411–420 of 981 posts
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Exactly. The inflation rate is about 3%, so the people at Xbox worked very hard all year to have about the same value they put into it.
Only if you count the value of the games produced as $0
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I never understood the esteem Phil Spencer was held in, seemingly both by fans and industry insiders. I never understood Phil’s strategy. Buy a plethora of studios. Pay an order of magnitude over the odds for the big ones - just to be sure you get them! ‘Rescue’ smaller ones of questionable financial value - as part of Xbox they’d somehow be successful enough to justify the price paid. Heavily manage the studio heads…
> Buy a plethora of studios IIRC Xbox had been criticized for quite a while at that point for having very few exclusive/first-party games worth buying an Xbox for. I always assumed this move was to try and fix that problem.
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Being a Steam competitor involves making a store that's actually good. All the other major stores/platforms don't really seem to give a shit, to be frank. Steam has like 20x their feature set, and the gap appears to be still growing. If anything, it should be easier to make cool new features when you own the hardware side of the platform experience too, but no, it's Steam that has stuff like remote play together, not…
Xbox used to have remote play together, via mixer. You could allow any viewer to play along side you, from the browser. Microsoft killed it
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The people I know that like Xbox like Game Pass and Buy Once Play Anywhere. Xbox is the value proposition for people that want to play on Console + {PC/Handheld}.
> Xbox is the value proposition for people that want to play on Console + {PC/Handheld} Okay. Then who is that? Most of the people who play games who I know are either A.) Console gamers who only use PCs for work, 2.) PC gamers who don't see the point in a console, or III.) The top 1% who just go where the games are and are willing to spend to get there, and that group isn't generally a fan of not actually owning the…
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You've got that backwards. It's free and STILL has no players.
Would they be counted as active players on steam if they're being played on game pass though?
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> This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year You're neglecting to consider that any time they acquire a studio or have a flop or two -- poof goes that $150M and probably more. It's not a risk-free venture. Entertainment is all about hits, and misses hurt. Would you put up $5K to win $150 on a hypothetical roulette wheel that hits 90% of the time? The math's not perfect obviously but Xbox is a somewhat simila…
If they shut down their gaming operation and instead decide to stuff money into bonds, where would that $5B even come from? As said elsewhere in the thread: > You’re saying that they should take the money people pay to buy Xboxes and put it in T-bills instead of delivering Xboxes?
Wherever it comes from now! They're spending about $4.85B to bring in $5B.
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I don't know if I care about the features, what I do care about is the games and a lean-back experience which is not sweaty. I play games to escape the drudgery of software development and the last thing I want to do is mess with an .INI file. I love the Steam Deck because it feels like a consumer electronics device: it has the reliability of Linux but not the sweat. The Steam Deck is the only device I've seen that w…
Microsoft is focused on AI and enterprise sales. I don't think they're institutionally capable of making a good end-user experience. You might just as well ask why SAP makes bad UIs - it's because the executives just don't really care.
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…
To me, the graphics abilities have been there for a decade... what we need are better games and gameplay. More fun games without gotcha, pay to win, loot box efforts. Too much effort is going for dazzling graphics at the expense of overall gameplay. How many people are still playing CoD, WoW and so many other games from over a decade ago? How many refreshes of Final Fantasy have we seen? The graphics can only carry y…
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You've got that backwards. It's free and STILL has no players.
Would they be counted as active players on steam if they're being played on game pass though?
Only people without GamePass subscription and no desire to get it for even a month or two would buy the game on Steam.