Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Resetting Xbox

news.xbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 981 posts

Re: Resetting Xbox

#61

Post by joshstrange »

BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #35
tangenter wrote: post #7

Game Pass has caused a lot of direct sales losses to game developers in favor of Microsoft trying to find a Netflix-like cash cow for itself. The numbers never added up, but it is not a surprise everyone nodded and went along with it. I wonder what the career repercussions would be for speaking up - but it doesn’t matter because they are getting fired anyway. Call of Duty alone lost $300 million: https://arstechnica.…

I was always very skeptical of the $300 million figure. It sounded like the same math that the movie industry used for pirating. If I was subscribed to Game Pass I might have downloaded CoD to see what it's about. That doesn't mean I would have paid full price for it.

> Last year, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft estimated it had lost $300 million in direct sales of Call of Duty games due to the title’s inclusion in Game Pass, according to an anonymous employee.

Yeah, that's a bullshit number. It's like when people provide piracy counts as lost direct sales, a lot of people will download something for free, those same people won't always pay full price if they can't download it for free.

I downloaded a TON of games from Game Pass, played <1hr, and uninstalled. Without GP I would have just never bought the game.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#62

Post by saghm »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #4

I think some of these game studios got so content with Microsoft constantly paying that they forgot to make games that would actually sell. South of Midnight took 7 years to make and cost $100 million to make... yet sold hardly any copies and I'm not even sure who they were trying to make it for. Meanwhile you have studios like Sandfall and Warhorse pumping out games on a fraction of the budget that ship millions (an…

> I think some of these game studios got so content with Microsoft constantly paying that they forgot to make games that would actually sell.

I mean, if you're assuming that Microsoft had a fully hands-off approach to managing these companies after buying them, then sure. It's not clear to me that you can make a compelling claim about whether the issues were from the bottom or the top just by looking at the final outputs.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#65

Post by protimewaster »

jeppester wrote: post #46
protimewaster wrote: post #42

Xbox has an interesting opportunity going forward, that I expect they'll fumble. Interest in physical media has actually been on the upswing, and, with Sony announcing their plans to abandon physical media, it feels like MS has a chance be the "good guys" like what Sony did to MS when MS threatened to ruin physical media prior to the Xbox One release. However, I'm expecting Microsoft to simply follow Sony's path, bec…

Xbox is ahead of Sony on this path. Their studios often, if not most of the time, release physical games that require a full download to play. I doubt that they will go back to where Sony are now.

> I doubt that they will go back to where Sony are now.

I agree. However, I do think they would get some positive attention (and some accompanying sales) if they were to backtrack and announce a console more like the 360.

It feels doable if they care to do it. Physical media should still be viable for holding all the game data for a while longer. Blurays can manage up to 128 GB, and I think the average game install size is ~60GB right now, giving most games some room to grow.

The biggest issue with a strategy like that is that they're, like you said, pushing digital-only hard already, and they're also trying to save money, so the idea of spending more money to make future consoles with disk drives, and to make disks, is unlikely to appeal to them.

It is a shame, though, because it seems like the Xbox 360 will have been widely viewed as peak Xbox until the end of Xbox.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#66

Post by maples37 »

whizzter wrote: post #40
hbn wrote: post #16

It was pretty rich seeing armchair video game industry analysts act like the new CEO was gonna usher in a new age for Microsoft's gaming division because she got to announce the updated logo and some games that would have obviously been in development long before she became CEO. Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the interv…

The pandemic and scalpers really destroyed peoples apetite for the "new thing" when this generation came out, and with that boost missing studios saw little point in going exclusive perpetuating the vicious cycle, it's just in the past few years that there's really been exclusives for this generation that didn't also support older consoles. And even then, already the PS4/XbOne generation added stratification making i…

Microsoft also didn't do themselves any favor with that naming scheme. In the current generation (I think?), you have: - Xbox X - Xbox S - Xbox Series X - Xbox Series S

Compared to: - PlayStation 5 - PlayStation 5 Pro

or: - Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Switch OLED - Nintendo Switch Lite

Anyone who's literate in English (and knows that OLED means "nicer screen") can immediately rank the PlayStations and Switches into "good, better, best". But with the Xbox, how is anyone supposed to know which one is which? Is the Series version better or worse? Is it a whole new generation, with whatever backwards-compatability implications that a new generation brings? I need a chart and I probably still won't be able to tell you if you ask me in a month.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#67

Post by hbn »

maples37 wrote: post #66
whizzter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pandemic and scalpers really destroyed peoples apetite for the "new thing" when this generation came out, and with that boost missing studios saw little point in going exclusive perpetuating the vicious cycle, it's just in the past few years that there's really been exclusives for this generation that didn't also support older consoles. And even then, already the PS4/XbOne generation added stratification making i…

Microsoft also didn't do themselves any favor with that naming scheme. In the current generation (I think?), you have: - Xbox X - Xbox S - Xbox Series X - Xbox Series S Compared to: - PlayStation 5 - PlayStation 5 Pro or: - Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Switch OLED - Nintendo Switch Lite Anyone who's literate in English (and knows that OLED means "nicer screen") can immediately rank the PlayStations and Switches into "g…

Slight correction. Last generation was the Xbox One (already a confusing name because some people thought that was referring to the original first Xbox)

A few years into the generation they updated the Xbox One, putting it into a smaller form factor called the Xbox One S, and at the same time released a spec bump model called the Xbox One X. I don't believe any of these are still available for purchase.

The new generation has the smaller/lower-powered Xbox Series S, and the higher-specced Xbox Series X. Leaving the overall generation with seemingly no name, other than "Xbox Series" I guess?

But yes, the names are terrible because S and X both refer to consoles from last gen and current gen.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#68

Post by saghm »

protimewaster wrote: post #42

Xbox has an interesting opportunity going forward, that I expect they'll fumble. Interest in physical media has actually been on the upswing, and, with Sony announcing their plans to abandon physical media, it feels like MS has a chance be the "good guys" like what Sony did to MS when MS threatened to ruin physical media prior to the Xbox One release. However, I'm expecting Microsoft to simply follow Sony's path, bec…

> Interest in physical media has actually been on the upswing, and, with Sony announcing their plans to abandon physical media, it feels like MS has a chance be the "good guys" like what Sony did to MS when MS threatened to ruin physical media prior to the l One release.

Not only that, but RAM/GPU/SSD prices going up so much recently (which is especially jarring for SSDs, which for like a decade had been getting more affordable; I bought a 120 GB SATA SSD in 2012 for around $100, and I was able to buy a 1 TB m.2 one for around the same price a few years ago) is starting to equalize pricing for PC gaming. In 2022, the initial Steam Deck launched for just $400, and it continued to be offered at that price for a few years, which made it cheaper than the Switch 2 launch price.

I feel like if I were a console manufacturer, I would be trying to figure out a way to take advantage of that. Other than price (previously), the other obvious selling point of PC gaming is more control over your system, so there could be an opening to try to lure away wayward PC gamers with some changes that give them a bit more control on the console. I agree with you that I can't really imagine Microsoft doing this though.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#69

Post by tapoxi »

righthand wrote: post #30
rockyj wrote: post #24

This is a total mess IMHO. - The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous). Some points - - They are huge business even now - 5 bi…

Well this is the new Xbox boss, Aska Sharma trying to course correct her own actions after pushing out Phil Spencer (and team). Phil had a deep understanding of the game world about profit margins and how the Xbox is essentially a stake in keeping Microsoft in the minds of consumers, a place in the home. Aska has a shallow understanding and sees only the financials and wanted to increase profits. Now she is burning i…

Are you conflating Asha Sharma with Satya Nadella? Asha just joined Xbox, she had no role in any prior decision making.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#70

Post by tracker1 »

hbn wrote: post #29
rockyj wrote: post #24

This is a total mess IMHO. - The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous). Some points - - They are huge business even now - 5 bi…

Game Pass was never a sustainable business model. People liked it because when a new game came out, they could buy a month of game pass for like $15, play through the game in a couple weeks, and cancel. It was a really good deal because Microsoft has spent the past decade+ trying to recover from their terrible fumble of the Xbox One launch, so they were subsidizing gamers to come back to their platform. With the mone…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN