MSFT used to be flat. What happened?
Resetting Xbox
751–760 of 981 posts
Re: Resetting Xbox
#752Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Azure is laughably bad. I'm genuinely at a loss to name a good recent Microsoft product.
I still love developing for the .NET Framework using C#. However, the number of reasons to keep using anything made by Microsoft continues to dwindle with each passing year.
As you already said, Azure is awful and only in second place behind AWS because of how much worse Google Cloud Platform is. Windows is back to sucking again, this time so hard that I'm seriously considering learning Linux and/or switching to macOS on my home system, & playing games on SteamOS instead. I almost never use Microsoft Office anymore, outside of household budgeting spreadsheets that I could easily work with LibreOffice instead.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#753Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a 3% margin which is unsustainable. It's less return than you can get from buying treasuries, which means that if they don't improve it they will go out of business.
This is the frustrating thing reading these comments, where people seem to assume that any profit margin is good enough to sustain a business. People see a 3% return and think, "Well, they aren't losing money so there is no reason they can't just keep doing business as usual." What this idea is missing is that the investors in a company aren't choosing between "keep my money in this company" and "sit on the cash", th…
So basically: The stock market is cancer.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#754Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Steam is competent at what it does and has been for decades. No other online game store is as good as what it does: Nintendo, Epic, Microsoft, & Sony have all failed to do well what Steam has gotten better at over the course of 2+ decades.
People would likely juggle the use of two stores if the value proposition was great enough. But it isn't, which is why Steam dominates and all their competitors operate in comparatively tiny fiefdoms.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#755Earlier quoted context omitted.
They wouldn’t. Only people without GamePass subscription and no desire to get it for even a month or two would buy the game on Steam.
> Only people without GamePass subscription and no desire to get it for even a month or two would buy the game on Steam So the majority of people? I jest, but I honestly don't know anyone who consults the GamePass offerings before making a decision on whether or not to buy a game. It's Steam or pirate.
Completely anecdotal (which i think both of us are guilty of) but i generally keep my PC game pass subscription active, and will check if games are on there before getting them elsewhere. I don’t really know how to measure how many people are doing that though.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#756Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if they had made it exclusive, $70B is too much for this. CoD sales would fall - not everyone buying it would go out and buy an Xbox, Xbox hardware sales would raise. Let's be optimistic and say every CoD player (including ones who already bought Xbox ) goes out and buys another Xbox and then buys 2 xboxes in the next generation. So it's ~20M more Xboxes sold. To break even on this investment in 10 years MS has…
CoD is just one title though, the deal included WoW and Candy Crush and the rest of the Activision IP.
Yes. How many consoles would WoW and Candy Crash move?
Re: Resetting Xbox
#757It 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…
Cutting edge graphics can even be actively detrimental to a game by lowering performance and limiting game design.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#758Too 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.
> We don't want to be ripped off with paying for assets we don't own.
You do know that PS is literally stopping physical games? You will not own anything.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#759Earlier 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?
Good Ol' New Nintendo 2DS XL naming scheme.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#760It becomes a problem for consumers when Xbox lays off large numbers of employees and closes studios, leading to fewer games and poorer support for them.