themightyant

Totally agree, must be a horrendous experience to work there right now knowing that your reward for finishing a project is an already planned dismissal.

The only ones that seem safe are the executives…

Err... you do realise that a massive part of Xbox executive leadership team, studio leaders etc. have all been laid off too. Satya and Asha have replaced whole swathes of Xbox Leadership with her old Core AI team, Matthew Ball etc. The bloodbath is everywhere.

This was inevitable, and clearly planned before release.

Asha stated she knew exactly how many job losses there would be over the next financial year, you only know this if you are planning on laying off staff already at a set time, likely after a project launch.

It has to be a HORRIBLE situation to be in, uncertainty that when you finish your project you will be booted out as a reward. Feel for the devs.

As it has to be enabled on a per title basis I suspect many devs won't want it enabled for their game.

Hopefully this is JUST for the base game and you don't lose it if they add DLC like on Steam. More importantly I hope they separate out DLC from the main game. This is especially crucial in live services where you may have hundreds of trophies over time.

All welcome improvements... but hardly changes all that much.
Baby steps.

I've only played a little of the Halo Remake but it was quite disappointing imo. It LOOKS lovely, but looks can be deceiving, it didn't quite FEEL right and lots of small things added up to it being a bit disappointing, enough that I stopped playing after a few levels. Maybe it gets better, but I didn't stick around to find out.

This is cool. It also seems to confirm Helix is planned to launch 2027.

But I am also interested in how my other PC store games might play on Helix, that is the potential unique selling point.

Yeah smooth as butter now been enjoying it

I'd take random Redditors views about performance with a humongous grain of salt! I've seen people saying performance is flawless over there in games that stutter constantly. I think some just don't see it.

Sadly this arrives just before I'm off on holiday and then we are into the super busy Sept/Oct period. Hopefully it's still on Game Pass when I get a moment.

@Fiendish-Beaver I tend to agree 2027 for Helix (also for PS6) simply because I think costs will get WORSE before they get better, hence there is little reason to delay, as you said especially for Xbox.

And I don't think Sony will want to give Microsoft a head start, it's in their better interest to give users a choice of PS6 v Helix and not delay, unless Xbox does. But Sony likes to announce late, as they want people to keep buying PS5s.

I didn't actually play it much, too many new games to play.

@Fiendish-Beaver If they say anything else this year it will almost certainly be The Game Awards imo, fanfest is FAR too small an event. But do we still think it's coming in 2027, or later?

@Weebleman You provided other crucial information too that fills out the picture. As you suggested Sony reportedly works on long term contracts and deals whereas Microsoft / Xbox works with shorter term deals as and when they need the supply. There's pros and cons to each approach, but when prices are rising as rapidly as they are currently then PlayStation has a better chance of securing lower costs.

Sadly VRAM is just one part and there are others that are increasing in cost too, hopefully that doesn't mean more price hikes!

@Pigrotto @Fiendish-Beaver Internally the Xbox Series X uses an off the shelf m.2 NVMe SSD which is in the smaller laptop 2230 form factor, that gives fewer options and raises costs. You can see it here.

The shorter laptop 2230 size is more expensive than the typical 2280 size in most PC's (and PS5 expansion). To my knowledge there aren't any 825GB off the shelf modules at that size, and certainly not in any great volume to keep it cheap, they would have to step down to 512GB which would more than halve the useable storage.

Whereas the PS5 soldered the SSD chips (highlighted in green, there's 3 more on the other side too) straight onto the board with their own custom SSD Controller (orange) to handle the super high data speeds. This gives them far more flexibility in terms of configuration but also on price as they only need to buy the chips, not the full retail m.2. NVMe SSD.

It's crazy that the series S costs 72% more than it did at launch in the UK and the Series X almost 50% more. Madness.

@Pigrotto AFAIK Famitsu hasn't fallen from grace more generally, but they do seem to rate some games (like JRPGS) higher than other publications on average, perhaps that is what @Lup was talking about. E.g. FF 13 was an almost perfect 39/40 (10/10/10/9) as was KH3 whereas Metacritic has them at a much lower, and imo more fair, 83 each.

That does mean you need to take some of their reviews with a pinch of salt imo, but perhaps you agree with those scores. It's just opinions at the end of the day.

I miss getting games added permanently to my library.

@Markatron84 I’m not sure I agree. Minecraft is a game that is wildly successful with 30+ million daily players and 200+ million monthly players. But it is still just a game.

Roblox is a platform on which to build games. They aren’t the same and hoping for Minecraft to be that fundamentally changes what it is.

First gears of war. I’ve told this story several times here, but it’s still as true as ever. I was saving up for a PS3 and wasn’t even really considering an Xbox. I didn’t have many friends with Xboxes so they were off my radar. Then I went round to a mates and played Gears of War… that roadie run, running between cover… and went out and spent my PS3 money on an Xbox 360 the very next day. It was like nothing I had ever seen. Happy memories.

@Markatron84 I’m not so sure, Minecraft is brilliant because of its simplicity. Massively monetising it even more and making it more like Roblox sounds pretty terrible to me. Ruin a good thing.

@Fiendish-Beaver well said. 👏👏👏. Came to say similar, but you articulated it far better.

Xbox is in a dire position right now - Asha, Matthew Ball and others have stated that very clearly - but there is more optimism with a change in leadership and strategy. But hope and optimism is not the same as actually delivering, it will take a long time to see if they can actually do that. Talk is cheap.

What is interesting here is we now have a timeline on when they plan to achieve their goals. They want to be half done by 2030 meaning by 2033/2034 they want Xbox to be the dominant force in gaming; have a billion players a day and other lofty goals they have set out.

Sounds great on paper, and of course I’d love to be see Xbox thrive as they suggest… but it also feels totally pie-in-the-sky. Like politicians not delivering on their manifesto I’d wager they don’t get close to most of those goals. But even if they make a decent effort Xbox could be in a better position than they are now. Fingers crossed.

@darylb24 PS5 Pro effectively runs the XSX 30fps quality mode at 60fps while also being sharper, that seems a decent upgrade for a mid-gen console.

But the reality is the game plays well everywhere and the developer deserves praise for optimising on each console. With the one exception of stuttering cutscenes on Xbox, hopefully that will be patched soon as currently it performs slightly better on BASE PS5 which is what the news is about.

@MrStark the surprise it is performs marginally better on base PS5 without stuttering in cutscenes unlike XSX.

Hopefully that will be patched soon.

You are making the classic mistake of comparing on paper specs rather than ACTUAL performance we can measure. In reality when ALL things are accounted for XSX and PS5 are virtually identical. It flip flops within a few percentage points game to game.

A good analogy is looking at cars. You may think a 1200hp super car would get round a track faster than a 1000hp one, but raw power isn’t everything and often the reverse is true if the weight distribution and aero package is better. Likewise with optimised console hardware, it’s more about the careful balance between ALL the parts rather than one or two comparisons like 12TF v 10TF.

The problem is that most developers work on the PS5 versions first and work back.

There may be some truth to that… but then why do the PS5 versions of Xbox developed games like Halo or Gears or Forza or Hellblade also perform almost identically?

If there was an ACTUAL large performance gap, as you suggest, where are the games from Xbox, developed for Xbox first, that show that? We’re almost 6 years in now, we now have hundreds of actual data points, at some point you need to realise on-paper specs aren’t everything.

Consolidating your PC storefronts and Xbox games was the Unique Selling Point. Without that what else do they have to convince people to buy? Game Pass? That didn’t work with Series X. They need a major hook else this will sell even worse.

Makes sense as they would have have had more financial freedom under Microsoft and expanded under their reign. Now they are independent again they will have to tighten their belts which means fewer employees.

Hopefully they have an actual chance to survive and aren't just being thrown into the river with no paddle.

Some games worked others didn’t. Thankfully I’m finishing something on another console right now so it didn’t affect me much this time.

Only played a little. I like it, but it hasn't held my attention as i've played the campaign too many times before, and with limited time to play right now would rather focus on games I haven't played.

I'll get back to it eventually.

D'oh! was just replying about this on the other thread.

It's a pretty good response, as far as these things go imo. Especially the last part you quoted. They need to make sure they have better systems in place to stop this happening in future. Though why some discs were blocked also needs to answered, these shouldn't be blocked just because Xbox is down.

Xbox CTO has come out and revealed the cause to be a third party licensing service that Xbox depends upon which failed.

It's worth a read and a pretty good response as far as these things go imo, especially the last part.

We're running a full post-incident review. I care less about the one-line root cause and more about the real questions: why a failure in one service was able to take down this much, why recovery took as long as it did, and what we change so a single point of failure can't ruin your night again.

Hopefully they can put measures in place to stop this happening again. Though why discs were blocked just because Xbox Live was down is madness.

@Titntin The discs worked just fine on PS5 when PSN was down, don't know why it wasn't the same on Xbox, I was referencing both. Not so adorable, unlike Animal!

Look I know we fundamentally disagree on Digital & Physical, you want us to all go digital to save the world from plastic waste, and I massively respect that, but do you need to add an ad-hominem comment each time? We disagree on this, that is fine by me. I still like you.

@Fiendish-Beaver I know what you mean, but there just isn't really capacity to do that for most older games for professional reviewers.

That's one of the areas where something Steam Reviews have an advantage, at least in theory, as you can filter by recent reviews to see how a game is reviewing now, versus release.

Although it isn't a perfect system. You would expect Stalker 2 having had a lot of updates to score better now than it did at launch, but in fact the opposite is true and it actually got much better user reviews at launch. E.g. It was 81% "Very positive" in the first month whereas the last month is just 64% positive, or "Mixed" in Steam parlance.

This is likely because the people that really wanted to play the game and were more likely to score it highly played it at launch, whereas those that are more on the fence waited and were less likely to enjoy it. Inherent bias.

At the end of the day all review systems are flawed, but still a useful guide.

It's a shame this was only on Game Pass for just 1 year. I played a few hours at launch but it was literally the buggiest game I have played in years Day 1 with everything from desynced audio, to floating items and T-posing characters, it completely killed immersion.

With this and PSN was down welcome your adorably all-digital future.

Nothing. I already have a backlog I could play for half a decade and the games on my wish list weren't on a decent sale. I also tend to buy most games on PS5 as I have a Pro and my larger library is there.

Series X is silent. I have to mute everything and get right up close to even hear the fan.

Sold the XB One but it was also very quiet all through it's life.

My X360 is noisy, I even took it apart, cleaned it and reapplied thermal paste several years ago which helped for a while but it's still noisy.

Additionally the core tenets sound OK, think they would do far better to SHOW NOT TELL. Give us a video showing an example of how the ads will appear so we can better judge.

While I personally hate this, I can see that for some users this may be what gets them playing games. It's probably a good thing for Microsoft / Xbox.

That said I do worry about the slippery slope and ads start creeping in elsewhere. Give an inch and they will take a mile.

Just working in the background with no further action needed.
This sounds great if it works as advertised.

@Jark What on earth are you talking about?

Video games are filled with God's whether it's Kratos, Zeus and the rest of the Greek and Norse pantheon in God of War.

Din, Nayru, and Farore the Goddesses in Zelda games.

The Nine Divines in Elder Scrolls among many many more.

This isn't some sacrosanct word that can't ever be used in video games or outside them. Capgod is a long established meme.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner Ah I see! My bad. 👍

@PsBoxSwitchOwner The tweet explains why it was so low LAST year (price hike + Switch 2), but I was speculating what led to it being so much higher this year and thought perhaps Forza.

Why is that "pissing in the wind"? It literally ISN'T explained in the tweets why this is the highest month this year.

Though as Mat says it's still a small base number.

@betterthings Looking at the data more carefully it shows that last year was especially low because it was just after the original Xbox price hike AND was the month Switch 2 launched so a double whammy keeping sales to a trickle, which likely accounts for the +86% YoY bump. Still better than not having it, but context is key. But I do wonder why this month was the highest this year?

This is good to see, and interesting, but it comes off the back of many, many YoY declines for Xbox sales so it seems silly to get ahead of ourselves for just one months sales. It's a drop in the ocean that hopefully signals something bigger. I wonder what the catalyst was? Probably Forza Horizon 6.

@MrStark Out of interest why would you be more concerned about Switch 2 outselling PS5? Isn't that expected? Switch 2 is a year old console and should be increasing in sales. PS5 is almost 6 years old and sales are expected to decrease, especially after it's just had a large price hike.

@betterthings No worries dude, we all miss the obvious sometimes! Skip the energy drink.

@betterthings It's achievements, read the FULL quote below

Just four games

This feels like an in-joke. lol

But this is really good news. I just hope the program lasts and the number of games increases sharply.

So according to those graphs and data

• physical media is GROWING for the first time since 2009
• almost three quarters of PS5s sold have a disc drive

Just because people buy more games digitally doesn't mean they don't buy any discs... it's about more CHOICE for consumers.

Several I want to play, especially Hell is Us, didn't know that was coming to Game Pass, big win. Halo and Beast of Reincarnation too.

Don't know much about the others but their curation is usually excellent.

@JustBusiness @Balaam_ It doesn't really make sense to give sales figures for games that are Day 1 on Game Pass. It's like comparing apples and oranges.

If Skyrim has been on Game Pass since Day 1 it wouldn't have anything near 65 million sales.

That's not to say hours played are very useful to us... but neither are copies sold anymore, it's incomplete data.

@Jark Eh? You mean?

It ain't that deep friend.