title I guess.

Never been a fan of gaming shows like this as it just seemed to be a trailers show with an award or two thrown in between them. I tried watching it and gave up half way as it was too over produced. It seems to have almost replaced E3 in people's minds as them expecting huge announcements and also seems to lack identity on if it wants to be an award show or an overly long press conference of new and upcoming game releases.

How many OG Xbox's were sold on the UK though? Just a simple statement without actual figures doesn't mean much.

So I did my own research the OG Xbox sold between 2.14 and 2.3 million units in the UK. While the 3DS/2DS sold around 3.9 million units. So this suggests the PS5 has sold close to double both Series consoles in the UK.

So maybe 31 December 2025...

@TakeItEasy no fridge sales are

I swear they are starting to sell more fridges than consoles these days.

Seems like they want people spending longer using bing rather than just the few minutes it took to knock the searches out. I am positive last month will be the last time I get over 20,000 points a month usually before 24,000 and 26,000. It's like they are going out of their way to make people not want to use it.

Translation: If were selling more we would open tell you.

Let's not kid ourselves that is the exact reason they haven't openly given numbers.

It just seems like a generic statement which was probably just sent out rather than anyone actually acknowledging anything. It has almost seemed like it winding down in the past couple of months. I'll go on the console app and there is no longer anything there except the weekly streak. Maybe they are getting ready for a relaunch in the new year but I am not holding my breath. Not overly concerned about it but the lack of any communication is actually poor.

They aren't far off going full third party developer seeing as they seem less and less interested I'm making exclusive games that sell their own hardware. They have become more of a publisher that happens to have hardware on the market. The thing is I have found their cloud gaming service to actually be poorer than Sony's and I will get more frequent drops and pauses in steam. That is over several different pieces of hardware so I imagine even on TVs it's no different. If they want to be streaming on everything they need to have a much better streaming technology first.