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Resetting Xbox

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Re: Resetting Xbox

#551

Post by Barrin92 »

cortesoft wrote: post #503
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compulsively chasing only the highest margins has been toxic for the country as a whole.

"Chasing the highest margins" is almost the entire point of a market based economy, and is the main selling point for capitalism. I get your complaint, but if you reframe it I think it isn't the real problem here. The whole point of a market-based economy is to allocate resources to making things people actually want. How does the market figure out what people want more of? Well, profit margin. If someone is making a…

>"Chasing the highest margins" is almost the entire point of a market based economy, and is the main selling point for capitalism

That's news to the ALDI brothers and Henry Ford. Capitalism used to be about the exact opposite. We moved from low volume - high margin, extractive feudal-like economics to consumer capitalism, high volume low margin. You create wealth by churning out commodities at low margins that the average worker could buy.

The tech industry is trying to exactly reverse this, as Varoufakis appropriately points out, by returning to techno-feudalism where you're not a consumer but a sort of platform serf. High volume commodity markets is exactly what these people try to eliminate to return to a kind of direct resource extraction.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#552

Post by freetonik »

maccard wrote: post #396
maples37 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m sorry but Nintendo don’t get a free pass in naming. Switch v switch Oled is as clear as Xbox series vs Xbox ones Nintendo, the company who released the Wii, wiiU, gameboy color, game boy advance, DS, 2DS, 3DS; all of which are similar but vaguely incompatible?

Don’t forget the “New 3DS”.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#553

Post by theturtletalks »

genxy wrote: post #504
dcrazy wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they have hiked the prices of the current gen very late in the cycle to reflect component costs.

The cheapest xbox should cost 129. Instead it is $399. That is how consoles work. It gets cheaper, the back catalog grows and now you have a mass market item that ideally could source games from anywhere. Consoles losing physical media and not allowing 3rd party app stores, or gasp, the ability to run user programs is going to kill the consoles. Expensive and marginal future utility.

Exactly, it seems their only way to make money is charging for online play which used to be $5/m and now $10/m for Game Pass Essential. Now that their high console prices aren't getting new players, the only play is to squeeze the existing ones and increasing the cost to play online.

They actually tried this a few months back when Game Pass Ultimate went from $20/m to $30/m. I cancelled my sub and went to essential. Then Asha backtracks and reduces it to $22/m and people are like wow, she will save Xbox. No, it just shows me they probably saw so much churn, especially from long-time subs, that they backtracked.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#555

Post by derrikcurran »

dsfnajlsdfnafn wrote: post #293
piltdownman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some extent - but you can't get away with Hollywood Accounting Practices in the same way. Also one must consider the likes of Hideo Kojima who can sell ~7 million copies of a new IP that is effectively a cinematic Walking Simulator as an Auteur acrimoniously splitting from the traditional studio system. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 also shipped over 5.4 million copies as a AA, in what is also arguably an interactiv…

> acrimoniously splitting from the traditional studio system. Yeah, he split from the traditional studio system to create... his own traditional studio system. Kojima is precisely what happens when you stop thinking of games as actual an interactive entertainment format and start thinking of it as a "cinematic experience" instead. Death Stranding is only a game by the narrowest of margins. What it is is a movie with…

> Death Stranding is only a game by the narrowest of margins.

I can't even entertain this notion, never mind agree with it. Death Stranding and its sequel are among the best games I've ever played, and I've played several hundred, maybe thousands of games spanning every decade and genre.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#556

Post by jordwest »

altairprime wrote: post #543
jordwest wrote: post #499

> While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected. That this is seen as a problem tells you everything about business today. It has to be explosive growth or it’s pointless, according to execs and shareholders.

The velocity up or down of { the rate of growth of profit } is the profit-linked factor that drives stock prices go up or down. Not the simple velocity of profits. The market demands corporations compete with cumulative interest to increase share prices, and that’s never a sustainable path.

Ah wow of course, I think you just made something click for me.

It's strange how we take interest on cash as a law of nature, when the original intention might have been nothing more than compensation for the risk the lender was taking on.

Now the risk (on bank deposits, govt bonds etc at least) has effectively been removed so the interest rate is the baseline expectation.

So compound interest is underpinning the infinite growth forever delusion...

Re: Resetting Xbox

#558

Post by hparadiz »

theturtletalks wrote: post #553
genxy wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cheapest xbox should cost 129. Instead it is $399. That is how consoles work. It gets cheaper, the back catalog grows and now you have a mass market item that ideally could source games from anywhere. Consoles losing physical media and not allowing 3rd party app stores, or gasp, the ability to run user programs is going to kill the consoles. Expensive and marginal future utility.

Exactly, it seems their only way to make money is charging for online play which used to be $5/m and now $10/m for Game Pass Essential. Now that their high console prices aren't getting new players, the only play is to squeeze the existing ones and increasing the cost to play online. They actually tried this a few months back when Game Pass Ultimate went from $20/m to $30/m. I cancelled my sub and went to essential.…

I've always thought it was borderline crazy that Xbox charged a monthly fee and I never had an Xbox for that reason. It always made me wonder how many people they failed to bring into their ecosystem for that reason.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#560

Post by johnnyanmac »

urbnspacecowboy wrote: post #526
markus_zhang wrote: post #463

Scott Miller on X said that many, if not most of ID was also let go. https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/2074198967550685268

Entire post text: > This post was about the insider news I got this morning that a majority of Id's studio is being laid off, including most (if not all) coders.

Damn, not ID. Some of the best engineers in the industry and they are all nearly gone?

Not to mention the legacy. Some of those people may have been there for over 25 years, in times where the idea of programming for a dedicated GPU was cutting edge. Absolutely crazy how little respect the industry has for these golden geese.

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