Microsoft is an empty shell of a company drifting on the momentum of it’s achievements from 20 years ago. It’s another victim of shareholder sharks and MBAs extracting value instead of engineering and innovating. It’s taking time to die, but it’s getting closer. There’s hardly any Microsoft products that are worth a damn these days.
In a lot of countries they are deeper embedded in many corporate/government cultures than ever before with the office365+teams combo tho…
One of the main retail store in my country always had a big fucking toys catalog for Christmas. 100s of pages. It has like 15 for gaming this year.
One reference to Xbox. Only one. It’s not the console. It’s not an accessory. It’s not a game. It’s the ROG handheld.
It’s wild how low it is. Even when people mocked PS3, it was still fine.
We’ve seen the buyout/burn down methodology against a lot of smaller companies; it sounds a bit like Microsoft is doing that internally to Xbox division. It’s all I can think of to explain so much of the intentional damage.
So, the console war is now basically Nintendo, Sony, and Valve.
I’ll play out my remaining games that I purchased for my Series X and then bail for the PlayStation (or maybe steam box) ecosystem. I’ve never owned a PlayStation or steam computer, I went straight from Dreamcast to Xbox and have been buying each generation. They got online gaming right, but now they’re so rudderless it’s astonishing. What a shame, after the 360 they had all the momentum and squandered it.
Why Playstation?
Because that’s the only other major console, outside of Switch 2 which I don’t have much interest in.
After Xbox one, I was unable to understand what the next version was.
And when people can’t even name the product, then yeah.
Microsoft just messed up the whole naming convention after the 360 I think. You had the Xbox “one” which was a name people often used to refer to the original Xbox. Then you have an Xbox One S. Then Xbox series X which is a genuinely terrible name. Oh, and the Xbox series S which is not the Xbox One S.
Sony to their credit got it right from the beginning. Simple 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. No medals for guessing what the name of the next Playstation will be.
Yeah, as someone who has never owned an Xbox I have little to say about the Original, I remember the 360 as an unreliable red ring of death piece of junk, the One had that galaxy brained name. That’s the kind of decision you can’t make snorting normal people cocaine, you’ve got to have that Fortune 500 executive cocaine to name the third product in a series the “One.”
The “One” was announced as being a privacy invasion machine that might someday have video games patched onto it; always on internet connection and a required Kinect. That got backpedaled, and everything else I know about that console was Yahtzee saying there weren’t any games for it then he stopped mentioning it.
After the “Please stop calling it the XBone”, was there a One S that isn’t the Series S? And the Series S and Series X are almost as bad as Linux software names. Best Buy employees across the English speaking world have to stop to enunciate “The Series ESS, or the Series ECKSS?” It’s like they watched Nintendo kick themselves in the dick naming a console the Wii U, and took it as a challenge.
Microsoft has done an amazing job generating apathy for their gaming division.
Every time I see the names of the Xbox lineup my brain just feels tired and kinda shuts down.
I am never going to remember it.
My immediate thought reading your comment was the original black and green box before 360. So I’m one worse off in the chronology than you.
i had no idea they gave up after xbox one, thats probably eveyrones response, they probably never heard them marketing a new console.
… But not on a snowy bench or laying on some exterior steps
Fucking shameful. All these men in tech, and not one can bring the greatest masculine virtue; finding cool dramatic spots to die.
they put all thier development into AI, and they are frantically trying to cram it into everything else,. much like GOOGLE neglected thier pixels, and thier other services for AI.
Neglected Pixels? Lol, truth is they were always poorly made midrange phones sold at high end prices. Google has never made good hardware, not even accidentally.
They are basically the exclusive target for GrapheneOS for their feature set:
Non-exhaustive list of requirements for future devices, which are standards met or exceeded by current Pixel devices: Support for using alternate operating systems including full hardware security functionality Complete monthly Android Security Bulletin patches without any regular delays longer than a week for device support code (firmware, drivers and HALs) At least 5 years of updates from launch for device support code with phones (Pixels now have 7) and 7 years with tablets Device support code updated to new monthly, quarterly and yearly releases of AOSP within several months to provide new security improvements (Pixels receive these in the month they're released) Linux 6.1, 6.6 or 6.12 Generic Kernel Image (GKI) support Hardware accelerated virtualization usable by GrapheneOS (ideally pKVM to match Pixels but another usable implementation may be acceptable) Hardware memory tagging (ARM MTE or equivalent) Hardware-based coarse grained Control Flow Integrity (CFI) for baseline coverage where type-based CFI isn't used or can't be deployed (BTI/PAC, CET IBT or equivalent) PXN, SMEP or equivalent PAN, SMAP or equivalent Isolated radios (cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, etc.), GPU, SSD, media encode / decode, image processor and other components Support for A/B updates of both the firmware and OS images with automatic rollback if the initial boot fails one or more times Verified boot with rollback protection for firmware Verified boot with rollback protection for the OS (Android Verified Boot) Verified boot key fingerprint for yellow boot state displayed with a secure hash (non-truncated SHA-256 or better) StrongBox keystore provided by secure element Hardware key attestation support for the StrongBox keystore Attest key support for hardware key attestation to provide pinning support Weaver disk encryption key derivation throttling provided by secure element Insider attack resistance for updates to the secure element (Owner user authentication required before updates are accepted) Inline disk encryption acceleration with wrapped key support 64-bit-only device support code Wi-Fi anonymity support including MAC address randomization, probe sequence number randomization and no other leaked identifiers Support for disabling USB data and also USB as a whole at a hardware level in the USB controller Reset attack mitigation for firmware-based boot modes such as fastboot mode zeroing memory left over from the OS and delaying opening up attack surface such as USB functionality until that's completed Debugging features such as JTAG or serial debugging must be inaccessible while the device is lockedDon’t worry, they’ll kill off and abandon the pixel line soon enough. Remember Nexus? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Nexus line had some real quality mid range phones at great prices.
My pixel 1 phone was fine. Went back to Samsung after that though.
Literally never heard this opinion before. Why are they bad?
Xbox is dead outside of being a different logo for windows. I think it’s obvious to anybody remotely watching the industry that all they really care about is game pass at this point. Even at the game awards, they were essentially absent outside of a game pass ad, and recently put a finance guy in charge of Zenimax.
I would love to say this won’t end well for them, but they probably crunched the numbers and determined they could continue the same revenue with minimum effort. Enough people will probably stick around on game pass, even after the recent hikes, to keep it as a solid revenue stream.
I sold my Xbox six months ago after it sat collecting dust for a year and a half, glad I did.
But what if we cram it full of AI bloat/spyware? Could we entice you then?
- Microsoft, probably
Xbox One X Series X CoPilot X
AI made games.
The writing has been on the wall for a while. I remember hearing quotes about wanting to turn Xbox into a Steam competitor back in like 2018. I was honestly surprised when they released the Series. I was pretty sure we would get some sort of streaming only console after the One X|S.
I imagine going forward, in addition to the streaming services, we are going to see Xbox leveraged as “certification” for other manufacturer’s hardware where consumers can be assured that this device meets some set spec for this year’s Xbox games.
They couldn’t go full steaming at that point, X Cloud wasn’t fully ready, and gamer sentiment was against it on the whole. The Series S was intended for this use, but the timing was off. So they set about building up infrastructure using massive AI investment money, which also increased the price of hardware, eventually releasing a console costing over $1000 pricing most gamers out of owning the top end hardware, making the Series S type devices much more appealing, and getting them onto the streaming service, raking in fixed income off everyone, and raising prices when the investors want another payout.
Not me. I’m hanging onto mine for the inevitable retro revival!
(h/j)
Have they tried doing something called innovating? Heard that’s in hot demand nowadays
Innovation is for libtard commies, let’s just rererelease another halo remaster and jack up the prices further, that’ll show em!
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Next victim of their downward spiral: gamepass and with it, the Xbox brand and the IP they own. I wonder who will they sell it to or if they’ll sit on it.
A couple months ago when the Game Pass price hike was announced, I checked my profile to see what tier I was in: how much I was paying. Turns out my account had expired, was tied to a credit card I haven’t had for a while. I really only play single- player games and apparently nothing on Game Pass interested me.
Were the authors aware that everyone is broke this year and the “deals” to be had were previous mark-ups going down slightly? The game is rigged, we are all aware these “sales” are nothing more than a sales gimmick and very little of worth is available by an actual deal. No one is even trying to hide that fact anymore, and the populace is broke and fed up with all the stupid games we get forced to play
I guess they consider their murder of non-subscription self-hosted multiplayer to be complete enough that their rent-seeking game service can survive without the need for hardware walls for the proverbial garden.
I love seeing those videos about game making up until 5th and 6th gen, how creative developers were, managing console hardware capabilities to bypass limitations and find other ways to render faster, wider, more colors, or fit more stuff in less space, pushing the system to its limits… am I wrong, or is the modern game industry just about using an unoptimized engine to make games, not optimizing shit, releasing games that don’t get close to reaching the full hardware potential, and then releasing a next gen of hardware even though the next gen games would probably run even better 2 gens ago if devs had half of the talent and problem-solving skills of past devs?
Games, like movies and TV, have become so expensive to make because studios and publishers have consolidated so much that they can’t keep the machine running with modest budgets to make modest profits. They have to slop together content with the lowest effort to extract the highest revenue from microtransactions and season passes because every game has to be a Call of Duty/Fortnite/Pokemon level hit or the studio is shuttered by the publisher.
Great games are still being made, just like great movies that aren’t remake or superhero slop are being made. Just not from big money but independent studios instead.
Well, putting together a trailer with Aerosmith or Beatles music playing over it isn’t helping the ballooning “development costs” either.
Neither is studios overhiring and then figuring out you can’t just hire 500 people and then not let them go. Game studios have become bloated. Overstaffed. And so have their games.
They just can’t understand not every game needs to be a 150GB+ open world game, or have the latest realistic graphics. Small games are okay, good even.
Imagine how much more detailed a game could be from a AAA studios if it launched with highly stylized retro inspired graphics. They will never do this of course, but just imagine it. Imagine how much more there could be, with way less time and money being required to do it. A single barrel that might take an artist a whole day to make could easily mean multiple variants of barrel in the same time. They could drop a 20GB game that feels like a 200GB game, and do it in like 6-12 months.
It would be so easy to split their already massive studios into like 20 smaller teams of 50 or less people to work on these kinds of smaller games and they could pump them out quickly. Just flood the market with these highly concentrated titles. But they won’t, because its easier to convince a shareholder to make billions from a single game that looks really good visually but plays like trash with MTX for short term profit than it is to convince them to play the long game and make trillions with the volume of smaller games sales and the massively reduced development costs.
Its all about short term profit these days, and its why all the businesses in the world seem to be racing each other to the bottom. Because why play the long game.when you might be dead before you hit the jackpot? Nevermind that you can’t take any of it with you to the grave.
I think it’s more about tsunamis of content now. Graphics have been on a track of diminishing returns for ages now. Today it’s all about generating hundreds of skins, weapons, badges, hats, drops, whatever. It would explain why everybody’s salivating over generative AI.
its all MTX. the only game to go reverse on graphics is pokemon.
They want how much for an Xbox‽
I’d pay maybe £150 at this stage. Ye gods.
Does it cum with AI?
