Microsoft Consoles and Updates

[one-armed dwarf]

I feel like with Obsidian I get more excited if it's a game with a ton of text rather than these first person RPGs they also do. 

 

I should play Tyranny tbh.

 

As for Senua, it was noticeable to me or at least the first time I noticed that it has a 2:35:1 aspect ratio, or something like that. Presumably stylistic choice but also to save on render budget. Very tight fov also. Could possibly achieve that on console

 

edit also Senua looks to be running at 30 frames to me. Definitely would fit within the render budget, the series x has a better GPU than PS5 iirc

 

Gots to be honest tho, even if it's not an amazing showing it's close enough between MS and Sony for me personally in 2024, the only thing my ps5 will get booted up for this year is FFVII I think (my 2023 review was 99 percent XVI, 1 percent TLOU remake, cause of the TV show).

 

While I may actually play Indiana Jones, cause there's a decent pedigree involved (tho I hated Old Colossus personally) and some of the more mid budget things can be good on steam deck

[one-armed dwarf]

MS made some brutal cuts over at actibliz it sounds like

 

https://www.ign.com/articles/microsoft-lays-off-1900-staff-from-its-video-game-workforce

[Maryokutai]

Seems more like it's across the board. Not that that it's a good thing of course. 

 

In addition to the info that marketing budgets seemingly have been heavily reduced, I'll admit I have no idea what Xbox is trying to do right now. Hoping Gamepass just spreads automatically through word of mouth and both Sony and Nintendo welcome it with open arms as a subscription on their platforms?

 

They're also really competent at harpooning themselves in the foot. The developer direct was exactly a week ago, seems like that was enough good PR for them.

[one-armed dwarf]

To me it just kinda exposes the bare reality that acquisitions like these are much more about glomping up as much 'IP' as possible rather than trying to improve the lot of the labour working on them (the propaganda talking point that was used a lot to justify this merger)

 

A big vertically integrated stack of shite

[Maf]

It’s madness. I guess it’s the result of the merger + current economics? I knew admin, PR, marketing people would go. There were always going to be losses from that side. But presumably that amount of people they must be cutting from creative teams as well. Are they going to start scaling back studios that are nearing the end of projects and then pack them up, or cut projects and studios altogether? 
 

I thought it was only this week Microsoft crossed some milestone in market value cap as well. I know that’s not Xbox and not liquid cash, but still. 
 

I wonder what the knock on effect will be for game development 1-2 years from now since the game industry just keeps shrinking 

[Nag]

I know this is slightly off topic from what you guys are discussing but a week or so ago I remember seeing a headline from some CEO or something that there's literally too many games nowadays... i think i actually agree with that to a point.

[Maf]

So far seeing a lot of Activision/Blizzard devs losing their job, not a lot of Xbox devs but we will see. 
 

Apparently Blizzard was working on a new survival game for PC and console and it’s been in active development for years - now the project is closed and all the devs were laid off. Think I saw it was like a 100 employees. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Quotes from the FTC

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/29/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcript-ftc-chair-lina-khan-speaks-with-cnbcs-squawk-box-today.html

 

Quote

SORKIN: Other headline I don't know if you saw, I'm sure you did -- Microsoft Activision announcing they're going to be firing 1,900 people. Elizabeth Warren came out and said, here's -- here's the reason why this deal should have never approved in the first place. You obviously didn't want it to be approved in the first place. How much should your job be about protecting employees' jobs in terms of how you think about a merger? But second in -- maybe in this specific case, we're now seeing layoffs in all sorts of parts of the technology stock. And so, other companies in the industry. And so, when you look at something like that, do you say to yourself, that's a function of the deal itself? Do you say that would have happened anyway? Do you say, well, maybe it wouldn't have been 1,900, it might have been 800 people? Tell me -- tell me what you think when you -- when you read a headline like that?

KHAN: Yeah. I mean, first of all, let me say my heart really goes out to the 1,900 employees that got a red slip -- pink slip last week. You know, unfortunately from where I sit, this is not all too uncommon after these megamergers. You often see layoffs. From our perspective, as an antitrust enforcer, we're supposed to protect competition in all markets. That includes labor markets. I think one of the things to think about is, you know, these 1,900 employees that were laid off, there could be among them the next big game developer, right? What does the market now look like for their employment? I mean, over the last few years through these waves of acquisitions, you had a lot of the independent studios gobbled up, and just in terms of getting your idea to market, there are fewer and fewer pathways. And so, that's bad for the workers, but it's ultimately also bad for consumers and for the market as a whole.

SORKIN: But you don't think one of those people laid off, hopefully -- I mean, that you think is super talented to the extent that they have this sort of genius idea in their head, can't go find a venture capitalist, or some other capital, create their game and then, frankly, get gobbled up all over again by somebody else, and that that's sort of fabulous version of capitalism if it works that way?

KHAN: Maybe. But in order for that to happen, they have to get their video game to market, right? What are the pathways of doing that? You increasingly now have a very small number of walled gardens. And so, the big question is that independent gamer going to be able to get their game in front of players in the first instance, right? And so, I think as you've seen a shift from a more independent model, where you have multiple pathways to reach gamers to instead now increasingly these --

SORKIN: Right.

KHAN: -- you know, to walled gardens, are you going to be able to get into the walled garden? Are they going to have an interest to let you in? I think these are some of the big questions.

 

[Nag]

 

[Maf]

2 years fighting legal battles with government agencies with the primary concern being about holding too much power and it seems like they’re going multi-platform anyway lol.

 

If they do this I think it’s a complete throw in the towel on this generation, and maybe they try again in 2028 or whenever that leak said the news boxes would come out. 
 

Or I dunno. I’m struggling to see the sense in this. Short term strategy, Xbox isn’t growing fast enough so we might as well sell our games somewhere if we can’t sell them on our machine. But long term strategy? I can’t see it. They’ve made so many huge investments in hardware and studios why turn around now and go fuck it. 
 

Interested to see what happens, but I can’t read anymore Twitter threads from dooming Xbox fans. That shit is brain damaging. 

[Nag]

I don't know what there is to get?... selling hardware has been falling lower and lower on their agenda for years now.

 

Either way, they ain't struggling.

[one-armed dwarf]

Tbh nag that sounds like some spindoctor shit lol. 

 

R&D on hardware costs so much

[Maf]

I find it hard to see this as anything less than white flag waving, we give up defeat.

 

At best I could see them porting Xbox games over to PS a year later and treating it like a second revenue stream, same way PS does on PC. But it’s still defeat. 

 

If the game sales are so weak that they would make more money by giving PS a cut than them having a 100%, that’s nothing but struggle. 

[Maryokutai]

Link in the tweet is dead, but I'd imagine it's about the Hi-Fi Rush stuff. Personally I think the whole future of Xbox looks extremely undesirable from a consumer perspective at the moment. Why would I buy a digital-only console (which, at this point in time, is clearly what they're planning for) that has barely any exclusive games to boot? From my perspective there's zero reason to invest in such a platform or ecosystem and I honestly don't know how they would even market that. Especially considering retailers will most likely not even stock it as they can't make money off game sales, so in terms of mainstream visibility it might even not exist at that point.

 

It's really weird. You'd think with ABK in their pockets they might at least have giving this whole thing another 5 to 10 years to see if that would shift the power dynamic a bit. 

[Maf]

Exactly. That’s what I was saying in the Hot Topic thread a few weeks ago. 5-10 years after all these investments they could be in a really strong position. 
 

This is why I can only see porting games to Playstation as a short term strategy. To the end of this generation. 
 

If the actual goal is to be purely 3rd party, why spend so many billions making new boxes (Which according to those court leaks they’re still doing)

 

So this only makes sense that they’re just kind of giving up on console this gen, and just trying to make Xbox an ongoing brand through games and Gamepass 

But porting games to PS/Switch is still such a bad look. 
 

It would almost make sense if Xbox games were amazing, but a larger audience just wasn’t seeing them or giving them a chance, so getting more visibility on Xbox and people playing the games would make them want to play more Xbox games and jump ship

 

But that would mean the Xbox games would have to be good and they haven’t been so

 

I dunno. I find it so interesting but struggle to make sense of it.

[mfnick]

Yea it’s a bit crazy if they go a lot more 3rd party. What’s the point in me having a Xbox if that’s the case? What’ll happen to my gamer tag and game library if they move more and more in that direction? Why should I invest more in that? 
 

The things that just completely doesn’t make sense to me is regarding how they’re expecting to make people sign up for Game Pass when there’s no huge exclusives from them on there. And doing this removes even more reason to have GP. I’ve said it before but the fastest and best way to grow Game Pass is to make Xbox feel essential with fantastic exclusive games. How do you get people so sign up to it when there’s no reason to buy their console in the first place? PC is an entirely different market too and I just don’t think it’ll fully take off there no matter what they do. Especially with the app being as bad as people say it is. 
 

imagine if Sony did the whole day 1 thing on their extra tier - stuff like Spider Man 2, FFVII RR, God of War Ragnarok etc. it would immediately decimate Game Pass numbers. The big marquee exclusive games are what will get people signed up but MS seem to be moving further and further way from this. 

[one-armed dwarf]

It does not feel like momentum is with them at this point. Maybe Starfield was supposed to drive hardware sales or something, or a lot of the litigation around ABK hamstrung some movements they wanted to make there. But as good as the hardware side is (technically speaking) they've really seemed to struggle on making an impression with software. Something which I think isn't helped by how the cycle in contractors every 18 months, for projects which take years.

 

What they could do I guess is get more into the market of steam deck type hardware, effectively PCs with a custom OS built into them with a console friendly front-end, but still a PC underneath. Allow people to access their libraries like this and make the Xbox a PC-based hardware ecosystem mostly for third party games (with the occasional exclusive that PC very rarely gets), with ease of use and access as its appeal. They will still be PC games with sliders and graphics settings and stuff, but without the modular hardware upgrade aspect, you have to buy a new system if you want that. I dunno, just spitballing

 

But yeah, I mean this is another reason why I'm pc mainly. Besides the power and scalability, there's the fact that it's an eternal platform and there's no concept of generations really. I don't trust Sony, Nintendo or MS with preserving my digital libraries, I've already 'lost' lots of Sony games cause of lack of BC. MS are better in that regard at least I suppose. Nintendo are the worst

[mfnick]

11 minutes ago, one-armed dwarf said:

What they could do I guess is get more into the market of steam deck type hardware

This is something I could get on board with I guess. If I could access Game Pass on Steam Deck I would have definitely bought (another) one of those as I’m just not invested enough in Steam to make that a must have thing at the minute. GP support on it definitely would though. I know the Asus one and some others have GP but they’re much more PC like. I want a more console style experience like the Deck has. 

[Maryokutai]

No matter what the plan is they have to be clear and transparent about it, and sooner rather than later. I know I'm going to think twice before buying something off their digital storefront in the future and if consumers like myself start thinking along those lines, then surely shareholders are already asking questions as well. Their silence and the ever-active rumour mill aren't doing them any favours right now.

 

But I'm out either way the moment they're all digital, at least as long as their competition isn't. Even a Steamdeck device or such wouldn't win me over in that scenario. 

[Maf]

59 minutes ago, mfnick said:

I’ve said it before but the fastest and best way to grow Game Pass is to make Xbox feel essential with fantastic exclusive games.

The sad part is, that’s what they’ve been trying to do. But with all their resources they just can’t seem to make a great game. 
 

Apart from Hi-Fi Rush - which I didn’t like because it’s a rhythm game so I can’t play it, but everyone else loved it, so I guess that’s the exception and the one great, new game for them

 

Maybe that’s why that’s the game that is leading the charge on this 3rd party stuff. 
 

I think Starfield did move systems for them for that month, but unless I’m just projecting my own apathy towards it, people thought Starfield was bad and so was a flop (relative to other Bethesda games)