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Microsoft finally admits Xbox One sales were less than half of the PS4

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Re: Microsoft finally admits Xbox One sales were less than half of the PS4

#21

Post by capableweb »

coldpie wrote: post #9
spywaregorilla wrote: post #7

Consoles seem like a dumb idea to me. They were great when split screen was the main form of multiplayer. Now multiplayer has largely moved online. Finding local co-op / competitive games is kind of hard, and of the few that still come out, few of them are console specific. If you're colocated with your friends, playing together may not be possible unless you want to bring along another console and hook it up to anot…

I turn on my console and it plays games. I'm not messing around with maintaining yet another PC and all those headaches.

Valve is underway to change this common misconception. I got a Steam Deck last month and can't remember the last time I had this fluid experience with gaming, especially since I can bring it anywhere (in the house, and elsewhere). And the Steam Deck is a PC with embedded controllers (that by default runs Linux as it's main OS). Last night I hooked it up to my monitor, keyboard and mouse, downloaded Rust and used it for programming as well, without issues.

I have a gaming PC, a couple of consoles, both stationary and handheld but the Steam Deck quickly became the main device for gaming for me.

Re: Microsoft finally admits Xbox One sales were less than half of the PS4

#22

Post by ghaff »

azalemeth wrote: post #14
spywaregorilla wrote: post #7

Consoles seem like a dumb idea to me. They were great when split screen was the main form of multiplayer. Now multiplayer has largely moved online. Finding local co-op / competitive games is kind of hard, and of the few that still come out, few of them are console specific. If you're colocated with your friends, playing together may not be possible unless you want to bring along another console and hook it up to anot…

This is why I like Nintendo's hardware – it tends to be different, in a creative and interesting way, rather than just being "cheaper than a gaming PC in upfront cost but more rent-seeking and DRM'd down to the nines". The 3DS – love it or loathe it – was different . The Wii, awfully-named and somewhat unfortunately DOA Wii-U, and the Switch were generationally different changed the direction (IMO) of the whole indus…

I've never been a big gamer but I was really into the Wii (mostly for sports-related titles) for a time. Pretty sure I used it a lot more than my Xbox 360.

Re: Microsoft finally admits Xbox One sales were less than half of the PS4

#23

Post by sanedigital »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #12
coldpie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I turn on my console and it plays games. I'm not messing around with maintaining yet another PC and all those headaches.

Why can't you turn on your pc and play games?

I'm a working father. I get maybe 20-30 minutes a month where I can play games. Previously, I had a PC that never got turned on except for gaming. When I would sit down to play, I would have to wade through ~30 minutes of OS updates, Steam updates, and then game updates. Every. Single. Time.

I got my son a PS5 for Christmas last year. I was able to play and beat Elden Ring over the course of a few months because I could sit down, open the game within ~30 seconds, and then go back to my responsibilities.

PCs are great, but they'll never compete with the effortless convenience of consoles.

Re: Microsoft finally admits Xbox One sales were less than half of the PS4

#24

Post by spywaregorilla »

dageshi wrote: post #10
spywaregorilla wrote: post #7

Consoles seem like a dumb idea to me. They were great when split screen was the main form of multiplayer. Now multiplayer has largely moved online. Finding local co-op / competitive games is kind of hard, and of the few that still come out, few of them are console specific. If you're colocated with your friends, playing together may not be possible unless you want to bring along another console and hook it up to anot…

That was true pre this current generation of consoles. It was damned hard to get a PC comparable to a PS5 or Xbox SX for the past 2-3 years, because the hardware in those consoles is very capable and graphics cards were unobtainium at MSRP. Even now, I think getting PC hardware for the same retail costs as the consoles would be tough.

I don't buy it. These things have been way more accessible than people thought. Building your own PC has been stupidly expensive due the crypto crunch. Buying a midrange prebuilt has been fine. Play a console for several years and you'll also see several hundred dollars disappear to online subscriptions and controllers and what not.

Re: Microsoft finally admits Xbox One sales were less than half of the PS4

#25

Post by manojlds »

originalvichy wrote: post #2

The generational gap is insane. In Finland a vast majority in the PS3/360 days were in the green team. The next generation? It was rare to see anyone with an Xbox One. The pendulum swang hard. As a 360 user those days I saw some of the writing on the wall. Xbox E3 events focused hard on American features which turned the Xbox to a smart TV box. Aside from games we gained nothing for most of Europe. With the upcoming…

Wasn't Xbox One defined by the massive backlash to its TV features, Kinect etc and Microsoft had to backtrack hard? It's not a Finland only thing you are seeing. Xbox is of course a American favourite but it faced the brunt there as well.

Not to mention that momentum was clearly with Sony towards end of the PS3/360 era and Microsoft killed all their momentum with the reveal. The results that we saw with PS4 and Xbox One are clear.

Re: Microsoft finally admits Xbox One sales were less than half of the PS4

#26

Post by danhor »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #7

Consoles seem like a dumb idea to me. They were great when split screen was the main form of multiplayer. Now multiplayer has largely moved online. Finding local co-op / competitive games is kind of hard, and of the few that still come out, few of them are console specific. If you're colocated with your friends, playing together may not be possible unless you want to bring along another console and hook it up to anot…

It's much simpler. You turn on the console and go to the game you want, opening it. There might be an update, but nothing close to the annoyance of using a windows PC and custom launchers (linux is slightly better in this regard, but requires a lot more fiddling to get started & compatability). There are no launchers, no multiple stores, just a single, integrated UI that works great on a big screen with a controller. There are even physical media, if one so desires, and even better, most of it works offline (after getting the day one patch with fixes and blah-blah-blah).

There are efforts to replicate that experience on a PC (mostly SteamOS) but they still have a lot of issues. I like my Deck and have used other consoles way less after getting it, but it's not for everyone. It still requires fiddling to get "all the current games" and a lot of launchers don't work when offline without some extra care [1]. Regularly launchers want the password again, which is horrible to type in with gamepad-like controls. You also need to configure the games to work properly. I don't want to configure the game so it looks alright at 30/40/60 fps, I want it to be done already.

It's like people preferring iOS for having less options, choices and being simpler in comparison to Android, but way more extreme.

[1]: How can it be so bad? Almost nothing with a launcher works right away, especially since there are separate launcher installations per game that need to be started regularly and have their own offline-mode settings

Re: Microsoft finally admits Xbox One sales were less than half of the PS4

#27

Post by _gabe_ »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #12
coldpie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I turn on my console and it plays games. I'm not messing around with maintaining yet another PC and all those headaches.

Why can't you turn on your pc and play games?

I don't know about OP, but I've got a pretty powerful PC, and Windows loves to suck up unnecessary resources. The Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe) routinely uses 1 whole GB out of my 8 GB of VRAM. That's not cool. So I have to go through a bunch of settings windows then tell windows to turn off all of it's hardware accelerated graphics rendering features for the OS to get dwm.exe to consume a more reasonable (I guess...) 250 MB of my VRAM.

Not only that, but windows anti-virus scanner runs all the time and routinely consumes about 20% of my CPU for no reason. I have yet to find a way to turn that off for a specified time period.

Consoles are built for games, so you can safely assume they're not going to consume unnecessary resources and tank your games performance. Games are (usually) built for consoles, so you can safely assume the game will be able to utilize the hardware much more efficiently than your PC that it has no clue about all the hardware/system specs.

That's just a couple reasons I can think of for not being able to just play a game on your PC, and I'm sure other people have more examples.

Re: Microsoft finally admits Xbox One sales were less than half of the PS4

#28

Post by amcoastal »

coldpie wrote: post #19
spywaregorilla wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you turn on your pc and play games?

Driver updates. OS updates. Driver update broke HDMI. OS update broke my controller config. Steam update broke my controller config. Bluetooth controller randomly unpairs every other week. Game picks the wrong sound device so now it's coming out of the TV instead of my wireless headphones. Some game doesn't work with gamepad so I guess I need a wireless kb/m now, too. Oop game lost focus because of a Chrome update di…

No post body was provided.

Re: Microsoft finally admits Xbox One sales were less than half of the PS4

#29

Post by spywaregorilla »

sanedigital wrote: post #23
spywaregorilla wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you turn on your pc and play games?

I'm a working father. I get maybe 20-30 minutes a month where I can play games. Previously, I had a PC that never got turned on except for gaming. When I would sit down to play, I would have to wade through ~30 minutes of OS updates, Steam updates, and then game updates. Every. Single. Time. I got my son a PS5 for Christmas last year. I was able to play and beat Elden Ring over the course of a few months because I co…

> I get maybe 20-30 minutes a month where I can play games.

> I was able to play and beat Elden Ring over the course of a few months

I congratulate you on beating Elden Ring over a few 20-30 minute sessions.

> Previously, I had a PC that never got turned on except for gaming. When I would sit down to play, I would have to wade through ~30 minutes of OS updates, Steam updates, and then game updates. Every. Single. Time.

Idk man. To me this sounds like nonsense. I've got a big desktop machine I turn on once every couple of months to check out VR stuff and this doesn't resonate with me at all. OS updates, Steam Updates, and Game updates are very negligible to me. 30 minutes sounds very wrong.

Re: Microsoft finally admits Xbox One sales were less than half of the PS4

#30

Post by asdajksah2123 »

ghaff wrote: post #22
azalemeth wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I like Nintendo's hardware – it tends to be different, in a creative and interesting way, rather than just being "cheaper than a gaming PC in upfront cost but more rent-seeking and DRM'd down to the nines". The 3DS – love it or loathe it – was different . The Wii, awfully-named and somewhat unfortunately DOA Wii-U, and the Switch were generationally different changed the direction (IMO) of the whole indus…

I've never been a big gamer but I was really into the Wii (mostly for sports-related titles) for a time. Pretty sure I used it a lot more than my Xbox 360.

The Wii was fun when it first came out. Unfortunately it seemed that all the games that came subsequently focused on the gimmicky nature of the Wii. Or maybe it was just a fad.

Either way, got a lot more value from the Wii for the year or so I used it religiously than the many years I've had my XBone.

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