Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Just so I understand your objection, they are woke because in the game one of their studios made, the woman in the game wasn't attractive enough for you?
Not even their studio, his example is from Sony.
Resetting Xbox
281–290 of 981 posts
Re: Resetting Xbox
#282Earlier 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 Considered as a raw percentage in a vacuum, sure, I guess, but we're talking about... - A company which has undertaken a concerted, long-term effort to consolidate the industry under its umbrella (something they themselves call out as a problem in this post), reducing consumer choice - A company which has captured a significant chunk of the console market. They're one of the big thre…
Remind me never to come to HN for business advice, this is dire reasoning.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#283Missed chance to call this a "Red ring of death".
From the title alone, I thought it was going to be a howto on fixing the red ring. My Xbox and my 360 still need some lifesaving care.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xbox has been profitable almost continuously since a few years into the Xbox 360. It's fascinating how "profitable but low margins" equates to "struggling" to so many.
It’s potentially a gross misallocation of capital. Right now, the 5 and 10 year US treasury rates are 4.2% and 4.47%. The 30 year is 4.99%. A business with a return on invested capital less than that is in fact operating at a loss. Unless there is reason to believe the situation will change in the near-to-mid future, such a business would literally be better off liquidating everything and just investing in treasuries…
Who needs goods and services when you can just buy infinity US treasuries?~
Re: Resetting Xbox
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Microsoft really wanted Game Pass to be a steam competitor which is pretty much what everyone in the industry tries to do and fails. Gamepass is quite literally the most anti-steam strategy ever. It's a massive loss leading (or rather, low margin leading) service relying on a pseudo-rental service to provide value. Steam got to where it is by keeping all its costs lean and developing a service around taking a cut fr…
I wrote a while ago about how companies seem to have gotten the idea into their head that subscriptions are unconditionally good, rather than a contingent good based on the exact circumstances of the subscription: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2023/streampocalypse-and-first-pri... Gamepass as a subscription to make sure you always have something to play, that has a lot of old games or indie games and other games that hav…
The logic of day 1 releases, at least how it seemed to me, was that a % of those people who get gamepass just to play the game for cheaper would stick around. That’s potentially worth way more than 1x $60 (now $70-$80) sale. That didn’t happen I guess
Re: Resetting Xbox
#286Re: Resetting Xbox
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well this is the new Xbox boss, Aska Sharma trying to course correct her own actions after pushing out Phil Spencer (and team). Phil had a deep understanding of the game world about profit margins and how the Xbox is essentially a stake in keeping Microsoft in the minds of consumers, a place in the home. Aska has a shallow understanding and sees only the financials and wanted to increase profits. Now she is burning i…
Just out of curiosity, I checked her Wikipedia page and this caught my eye: > Sharma posted in 2026 that she had recently begun playing video games under the gamertag AMRAHSAHSA to "learn and understand" the games industry Imagine running the Xbox division and only just now picking up a controller.
A part of me wants to be generous in interpreting that and say, OK, maybe it's the first time she's playing games semi-seriously in order to understand the capital G Gamer. Surely she's played games before, like say, the Sims, Bejeweled, Mario Kart, or picked up a Nintendo DS or Switch in her lifetime. Heck, even Wii Sports should count here in some capacity. Most people have played games casually in their lifetime by this point.
The other part of me though says that, no, it is in fact pretty possible that she hasn't played any video games of note, other than Wii Sports that one time. And even if she has played games casually, is it really too much to ask to have the person leading the Xbox brand be someone who can press the X button on their controller and not be confused by that?
Re: Resetting Xbox
#288Earlier 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…
Yeah, that's how it usually works.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#289Reading 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…
Same boat as you. It's wild that I can turn on the xbox, wait 20-30min for mandatory updates, then need to re-sign in or occasionally reset my wireless mac address due to some bug, then re-sign into my Xbox account even if I am fine playing offline but of course I forgot my password so now I'm on my phone doing 2FA to remember which email I used to reset the password.
Then I will need to update the game I want to play (somehow FIFA 23 still requires updates?), then re-sign in to EA whose password of course I also forgot so now I'm on my phone resetting my password for EA.
Now it's been 45minutes and I'm frustrated and realize I could have loaded up Steam or Switch and been playing this whole time. Not to mention that once the Xbox itself is working it will be running slower than the Nintendo Switch I own which is only about 2yr newer than it. just a bad system!
I legit got my old PlayStation 2 back up and running so I wouldn't deal with this. (sorry been needing to vent all this lmao)
Re: Resetting Xbox
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass A company that sells consoles complaining about not having enough games after 25 years in business and acquiring most popular game studios is hilarious. They keep cutting game studios, killing games and then set ambitious profit margins. At some point you have to question, do the people in charge understand their own business at all? They just g…
This attitude seemed prevelant at Blizzard too based on a book I read (Play Nice)they wouldn't fund anything that wasn't a billionaire dollar idea. Never ending growth and profits just seem to ruin everything
It seems like a simple fact is often overlooked: you can't just throw money at art and expect it to be good, no matter the form. Netflix tried it and ended up with a lot of weak stuff, Microsoft did the same with similar results. Most games these days are just copies or rehashes of others, not original, full of clichés or old-fashioned mechanics. Acquired studios tried to mash up different ideas, hoping it would stick, often with really bad results, like Redfall. It's like the E.T. game disaster, but forty years later and spanned across the whole company. Hardware is great, GamePass is great, but Microsoft can't produce games.