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

771–780 of 981 posts

Re: Resetting Xbox

#771

Post by rawbot »

account42 wrote: post #757
tracker1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> limiting game design

It's what RPG players have been saying all this time about voice-overs.

It is sold as an accomplishment, but it limits the scope and writing of a game.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#772

Post by nayroclade »

lelanthran wrote: post #695
Orygin wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah I forgot 5 BILLION dollar in revenue is a signal that the market does not want your product

> Oh yeah I forgot 5 BILLION dollar in revenue is a signal that the market does not want your product Doesn't matter how big the revenue is if the market is not interested at the price you are selling. I mean, by your logic, if I sell a dollar for 64c, and do $5b revenue, that's an indication that the market does indeed want the product, but not an indication that the market wants the product at the price you need to…

They are not selling at a loss though. The real issue here is that businesses such as Microsoft do not exist to serve a market or make enough money to survive and pay their employees. They exist to increase the value of their owner's shares. This is predicated on an unsustainable model of continual growth, with the expectation that every market they operate in can produce high margins and endless expansion. But demand is not infinite and persistent high margins are the exception, not the norm.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#773

Post by ethbr1 »

account42 wrote: post #710
Gareth321 wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the glowing praise at the time for the policy of being hands off and allowing studios to cook. Gamers all over the world were very happy about that approach. Unfortunately it looks like many studios do in fact require hands-on management to make tough calls and keep things moving. I'll remember this next time studios complain about management interference.

We already saw this during the Kickstarter era where all the temporarily confused AAA studios sold themselves as having been held back by unreasonable publishers all this time only to produce the most bland and still unfinished games now that they were funded directly by fans.

Also, Chris Roberts should never be allowed to manage anything bigger than a shoebox.

Sometimes, adults minding the financial shop focuses creativity.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#774

Post by ethbr1 »

ghaff wrote: post #378
mrandish wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Phil's strategy made sense on paper It was a risky bet that became even higher risk when MSFT spent ~$80 billion dollars rolling up game studios near the peak of the historic COVID gaming bubble. They bet it would greatly increase Game Pass sub growth. Instead, Game Pass sub growth slowed down. At the time I thought it was a reasonable plan - but not at the prices MSFT was paying for content. Then the DRAM drought…

I needed a new DVD player and I pretty much splurged on an Xbox. But I haven't really used it for gaming.

I remember that was my calculus in the PS2 era. At one point near launch, they weren't much more expensive than a dedicated DVD player.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#775

Post by iosjunkie »

slg wrote: post #702
Gareth321 wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When XBOX fires a bunch of people and shutters studios leading to fewer games with worse support, that's a problem for consumers. I think people often forget that in a society we rely on companies making and serving things. They make our food and our medicine and build our homes and make our games. It's a good thing when their finances are healthy. It's a bad thing when they form monopolies and rent-seek.

Once again, what is the actual problem here? The company was making a profit at their current employment level. They are laying people off and shuttering studios because that profit isn't enough for them. This entire argument keeps coming back to "money grubbery".

Would you accept 3% return on your money, especially if the investment was risky?

Re: Resetting Xbox

#776

Post by mathgeek »

ColdStream wrote: post #461
grg0 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think graphics peaked ~2015. But interaction still leaves a lot to be desired; we still have slipping and characters who can't walk stairs in AAA games to this day. Making characters more physically grounded and present seems like the obvious thing to improve to me.

This is something 'The Last Guardian' absolutely nailed! Everything was just so grounded. Yes, as a game it had a lot of flaws that many other games also had, but the things it excelled at were absolutely unique.

What did it excel at that hit the right notes for you?

Re: Resetting Xbox

#777

Post by hollerith »

Drupon wrote: post #579
mattalex wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin! The bigger issue is that console manufacturer revenue is highly cyclical. This is hard to see in e.g. Xbox and Sony since they are both part of a larger conglomerate, but really obvious for nintendo. You generally have a cycle of - "Launch": high marketing costs, low/negative HW margins - "Mid-cycle": lowering manufacturing costs, large game sales, high margin DLCs -…

>150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin! Oy vey maybe this kind of money grubbery is not good for our society.

Our society uses return on investment (which is correlated with profit margin) to decide what projects and what processes our society's workers will focus on.

So for example, if I can make twice as much money as a software developer as I can as a musician, that is strong evidence that my doing the former kind of work will benefit society about twice as much as my doing the latter kind of work.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#778

Post by Ntrails »

Flere-Imsaho wrote: post #305
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…

> 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".…

I've never had a steam update take more than 30secs.

Game updates can take a lot longer if you need them (ie multiplayer) to play. idk

Re: Resetting Xbox

#779

Post by Invictus0 »

Drupon wrote: post #579
mattalex wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin! The bigger issue is that console manufacturer revenue is highly cyclical. This is hard to see in e.g. Xbox and Sony since they are both part of a larger conglomerate, but really obvious for nintendo. You generally have a cycle of - "Launch": high marketing costs, low/negative HW margins - "Mid-cycle": lowering manufacturing costs, large game sales, high margin DLCs -…

>150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin! Oy vey maybe this kind of money grubbery is not good for our society.

is it somehow lost on you that you're commenting on a vc's website

Re: Resetting Xbox

#780

Post by ethbr1 »

tracker1 wrote: post #71
mjr00 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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). How is that profit margin distributed though? King (Candy Crush etc) and Moja…

On the margins, that's crazy thin for the size of the org... One bad quarter could turn from a few million in profits to hundreds of millions in losses. It's too close, and there's no way to build/store funds for any kind of storm at that level. Now, I think the vast majority of the pain is more than self-inflicted... I think actual business, marketing and focus need to start taking priority over idealistic political…

This is the industry in general though, and why you see so many historical AAA studios go bankrupt after one bad game.

The problem was that if you kept a studio small and lean, you were often at the mercy of predatory publishers who controlled the distribution channels (pre-network, physical media).

So most studios tried to vertically and horizontally integrate into conglomerates: own their own publishing + have a diversified enough pipeline of games that one flop wouldn't take down the entire works.

Unfortunately, that works at Activision (pre-Blizzard) and EA (00s) scale, but not Microsoft scale (where you essentially own a large chunk of all studios).

This was a reckoning long in coming, as MS XBOX leadership, after some initially brilliant ideas, got high on their own supply and forgot they couldn't endlessly acquire more studio with their parents' cash.

Tbh, they probably should have lured away one of Berkshire Hathaway's acquisition people and put them in a go / no-go decision role.

It's the acquisition price, product, and financials that make something a good deal or not, but XBOX spent the last 10 years valuing potential acquisitions on intangibles (synergy, strategy, if we don't they will, etc).

Post reply on HN