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The last Xbox I had was the 360 so take this with a grain of salt, but they made the choice between XBone and PS5 so simple for me by making all XBox titles playable on PC. As someone who would entertain buying both consoles, I never found a compelling argument to bother.
How do you play Xbox titles on PC? I thought some didn't work?
As far as I can tell, every game that's listed as XBox exclusive on Google is available on PC Game Pass. I played Forza, Halo Infinite, Flight Sim, Sea of Thieves, Starfield, Ori, etc.
Oh I see. Can you play with Xbox players?
That's a good question! I know there is some cross play, but I think there are many titles that don't have it. If you play multiplayer with friends who also have Xboxes, that's probably a good argument to get one.
I started dropping off after every time I started to boot my Xbox it just was just ads upon ads trying to sell me stuff and not gettin me into the games faster.
I use mine primarily for media and occasionally play online with friends. They killed gold, and reverted to game pass core, so now I have to pay $10/month to play games I own. They are deleting my purchased games, ea archived an active account for inactivity when I had playtime in the calendar year. There is no new IP, they shut down studios, and raised prices, locked us into a shitty platform and started monitoring and monetizing their paid users.
They deserve this
Oh crap. That just PlayStation's going to do it too. Right now I get ads at the bottom and games at the top so I can at least jump straight into a game. Assuming I don't boot straight into one because I went to rest mode in it.
But the second MS proves this, Sony will follow.
My Baseless Prediction, i.e. if I ran Xbox, what I would do given their situation:
Microsoft will sunset the Xbox as a console but focus on creating a dual boot mode for Windows similar to the Steam Deck and Big Picture Mode. Probably called “Xbox Mode” or something similarly unoriginal but evocative. This streamlined mode will greatly reduce system overhead and be controller-centric, and it will have an emulation layer to support all Xbox ecosystem games along with backward compatibility. On certain form factors it will be the default boot mode, and supporting this they will release two new Windows PC form factors: a living room box and a handheld. Other PC manufacturers will be able to jump on the wagon as well. I doubt they will in any way define reference performance profiles akin to a console “generation” but they may have some kind of guidance regarding how graphics should scale seamlessly between TV/monitor and handheld form factors to allow for a Switch-like docking experience.
This streamlined mode will greatly reduce system overhead and be controller-centric
This doesn't sound like anything Microsoft has done before.
Well... could it be that they saturated?
I mean, the consoles been out for a while, I suspect at this point everyone remotely interested has one?
That'd make sense, but that's still a negative sign, as PS5/Switch have yet to meet saturation.
Thing is, they don't need to sell consoles anymore. They're in the gamepass business now. This is why they're pushing gamepass on phones, PCs, Samsung TVs and Firesticks. They don't really care about selling you a box under the TV anymore since they're usually sold at or near a loss anyway. They just want you on the subscription wherever you can play it.
They currently have roughly 34 million subscribers (as of February, I'm guessing Activision Blizzard King is going to bump this number up further), let's assume an average of $12 a month. That's over $400 million coming in every month or 1.2 billion every quarter on the books. They don't have to rely on a big game to have a good month.
You're more valuable to them having the gamepass subscription and just playing on your phone over someone who buys a console and purchases 7 or 8 games a year. Articles like this fundamentally misunderstand the current gaming landscape and their business model. They're not losing the race, they're playing a different sport.
Thing is, they don’t need to sell consoles anymore. They’re in the gamepass business now.
They need to sell consoles to sell GamePass to people. Nobody is going to play games on a Firestick. Same reason why nobody bought the mobile ports of Resident Evil. Those who play games, buy the hardware for it. Some go overboard with the high-end PC and some prefer to buy a cheaper console, but nobody is like "yeah I'll play Elden Ring on my phone". Gamers want the hardware, and casuals don't buy gaming subscriptions. It's a lost cause.
"MS doesn't care about selling Xbox console" is a lie they have been pushing for a while now because their console sales have been tanking for that many years. They would LOVE to sell more consoles, they just can't, so they attempt to spin the story a different way so that the shareholders are still happy. What, you want to know about sales? But who cares about sales, it's all about engagement! Look at those big, happy numbers we are showing you!
Nobody enters a business with the idea that "whatever, even if we don't sell enough, it's fine, we still had a great time". MS didn't became the world's biggest corporation by being lazy.
They currently have roughly 34 million subscribers (as of February, I’m guessing Activision Blizzard King is going to bump this number up further), let’s assume an average of $12 a month. That’s over $400 million coming in every month or 1.2 billion every quarter on the books. They don’t have to rely on a big game to have a good month.
That's great until you consider the fact that GamePass doesn't operate in a vacuum. To put games on their service, they have to pay developers. They then need to please shareholders who want subscribers and revenue to increase. The fact that they increased the price twice in a row and effectively doubled the price of GamePass overnight suggests that they are not pleased with the current revenue.
Heck, we don't even know how many of those 34m subscribers are paying customers, and how many just got into GP by paying $1 or benefitting from some other deal. I was one of those 34m back in February, because I got a year for free with the Rewards program (back when it was still worth something; they axed that one as well, because of course). When they asked me to pay to renew it, I cancelled the subscription. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
You’re more valuable to them having the gamepass subscription and just playing on your phone over someone who buys a console and purchases 7 or 8 games a year.
Sure, but that's the same as Don Mattrick asking customers to "stick to their X360". The choice is not between buying games on XOne or subscribing to GamePass on your phone. The choice is between an Xbox, a PS5, a Switch or a PC. Two of those choices means that they have lost a customer (you can't subscribe to GP on PS or Nintendo consoles), and I'd be curious to know how many people are subscribing for GP on PC instead of just buying games on Steam. You don't need GP to play online on PC as you do on console, and the prices are cheap enough that you are probably saving money just buying those games instead of renting them.
And let's not talk about how terrible the user experience is on their PC storefront compared to literally any other competing storefront - I'd rather buy a game on Epic than use their Xbox store, and that says a lot. I had a game on PC thanks to the Play Anywhere program (bought it on Xbox, got the PC version as well), but I had to buy it again on GoG to mod it because MS considers their game files more precious than the holy grail itself and wouldn't let me go anywhere close to them, let alone touch them.
Just wanted to comment that the Xbox/MS store games are fine now. They used to be in some shitty encrypted directory but not anymore. I have Gamepass for free from a ton of Microsoft rewards points and primarily play GP games on my Xbox, but I’ve played a few on PC as well and I’ve not found it to be too much different from Steam. You can go to a directory and see all the game files as expected. The always online bit sucks though, the recent Microsoft outage due to Cloudstrike kept a lot of people from playing games. That said, I don’t buy any games there, but my experience with gamepass games has been fine past that initial encrypted directory phase.
They could stop charging gamers a subscription to play the paid games (they "own") online.
This could attract some customers that don't want to deal with PC or don't want to add fixed costs to their monthly or yearly bill.
Microsoft not being evil? Not going to happen. (Except for smokescreen purposes and amounts)
Let me just fire up all these Xbox exclusive and first party games they've released since like 2021...
I have a real opposite problem with exclusives. I don't think they should exist. A console should just be a means to an end: to play a game.
I get why they do it but it's bullshit. It's just a custom PC that plugs into a TV.