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Resetting Xbox

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Re: Resetting Xbox

#731

Post by account42 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #131
zitterbewegung wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xbox around 2021 had around a 12% profit margin and the gaming industry as a whole was around 17-22% . In 2023 the target for the division was put to 30% . We see this new restructuring because the target was put this high. Microsoft really wanted Game Pass to be a steam competitor which is pretty much what everyone in the industry tries to do and fails. The push for Game Pass prices to be higher was to get the 30% m…

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…

No it means making a store that is barely acceptable. Steam itself is far from good - the competition is just even worse.

The biggest problem however is network effects. Most people simply don't want to juggle multiple stores and the communities attached to them.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#732

Post by qiine »

mvdtnz wrote: post #474
jjcm wrote: post #269

What's fascinating to me are the Valve comparables here. 17B ARR vs 20B ARR At the end of the day there are two strong differences here. Valve has always been lead by people who were game devs, and have always conveyed a message that the gaming experience matters most. Xbox was led by Phil Spencer, who at least was known as being an avid gamer, but in his tenure pushed for things like xbox game pass to drive continua…

Valve doesn't make games. (within the margin of error).

"Valve rarely releases games" would be more accurate

Re: Resetting Xbox

#734

Post by Hugsbox »

nkrisc wrote: post #214

Reading this made me remember why I stopped playing my Xbox One: never-ending updates. I never played it very frequently so I disabled the sleep mode so it wouldn’t just stay on in my media cabinet heating my house. But of course that meant any time I spontaneously felt like using it there were 10 minutes of updates to download, so I would get annoyed and just do something else. Oh it can also play movies? Sorry movi…

This is what drove me to get a PS5. My xbox one would have 30 minute updates nearly every single night, and it doesn't allow you to access anything on the internet unless you let it do the updates. It was always inevitably at 7 or 8pm, when I'm trying to wind down after a day of work and just watch a show or a movie or something. It was a constant interruption to my daily routine - I like my shows before bed.

And then sometime in the last year and a half or so it became nearly unusable, constant crashes, poor performance, it was just such a constant pain in my ass. Feels like Microsoft just don't give a shit.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#735

Post by account42 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #204
PaulHoule wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it's one of those things where people only care about a small percentage of the features, but which small percentage varies. For example, I used the example of remote play together, which is very neat and a lot of people love it, but I personally don't use it. On the other hand, I make extensive use of Steam's gifting feature, including its ability to handle multiple gifts to multiple people in a single trans…

It used to be that you could get gift keys/links that worked just like any steam key you can buy outside Steam and you could gift those to people in whatever manner and on whatever schedule you wanted. I liked that a lot more than a gifting feature built into the store no matter how well designed it is.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#736

Post by ta8903 »

vachina wrote: post #453
Flere-Imsaho wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reading this made me remember why I stopped playing my Xbox One: never-ending updates. My experience with Steam is very similar (I don't have it run on startup because I like my PC to do other things from playing games). Online updates really have ruined gaming for a lot of people. Just like vinyl, humans seem to prefer a physical "thing" they pick up - put in the machine - and instantly have access to the "thing".…

Steam update is FAST. Less than 10 seconds and their CDN saturates any pipe. And since it’s a PC you can do other things while waiting. Xbox is a dedicated gaming device and while the game/device is updating I’ll have to sit there. Plus the updates for some reason slows down the longer it takes. They’ve lost my attention.

>Plus the updates for some reason slows down the longer it takes.

They're probably using the same technology as Windows Update.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#738

Post by grugdev42 »

Too little too late. Xbox is dying and PS won.

Try listening to your customers next time.

We don't want to be ripped off with paying for assets we don't own.

We don't want another monthly subscription.

We want the old games, remastered, with fully functioning multiplayer.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#739

Post by refurb »

tommit wrote: post #719
refurb wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a thin 3% profit that can go negative when the wind blows

Making crazy changes like squeezing out every last dollar out of your existing, loyal customers (looking at any PE firm ever) certainly affects the wind I'd wager.

Absolutely, and plenty of companies have made that mistake.

But the point is locking up money in a 3% margin business doesn’t impress investors.

So you either need to improve the margin with lower costs or higher price (or both). Or bail from the market entirely and put your money in something that makes more money.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#740

Post by account42 »

ryandrake wrote: post #164
tracker1 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

None of those examples are political. They might be things you don't like, which is fine, but that doesn't make them politics. What makes the attractiveness of a 3D game character "politics"? What makes a useless gay side quest politics, but a similar useless straight side quest not-politics?

They are political and being outraged at gp pointing it out doesn't change that they negatively affect the commercial success of the games.
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