The console war argument is around such an outdated definition of the gaming industry. Self-identifying gamers have had their head in the sand for over a decade now.
Since 2010 mobile gaming has eclipsed revenue of both console and PC gaming _combined_.
Also since 2010, console revenue has stagnated while PC revenue has continued to grow.
This is the landscape to evaluate the different gaming brands. Xboxes are nothing more than a user-friendly gaming PC brand. The total addressable market for Microsoft is much larger than what Sony could hope for. Sony is in the worst bind long-term, trapped in consoles without any leg up in PC or mobile. They invested in VR instead which never became a strong category. In terms of revenue, VR is barely competing with Arcades.
If you had to stack rank gaming devices, iOS would be winning the console wars, followed by Android. In a distant third would be PlayStation, and then Microsoft and Nintendo neck in neck.
If you look at it by company, Tencent would be at the top, then Sony, then Microsoft and Nintendo.
Microsoft is definitely in -- at best -- third place no matter how you count it. The FTC trying to restrict the conversation to an era of console war that expired over 13 years ago shows they have no business trying to regulate this space.
jdietrich 782 days ago [-]
The revenues in mobile gaming overwhelmingly come from predatory in-app item sales. They aren't in the business of selling games to people who like playing games, they're in the business of psychologically exploiting people who are vulnerable to compulsive behaviours. The industry isn't shy about this - they openly brag about their pursuit of "whales" and their use of psychological manipulation. Frankly, everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.
Slightly tangential, but I've been watching Duolingo go down this road for the past few years since one of Zynga's product people became their head of product. Duolingo was never the best way to learn a language, but it's increasingly become essentially useless as an educational tool as they push for more and more revenue from their "whales". Every aspect of the experience is shaped towards manipulating people into "engaging" for longer and keeping them coming back, ostensibly to make learning more effective but in practice at the expense of learning.
This blog post by their head of product is a great example of the problems in the industry—he talks gleefully about all the manipulative techniques he pulled in from Zynga, and doesn't seem to have any clue that he's sacrificed the mission in pursuit of relentless growth.
>The team consisted of an engineering manager, an engineer, a designer, an APM, and me.
I feel for that lone engineer with 4 people breathing down the back of his neck.
solardev 782 days ago [-]
But every time he gets a new order, there's a 0.0025% chance he will randomly get promoted to CEO, so it's all worth it.
deafpolygon 781 days ago [-]
Anecdotal- but my daughter wanted to use duolingo to "learn a new language". I said, sure... but no in-app purchases of any kind. After a couple of weeks, she no longer uses it. It turns out that you need to pay for gems and stuff, in order to continue practicing. Once you're out of hearts and gems, you can't do anything until it refreshes.
It's kind of sad, that in the pursuit of cashing in on their "whales" that they've essentially neutered it as an educational app.
addandsubtract 781 days ago [-]
This is only true if you're on the free plan. If you get Duo Plus (family plan and split it, for example), all the IAP become obsolete. You can practice/learn a language 24/7 without limits. The gems become completely irrelevant. I think this is a really fair model and great bang for the buck.
deafpolygon 780 days ago [-]
The problem is when the whole thing is structured around gems, etc. Duolingo is incentivized to structure it in such a way that it benefits the nature of microtransactions. It diminishes the educational value of the whole thing, subscription plan or not.
781 days ago [-]
echelon 782 days ago [-]
Mobile games are a pastiche.
The viewport is a small number of inches, the types of games are wholly different, the controls are awful.
These are not only different consumer segments, they're wholly different products. The FTC is making the right call.
zardo 782 days ago [-]
If the category includes all mobile games, it should include video gambling machines as well.
bitxbitxbitcoin 782 days ago [-]
Blurring the line between gambling and gaming.
dijit 782 days ago [-]
they even call that section of the industry "iGaming".
golergka 782 days ago [-]
Just because people make decisions that you wouldn't make yourself doesn't mean that they're stupid and emotionally manipulated.
lolinder 782 days ago [-]
Have you read any of the literature from the mobile gaming industry? I don't judge the people victimized by the industry, I judge the industry, and I do it based on the way they talk about their customers. They're very open about their exploitative practices and don't even really seem to see the problem.
In my other comment, I pointed to this post by Duolingo's head of product as a good example of someone talking openly about exploitative practices without even really seeming to see the problem. This is honestly mild on the scale of industry discussions of how to manipulate people into giving more money.
I mean, at the end of the day it's opt-in deluxe entertainment, and games have been attacked on this vector for decades. They are by nature time wasters and they (console games) can arguably be money wasters depending on how many games or whay kinds of games you play. We did especially have an era of this with MMOs.
The game design patterns aren't new nor novel. Retaining players with repetitive grinds, using guilds to create peer pressure to stay, daily rotating events with a trickle of currency used to obtain desirable characters/gear. You could trace all that back to WOW and several Korean MMOs. The only difference is that they can reach a wider audience now, some of which they drew in from the console market.
golergka 782 days ago [-]
I've worked in it for many years, and I've been a happy customer as well, spending a lot of my money on those games. I get a game, I figure out I like it, spend a few hundreds on it in a span of a few months, and move on after it bores me, with perfect return on investment. I've tried spending the same money in casinos, but they are just too boring — I usually can't even get myself to burn down the money I've decided to spend, so I take don't get the gambling comparison: mobile games a simply better as entertainment.
solardev 782 days ago [-]
One of those rare sentences that can be both a game design doc and a casino defense...
Schnitz 782 days ago [-]
I strongly disagree, mobile and console/PC gaming are not competing. It’s a completely different audience, different games and so on. I’d consider them mostly separate markets. The Switch tried to bridge the gap but really didn’t.
zagrebian 782 days ago [-]
> The Switch tried to bridge the gap but really didn’t.
What would the Switch have needed to accomplish to bridge the gap to mobile? Sell 1 billion units?
tolmasky 782 days ago [-]
To be clear, “mobile” is a distinct category from “handheld”. I am not OP, but to answer your question, I think the idea is that to bridge the gap with mobile gaming the Switch would have to… actually compete in that space. IOW, it has nothing to do with sales. Not many people are considering whether to buy a Switch instead of Candy Crush on their phone. If you ask me how many toasters you have to sell to prove to me you’re in the mobile gaming space, I’d reply that you’re committing a category error. You could sell 1 trillion toasters and still not succeed in “bridging the gap between making toast and mobile gaming”. This is of course a hyperbolic example, and gaming is a gradient with more grey areas and plenty of overlap, but arguably “mobile gaming” in particular is so different from the rest that it is fair to categorize quite differently. There is a good argument that it should if anything instead be compared to gambling from a business model perspective, or social media / content consumption given its expected use environment (on the bus, waiting in line, in bed, etc.).
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
At the same time this metaphor works in reverse. There wee very much people who don't see the appeal of a 3DS becsuse "I have free games on my phone". And the 3DS lost a lot of its market due to that. Pokemon wasn't enough for the first time in some 20 years. And then Some part of The Pokemon Company released Pokemon Go and it was clear that the lines were blurry. Gaming or non-gaming, I can't find someone who didn't at least tinker with POGO in the few 2 months.
I think it's a bit silly to suggest that there isnt a decent overlap in the market. Any Japanese company has a mobile division, and they all utilize their console IP's there. They wouldn't do that if all their audience were candy crush players.
Schnitz 782 days ago [-]
Exactly. If you ask me, it would have to run the latest triple A games like F1, Call of Duty, FIFA, Elden Ring, Dirt, etc very well and be an attractive platform for that kind of gaming. The FTC is IMHO correct when they see Xbox, Play Station and Windows as one market and Switch in another.
People usually have the latest Play Station or Xbox, not both, but lots of people have a Switch in addition to either.
philipov 782 days ago [-]
Right, the switch wouldn't be competing with Mobile Games, it would be competing with Mobile Phones. So, to compete in that space, the Switch would have had to be a mobile phone. Maybe they could have gotten away with being a Tablet.
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
It's competing for a similar audience. But phones target a wider audience. There are very much high spec phones marketed to play the highest fidelity games, so it's not like there are no console gamers who consider mobile gaming.
bombcar 782 days ago [-]
Allow horrible gatcha games
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
They do, there are some gacha on the switch. Most notably, Genshin was trying to promise a Switch port, but never delivered.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 782 days ago [-]
I think the op is right.
Try to sell mobile games to "console/pc gamers", you just don't sell them, different market.
From a personal perspective, all my friends who play videogames avoid mobile like plague.
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
On the other hand, my friend group have all played some mobile games at some point. I think it really comes down to genre.
These were a bunch of weebs who also played stuff like Final Fantasy 14. And many mobile games marketed towards those current/former RPG players are similar in all but raw technical scope (and even then, we have Genshin impact now. That gap is closing). But sure, if your friend group focuses on FPS or fighters I can see a lack of interest.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 782 days ago [-]
I have no problem with the mobile platform itself, it's that usually all the games are terrible.
The few that are on mobile usually have a counterpart on steam, with the steam deck that lost all the interest
underdeserver 782 days ago [-]
The Switch didn't really try to bridge the gap, the games are different. There are no Tears of the Kingdom or Mario Odyssey on phones.
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
Genshin impact was mocked in the gaming space as a Breath of the Wild clone. So i don't think that angle is correct.
No one has tried to really make a 3d platformer mobile game, though. I wonder how much of that is due to technical/logistical issues and how much due to lack of audience demand. There are some 2D platformers, so that's not the issue.
opan 782 days ago [-]
I haven't played it, but Genshin Impact is often compared to Breath of the Wild.
scheeseman486 782 days ago [-]
They all compete with each other since they're all competing for your time, there's just specializations that make them more attractive in certain situations. If I'm at home poking at a gem game at my phone, that's still taking up time that could be spent on a console. If I'm out and about, it's time that could be spent on a Switch or Steam Deck, or possibly cloud streaming.
There's plenty of overlap between all of them. Hell, most mobile games are mostly adaptions of what are usually called casual or what used to be called "desktop" games on PC. Genshin Impact is an open world RPG, there's CoD Mobile and Mario Kart too.
There's a habit to separate various kinds of media in it's own little lockboxes and it's completely wrongheaded and old fashioned in an age where tech is consolidating so rapidly.
BeFlatXIII 782 days ago [-]
> They all compete with each other since they're all competing for your time
But they have largely separate audiences. The number of people for whom they are in legitimate competition is vanishingly small compared to those who are exclusively on one side of the divide or the other.
scheeseman486 782 days ago [-]
Do they? Most people and households I know, particularly families, have products from all categories, with those who play games gravitating to dedicated hardware (mobile, console, PC etc) as opposed to phones and tablets.
Mobile, console, PC, handheld? Potato Potahto. I can play PC games on a handheld. I can play Xbox games on an iPhone. I can play Switch games on a PC. I can play "Mobile" games on a TV box.
The industry is so busy categorizing that they missed that everything runs on everything now.
lowbloodsugar 782 days ago [-]
My wife plays solitaire on her phone and never ever plays on my PS5.
I play games on my PS5 and never ever on my iPhone.
When my friends and I talk about what games we are playing no one, ever, has mentioned a mobile game. We did discuss Pokémon go, but not one of us actually installed it.
scheeseman486 782 days ago [-]
Software market segmentation was at one point borne entirely from technical considerations between different hardware platforms. Form factors, architecures, performance etc. To some extent it still is, but the differentiation has mostly dissolved down to screen size and the tradeoffs that need to be made to accommodate those differently sized screens.
The technical reasons for justifying segmented software markets have faded away. In spite of personal preference, your wife could play that exact same solitaire game on a PC or laptop if they wanted to, just like you could play PS5 games on your iPhone. Just like you should be able to play Xbox games on a PS5, or vice versa, with the only barrier existing to prevent this being the walls the platform holders themselves built. This absolutely results in market segmentation, but of the anti-competitive kind.
This will come to a head whenever AR glasses catch on proper, since that dissolves segmentation based on screen size. What's "mobile", when everything is mobile?
lowbloodsugar 782 days ago [-]
>if they wanted to
That's the market segmentation right there. My wife could play solitaire on her PC but she doesn't want to. She has her phone on her all the time. She is a very casual gamer. I, on the other hand, want to play games in surround sound with a large 4K TV. I have a switch but have never played it disconnected from the TV.
>What's "mobile", when everything is mobile?
The games. As as has been said on this thread, "mobile" games are actually either skinner boxes or casual games like solitaire. Console games are big investments in experiences - be the investment money, like GTA or Halo, or time and passion, like Celeste.
I hope that we will see some interesting games for VR/AR. So far there have been exactly zero high-investment games. Superhot, for example, was interesting, but played well without VR, and was short.
Here's the thing: I don't remember the last time I played a first person game other than Superhot. They aren't that fun. I don't have great proprioception in the real world, so how is that going to work in VR where I don't have legs? How will I time jumping off a building? How will I know when to strike? These are all reasons why most 3D games are third person. Games are fun.
scheeseman486 779 days ago [-]
Sure that's segmentation, but only because the platform holders architected it that way.
Solitaire is a mobile game? It didn't start out like that! Not just that it was for a long time a PC game, but also as a card game that required a big ass desk to play. Same with gambling games. You've been groomed into expecting that different hardware form factors require different software ecosystems, but that is a box that the industry has drawn for itself (with a few notable exceptions trying to break out of it).
As for the AR/VR talk, I was speaking more generally, not about AR/VR specific experiences. Given the panacea of AR glasses with perfect passthrough in a pair of Oakleys, virtual screens can be any shape or size. At which point the hardware distinction between "big screen" experiences like movies and GTA and smaller, casual games like solitaire are effectively at an even footing on the same device. At that point does it make sense to have separate stores for different hardware?
Not that I think it does today. If I purchase Solitaire, I should be able to play it anywhere on anything. If I purchase GTA, I should be able to play it anywhere on anything.
amanaplanacanal 782 days ago [-]
> They all compete with each other since they're all competing for your time
But if you define the market that way, it probably also includes books, movies, television, and sports. Not so useful when working on antitrust.
scheeseman486 782 days ago [-]
Music and some less demanding TV (reality shows, news) can be passive enough that you can consume it concurrently to video games or sport. Narrative TV and movies absolutely compete with time spent playing video games.
I don't think that the categorization is actually helpful, if anything it distorts reality by making it seem as if Microsoft are on the backfoot regarding gaming. Meanwhile, Sony is releasing games on Windows.
joenot443 782 days ago [-]
I think it’s important to note the revenue coming from mobile gamers (generally) isn’t the same revenue that Sony/MS are after here. Very different customer segments with very different demographics. You’re right though, it seems that the mobile sector is growing and the console one has stagnated.
I imagine contingent of people who spend big bucks on mobile games _probably_ wouldn’t be spending that money on AAA PS5 games otherwise.
jibe 782 days ago [-]
I think it’s important to note the revenue coming from mobile gamers (generally) isn’t the same revenue that Sony/MS are after here.
Just curious if you are making that comment after reading the article, or is your general opinion? Because one of the big points of the article is that Phil Spencer said they tried to by Zynga, and the major reason they want Activision is for the mobile assets. This is Spencer’s testimony quoted in the article:
The deal, as we’ve talked about, expands our business to the mobile platform... the existing business that we run today as the third-place console business is a very difficult business to drive profit and margin. So the opportunity for us to expand in a meaningful way onto mobile, the world’s largest gaming platform, was really both a strategic and business opportunity behind this deal.
joenot443 782 days ago [-]
That's just my general opinion! That's a great point though, and tracks well with what other commenters have said. Sony/MS definitely have a very good understanding of their own market, so if they're making efforts to expand into mobile, there's clearly very good business justification.
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
It can vary. Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail show that there certainly is a console-esque audience you can target, even with mobile style monetization. Their success does make me wonder why the West hasn't attempted something similar since the days of Infinity Blade.
fomine3 781 days ago [-]
It's very disappointing that big Japanese mobile and console game industry can't do what Mihoyo did. They should.
ffgjgf1 782 days ago [-]
At this point though the PC gaming market is indistinguishable from Xbox which is just a closed down Windows PC with DRM. AFAIK all Xbox games are supposed to be available on PC anyway?
asvitkine 782 days ago [-]
There's a difference for MS though, right? I assume it gets a cut off Xbox titles but nothing (other than cementing Windows) for sales of PC titles?
moogly 782 days ago [-]
That's why they created GamePass. There's no way that's not operating at a loss right now, but they're playing the long game I suppose.
Dah00n 782 days ago [-]
This is like comparing bikes, cars and motorcycles, saying "the car has won, motorcycle sales have stagnated - get your head out the sand". You cannot just change "Console" to "Computing device that can run a game" because you think it is a better way to look at it. You also count Microsoft as PC + Xbox but not Sony as PlayStation + Phones + TVs etc. all of which has apps and games, making this an extremely arbitrary definition.
There's no doubt that a Console is far from the same experience most people have with a PC or a phone. Different, not better. Why do you think most that identify as a gamer own both a Console, a phone and a PC if it is basically the same experience? I own one of each for the exact same reason I own both a car a motorcycle and a bike: They are not at all the same or even related outside having wheels.
zeroxfe 782 days ago [-]
So how does one find high quality games on mobile? There's so much crap out there on the Play store, it's really hard to pick games. I don't care much about the genre or the price, I just want to play some high quality, low bullshit (no ads, spam, loot boxes, etc.) games.
It's kinda a joke, but when I asked myself the question "can I play anything interesting on mobile", the answer I found was that one.
opan 782 days ago [-]
Check out some free software titles on F-Droid. Shattered Pixel Dungeon and Minetest are a couple examples. Anuto TD is also a decent low-budget-feeling tower defense game (don't set your expectations too high).
manzanarama 782 days ago [-]
Apple Arcade?
madeofpalk 782 days ago [-]
Maybe Microsoft could compete by building something people would pay money for, rather than just buying their way to a dominant position?
NBJack 782 days ago [-]
I agree with this sentiment. As much as it lags the competition, it would be doing even worse had they not marketed the ever loving crap out of their flagship Halo. Remember I Love Bees?
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
I guess the underlying question is, are any of the consoles worth buying? I feel like they aren't.
gilbetron 782 days ago [-]
I love my PS5, as I loved all the playstations, although the xbox 360 saw more use from me for that era. I also game on the PC, but generally I find consoles get more gaming use, because I'm in front of a PC screen all day for work, so it's nice to sit on a coach and play games in the evening. The game catalog is huge, and older games these days are well worth playing. I'd say I'm at about 90% console gaming to 10% pc gaming at this point (no mobile gaming), although it can vary a lot over the years.
Also, a console just works (99% of the time), and I don't have to fiddle with drivers and editing config files and the other random crap that can crop up with even the best PC games.
carl_dr 782 days ago [-]
> Also, a console just works (99% of the time), and I don't have to fiddle with drivers and editing config files and the other random crap that can crop up with even the best PC games.
Another anecdata point - I have several hundred games for PC on Steam, and can’t remember the last time I had an issue with drivers or having to do anything to get games to run.
WillAdams 782 days ago [-]
The Nintendo Switch is an easy choice if one wants a mix of at-home and mobile gaming and are able to find games w/in its catalog which suit.
I just wish someone would make a motion-controlled RPG which had:
- the exploration and immersive story of Xenoblade Chronicles
- the amazing imagery and intricate puzzles of Pandora's Tower
- the endless grinding potential of The Last Story
- on-going content like to Diablo 3's Seasons
- the fluid transition between ranged combat and melee of Red Steel 2
- the wonderful archery of Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword on the Wii
and a story/world where constant replays make sense --- say something like to the Gates of C.J. Cherryh's Morgaine books.
(and yes, I should spend more time playing Ring Fit Adventure, but )
tourmalinetaco 782 days ago [-]
The problem with the Switch is, why buy that when you can get a Steam Deck? It’s exclusives aren’t really that exclusive when emulation exists. And all things considered, buying a legal copy of the game and then pirating the game file is equivalent enough to satisfy most moral objections one may have.
The PS5 is really the only console with any amount of exclusives, and even then Sony is opening up to PC more and more.
So to answer OP, none are really worth by themselves. Online games obviously create different considerations though.
enragedcacti 782 days ago [-]
> The problem with the Switch is, why buy that when you can get a Steam Deck?
One reason is that the cheapest steam deck is twice the price of the cheapest switch while being much less portable. If you want a Switch-like TV experience you need to spend an extra $150 on the dock and a controller whereas that comes in the box on a Switch OLED with a vastly better screen for $350. The Steam Deck is obviously more capable but it definitely has tradeoffs even for someone willing to go through all of the effort of piracy and emulation.
capitainenemo 782 days ago [-]
FWIW, you don't actually have to spend that much on a dock.
Since the docks weren't initially available, I purchased a $20 USB-C hub from Anker on newegg (with passthrough charging, SD card, USB/USB-C/HDMI) although there are even cheaper ones some as low as $10 for HDMI only. It fits pretty easily in the nylon bag with the charger so it's now a portable dock which I can also use for work due to the full linux desktop on the steam deck (I combine it with a collapsing BT keyboard and mini mouse when not at a desk).
Controllers you can get pretty good USB ones for $10 with better form factor than the switch and easier to replace.
The openness of the steam deck really helps with peripherals.
capitainenemo 782 days ago [-]
Oh... one thing I forgot to mention. I was concerned about strain on the USB-C connector, esp w/ the hub, so I added a magnetic USB-C connector. It's worked both to protect the port and break away if the hub was mispositioned and adding strain at an angle.
anotherman554 781 days ago [-]
>>The problem with the Switch is, why buy that when you can get a Steam Deck?
Have you used the Steam Deck?
It's a janky experience if you try to use it in the living room. For one thing, the Bluetooth chip is terrible. I realized this when I emulated Donkey Kong, was doing terribly, then unplugged it from my TV and started winning in handheld mode.
The issue isn't the TV introducing lag, I followed instruction online to install the driver for the Xbox controller Dongle and the difference was night and day.
This is just an emblematic example. I had to buy a wifi extender because the Steam Deck literally crash itself (It will actually report "out of battery" when the battery is full) when it has a bad wifi signal, due to some sort of hardware flaw.
Steam Deck is a very janky experience, which perhaps isn't a surprise when you realize Valve has the highest profits per employee in tech, they accomplish a lot with a small staff, but they have huge resource constraints when producing products like the Steam Deck.
alphager 782 days ago [-]
Because of convenience. I could do the whole dance fiddling with settings of yuzu and ryuxin or just press play on my switch.
jghn 782 days ago [-]
Because I like Nintendo and would like to financially reward them for their efforts?
deadbunny 782 days ago [-]
Did you miss the part where they said they bought the game before pirating it? Hardware doesn't make money, software does.
jghn 782 days ago [-]
No I did not. Sales numbers matter. And Nintendo claims to make a profit on the hardware.
tourmalinetaco 781 days ago [-]
I don’t want the hardware, I want the games. The hardware is literally useless to me. A Steam Deck does everything I need it to do but better because it’s a Linux machine.
jghn 780 days ago [-]
What you want is irrelevant here. If they wanted to sell it for the Steam Deck platform, they would have done so.
2muchcoffeeman 782 days ago [-]
Because everyone can actually buy a Switch and it’s cheaper.
hombre_fatal 782 days ago [-]
Yes, why isn't anyone "just" making the perfect game? Look how easy it was to write that list. It's just the best aspect of six games and a series of books. Can't be too hard.
oblio 782 days ago [-]
> Yes, why isn't anyone "just" making the perfect game?
I think we had a few that tried.
We got instant classics released soon after the initial announcement: Daikatana, Duke Nukem Forever, etc.
moogly 782 days ago [-]
I bought a Switch last month to play BotW (yeah, I'm a bit behind). I kind of regret starting to play BotW on it (85 hours so far; it's a good game, with some flaws like all games, but good). The framerate is just absolutely horrid in parts, even in 720p, and I'm just not getting used to it; even after 85 hours, I wince every time it goes down to 10 fps. If I could move over my progress to CEMU I would.
If they haven't improved performance in TotK (or Switch 2 is out by then), I will play that game emulated on a PC.
Super Mario Odyssey framerate was better. Not great, but not "did Nintendo seriously consider this to be good enough to release?".
tmerc 782 days ago [-]
That depends on what you value in a console.
I bought an xbone a few years after I quit wow and got rid of my gaming PC. I don't game much any more but when I want to, I have xbone. 8 years of an appliance that plays games for like $300. My fiance doesn't play PC games but will play Xbox. My cat sitter doesn't need an account on my computer to play fortnight.
A gaming PC would be better in most ways but as far as value for dollar, xbone was well worth buying.
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
I agree they are dirt cheap for the specs. They've just lost the social aspect. I miss the LAN parties with 12-16 guys playing playing together in someone's basement.
pjmlp 782 days ago [-]
Depends on how much you like messing with drivers, and other hardware issues.
ericd 782 days ago [-]
I haven’t had a driver issue in windows in ages, have you? I’m sure they still happen here and there, but I feel like this is mostly an obsolete meme at this point.
pjmlp 782 days ago [-]
You would be surprised when looking at AAA bug databases, specially graphics and audio.
Not everyone buys top quality hardware.
ericd 782 days ago [-]
Yeah, fair, I guess I’ve narrowed my vendor list a lot from when I was a teenager, probably a big part of it.
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
I had no issues with my PC drivers. On the other hand I had to install a sound driver on Xbox for my headset to work...
pjmlp 782 days ago [-]
Sure...
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
For real
pjmlp 782 days ago [-]
And the driver was installed on XBox putting a USB pen and starting setup.exe..../s
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
No idea what you're talking about because I didn't have to do any of that on PC since Vista and earlier.
But there are multiple drivers in the Xbox store and it took some research to see what had to be installed. There are still times I have to disconnect and reconnect the controller for the headset to work.
pjmlp 781 days ago [-]
There is no way to install drivers on XBox other than whatever comes with firmware updates.
Not exactly. That is true for Microsoft hardware. Even then sometimes you have to reinstall those using "Update Now" and a few steps. You can also need third party audio drivers - I had to download audio software from the Xbox store to get my headset to work.
Dah00n 782 days ago [-]
It depends. Can you compare a car and a motorcycle? Maybe, but they really don't compete directly in most cases. I play 90% of my games on my PC but when I play Co-op I always pick the console version of the game if possible because every single time there are problems with either Windows, the game, whatever communication software we use, the network, etc. etc. I can count on one hand how many times I've had these problems since the original Xbox. The whole experience also feels very different. I have also been lucky enough to not once have a console die unlike a PC and I own all my old consoles - again unlike all my PCs (try installing a PlayStation 1 era PC game on a modern PC).
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
"try installing a PlayStation 1 era PC game on a modern PC"
I still occasionally play F22 TAW and Chamanche Gold. No issues.
I've had way more issues like you describe on Xbox with stuff like Halo Infinite than with stuff on PC like Destiny 2. That includes driver issues! (Headset sound on Xbox).
MegaDeKay 782 days ago [-]
The answer depends on the individual, but millions and millions of people have said "Yes" to that question and are very happy with their choice.
endemic 782 days ago [-]
I buy Nintendo hardware since it’s the only legit way to play their software.
mcpackieh 782 days ago [-]
"Self-identified gamers" and those extremely profitable mobile games have virtually nothing to do with each other, the commonality of 'games' is superficial. There's basically no overlap between the consumers of these markets.
You might as well compare console games to casino games.
jorvi 782 days ago [-]
> without any leg up in PC or mobile
Sony has a stable of desired exclusives (and even exclusive series). Microsoft Gaming doesn’t earn a dime on PC hardware sales. Hell, even the Windows group doesn’t earn more than a couple of bucks on a Windows sale.
It’s Microsoft Gaming that is in a bind here.
a13o 782 days ago [-]
I'm evaluating them ultimately from their technical prospects and on a long timeline. Sony has a bright future as a content curator no doubt. It's their hardware business I think looks shaky.
Consider a future where TV sales dwindle, cannibalized by personal screens like tablets and headsets. Or imagine smart tv platforms clamping down on media that they don't get a cut of (anything over that 'obsolete' HDMI port).
Those trends are slowly underway, and part of the reason the console segment is not just stagnating, but shrinking. Sony has a big piece of a shrinking segment and no easy way to move to the other gaming segments. Microsoft on the other hand has 3 generations of games that run on Windows, which is still the dominant OS in a growing gaming segment.
If we could define the console wars as: who will escape the console segment before it disappears? That is the lens by which I say Sony has the worse hand. They're more likely to become an Atari or Sega at this point than Microsoft is.
jorvi 781 days ago [-]
> Microsoft on the other hand has 3 generations of games that run on Windows, which is still the dominant OS in a growing gaming segment.
But what does it matter that Microsoft owns the OS? They don’t see a dime more because of that except for the OEM Windows fee and tiny sliver from OS ads.
Steam is the predominant sales platform on PC, which again Microsoft doesn’t earn a dime from.
Sony has ported or is porting all their successful 1st party and 3rd party games. Nothing is stopping them from doing that for all the games they think customers care about. And the supermajority of customers care very little beyond current gen, maybe one gen back.
I don’t see consoles shrinking a whole lot either (once you cut out the spike from COVID). I use my PC with a bunch of fancy tricks and Big Picture and it still has plenty of weird bugs. The most recent annoying one is having to manually override DPI scaling on Ori, and choosing my TV as the monitor for Ori and Halo MCC. Funnily enough both Microsoft games (although I am not saying Sony’s games would fare much better).
Maybe that a revival of Steam boxes / Steam machines will change that in the future.. or hell, maybe the EU breaks open the console walled garden. Who knows.
a13o 781 days ago [-]
Microsoft has been doing Microsoft things to boost the Xbox app and game pass. Having a huge back catalog to fill their store gives them a leg up over say, Epic's game store, which also wants to enter the space.
It's a huge hill to climb to catch up to Steam's market share, but we've seen Microsoft leverage Windows to climb similar hills time and time again. The strategy is at least viable enough that Valve has been shaking in their boots for years, trying to build up a war chest of games on Linux. The Steam Deck is a great strategic accomplishment for them.
johnchristopher 782 days ago [-]
I don't understand why smartphone games are relevant in determining whether or not the FTC is right to have concerns over competition in the console gaming industry.
Consoles games aren't the same products than smartphones games. Only xbox, playstation and the nintendo consoles are in the same market (edit: and PC)
I do agree console war is outdated and not relevant anymore but it doesn't mean the FTC is wrong. Of course they may be wrong for an entire different set of reasons.
rvba 782 days ago [-]
Ypu are writing as if only the winners were making money. What is not true.
Consoles, handhelds and PCs can still make a ton of money even when studios are not centralized.
pipes 782 days ago [-]
Unfortunately I think you are probably right. One thing I don't get though, why is either ms or Sony still in the console business. It's extremely risky, why bother when real money is mobile?
Edit: is pc gaming really growing? That surprises me, I used to really be in to pc games (late 90s). GPUs are ridiculously expensive, is it really big now? It was niche in my day
djmips 782 days ago [-]
I don't consider most of mobile gaming 'the gaming industry' - superficially it's the gaming industry but it's some other thing. That's my own opinion and I guess I'm outdated but I never 'game' on mobile.
pictur 782 days ago [-]
I don't think mobile games have anything to do with it. It would be more accurate to say mobile applications.
It's a big market, but is it really competing with other forms of gaming? As an analogy, if someone were buying up all the oven manufacturers, would it matter that microwaves were more widely used?
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
We could certainly debate that all day. I simply replied because the parent comment made it sound like games were this niche corner of the mobile market. I wanted to assert otherwise.
But to properly reply to your comment: indirectly, yes. I'd go so far to argue that the rise of mobile gaming yet another reason why the Vita couldn't gain traction (releasing in 2013, around the time mobile games started to really show they can do more than arcade-y style minigames), and why Nintendo decided to pivot to a hybrid model. the 3DS's middling sales (for a nintendo console) definitely put some pressure on even the uncontested king of handhelds, so what chance would any other platform have?
Meanwhile Microsoft in this era would flounder with Windows Mobile and fail to gain traction with Windows 8S or whatever they were trying to do with tablets in this time, so I guess their enthusiasm to try that in their gaming division was negative. I'm honestly still baffled Valve beat MS to making the most obvious Xbox handheld, that we now know as the Steam Deck.
So I'd say it was competing the same way handhelds competed with consoles. There would never be apples to apples comparison, but the markets definitely tug on one another, the markets keep eyes on one another, and the audience have some significant overlap, enough to be kept in mind with marketing. Sony and Microsoft wouldn't be marketing cloud gaming on mobile if they thought none of their audience were interested in playing games on their phone.
Dah00n 782 days ago [-]
I'm a bit confused. Are you saying the Vita competes with Consoles and PCs? Surely it competes with phones?
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
The Vita/3DS had very similar audiences to their console counterparts, despite not necessarily being direct competitors. But you can't think in just games for this to make sense.
Remember that the PSP was also a pretty good multimedia device pre-smartphone. So it lost that userbase as it became the Vita. But of course it's primary purpose was games and the Vita focused on that in its western marketing: "console gaming on the go". It couldn't sell itself on mobile style games if it ever expected to succeed, so while it may have overlap I can't say it was a direct smartphone competitor either.
And it took similar resources within Sony to develop and market it. Another of a dozen reasons why it failed: Sony decided very early on to put all its chips into the PS4, and ditched first party Vita support after the first year. This woildnt make sense for a phone competitor.
fomine3 781 days ago [-]
Everyone weren't sure whether mobile console disappearing or not by smartphones getting popular and high performance. Sony tried some weird things like PlayStation Mobile. Nintendo merged consoles as Switch.
As a result, it seems that it's a different market.
hombre_fatal 782 days ago [-]
I don't see why it wouldn't. You're probably thinking of just Candy Crush and company but I have games like Final Fantasy 7 and Baldur's Gate on the iPhone. Though more interesting from a money standpoint would be major online games like Fortnite and League of Legends on the iPhone.
Every time I want to play a game I have to consider if I want to bust out my laptop, turn on my TV system, or just swipe over to a game on the phone I'm already holding.
goda90 782 days ago [-]
Sure, but the experience is different. You can cook a piece of meat in the microwave but it won't be the same as one cooked in an oven or on a stove. I can forsee a future of convergence where a phone is powerful enough to play any games and can just be docked to get the console or PC experience but we're not there yet.
goosedragons 782 days ago [-]
We are already there. Pretty much every iPhone sold for the past 5 years is more powerful than the Nintendo Switch, could be used with controllers and connected to a TV. But they don't seem to bother.
Dah00n 782 days ago [-]
Cinema / 65' TV versus iPhone. It is definitely not the same experience. I own many consoles and more than one gaming PC and I'd never play a game on a phone.
DougEiffel 782 days ago [-]
I don't find myself doing that very much.
I obviously prefer to play my PC or PlayStation, but will play my Switch if I am in the bathroom, riding shotgun on a long car ride, etc. Mobile games, for me, are essentially waiting room games or something I will whip out if I have exactly 7 minutes to kill.
I don't generally think, "I want to game" and then decide which one is worth the effort in the moment.
oblio 782 days ago [-]
Entertainment is entertainment and attention is the currency.
goda90 782 days ago [-]
With that point of view, would it be acceptable for Disney to buy up all movie studios since there are other forms of entertainment?
PurpleRamen 782 days ago [-]
To be fair, apps are a limited market. Games are fun for some time, and then you move on to the next game. Or you are addicted, and waste a steady amount every month to get the ever same experience. Apps are different. After you found your necessary set of functionality, you stay with them for years and years, you barely add any new app, or change to another one. And often there are even enough free or builtin apps around to cover your demand. So revenue is naturally smaller.
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
I do agree the monetization ceiling of games is much higher. There's not much to infinitely spend on in a productivity app but you hear stories of whales spending thousands a month on a single mobile game.
And that does line up with the above link: most of that revenue os generated by a snall minority of gamers. Most games are indeed played for free for a few hours/days with no money obtained outside of Ads. But that whale market is small but insanely lucrative.
LocalH 782 days ago [-]
> Xboxes are nothing more than a user-friendly gaming PC brand
Also, manufacturer- and publisher-friendly, given the heavy restrictions on the platform. It's bad for preservation that the Xbox One hasn't significantly been cracked yet.
Jochim 782 days ago [-]
Sony exclusives on the PS5 and a dearth of quality exclusives on Microsoft's side definitely have a lot to do with this but I wonder whether the Xbox Series S/X distinction contributed as well.
The current console generation came with a fairly large price hike and Microsoft responded by also releasing a more affordable but less powerful model.
The problem is that a non-technical consumer can go out and purchase a PS5 safe in the knowledge that they're getting the same gaming experience as anyone else that owns a PS5. Someone considering an Xbox now has to choose between the series S and X.
They now need to compare specifications, figure out which one is more powerful and worry whether the console will be able to deliver decent fidelity and performance in newer games.
On another note, it'd be nice to see exclusivity agreements die entirely. Microsoft has always been fairly good at making their titles available on PC and Sony is moving in that direction but still makes heavy use of timed exclusives.
disruptiveink 782 days ago [-]
Xbox ultimately made the same mistake as Nintendo with the Wii / Wii U.
Just give the console a number. And. Increment.
That's it. You can still have Pro / Slim / whatever models, but I have no idea why Nintendo and Microsoft both willingly threw away the easiest marketing strategy there is: your kid has the 4 and the 5 just came out. 5 is larger than 4 therefore the kid knows what to ask, regardless of age. The parent also knows what to buy because 5 is larger than 4.
Nothing convinces me that this isn't the reason why new Playstation models sell like crazy before any decent games are out. 4 was larger than 3 and 5 is larger than 4. That's it.
Nintendo got out of it by starting a new line of consoles with the Switch, but Microsoft's marketing just keeps giving this one away to Sony for free. It's unbelievable.
Philip-J-Fry 782 days ago [-]
I don't think Xbox made the same mistake. Because while the naming is pretty bad, people do actually know it's the latest generation console.
The Wii U on the other hand completely flew under most people's radar. People were over the Wii and then Nintendo releases the Wii U. Most people thought it was an addon tablet because that's all they kept showing, just Wii remotes and the tablet.
petepete 782 days ago [-]
I just had to look up the difference between the series X and S. It wasn't obvious to me. It's not even obvious which is the more powerful model, there's no mention anywhere of what X and S stand for. Is 'S' Small or Super? And I guess the 'X' is for eXperience.
Compare that to PlayStation 4/PlayStation 4 Pro/PlayStation 5 (and yeah, I'm not going to argue that 'pro' isn't a stupid designation for a slightly-more-powerful-than-before console), but it's at least obvious where they sit in the lineup.
ramses0 782 days ago [-]
AFAIK it’s X, S, Series X, Series S.
AFAIK, S is “no physical media”
AFAIK, “series” means “fancy”
I’ve only ever purchased XBox consoles and currently rock an XBox One.
Lemme fix your marketing, XBox: call the “no drive” ones “cloud” or “online” or “vapor” or whatever.
Call your next one 9006 so it is simultaneously “over 9000”, and puts you back in the semver race with PlayStation. /s
theropost 782 days ago [-]
And not to be confused with the previous generation Xbox One X.
mavhc 782 days ago [-]
You didn't play your professional games on your PlayStation Pro? Office Simulator 2017, Mortgage Agreement 8, Car Repayments Xtreme?
dfc 782 days ago [-]
I do not believe that you tried to figure out which was more powerful and it was not immediately obvious. MS even made a page comparing them and highlights the differences: one can do 12 teraflops the other 4. One does 4k the other only 1440p.
Yes the names are not as easy to compare as PS5 vs PS4, but upon cursory investigation it's blatantly obvious that the X is more powerful than the S.
Dah00n 782 days ago [-]
>MS even made a page comparing them
You wouldn't google Playstation 4 and 5 to find out which is which. I have no idea why Microsoft would do this. Try sending your mother out to buy one. Would she know which one to buy and understand the difference?
rcme 782 days ago [-]
The person you’re responding to’s point is that you know that a PS5 is better than a PS4 without cursory investigation because you know 5 > 4. When you’re dealing with mass market consumers, there are many that won’t perform cursory investigations of products. Busy parents, technologically illiterate grand parents, kids with limited internet access, etc.
dfc 782 days ago [-]
The commenter said they didn't know the difference based on the name AND once they did:
"it's not even obvious which is the more powerful model, there's no mention anywhere of what X and S stand for."
petepete 782 days ago [-]
The point is, it's not _obvious_. You need to get three pages deep on xbox.com to see the specs side by side.
At a glance the difference between the X and the S could be like the PS4 vs PS4 Slim, or the PS5 and PS5 Digital Edition.
rcme 782 days ago [-]
I believe the point they were trying to make is that the naming is confusing for consumers. Even if you’re aware of the difference, the naming is still confusing. If someone with knowledge of the product can’t figure out the naming, then how can anyone else?
littlestymaar 782 days ago [-]
> upon cursory investigation it's blatantly obvious that the X is more powerful than the S.
The part I emphasize is exactly the argument of the person you're responding.
funkykong 782 days ago [-]
Right, blame the user for not doing sufficient research to understand which letter is better. /s
golergka 781 days ago [-]
Having to open a comparison page means it's not immediately obvious. Picture an office worker who has one December evening to run through the mall, buy and wrap gifts for the whole family. Opening his phone, googling the differences between X and S, and also between Xbox series X and Xbox one X? He'll just take Playstation 5 instead.
solardev 781 days ago [-]
It really isn't obvious at all. In the past, the slimmer model tends to come out after a few years, maybe with some minor upgrades. Having two released at the same time within the same generation is just... stupid.
lodovic 782 days ago [-]
But people purchasing an xbox will see the price difference between the models and immediately understand what they should buy.
It should be pretty obvious that Series > One > 360.
I think it’s absolutely baffling that somebody might find such a perfectly logical and reasonable naming system confusing.
vxNsr 782 days ago [-]
Are you pulling his leg calling this intuative and obvious?
What is obvious about series being better than 360? why would someone think that if they were just presented with those names and nothing else?
Why would someone think x is better than s without doing any research?
sunnybeetroot 782 days ago [-]
Yes the user is being sarcastic.
vxNsr 781 days ago [-]
Yea, I couldn’t tell. It felt like it, but the way he kept responding implied that maybe he really did think it was simple for some reason I wasn’t getting.
2muchcoffeeman 782 days ago [-]
I agree that x > s.
But why does Series > One?
WillPostForFood 782 days ago [-]
Xbox Series S > Xbox One X
BrotherBisquick 782 days ago [-]
> Because while the naming is pretty bad, people do actually know it's the latest generation console.
Do they? I don't. At this moment, I couldn't tell you the name of Microsoft's newest console, because their naming convention is so convoluted. Meanwhile, I can tell from a glance that the PS5 is newer than the PS4.
Granted, I'm not a console gamer, but neither are (most) parents buying consoles for their children.
"Ehh, people will know what we're talking about" seems like a haphazard marketing strategy.
dontlaugh 782 days ago [-]
I work in the industry and mostly play on consoles (admittedly Sony’s) and even I’m not sure at first glance. I have to stop and think a bit every time.
Dah00n 782 days ago [-]
I used to own Xbox consoles but the last few generations have only had Playstation (and PC). I would have absolutely no idea which of the last 3 (4?) released Xbox versions came before which. The naming is horrible. The X is top dog with S below? What was the last generation even called? Where there 1 or 2? I have no idea even though I have used it (them?) many times at a friend's house.
Edit: I googled it. Xbox X and the old one is Xbox One X? That is simply hilariously stupid.
r00fus 782 days ago [-]
It's not just stupid, it's demeaning to the audience. Be like Intel/BMW and give your models numbers that roughly correlate to the performance/size/features.
Sony/Apple/Samsung have this one solid - just release the next semver and market the hell out of it. Don't make me confused when I'm thinking about paying you money. Note: even the ones that aren't "on the version treadmill" do poorly: "iPhone mini" vs. "Samsung Fold" etc are niche products and exist to essentially sell the mainline item.
mcpackieh 782 days ago [-]
I honestly though the Wii U was an accessory until years after it was released, and at this moment now I couldn't tell you whether an Xbox X or S is better. Is S better because 'S-tier' is the top rating, or is X better because 'X'box? Either way could make sense, you can't intuitively divine this.
It wasn't very long ago that kids were struggling to get their parents to stop calling xbox and playstation "the nintendo". Young parents today are probably comfortable with the brands of xbox and playstation, having grown up with those brands, but expecting them to be up-to-date on the latest models isn't smart. There can be a considerable gap in understanding between those who are tuned into gaming matters and those who might be making the actual purchase. The value of simple branding should not be underestimated.
rvba 782 days ago [-]
I am somehow interested to read the news about this ans I still dont know which Xbox is the latest.
If they want me to check on google, they failed.
Also it is funny that you attack people on.. hacker news for not understanding the versioning.
It just proves that microsoft does it in a bad way.
dillydogg 782 days ago [-]
I have no idea which is more modern. I suspect most people who don't console game are in the same boat. This feels exactly like Wii/WiiU to me.
solardev 781 days ago [-]
I mean... Xbox, Xbox S Series, Xbox 1, Xbox X, Xbox 360... it's totally obvious, isn't it?
HKH2 780 days ago [-]
Haha I genuinely have no idea how to sort that list, except that it starts with the Xbox.
solardev 780 days ago [-]
There's probably an entire department within Microsoft that makes their own alphabets and number systems. 95 comes after 3.1, right, but before 10? And XP is bigger than 365 but smaller than One? If you have a series of something, it obviously stands to reason that X is bigger than Vista.
But fret not, there's an easy shortcut to see which Microsoft product is newer. Just try them side by side and whichever has more advertisements is newer.
782 days ago [-]
msla 782 days ago [-]
This seems like it assumes the Xbox's target audience are kids, which doesn't automatically follow. It's like thinking rock music is greasy kids' stuff: Update your mental model. The MTV generation has grandkids now.
In short, Ford doesn't release the Ford 5 because it knows the Ford 4 is old news. (Also, get a horse, ya durn kids.)
> Most Xbox One gamers reside in the 25- to 34-year-old bracket, followed closely by the 35- to 44-year-old bracket.
> 56 percent of Xbox One owners live with a married spouse or partner, 10 percent live alone, and 23 percent live with their parents.
> Many Xbox One owners have an annual income of around $75,000.
I'd say I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac, but both of those references are outdated these days.
ahoka 782 days ago [-]
These statistics just prove the parent comments point.
msla 781 days ago [-]
No, they don't. They prove the exact opposite.
willcipriano 782 days ago [-]
Isn't the parent the "owner" even if they never use it and it's for the kid?
msla 781 days ago [-]
Do you have evidence that's what's happening?
willcipriano 781 days ago [-]
Yes. Every household ever.
msla 781 days ago [-]
Source: Trust me, bro.
elguyosupremo 782 days ago [-]
Sure they do, Ford released the 2022 Fords the year after the 2021s.
msla 781 days ago [-]
Is the Ford Focus newer than the Ford Escort?
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
Nintendo wants to communicate in their platform what they are targeting, so it will usually make sense. In comparison, Xbox tried, but always failed with clearly communicating their names.
I don't think non-numbers are a bad naming scheme, just the simplest. It means its easiest to keep up with and archive, but it can also mean it's hard to tell audiences what fancy new features you're marketing. If the Wii was the Nintendo 5 and the Switch was the Nintendo 7 I'm not sure if it would be quite as snappy in consumer minds.
Jochim 782 days ago [-]
The difference is that Microsoft released consoles with very similar purposes and names in the same generation.
Labelling the Switch as a new version of the Wii doesn't make much sense because it occupies a different niche, comparable to PlayStation/2/3/4/5 vs the PlayStation Portable.
PlayStation's addition of "Pro" in it's own naming scheme clearly distinguishes the more powerful console. Delaying the release of the pro model until later in the generation's lifecycle also helps reduce friction.
atraac 782 days ago [-]
> 5 is larger than 4 therefore the kid knows what to ask, regardless of age.
I don't know a single kid that would not know which models are current gen and which are better or worse. Argument about non technical parents is valid but any kid today will know which Xbox to get and will tell their parents. Kids these days know much more stuff than you seem to think, they spent 1/3-1/4 of their lives on the internet. My 11-12yo nephews built PCs just following youtube guides, they do video montages of their Fortnite games to put on youtube and almost every single friend of theirs is similarly familiar with current tech.
Xbox having lower numbers is purely fault of PS dominating the market over last decade, people will continue buying it cause they trust Sony to deliver exclusives and they have existing game libraries. I converted two Sony fanboys to Xbox with Game Pass and they both love it. Noone these days buys a PS "because they are confused with Xbox naming", 5 minutes of googling answers any questions. The only people who might really have an issue with this are boomers+ who are not even going to buy a console for themselves cause "games are for kids and a waste of time".
Kwpolska 782 days ago [-]
The Xbox line goes: Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X.
The kids may know and understand this, but parents may not. If you go to a store today, you will only find the latter two, and you won’t have an issue picking the one your kid asked for (i.e. the X). But when both generations were on sale, the parent might end up buying "One X" instead of "Series X" because it’s cheaper, or buying "360" instead of "One" because it’s clearly bigger (by 359 no less).
hombre_fatal 782 days ago [-]
15+ years ago when I worked at Target's electronic dept over the summer, it was hard enough for parents to track whether the PS2 or PS3 was the latest one much less where a "Wii" or "360" fit into that.
The Xbox line-up is just comical. I walk through any gaming department and see an "S", "X", or sometimes even both "S" and "X" on Xbox games. If it was just "Xbox 7" and "Xbox 8", you'd at least have some idea of what's going on.
It's like someone who knows nothing about cars trying to figure out SE vs LE vs CE vs XLE trimmings when looking at accessories.
mcpackieh 782 days ago [-]
> Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X.
Wtf, there are two different S's and two different X's? I thought 'Xbox One _' and 'Xbox Series _' referred to the same products.
Arrath 782 days ago [-]
In fact the One and the Series are the different generations.
Xbox One _ :: PS4.
Xbox Series _ :: PS5.
YurgenJurgensen 782 days ago [-]
This is coming from the company that in an attempt to count to 10 (and only ten) went "1, 2, 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, 11".
Arrath 782 days ago [-]
Poor forgotten ME.
citizenkeen 782 days ago [-]
You have to go younger. My son is in first grade, he knows we have a PS bit he couldn't tell you what number. His friend is in kindergarten and loves his Xbox, and I'll wager a box of donuts he couldn't tell me what Xbox he has.
If he doesn't know, no way grandma and grandpa are going to be able to get him a birthday present.
sharatvir 782 days ago [-]
Nintendo has always done this though.
NES -> SNES
GB -> GBC, GBA, GBA SP
DS -> DSi, 3DS, 2DS
jjfoooo4 782 days ago [-]
I’m unfamiliar with Nintendo’s product line and this example proves the point. If I were buying a DS for a kid I’d have no idea which one is the best.
Jochim 782 days ago [-]
Every DS could play the same games at the same level of quality. So, unless a kid really wanted a specific console feature, it didn't really matter if you bought the wrong one.
Xbox is the opposite, if you get the cheaper console games will look worse and/or run at lower FPS. It only has one option for internal storage, leaving you with ~360gb after accounting for the OS, five or six modern games can fill that pretty easily. Official external storage costs about as much as the console itself.
For many people the trade-offs won't matter but it does make the PlayStation a much simpler choice if you're looking for a console for a kid that doesn't already favour one or the other.
BeFlatXIII 782 days ago [-]
> Just give the console a number. And. Increment.
Microsoft has never been able to do that.
bluescrn 782 days ago [-]
If Xbox is dying, Game Pass killed it, not the (admittedly stupid) naming conventions.
Everyone subscribes to Game Pass, but nobody buys many games.
chipgap98 782 days ago [-]
That would be a good thing for Microsoft. I don't think the data supports this. A quick google search showed that there are 25 million Game Pass subscribers and 125 million people in the Xbox ecosystem. There are also still plenty of games that aren't included in Game Pass.
bluescrn 782 days ago [-]
Good for Microsoft. Bad for developers. And a console is nothing without the games.
KnobbleMcKnees 782 days ago [-]
In this context it sounds like the war is either not lost, or, maybe, there is no war and both ecosystems are thriving in different ways.
Kind of like how Apple hasn't "lost" any "laptop war"
tialaramex 782 days ago [-]
It doesn't help at all that Microsoft's usual brand insanity infected this product. So whereas Sony have made the Playstation, the Playstation 2, the Playstation 3, the Playstation 4 and now the Playstation 5 - Microsoft names products based on picking a handful of "hot" words with no specific meaning, and so like a modern CPU you need to go read a detailed specification document to even figure out what you're actually buying.
Do we need Windows Azure .NET Live? No idea, maybe it's similar to Microsoft Active Core X except targetted at a different market? Here's a blurb telling us it's "For the smart professional", presumably as opposed to products which are only for dumb amateurs ?
PretzelPirate 782 days ago [-]
Microsoft couldn't follow the 1,2,3... naming convention because the first Xbox came out when the PS2 was out. They'd always seem one behind if they released the Xbox 2 when the PS3 released.
uptown 782 days ago [-]
Windows 9 would like a word.
NBJack 782 days ago [-]
Windows XP and Windows ME have joined your party. They corroborate your story, but seem to be carrying a text only version that claims to be Windows 1.0, who asks in a wheeze where 2 is. Windows 2.1 hides their face and pretends not to notice as they walk away, but they awkwardly trip over Office 365 in the process.
mcpackieh 782 days ago [-]
Don't forget Windows 2000. Between Millennium Edition and 2000, Microsoft had two versions of windows simultaneously named in reference to the new century, but with different underlying technology and no way for average users to determine which was better (hint: not the one they marketed to average users.)
web3-is-a-scam 782 days ago [-]
The funny thing is even as a consumer that understands all the confusing branding and power differences, I would still buy the cheaper system if it had compelling games to play compared to the PS5…it just doesn’t, and when it comes to first party titles everything Microsoft puts out is mid at best (Halo), or downright awful (Redfall). I also own a Nintendo Switch and I think I own more games on that than any other console I’ve owned in my entire life so raw power is t an issue for me. I want to want to buy an Xbox but the most important thing (games) just is t there. I may still buy one when Starfield comes out because it would be more expensive to build a gaming PC to play it (mac user), but I’m waiting to find out from reviews if it lives up to the (admittedly impressive from what they’ve shown) stuff they’ve shown off recently.
Funny thing is, that video was made within Microsoft. It's fascinating that everyone can be aware of the problem, but they still can't steer the behemoth.
gonzo41 782 days ago [-]
I'm surprised that with all the money that MSFT has that they can't just put 1 or 2 Bm into a few few AAA titles / or just create them to drive the experience.
On the hardware note, I would not discount the impact that covid chip shortage had on the ability for MSFT to pivot on this problem.
ohgodplsno 782 days ago [-]
Microsoft put over 200 mil in Halo 5, only to promptly abandon it. Needless to say, Microsoft has not been a great steward for first party games. Ninja Theory has been making Hellblade for god knows how many years, Redfall, Sea of Thieves... All massive investments with very little return.
gonzo41 782 days ago [-]
Yeah I think the problem is MSFT being directly involved in the game. I think the better model for them would be if they just sprinkled money on studio's with ambition. It's like the movie business, there'll be misses, but there'll be big wins.
Jochim 782 days ago [-]
IIRC they weren't directly involved in Redfall's development. They may have pushed for it to release when it did though.
HiFi Rush is exactly what you describe. Published by Bethesda but developed by a smaller studio. Very well received without requiring a huge investment.
jmkni 782 days ago [-]
Do non-technical consumers care though? The Series S is an amazing little machine, and it's the cheapest. I think that's all most non-technical or casual gamers really want.
I'm pretty technical but I'm definitely a casual gamer, the Series S serves me perfectly.
Hamuko 782 days ago [-]
I don't think the Series S is selling that particularly well. Back when the consoles were in very short supply in 2021-2022, the Series S and the Switch were the only consoles advertised in electronics stores print ads – the PS5 and Xbox Series X would be long sold out before the print ads would even get to circulation.
aranelsurion 783 days ago [-]
Seems to me it's more like Xbox has been redefined into something much bigger, now it's an umbrella of many big name game companies across all three platforms. They've also gained a lot more relevance on PC side of things, and their GamePass is very popular. They've finally embraced their Windows moat, and built a lot on top of it in the last few years.
Xbox as we know it (the console) became irrelevant, but that'd be assumed by everyone incl. Microsoft the moment they promised to bring Xbox exclusives to PC. IMO that was the first visible point of them committing to change course for Xbox. If anything, nowadays Sony seems to be pigeonholed to their own world, while Microsoft seems to be thriving.
mrweasel 782 days ago [-]
From reading the article it also seems like Microsoft is well aware that the console isn't necessarily the point, the games are. Sure, they are in the number three spot for consoles, but doing fairly well for the Xbox division as a whole.
This might also be a case of Xbox having a different user segment, as compared to the PlayStation, and certainly compared to Nintendos offerings. I might be completely wrong, but PlayStation seems very much like the console for people who want large worlds, larger than life scenaries and single player games. Xbox is for when you want to play with friends, either in person of online.
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
"Xbox is for when you want to play with friends, either in person of online."
What new games can you actually play in person, like splitscreen? Seems most don't allow it, or at best it's 2 player.
2muchcoffeeman 782 days ago [-]
The social console is the Switch. You can have split screen. Or local wifi where one console is the host. I used to play D3 with workmates this way. You also get 2 controllers with the base console.
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
Yeah, my friends play switch when we get together. Pretty much just Mario kart and smash. Any other suggestions?
On Xbox we play Castle Crashers.
JopV 782 days ago [-]
With multiple Switches: Splatoon 3, Monster Hunter Rise, Pac-Man Vs. (part of Namco Museum), 51 Worldwide Games
With one Switch: Super Bomberman R, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Overcooked 2 (these are also on Xbox), Zarvot, Mario Party, New Super Mario Bros. U, Super Mario 3D World
You can also play through Donkey Kong Country, Pikmin 3, and Untitled Goose Game with two players.
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
I'll check them out, thanks!
mrweasel 782 days ago [-]
FIFA 23 supports it I believe, so by extension, most of EAs sports-ball-games, but that's still only two player, but more wouldn't make sense anyway.
worrycue 783 days ago [-]
Might as well drop the console then or at least drop the console business model. However I have a feeling they won’t.
Consoles make money via licensing - each game sold they get a cut. Is MS willing to give that up? If no then they are still in the console business - and Windows is an internal competitor; MS earns nothing when someone buys a game for Windows.
tnecniv 783 days ago [-]
Eh then you’re just running a PC business?
I don’t know the statistics but I feel like that misses a huge market segment. Lots and lots of people just have laptops for school / work that won’t run AAA games. Moreover, lots of people want to game in their living room and, while I know they exist, I’ve never met anyone that hooks their PC up to their TV to do that. Doing so might not even cross the mind of less tech savvy people.
wincy 782 days ago [-]
I really tried the whole Steam with big picture mode a few years ago. I had a 2080Ti and mostly ended up with micro stuttering in AAA titles, it took months of swapping out parts to finally get it halfway stable, then I discovered the power from that electrical socket was dirty. It was a nightmare. My PS5 just works, no fuss, no muss. Which I a real PC gamer would just tell me to “git gud” but I’m getting too old for this shit. I just want to relax and play games not tweak settings for hours before I play.
el_benhameen 782 days ago [-]
That’s me. Have built computers since I was a kid but have no interest in (or time to devote to) building a gaming rig. Whatever I paid for the xbox ($300 maybe?) was a bargain and well worth being able to play with friends on a Friday night and let my kids check out new games without needing to worry about specs. I’d just not be in the ecosystem otherwise.
sergiomattei 782 days ago [-]
They’re also attempting game streaming via Game Pass. I’ve got people who use that functionality frequently.
Hamuko 782 days ago [-]
>MS earns nothing when someone buys a game for Windows.
They earn money from each Windows license though and gaming helps to keep Windows relevant against Linux and macOS, especially for younger people.
dontlaugh 782 days ago [-]
They’re trying the opposite, bringing the console model to PC. The consoles themselves are still necessary, since they’re the default hardware non-enthusiasts buy.
jxdxbx 782 days ago [-]
It always seems like the kind of gamers who are attracted to the XBox are better off with a PC. Like, if you are a dedicated gamer, maybe you have a gaming PC, a Switch, and a PS5, and that gives you pretty broad coverage / FOMO avoidance. What incremental gain is there from XBox? It seems like it would be better positioned as a PC that you can use on your big TV with less dicking around than attaching a full PC to a regular TV.
But in general I think Valve has beaten Microsoft to the console-ization of PC gaming with the Windows-less Steam Deck. Maybe the Steam Machine is ready for a comeback.
palijer 782 days ago [-]
I switched from being a hardcore PC gamer to Xbox and haven't turned on my gaming PC in the 2 years since I got it.
The gain I get is how much easier it is to use. I'm fairly tech savvy, but Windows has been a curse and there've been too many times I've spent my intended gaming time troubleshooting Windows, or a game's display settings, or drivers etc.
Steam as software never felt great to me. I don't have the greatest eyes and I find it difficult to use. Xbox UI is just stupidly simple and intuitive.
I like that the Xbox gamepass experience is so streamlined I can sit down on a couch, turn on my controller, and that will turn the console and TV on and I can be playing a game in 10 seconds. On PC it just ain't even close.
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
I've had more bugs on the Xbox side than with Steam. Stuff like quick resume server issues where you have to launch the game, then backout to the dashboard, then quit the game, then launch again. I've also seen games get stuck in matchmaking without actually searching and with no way to back out.
op00to 782 days ago [-]
The XBox is basically a mid range gaming pc with a better gaming oriented os.
No idea if PS5 has this, but XBox’s ability to suspend games and instantly start back in the game is indispensable for someone with a minimum of gaming time available!
extrememacaroni 782 days ago [-]
Every gaming console has that functionality, though depending on the game it's better to exit and restart often. Memory leaks and all that, aside from bugs caused by long runtime.
donatj 781 days ago [-]
I have a gaming PC, bought it beginning of the pandemic. I turn it on and things start trying to update and eight different game storefronts pop up and windows will reboot to install updates when I step away to go to the bathroom, whole thing is just a nightmare.
I vastly prefer my Xbox. I sit on the couch, power up near instantly, pick a game. Play my games. Everything’s works. The UX is just sooo much better.
I have had both PlayStation and Xbox consoles every generation since the inception of both and every generation I just find Xbox more inviting. Maybe it’s some form of dyslexia but I also have never internalized the PlayStations button labels. Every time it tells me to hit a shape I need to look at the controller.
PretzelPirate 782 days ago [-]
Microsoft isn't in the business of selling you a box, they want you in their ecosystem. They'll be happy if you play on PC as long as you buy their games to play on it.
pjmlp 782 days ago [-]
Only if one likes to mess with hardware configurations.
The main reasons why game studios love consoles, and the gamers as well, is the development and user experience of using them.
781 days ago [-]
kitsunesoba 783 days ago [-]
With nearly all of the Xbox games I’m interested in being on Windows too and PlayStation having both better exclusives and better genre variety, I have no idea why I’d want an Xbox.
The last time Xboxes were remotely interesting to me was with the 360. Every generation since has been dominated by unremarkable competitive FPS games.
gambiting 782 days ago [-]
I have a PS5 and Xbox Series S and Series X - the PS5 is just gathering dust, started up only now and then to play one of the few exclusives(last one being God of War.....like 6 months ago?) or Genshin Impact as it doesn't exist on Xbox. It's a brilliant system but the ability to pick up any Gampass Game and have the saves instantly synchronized with my gaming PC is just incredible. I can play something like Forza or Yakuza 0 on my gaming PC upstairs then go to the living room, pick up the controller and continue the same game on the Xbox - that's a complete gamechanger and what makes this console more useful(for me) than PS5.
kitsunesoba 782 days ago [-]
I do similar with the upstairs/downstairs, except in the living room it’s another PC instead of an Xbox. It does Steam, GoG, etc in addition to Gamepass for a much wider variety of games. It was more expensive than an Xbox sure, but the greater game variety and flexibility is worth it.
My PS5 also hasn’t gotten a ton of usage playing PS5 games, but there are finally some interesting ones brewing now. It’s been nice as a “PS4 Ultimate” with backwards compatibility though.
sumedh 782 days ago [-]
The exclusives come to PC after a long time so if you are prepared to wait there is no need for Playstation.
gambiting 782 days ago [-]
Still waiting on that Bloodborne port.....
paride5745 782 days ago [-]
Still waiting for GT 7, but honestly I can't justify buying a PS5 just for a game.
ayemel 782 days ago [-]
I like gaming on the couch. All my friends are on either Xbox or PC and, seeing as I don’t want to game on a PC, Xbox is perfect. Quick resume, SSD, and enhanced backwards compatibility make the Series X the best console I’ve ever had. This definitely reads like an ad lol but figure I’d give you some insight into why people still buy Xbox.
wincy 782 days ago [-]
Haha this is funny as it reads exactly like the checklist of why I bought a PS5 after playing PC games for the longest. Which like, we’re adults here and I don’t care what console you have, more power to you. I think we’re both comparing to PC more than anything here.
The first game I played after getting my PS5 was… Bloodborne. I’d tried it on PS4 then sold the PS4 as it offended my eyes how ugly the game was back in December 2020. Two years later when the PS5 finally became available where I could just walk into my local store and buy it, it looked very pretty on the new PS5 hardware once the market calmed down. Such a delightfully weird and creepy game.
permo-w 782 days ago [-]
I've never bought or owned an Xbox, but my friend has a One, bought new at roughly the same time I bought my PS4 new (2014). my PS4 sounds like a helicopter taking off and his One is almost silent. I remember roughly similar experiences for my PS3 and others' 360s. it seems that perhaps Microsoft is (or was) less expectant of you buying their Slim/XS/mini/etc model in 3 years time. no idea how true this still is though
subsection1h 783 days ago [-]
> Every generation since has been dominated by unremarkable competitive FPS games.
PvE games are for unskilled gamers. PlayStation and Switch are the preferred platforms for unskilled gamers. PC is the preferred platform for skilled gamers who can afford a good PC. Xbox is the preferred platform for skilled gamers who are poor (Xbox controllers are better for shooters than PlayStation controllers).
wincy 782 days ago [-]
By the time you’re 28 it’ll be impossible to be a ”skilled” gamer as your reaction times will start to slow down due to being a “senior gamer”. No amount of expensive gaming peripherals on PC or XBox can stop this.
Biology catches up fast, and it doesn’t matter what gaming hardware you’re using. I’d suggest chasing fun or develop competency in a longer term skill instead of working on your “skilled” gaming clout.
But what do I know, maybe I just need to git gud.
Supermancho 782 days ago [-]
When I was involved in CoD Blackops the top player in pulic play, was a guy in his 50s iirc. He had a username that we called Kidfan (for convenience and privacy) and had above average stats, per game. He was such a statistical outlier that he was invited to an onsite office where his play was recorded. Some people just click with game design choices and he was a super intuit.
beebeepka 782 days ago [-]
Hard disagree. The top Quake Champions player right now - a German called k1llsen - is 40+.
Now, you are free to argue that Quake has been dead for a while and competition isn't as strong but the guy's reflexes seem just as good as they did 20 years ago. Yeah, he's been around for some time.
There are many formidable old school guys in their 40s, even 50s, that still play high skill games and they will kick your ass.
I'm still in the 40-50 range. My reflexes and hand-eye coordination haven't deteriorated significantly. It's not about age, it's about practice, talent, and will.
I still kick some ass in CS, TF2 and Quake. I get tired a lot quicker, of course. But it's mostly my unwillingness to waste my stamina on games rather than work.
beebeepka 782 days ago [-]
Oh man, don't let yourself be triggered by a Verge article.
For what it's worth though, the really skilled FPS players have always been on the PC side.
suction 782 days ago [-]
[dead]
wiseowise 782 days ago [-]
> skilled
Nerds. The word you’re looking for is nerds.
jncfhnb 782 days ago [-]
Most competitive shooter players, or rather, any genre, are absolute trash at the game.
wilg 783 days ago [-]
I think so. Nobody I know has an Xbox, even though we all had Xbox 360s back in the day. But they all have PS5s because Sony has great exclusive games. I don't see why Microsoft shouldn't be able to buy Activision, exclusives would be very helpful for them becoming competitive. But I don't play many (any?) Activision games so it wouldn't really move the needle much for me.
It is interesting the US is trying to block the last place player in the market from growing, which is also the only US company in the market.
kibwen 783 days ago [-]
> I don't see why Microsoft shouldn't be able to buy Activision, exclusives would be very helpful for them becoming competitive.
Because acquisitions make markets less competitive, not more. There are a zillion US companies making games, and if the platform gatekeepers become an issue, then the US can force them to open up their platforms and quit their rent-seeking.
wilg 783 days ago [-]
> Because acquisitions make markets less competitive, not more.
This is just simply not true as a blanket rule.
Also, I don't understand what you're saying. Activision is not in the console market, only Microsoft is. Buying Activision makes the console market more competitive because it makes Microsoft's console more compelling in that market, a market where they are floundering.
You could also look at the game market, which as you say has a zillion US companies making games, and Activision under Microsoft would have to continue to compete in that market.
How does this reduce competition, and in what market?
kibwen 783 days ago [-]
> This is just simply not true as a blanket rule.
It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.
> Buying Activision makes the console market more competitive
Why should the FTC care about the console market specifically rather than the gaming market in general?
> How does this reduce competition, and in what market?
The very notion of "console exclusives" reduces competition because it removes incentives to compete on hardware cost or quality and instead compete only on whatever IPs a company happens to own.
wilg 783 days ago [-]
> It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.
It isn't, which is why the FTC often approves mergers.
> Why should the FTC care about the console market specifically rather than the gaming market in general?
They should consider both.
> The very notion of "console exclusives" reduces competition because it removes incentives to compete on hardware cost or quality and instead compete only on whatever IPs a company happens to own.
Why is competing on hardware cost or quality more valid than competing on exclusive content? And if that's the rule, why is the company with better exclusive content, Sony, allowed to acquire more studios, like Bungie?
THENATHE 782 days ago [-]
How is Sony holding their "first party games" (which were all made form company acquisitions, just years ago) from Xboxes not literally the same thing as M$ purchasing Activision and blocking them from PlayStations?
Both are 1) buying a game making company, 2) making a game, 3) withholding it from the competition.
fredoralive 782 days ago [-]
Sony's purchases were generally smaller individual studios that didn't have big libraries of existing established IPs?
There doesn't seem to be many examples of them buying studios to take existing cross platform megahits exclusive.
Edit: They apparently bought Bungie recently? Wikipedia kinda doesn't include it in their list of PlayStation studios in a normal fashion so I missed it. I suppose that is buying a big IP in Destiny (in reaction to the MS-AB takeover?), although that's basically a 1 game studio (next to no-one is really going to care about Myth or Marathon), so it's still a fair bit smaller than the sort of stuff proposed with MS and A-B.
danielscrubs 782 days ago [-]
It is the same thing. The biggest player (if you include Windows gaming) in the market gets treated differently than the second biggest player.
Many may not like it but it is not about what is fair, but what keeps the market healthy.
LegitShady 782 days ago [-]
>if you include Windows gaming
But windows gaming isn't like console gaming. You don't have to pay license fees to microsoft to publish on windows - its a general purpose platform thats relatively open. It has nothing to do with the console market for you to count it except to purposely misrepresent the market.
danielscrubs 781 days ago [-]
You are having a different lens. If you focus on what Microsoft could do (enforce Apple like rules) not what they are doing right now you will understand the regulators better.
It’s just about making sure the biggest player has competition.
worrycue 782 days ago [-]
Most of the studios Sony bought were “2nd party” - i.e. they predominantly made games only for PlayStation. The effect on competing consoles was minimal - their game never made it to non-Sony consoles anyway; this was a different era where porting games was very painful since the hardware can vary radically between consoles.
activiation 782 days ago [-]
> It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.
It would make Microsoft more competitive/powerful
scarface_74 782 days ago [-]
> Nobody I know has an Xbox, even though we all had Xbox 360s back in the day.
Yes, because no one you know has an XBox, it obviously means that Microsoft isn’t selling any…
Philip-J-Fry 782 days ago [-]
Objectively they are selling significantly less than the PS5. And subjective estimates put it at 1 Xbox for every 2 PS5s at best, but it's most likely a bit worse.
greenthrow 783 days ago [-]
Sony built its library of exclusives. Microsoft is trying to just gobble up the biggest studios not already owned by a console manufactuerer. That's blatantly anti-competitive.
jug6ernaut 783 days ago [-]
Let's not act like both companies haven't bought up every independent studio they can get their hands on. Hell Sony just bought Bungie in a multi billion dollar deal.
IMO the only of the big 3 that can truly be said to "built is library" is Nintendo.
worrycue 783 days ago [-]
Insomniac I can understand. The company has a lot of history with Sony.
Bungie is puzzling. Frankly, I’m not even sure what’s there to buy. All they got is Destiny that’s a pretty so-so game popularity-wise.
Who else has Sony bought?
wilg 783 days ago [-]
Naughty Dog, Media Molecule, Guerrilla Games, Sucker Punch.
I meant recently. Those are ancient history - most of them have history with Sony before being acquired.
wilg 783 days ago [-]
Why does that matter? Early bird gets to buy the worm? Is it less anti-competitive if we forgot about it?
worrycue 782 days ago [-]
Because we are talking about the companies’ behaviour today? MS is trying to buy one of the biggest publishers right now.
Secondly, most of those game studios already have a close relationship with Sony, they can be considered 2nd party, and mostly make PS games. Sony’s competitors aren’t losing out much.
P.S. Frankly, I don’t think Sony ever intended to be in the game development business - they are a hardware company. There is a pattern to the game developers they buy - almost all of them are “tech wiz” developers; i.e. optimisation gods while gameplay of their games are usually so-so. The raison d'être of their acquired studios are to showcase the power of their hardware and coincidently provide development tool chain feedback as well as development knowledge which Sony’s “ICE team” will then share with other developers, not compete with their 3rd party developers.
That said this might have change in recent years as exclusives become a differentiator for their console.
fomine3 782 days ago [-]
Speaking about the origin of Sony PlayStation divison (Sony Computer Entertainment), it was derived from Sony Music. Its origin was a content company than a hardware company.
worrycue 782 days ago [-]
Going to need a citation for that.
The PlayStation all started with Ken Kutaragi who worked in Sony’s digital research labs. It started as the “Play Station” a CD addon for the SNES. But due to contract disputes Sony got dumped for Philips in a very public fashion - probably Nintendo’s biggest mistake ever. Sony went ahead on its own and created the “PlayStation” (aka PS1 today) and the rest is history.
All of these had existing relationships with Sony and made PS exclusives anyways (i.e., so-called 2nd party studios).
ESMirro 782 days ago [-]
The Bungie purchase isn’t puzzling if you look at Sony’s future trajectory. They have 10 or so live-service titles in development, and have stated very openly that they aim to greatly expand their offerings in that area going forward. There are only a handful of studios that have created successful live service games and even fewer that haven’t leant on popular existing IP (such as Call of Duty: Warzone) to do so, Bungie (and Epic) are pretty much the pioneers in this space, and Bungie have learnt a lot from their trials cultivating the Destiny franchise.
Sony purchased Bungie to essentially teach them how to make successful live service games, not for the IP. They hold so much power inside PlayStation studios that they, as per the recent The Last of Us factions leaks, review and determine if a multiplayer title meets their requirements for success (factions didn’t).
I don’t think it’s a good thing (as I personally disapprove of the way Destiny operates & see a focus on these sorts of games from Sony as a major blunder) but the business logic of the purchase is obvious.
enragedcacti 782 days ago [-]
Destiny 2 has the 20th most concurrent users on Steam right now and had 300k+ concurrent players after the last $30 expansion, its by all rights a very successful game within the live service RPG space.
wilg 783 days ago [-]
Why is building them internally more anti-competitive than acquiring them externally? They were never competing with Activision.
Pigalowda 782 days ago [-]
And here I am reading that Sony just purchased Bungie for $3.9 billion…
THENATHE 782 days ago [-]
They built it off of companies they bought when they were 4/10 big, and they bought like 30. Microsoft is buying like 5 10/10 big companies and everyone starts freaking out.
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
Ahh yes, the THQ Nordic/Embracer Group approach. Works everytime if you slowly buy companies that made that one smash hit 10 years ago and was forgotten about. Genius business move.
MikusR 782 days ago [-]
Sony made Final Fantasy?
boomboomsubban 783 days ago [-]
>FTC: What about Diablo? Can you promise it will ship on all future versions of PlayStation?
>Spencer: Can I promise? I am able to promise, yes.
The kind of obnoxious reply I'd expect from somebody on Xbox live, not their chief.
wldcordeiro 783 days ago [-]
These kinds of questions are such bullshit too just getting promises from these people are meaningless. Ticketmaster "promised" that buying LiveNation wouldn't lead to more price gouging, venues extorting artists, etc and all that happened nearly instantly because they were able to consolidate the market further and vertically integrate more.
wilg 783 days ago [-]
Is this obnoxious? Or just how people talk? Sometimes they just repeat and/or slightly reword the question before answering it.
boomboomsubban 783 days ago [-]
Responding to "can you..." with "I can but won't" is generally obnoxious behavior.
Maybe he was thinking out loud, but they should have known full well what the judge was asking and by refusing to answer the clarified follow-up they seemed to be doing whatever they could to weasel out of saying anything meaningful.
wilg 783 days ago [-]
I guess I didn't read it that way, but maybe you're right. I'm not sure it's a reasonable thing to be asked to promise, so it doesn't really upset me.
boomboomsubban 783 days ago [-]
> I'm not sure it's a reasonable thing to be asked to promise
If that was their response, I'd have no issue with it. I dislike the "technically I can but won't" answer followed by silence. It shows an attempt to deceive.
the8472 782 days ago [-]
> Responding to "can you..." with "I can but won't" is generally obnoxious behavior.
It's a prod to get people to say what they actually want, instead of asking a vague questions with a stronger implication because it waters down the actual meaning of the words and is as weaselly as the response. Asking for the ability, requesting an action and giving a command are different things. Doubly so in hearings by government officials.
"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
speak_plainly 783 days ago [-]
It’s obnoxious because it appears he’s trying to make light of the question by misidentifying its scope. It wasn’t a question about his ability but rather a future state of affairs.
fweimer 782 days ago [-]
How can he promise that, given that it's a walled garden and they can't publish anything without Sony's approval?
web3-is-a-scam 782 days ago [-]
Why would Sony refuse to allow diablo 4, or call of duty for that matter, to appear on the PlayStation? The most contentious thing about the entire activision deal is the titles that currently release on PlayStation becoming exclusive to Microsoft platforms, there’s no chance Sony would ever block those games from their platform arbitrarily just silly business move.
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
WHo knows? Times change, leadership changes, priorities change. I never thought Sony, a Japaanese company, would abandon their Japanese branch of first party development, but here we are. It's simply Gran Turismo and some support wings to help out 3rd party developers. Oh, and a singular VR team that hasn't yet announced its first time since the scale down.
fweimer 782 days ago [-]
In the future, these games could come with their own nested game stores, bypassing the platform store. It wouldn't be an issue for Microsoft because they own both games and platform. It might be tough to accept for Sony.
boomboomsubban 782 days ago [-]
They were able to promise all CoDs would be on PlayStation, so presumably the same way.
pstanger 783 days ago [-]
I didn't read it as a grammar correction but much is lost in transcripts
matwood 782 days ago [-]
The FTC is equally obnoxious here by asking absolute questions with 'all'.
causality0 783 days ago [-]
If it isn't a guarantee in writing it isn't even worth wasting the time to perceive it, let alone believe it. Executives are just piles of wet meat whose only function is turning lies into profit.
blitzar 783 days ago [-]
The guarantee has been spoken, it has been written, is has been commited to in writing with nation states, it has been sworn to under oath.
You obviously have information that is counter to this, I for one would appreciate if you could produce it. Xbox executives can then be charged criminally and prosecuted.
3np 782 days ago [-]
Well, no, they just said they would be able to promise. Actual promise was not made.
Is that written enough for you? 4 seconds of googling.
wldcordeiro 783 days ago [-]
Not even just a guarantee in writing, the only thing that actually holds these assholes is regulations with actual punishments.
tastysandwich 782 days ago [-]
I know this isn't exactly on topic. I haven't played video games since I was a teenager, but I'm struck by how cheap consoles are now!
I remember the Xbox and Playstation being prohibitively expensive. I just looked it up, the Playstation was $749 AUD [1] and the Xbox was $649 AUD [2]. I had to wait yeeeears for the price to fall so I could get an Xbox.
Today, I can get a Playstation 5 Digital Edition for $649 AUD on the Sony website, or $794 AUD for the "normal" edition from Amazon.
The Xbox series X is similarly priced, at $749 AUD.
Given inflation since then, these are prices many teenagers could realistically save up for now.
Inflation ajusted, the prices are similar to now. But the games do cost less now when you take inflation into account.
theropost 782 days ago [-]
I don't recall having to spend $5 to 15 a month extra on my PS1, or N64 though. Inflation adjusted amounts tend to leave out a lot of externalized factors
tiahura 782 days ago [-]
$5 to 15 a month extra on my PS1, or N64
Did a lot of online gaming on the PS1 and N64?
frankfrankfrank 782 days ago [-]
It’s not personal, because basically everyone does it, but I love how people just say “inflation adjusted” as if we aren’t talking about fraud, they, plunder by a parasitic ruling class that used to live off the “inflation” delta between their assets and profits increasing, and the income of regular people increasing less. What’s gotten even worse now though is that they’ve gotten so greedy and there have been no consequences, that mere inflation is insufficient, they commit open theft and fraud through things like the COVID relief con job where $800 billion dollars go missing or are known to have been stolen.
Inflation is simply a manipulative way of covering up fraud, but those vomiting the fraud.
garbagecoder 782 days ago [-]
(Mild) inflation benefits debtors. The people who benefit from constant prices are the rent-seeking class, who never have to take on any risk to keep income. You have this backwards just as the people you claim to dislike want.
Your #1 debt is likely to be a fixed rate mortgage. That payment gets less in real terms every time there’s inflation. And even if it’s not yours it’s still most people’s. So most people are helped by this.
Student loans also have fixed rates.
oblio 782 days ago [-]
This is an extreme way to look at inflation, and as far as I know, it's not backed up by studies.
wincy 782 days ago [-]
They’re so cheap for what you get! I walked into a Walmart and for ~$600 USD including tax I got a AAA game (God of War Ragnarok) and a console ready to play it.
As someone who built a high end gaming PC and skipped the PS3/360 and PS4/Xbox One generations, the value proposition of the PS5 is just too good compared to buying a fully specced out PC! Which sure, it can be argued a midrange PC is the actual competitor, but if I decided to start PC gaming again I’d 100% drop $2000 on a 4090, definitely a personal problem), but I had an ultra high end rig with a 2080ti and games were still stuttering in 4K, then the crypto mining boom happened and I sold my GPU for more than I originally paid for it, and bought a PS5.
To do real 4K gaming these days is something like $3500! That’s not even including if you want to use a good monitor instead of a TV to push all those pixels to. I almost convinced myself “well I might use it for ML”, but even then I’m better off renting off of Runpod for a few dollars an hour. It’d take years to break even and by then a new better GPU will be out.
Alternatively, playing on PS5 has been a dream. The Demons Souls remake is a shockingly beautiful game, one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen, and God of War Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 16 are games that just work. If I want to play them away from my couch (one of my favorite features of the Switch), my Steam Deck streams them flawlessly using Chiaki4Deck (after a little bit of admittedly annoying config and adding a wired connection to the PS5, it’s a totally seamless, lag free experience. Played for 5 hours yesterday without a single drop.)
Even with a top of the line GPU gaming on a PC with AAA titles like Borderlands 3 and Monster Hunter World felt fiddly and janky, HDR setup was always confusing, and I’d have to identify why things were causing microstuttering which took me MONTHS to figure out. I also learned that games just sort of add experimental bells and whistles that a $1200 video card couldn’t actually run so I’d have to spend hours tweaking the settings for each game no matter how much hardware I threw at it. It just got tedious.
ivandenysov 782 days ago [-]
One explanation that I heard is that the hardware is often sold at a loss. Online store purchases (subscriptions/games) are the real money maker.
beardedscotsman 782 days ago [-]
The consoles used to be sold at a loss, that was back a long time ago, Xbox 360, PS3 I believe were the last generation to be sold at a loss. The next gen Xbox at the time was sold for a 20% markup on cogs or there about at the time.
Games sold on the consoles have around a 15 usd flat royalty for big titles, not sure how that affected low cost games at the time. The 360 needed 5 games to brake even, but I believe they had an attach rate of around 3 at launch and that was unreal and unexpected at the time.
nindalf 782 days ago [-]
3 was unexpectedly high or unexpectedly low?
tialaramex 782 days ago [-]
Unexpectedly low. Conventionally you're selling this product to Gamers™ who will have at least one annual franchise they buy, (e.g. a sports game) and then pick up a few titles at the start plus one or two big titles. So you hit your desired attach rate and then it's profit. But if people buy your console, plus one game, and then are happy, with that model you are screwed.
It's actually doubtful whether they were really selling at a loss per se even then, most likely the notional loss represented amortizable R&D. Which is a loss on your annual balance sheet but - if you understand your business, can finance the R&D cost affordably and have a steady nerve so as to stick with the plan - this can be profitable eventually. The era of straight up dumping (exporting products for less than their BOM price, which may be illegal in some international trade rules) was last century. In the Sega era it really was possible you'd spend $100 on the actual product, sell it for $80 and figure you'll make up for it on royalties.
beardedscotsman 782 days ago [-]
No, a 3 attach rate was huge, I said in a previous reply other consoles at the time were around 1.25. Over the lifetime older consoles needed around 5 games per console to break even and Xbox 360 hit that super fast compared to the competition.
This needs to be noted that it’s average as in 5 games per unit sold. So two consoles and 10 games sold to one person. The attach rate is a term related to games sold with the console at time of console purchase.
360 for sure was selling for a loss on cogs, that was rectified with the Xbox one that I believe was 400 cogs for 500 retail. It frustrated a ton of folk because 360 was 300 retail, but this was a clear change to make the console profitable without sales since they were worried people were buying it as a media device, hence the media focus of the Xbox one.
Just to be clear they managed to reduce the cogs with the Xbox 360 small and sold them at a profit without license sales.
tialaramex 782 days ago [-]
I've never seen this idea of attach rate as "related to games sold with the console at time of console purchase". I've seen people say attach rate is %of platform which took the game (so e.g. some First Party Nintendo titles score very highly because if you own a Nintendo Wii U, you are very likely to take the Wii-U specific franchise titles) and use tie rate for games per console unit. But never the description you've used.
WillPostForFood 782 days ago [-]
In industry, attach rate (aka software tie ratio) is typically the number of titles purchased for the console over the lifetime of ownership, not just at purchase (though that number is tracked as well).
beardedscotsman 782 days ago [-]
Ok, we used a different term and associated attach rate as with console purchase. Either way, just take what I said as games sold with console purchase.
beardedscotsman 782 days ago [-]
Three was huge at the time. Before Xbox 360 the attach rate was estimated at 1.25 for previous consoles. Often due to low games at launch or including a game with the console.
Xbox 360 broke this at the time with a huge launch portfolio and a whole set of HD games, it was really exciting and beating PS3 to launch was a big bonus. Shame the Xbox One had disastrous leadership that turned the console into a media device and forgot that people bought it for games primarily. This is a whole different conversation though.
nichcat 782 days ago [-]
Microsoft are going to put the price of the console up in August (in addition to their game pass) in Australia, among other places. Not sure by how much.
They've moved to more standard PC like hardware over the past few generations so they've got far more economy of scale on their hardware bills than they did in earlier generations.
veave 782 days ago [-]
The original Xbox was practically an off the shelf PC...
rvba 782 days ago [-]
If they are cheap will you buy one and send it to me for free?
Maybe it's not the consoles whoch are cheap. It's just you sitting on that 300k per year FAANG salary.
branon 783 days ago [-]
Microsoft has been keeping the Windows platform away from the gaming market in favor of Xbox, I'd imagine to avoid competing with themselves. Xbox has to have been getting subsidies from somewhere to run Game Pass. Despite all this help, they do seem to be stuck third place. Excluding Nintendo as a competitor seems wrong, it's not just about current-gen.
I don't play Activision/Blizzard games or use Xbox so I'm not really invested, but I tend to oppose market consolidation and monoculture whenever possible. That said, lately game releases have been pretty lackluster with some major flops and lots of remakes coming out. If the underdog thinks they can turn the tide by acquiring a major studio, I don't particularly want the government in the way either.
Hamcha 782 days ago [-]
What do you mean by your first statement? Since like 5/6 years if not more, MS has started using "console exclusive" to mean "Xbox/Windows" for their exclusives. All their biggest hits (Forza, Halo, Sea of Thieves, etc.) have been coming out to Xbox and windows at the same time. I think part of it is the pressure from Apple in the computer space, part of it might be envisioning their console as a "cheap gaming pc" rather than its own platform.
heresie-dabord 783 days ago [-]
> Microsoft has been keeping the Windows platform away from the gaming market in favor of Xbox
Consoles have admirable hardware. It is a pity that consoles are walled gardens.
Steam on PC is my choice for gaming because I like Valve's platform and I prefer the versatility of owning my hardware platform despite occasional problems with drivers. PC gamers are accustomed to finding solutions.
worrycue 783 days ago [-]
They have to be walled gardens. Game licensing is how they make money, fund future R&D, and sell their hardware at break even prices.
heresie-dabord 783 days ago [-]
I understand that the business model is as you describe.
But it would be excellent if an older generation console could at least also run Debian or Pop!OS. As it is, the older consoles are just techno-waste.
tmtvl 782 days ago [-]
You can still hook your SNES to your TV and replay Chrono Trigger, although I have to admit eventually things will break and old machines will end up getting dismantled and recycled.
Nullabillity 782 days ago [-]
It's not our responsibility to maintain their unethical business models.
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
Consoles in general suck today. The games are all about monetization, they can mostly only run one person per console, and you can only get about 5 full games on the drive. I miss getting 4-16 people together on 1-4 consoles. The games were mostly portable via DVD/CD so you could bring a bunch of different options, or people who event bringing consoles could bring extra copies if one of the console owners didn't own a game. Used games could be had for a fraction of the cost. And no paid loot boxes or paying to level up.
I don't think I'll ever buy another console. I'll probably go with PC gaming instead.
tapoxi 782 days ago [-]
The most recent generation of consoles is a pretty significant value, there's not a whole lot of PCs that can rival the PS5's performance for the price, even when you do a 1:1 comparison with their PC ports.
Physical titles still exist, my local library rents out PS5 games.
Loot boxes are mostly in free-to-play titles. Sony's big-budget games like Returnal, God of War, Ratchet and Clank, Horizon, etc don't have any predatory monetization. In fact of the above only Horizon had DLC, a $20 expansion pack that was well recieved.
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
That's good there are still some physical copies our there. It seems for PC and Xbox, it's mostly downloads. I bought a disk for RockSmith thinking it was a physical copy - all it did was download download and ply it through Steam.
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
PC is a completely different and interesting history, but for Xbox it's simply because msot people are buying into Gamepass. There are even stories about how some indie developers have considered publishig for Xbox but did not think it was worth it without a gamepass deal from Microsoft. It was that big a deal for visibility on the console.
vlunkr 782 days ago [-]
I feel like you’re imagining a world where only loot-box games exist. There are plenty of couch co-op games if you look for them. You can also still buy physical games, and they are still cheaper used.
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
I have some older games and consoles. I'm talking about the current games. Do you have recommendations? I've even looked through some lists online for splitscreen games and ther choices are pretty slim for new games.
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
Really depends on what kind of games you play and how much time you spend with frinds. Games like Overcooked and Jackbox Party Pack can fill the void for more casual play (I even played them with parents). It Takes Two won game of the year 2021 as a game focused primarily on a 2 player experience.
The hardcore market, sure. There is less these days. AAA games are more and more targeted at american adults who are farther away than ever, and we just had 2-3 years of COVID that actively pushed people closeby to be at distance. Online multiplayer has taken over in those regards.
For me personally, I was always a huge platformer fan, so CupHead and Rayman Origins/Legends were some of my go to multiplayer expeirences for more gaming heavy friends back in the day (i.e. 6-7 years ago). As well as Kirby Star Allies that had drop in multiplayer. it looks like the upcomig Sonic Superstars will also support multiplayer as well
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
Thanks, I'll look into these.
slumberlust 782 days ago [-]
Do you currently game on the PC? Most AAA titles, regardless of platform, are doing the lootbox/battle pass/mtx to death strategy on PC as well.
giantg2 782 days ago [-]
Yeah, that part is definitely still applicable to PC. Same with the issues surrounding downloads. I was not really making a PC vs console comparison, rather just how consoles suck now. The biggest factors that made them a success in the past in my opinion were that they just worked and you could get a bunch of people playing together locally like splitscreen. They still pretty much just work, but you won't find many new 4p splitscreen games.
tyfon 782 days ago [-]
The new final fantasy doesn't have a single microtransaction.
You see fast less intrusive versions of this when they are the too in the AAA first party games from Sony and Nintendo.
Microsoft seems to not go that route, I suspect it's due to gamepass.
miiiiiike 783 days ago [-]
Last year I bought an Xbox for the first time to give Game Pass a try.. And I sold it to buy a PS5 w\ Plus a few weeks ago. If there's a reason to own an Xbox I couldn't find it.
FreeFull 783 days ago [-]
A bit of a weird reason, but Xboxes still support audio CD playback, while the PS5 doesn't.
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
It really depends on how you game. A subscription gaming service wouldn't work for me, but I've had other friends say they don't even buy games anymore because of gamepass.
Toutouxc 783 days ago [-]
I'm currently neglecting my fairly decent and expensive gaming PC with GamePass because I prefer the PS5, but AFAIK Xbox has pretty much 95 % of games that we have on PS and we have 95 % of games that they have..? I'd actually love to play some Forza Horizon and Stalker 2 and the new Elder Scrolls game when they come out and I guess some Xbox users would love to play God of War or Spider Man 2 when it comes out. What makes PS so much better for you?
lostmsu 783 days ago [-]
Are God of War and Spider-Man comparable to Elder Scrolls?
GoW seems to be available on Steam, but doesn't even hit top 100 currently played.
Talanes 783 days ago [-]
It's hard to make a direct comparison because they're trying to do different things. God of War and Spider-Man were released on PC 4 years after their console versions.
As someone who's looking forward to both new Elder Scrolls and Spider-Man 2, I've only considered buying a console for the second: I'll just update my PC for the first.
cleerline 782 days ago [-]
just for your information es6 wont be out for 5+ years
Talanes 772 days ago [-]
Yeah, but that just proves my point further: having more exclusives only matters to the point that the exclusives drum up interest; which for my household won't happen with Microsoft for another 5+ years unless they get a surprise in there.
Toutouxc 783 days ago [-]
Both PlayStation and Xbox have some really hard hitting exclusives comparable to the Elder Scrolls series, but my intention was not to start a pissing contest of who has the most or the best.
lostmsu 782 days ago [-]
It is not exactly a pissing contest. The point is that Microsoft bought Bethesda, so theoretically they can make it exclusive to Xbox and start using it as a leverage. I question "comparable" here. The available data suggests they really are not.
worrycue 783 days ago [-]
I feel they are different genres. The former 2 are cinematic games. The latter is a huge RPG.
783 days ago [-]
adrr 783 days ago [-]
Bethesda could hit a home run with their new game Starfield.
readyplayernull 783 days ago [-]
Looks like No Man's Sky.
miiiiiike 783 days ago [-]
I have a gaming PC tho so I'll just grab it on Steam and play it on Linux.
behnamoh 783 days ago [-]
Doing anything to avoid XBox and Windows!
miiiiiike 782 days ago [-]
I tried Xbox man, I tried.
loeg 782 days ago [-]
I'd need to upgrade the graphics card in my PC! Minimum spec on the Nvidia side is 1070 Ti.
leetrout 783 days ago [-]
Care to elaborate with specifics?
miiiiiike 783 days ago [-]
The UX for the XB feels unpolished and unintuitive compare to the PS5 (uninstalling a game, etc), Game Pass vs Playstation Plus the exclusives on Xbox/Game Pass are uninteresting (Scorn vs Returnal vs everything Nintendo), the PS5 controller blows the Xbox controller out of the water (feel, responsiveness, haptics).
PretzelPirate 782 days ago [-]
You and I have the exact opposite opinions on this. I own all 3 major consoles but I only find the Xbox controller and UI nice to use. I subscribe to gamepass and have no interest in PS+. My PS5 is only used for playing GoW, Final Fantasy, and Uncharted.
I also having a gaming PC where I use an Xbox controller, racing wheel, or VR controls.
I still don't understand why people like the PS5 haptics. To me, they don't feel like they add anything and just drain the battery.
pebble 782 days ago [-]
The PS5 haptics help with immersion a lot for me and the adaptive triggers potentially double the functionality of the triggers in an immersive way.
I also find the the PS5 controller the most comfortable I've ever used. I was strictly an xbox controller guy through xbox 360 and ps4 eras but the ps5 controller won me over.
I have two PS5 controllers, one for the PS5 and one for PC, just so I don't have to bother resyncing every time. If the PS5 controller extra features worked on PC without a cable it would be the perfect controller.
And yea I have gamepass too but who needs an xbox when they have a PC and the PS5 has the console exclusives I like.
Just, to offer another counterpoint.
causality0 783 days ago [-]
I might jump ship for Sony except for the fact I've never been able to use a Playstation controller without my thumbs knocking together and I find the sensation unendurably irritating.
leetrout 783 days ago [-]
Oh I didnt know there were nintendo games for PS5.
subsection1h 783 days ago [-]
> PS5 controller blows the Xbox controller out of the water
In which PvP shooters are you currently ranked Diamond or higher?
miiiiiike 782 days ago [-]
Just a hair outside of that range in Overwatch
scns 783 days ago [-]
Halo if you are into it.
miiiiiike 781 days ago [-]
I played the Halo 1 campaign, multiplayer didn't grab me.
scns 783 days ago [-]
One reason a
t8sr 782 days ago [-]
Everything that Microsoft makes looks like technology - it has a million buttons and knobs, a colorful plastic aesthetic and names like "Xbox" or "Microsoft Gamepass Azure Edition Professional". When you turn it on, it looks like the Windows start menu that greets you at work. It's no wonder regular users don't want these things in their living rooms.
ayemel 782 days ago [-]
You must be an LLM with no concept of aesthetics since most people agree the PS5 is an ugly monstrosity. Unless you are living in a dorm, it looks out of place in most adult living rooms. Meanwhile the Xbox is a simple, modern black box, literally the exact opposite of how you’re trying to paint their hardware and trust me, I’m no Microsoft fan. Give me a break.
beltsazar 782 days ago [-]
> You must be an LLM
That's a new kind of insult LOL. In my case, the slimmer side of PS5 barely fits my setup in a small room. Maybe my case is uncommon, but Xbox Series X won't fit my setup.
t8sr 782 days ago [-]
Maybe stop and think if you’d react the same way to someone critiquing the product market fit of a workplace chat product. If not, then ask yourself why is a preference for a video game console a core part of your identity to the point where you feel under attack when someone doesn’t like what you like.
Also I never once mentioned PlayStation - this is HN, not an IGN comment section. We talk about technology from the POV of the people who make it, not “gamers” or whatever.
ayemel 782 days ago [-]
All I’m saying is if you feel that way about a black box then I’m curious what you’d say about the PlayStation since that is clearly more fitting to your original comment. My identity isn’t under attack either, couldn’t care less what you stick under your tv or what you think of what’s under mine.
Hamuko 782 days ago [-]
>since most people agree the PS5 is an ugly monstrosity
[citation needed]
PS5 is really the only one of the two with any kind of a design identity to it. The Xbox Series is just a box.
tourmalinetaco 782 days ago [-]
> The Xbox Series is just a box.
At least the name is accurate.
kolmel 782 days ago [-]
“People I disagree with are LLMs” is a terrible stance and awful way to continue a discussion. People can have different opinions to you.
Having said that I do personally agree that physically the Xbox looks better. The software experience of the Xboxes I’ve used, however, really do remind me I’m using a Microsoft device.
nixass 782 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Clent 782 days ago [-]
This sums it up for me.
Microsoft doesn't know how to create a consumer product. The Xbox owners I know were also PC gamers at some point.
The PS5 is designed to play games.
I don't know what the Xbox is designed for, it's confusing l,
Microsoft's design choices have been consistently ghastly.
I begrudgingly accept my workplace choosing their platform.
Why would I pay for that experience?
indigodaddy 783 days ago [-]
Can someone explain why FTC is trying to stop the deal? Isn’t it good for the US for MS to be propped up in the gaming business, when Sony is basically the single major player.. ?
Kapura 783 days ago [-]
Microsoft already owns a large number of successful studios and IP, such as Halo, Minecraft, and Bethesda, developers of The Elder Scrolls Series (Skyrim) and the upcoming Starfield. They don't need a helping hand from the government to prevent them being squished out. Starfield was confirmed to have been going on Playstation until they were acquired by Microsoft; now the only way to play it will be on Xbox or Windows.
If Microsoft buys Activision/Blizzard, it's safe to assume that future A/B games will go the same way, and only be available on Xbox or Windows. This is problematic because Activision's IP portfolio is massive (including huge console annuals like Call of Duty), and Blizzard games are still extremely popular. If a normal game studio acquisition is like a comet colliding and adding its mass to the Earth, this would be like the moon crashing into the Earth.
indigodaddy 783 days ago [-]
Sony has way more exclusives than MS— why would it be catastrophic to even that particular playing field? This just sounds like Sony fans pissed that a few games are going to get taken away.
Kapura 783 days ago [-]
Sony isn't trying to buy activision ? The issue isn't sony, it's the size of Activision/Blizzard in the gaming market.
bllguo 782 days ago [-]
exactly, a nice concise answer
it shocks me every time how few people here seem to understand that scale changes things. is this not a forum frequented by SV techies?
ayemel 782 days ago [-]
No one is having issues understanding the scale of the acquisition—a $70 billion dollar price tag kinda makes that obvious to everyone.
The question that myself and others in the thread have been asking without getting a clear answer is how could this acquisition make Microsoft a monopoly in the gaming space?
Even with the scale there doesn’t seem to be any legitimate path to Microsoft becoming a monopoly: video games is a $200b a year industry. Activision Blizzard’s 2022 revenue was $7.5b and combining that with Xbox’s $15b revenue still doesn’t even surpass PlayStation’s $24b. Is that a monopoly? I don’t see it.
c4ptnjack 782 days ago [-]
I mostly agree. However, I think it has more to do with the market power MS has across multiple domains.
kibwen 783 days ago [-]
Activision Blizzard is already a US company. If the US is worried about the health of the video game platform market (which is to say, if it ignores PC and Switch), then it can use the exact same antitrust argument to force Sony to allow sideloading on consoles and break their stranglehold on the hardware.
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
why would the US care? the EU is the on who enforced sideloading this year.
elefanten 782 days ago [-]
The real answer is that the FTC is pursuing the currently canonical Democrat party regulatory agenda of trying to stop big companies from getting bigger (search terms “Neo-Brandeisian” and “market power”). This goes along with the general optics / narrative that regulators “failed” to stop big acquisitions that, in hindsight, made Big Tech more competitive (the most common examples are Google acquiring DoubleClick and YouTube, and Facebook acquiring WhatsApp and Instagram). This deal had a large headline price ($70B / “biggest gaming acquisition ever”), so the FTC opposed it knee-jerk and has tried to justify it post-hoc.
Most of the comments here are uninformed on the law and the underlying market dynamics. My job involves analyzing the games market and there is no reasonable support to the claim that this deal will significantly harm competition in itself. Various parties might not like it for various reasons, but it would be pretty bog-standard, business-as-usual in video games. Activision is big but its portfolio isn’t big enough to single-handedly sew up the market for long. Huge swings happen every decade and no content or IP is guaranteed to keep its influence for very long. Xbox is in a distant third among consoles and MS would lose more money by pulling their biggest titles from the biggest console platform (PlayStation) than they’d gain by muscling more device share. They’d also degrade the value of the product because cross-platform play is basically table stakes and gamers would move towards games they can play together. MS is proving all this by offering all other platforms access to said content (which Nintendo and most others have accepted, but Sony has performatively refused). Some smaller content will be held exclusive, but that’s the running standard in the industry and has been for all time.
So, the FTC really doesn’t have shit here. They’re going to lose the ongoing injunction case and by all likelihood MS will close the deal before the July 18th deadline.
The UK’s Competitive Markets Authority is also holding it up (but notably, no other major regulator has objected, including the EU which has the most regulatory credibility). Playstation has a huge corporate presence and its European HQ in the UK, so the CMA is likely driven by local lobbying strength combined with similar political motivations (further bolstered by pressure from the current FTC commissioners, which has been reported). The CMA’s objection is (amazingly) even more poorly constructed, based on the argument that this will make future “cloud gaming” markets uncompetitive. I’ll spare you the details, but that is even more comically ridiculous than the FTC case. Once the FTC loses this injunction, the CMA will have to fold or else they will be embarrassed as a regulatory body by Microsoft closing the deal over their objections and showing them to have no teeth (and no clue).
ivirshup 782 days ago [-]
> big acquisitions that, in hindsight, made Big Tech more competitive (the most common examples are Google acquiring DoubleClick and YouTube, and Facebook acquiring WhatsApp and Instagram).
How did these acquisitions make big tech more competitive?
elefanten 781 days ago [-]
I’m saying it made those companies more competitive (as in “better equipped to compete”), not that it made the various markets more competitive (as in “characterized by competition by multiple actors”).
“Big Tech” tends to refer to the companies.
Edit: To clarify further, I’m not casting those claims about older Big Tech acquisitions as wrong or misinformed. Nor am I trying to make any specific argument about the Democrats’ strategy / Neo-Brandeisian thought here. Just directly answering the question I replied to. I’m quite confident that this particular case against Microsoft, as argued by the regulators, is quite weak and that the political tail is wagging the dog here.
echelon 783 days ago [-]
I would love to see this level of scrutiny applied somewhere it actually matters.
Mobile.
The real tax on innovation is the device + platform + payments + services duopoly where the gatekeepers get to pick winners (typically their own), tax everything, force tech choices and update regimes, and keep the customer relationships.
It's maddening that general purpose computing and financial transactions became this. Owned by a handful of giants.
wilg 783 days ago [-]
??? Isn't the biggest mobile platform Android, on which you can do whatever you want if you choose to?
amelius 783 days ago [-]
Please tell me how I can run my own version of Android on my Samsung phone that doesn't phone home to Google or Samsung, while still being able to run my banking apps.
Talanes 783 days ago [-]
Granted, but would we have banking apps at all in a more open system, or would the banks just resist it and have stayed more offline?
I'm not implying one answer or the other, because I definitely don't know.
cglong 782 days ago [-]
If the duopoly hadn't trained users so well to rely on app stores for everything, banks probably would've invested more in web interfaces. At one point, the Bank of America website was the only access point for Windows Phone, but it was good enough for my needs and helped supported a little more diversity.
wiseowise 782 days ago [-]
Web.
wilg 783 days ago [-]
I don't know anything about it, I use iOS. I guess the web?
tredre3 783 days ago [-]
You can generally sideload whatever you want on Android.
But people will ALWAYS point out the edge cases such as banking apps not working on custom firmware/rooted devices, and somehow that makes Android very bad and very walled garden.
ben7799 782 days ago [-]
I have an Xbox One and have had it since late 2015?
I have been gaming since Atari (though the first I bought with my own money was Dreamcast) and even versus the Xbox 360 I'd say the Xbox One has been the console I'm least satisfied by. And Microsoft's strategy with the S/X nonsense and games now not working as well on some versions of the console versus others has put the stake in it for me. I'm going to be extremely reluctant to ever buy another one of their consoles. This generation has almost completely turned me off gaming. A lot of the other changes in gaming (gambling, loot boxes, monetization, abandoning single player gaming) have not helped either, but MS has definitely shot themselves in the foot hard as far as I'm concerned.
My son has a Switch, it might not be as powerful, but Nintendo literally got everything right in the way MS got everything wrong. You can actually play the switch when you have 5 minutes to play. It doesn't do super long updates. The games always work. The games don't get slower when an update is applied, etc.. It has excellent single player games and excellent multiplayer in the same room games. A lot of their games have great deployability.
My 360 broke twice (RROD, DVD drive failure) and my PS3 also broke, and yet I would still take either of those back over the Xbox One any day.
My kid is 10 and the other thing is the game selection on Xbox is terrible for having games that adults and kids can actually play together. The % of games with an M rating on Xbox is so high, and the longer I've played the more the M games seem repetitive. There are a bunch of Playstation games we're quite jealous of, but we haven't jumped on getting a PS5, partially cause they were hard to get? We have a family member who got a PS5, when we go over it is definitely a lot more fun. Another family member got an Xbox Series X and it has been a disaster of bugs.
nerdjon 783 days ago [-]
I find this entire thing interesting. If you look at percents then sure, the PS5 is "winning" by a large margin, but from a units sold prospectrive if the PS5 is really selling 2:1 the Series X/S than we can estimate that the PS5 is around 38 Million and the Xbox is at 19 Million. From the best I can find that is still better than the Xbox 360 was by this time (someone please correct me if I am wrong in this case, finding concrete numbers for this is difficult). That number is nowhere near a failure.
That being said, its also obvious that Microsoft is playing at a different game and that it is largely fanboys and news sites keeping the "console wars" alive. (And I guess this case now but that's something else entirely) Every game that Microsoft publishes is day one also on Windows and on Game Pass. The box that is an xbox is just another avenue to playing games from Microsoft, but not the only way they care about.
I have an Xbox because it is my preferred console to play on (Xbox Live, the UI, Controller, etc) if I am playing on a console instead of a PC. I have a PS5 but that is only for exclusives.
Personally I am hoping this deal goes through because I want Xbox to be taken more seriously. Not because I want Microsoft to control these specific games or I want xbox to "Win".
But because I am particularity worried about a cocky Sony. We saw it before with the PS3 erra and we are starting to see it again with the PS5. They are making certain decisions that are not gamer friendly (cross play, paying for third party exclusives, and paying for exclusive content being some key examples). My concern is that unlike the PS3 erra where they stumbled hard, gamers are not pushing back against it this time and Sony is just continuing what they have been doing. For me personally an unchecked Sony/Playstation power in gaming is worse than this deal going through. They are both harmful for gaming, but I don't see a choice outside of it.
worrycue 783 days ago [-]
> Personally I am hoping this deal goes through because I want Xbox to be taken more seriously
It was taken seriously by the 360 era. MS just bleed away all the good will the following generation, ceding significant market share to Sony. Now Sony is riding on the momentum from the previous generation to an easy 1st place.
> They are making certain decisions that are not gamer friendly (cross play, paying for third party exclusives, and paying for exclusive content being some key examples)
Was Sony buying any exclusives before MS attempted to take over Activision-Blizzard? (Those that they fund don’t count since it makes no difference to their competitors - the games wouldn’t be available to them either way; either it doesn’t exist if Sony doesn’t fund it or it’s exclusive to Sony if Sony did.)
nerdjon 783 days ago [-]
Microsoft screwed up with the announcement of the Xbox One and they were never able to recover from that. They basically made one big mistake that has screwed them over. You are right but we are talking about a mistake from 10 years ago.
Yes they were, they have been doing it for years including in the PS4 generation. The distinction between funding and paying for however is a complicated one since we don't know whether or not something would have existed if it was not for Sony stepping in.
A few examples of this practice from Sony:
FF7 remake (3 years ago) and FF16 (there is no way in hell you can convince we either of those would not have been made without money from Sony)
We know from yesterday Sony tried to make Starfield exclusive
GhostWire Tokyo and Deathloop (both of these have since come to Xbox but it is unclear if this would have ever been the case if Microsoft had not bought Bethesda)
KOTOR remake that has yet to come out
Death Stranding (The exact situation for this is a bit unclear, but I doubt sony specifically funded it considering it is on Game Pass but not on Xbox)
It is not a hard to find a list of third party exclusives that Sony has paid for.
And again this also doesnt even get into the exclusive content for games. Meaning someone playing on another platform is spending the same amount of money and getting less of a game. "But its just one mission" I don't care, we spent the same amount of money. Off the top of my head I know of Call of Duty, Harry Potter, Destiny 2, and I know there are others.
worrycue 783 days ago [-]
The exclusive content thing during the 360 era was to counter MS buying up timed exclusives. Sony basically said, sure you can do time exclusivity for MS but we demand that games that launch late on our console have content exclusive to it or you don’t launch at all. So I guess developers just cut content from the 360 version and repurpose it as exclusive content for PS3.
Does Sony still do it now? I’m a bit out of the loop. Which games have they demanded exclusive content and are they timed exclusive to MS?
Edit: I think the real issue with MS buying Activision-Blizzard is games that were original multi-platform, i.e. available on PlayStation and Nintendo consoles, becoming exclusive to MS platforms. PlayStation and Nintendo consoles will lose games.
No one cares that God of War is exclusive to Sony’s machines. No one is losing anything - you can’t lose what you never had.
IMHO if you cannot stomach say Sony buying EA and making all their sport franchises exclusive to PlayStation then you shouldn’t be OK with the MS and Activision-Blizzard merge either.
PretzelPirate 782 days ago [-]
> PlayStation and Nintendo consoles will lose games
No one loses games. Previously published games will still be playable. They may not have access to new titles in those series, but they were never guaranteed that anyway. Just like with console generations, sometimes you have to buy a new box to play the next game in your favorite series.
It seems that switch owners may even get access to Call of Duty, which they never would have without the aquisition.
anonymousab 782 days ago [-]
Microsoft has been messing up the stewardship of their platform, the games on it and the studios that make them for a long time. Not just with the early Xbox one.
Halo's fall from grace as an IP, for instance, cannot in any way be blamed on anyone other than Microsoft, at multiple times and with multiple bad decisions. It's not due to one bad big screwup with the Xbox one; it's an ever-continuing quality problem with Microsoft.
tjpnz 782 days ago [-]
I was fully ready to but an XBONE but ended up getting a PS4 after that. Could've lived with the downsides, but not with all the arrogance that they were announced with. Based on the games that generation I probably made the right choice too.
Don Mattrick fucked up good and proper and Sony owes him a huge debt of gratitude.
ThrowawayB7 783 days ago [-]
> "Microsoft screwed up with the announcement of the Xbox One and they were never able to recover from that."
Put the blame where it belongs: Don Mattrick screwed up the positioning and announcement of the Xbox One and they were never able to recover from that.
waboremo 783 days ago [-]
I don't see how an unchecked Playstation is at all comparable to how much Microsoft can leverage ABK across several industries. Microsoft knows this, it's why they're OK with Game Pass destroying software console sales (something they admitted during previous trials). It's peanuts for what they want to do.
politelemon 783 days ago [-]
> I have a PS5 but that is only for exclusives.
I used to keep a Ps4pro for their exclusives and they certainly were enjoyable. But... Seeing previous exclusives now make its way to desktop has me a bit sad about missing out on high fidelity gaming. I could have enjoyed God of war, horizon, rdr2 at higher frame rates and resolutions, if I were just a little more patient.
I'm not happy about the way Epic wrings exclusives, I shouldn't be a hypocrite for Sony.
nerdjon 783 days ago [-]
I feel like I should train myself to be more patient, but I just can't. I tell myself I will wait and then I am up at midnight playing the new Horizon game at launch.
I have thought about that option, and if Sony does continue to actually put out games on PC I will likely consider it. But I hate how long of a wait it is. And then we see how badly some of the ports like the last of us launch.
dghughes 783 days ago [-]
The only reason I bought an Xbox (in pieces since 2013??) is at the time it had only been two years since the Sony rootkit incident. Really even now I still don't trust Sony. Yes Microsoft is probably just as bad in some ways but Sony in my mind is still the company who spied on me.
The reason I bought an Xbox is because of the PS4 I had before. It was quite bad and I have no idea why anyone would think it’s better. The game controller was average, laggy and had to be charged every 5 hours. The console was noisy and the UI was sluggish. Download speeds from the store were also weirdly slow. The whole experience was very meh. Then I bought an Xbox and was pleasantly surprised with the quality.
Narishma 783 days ago [-]
Microsoft isn't as bad, it's much worse.
fomine3 782 days ago [-]
By becoming an first party OS developer, it doesn't need to have rootkit.
keyle 782 days ago [-]
I dunno, I own everything Apple, except for gaming.
I have two of their best XBOX and I'm loving the game pass and their "game streaming" actually works.
In my mind, you can't get better value than XBOX for console games.
My kids have the switch, with all the mario titles, they're super cool too. But in terms of winning, XBOX has the best value proposition + powerhouse.
sumedh 782 days ago [-]
> In my mind, you can't get better value than XBOX for console games
Speaking of value, you should not be using Apple but go with Windows or Linux. The reason you went with Apple is the same reason people go for Playstation instead of Xbox.
keyle 781 days ago [-]
I respectfully disagree.
fossuser 782 days ago [-]
Ben Thompson of Stratechery has been writing about this for a while - a big part of it is Microsoft is attempting to shift their product into a subscription model for content with Xbox game pass which is likely a lot better for consumers (and for Microsoft due to azure), it’s why they acquired activision. This is a good idea and Microsoft is doing it correctly (as opposed to Google stadia which had the games over the network idea, but stupidly kept an old business model that made no sense).
Sony sees this as a competitive threat and EU regulators are bad so don’t understand what’s happening - their restriction of the activision sale is itself anti-competitive because it locks in the existing business model (which is favorable for Sony) and reduces real business model competition which would benefit consumers.
All this focus on exclusives is dumb and part of the old business model.
anonyfox 782 days ago [-]
For me, I chose xbox recently because of very specific titles (like, starfield). And not to mention the MS/activision talks that were going on for a while now, and I really do love blizzard games, so there would have been a risk of losing out with sony in the longer run.
What I don't get in return a _some_ JRPG titles that ps5 has access to. On the other hand, I also have a switch (which has some exceptionally great exclusives + some of the missing JRPGs), and quite a lot of the gaming portfolio is covered by having xbox+switch.
The only thing I refuse to do nowadays is playing on PC, at all. I am tied to this unhealthy seating position most of the day already, and with consoles I can move to the couch, not to mention multiplayer there. I get why PC gaming is better in several aspects, but body posture is the single thing I am no longer accepting here.
happymellon 782 days ago [-]
My deck works fine in the garden, the sofa or the train.
And I was able to get a Lenovo SFF Ryzen 5600 for £300 from ebay, which is cheaper, smaller and faster than the current consoles.
It's a shame that Valve don't distribute the current Steam Deck Linux, but HoloOS does effectively the same and that plugs into the TV just as well.
You don't need to compromise with PC gaming, and when I upgrade I won't be forced to buy all my games again to carry on playing Overcooked and Moving Out with the kids.
Philip-J-Fry 782 days ago [-]
>And I was able to get a Lenovo SFF Ryzen 5600 for £300 from ebay, which is cheaper, smaller and faster than the current consoles
Maybe the CPU is faster but I doubt the GPU is.
happymellon 782 days ago [-]
You are right, it is probably more comparable to PS4/Xbox One because of it being GCN rather than RDNA.
oefnak 782 days ago [-]
Did you know you can connect your computer to a television? There's a special cable called HMDI or something like that.
beltsazar 782 days ago [-]
I don't understand this common argument. Of course a PC can technically be connected to a TV. The problem is that most people don't have their PC in a living room, much less within the HDMI-range from a TV.
So, unless you want to permanently move your PC (and lose your desk setup with a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse) OR to have another PC dedicated for your TV setup in a living room, then no, you can't play on PC while sitting a couch.
christkv 782 days ago [-]
We have all three consoles due to kids. I play pretty much only on the steam deck. It’s been great for getting back into pc gaming. Currently replaying Oblivion on it but also a bit of Yakuza 0.
ravenstine 783 days ago [-]
Yes, and maybe Microsoft shouldn't have ruined Halo.
WhereIsTheTruth 782 days ago [-]
Console wars? that's a very stupid argument, I expected better from journalists, but it's The Verge, and the journalist in that case is Tom Warren, not very impartial
Sony/Xbox has the exact same amount of 1st party studios, yet Sony managed to deliver more games at a consistent rate, not only that, but Sony released a single SKU as opposed to 2 for Xbox, so they didn't confuse their customers, worse.. Xbox choose very confusing naming
Also Sony puts in the effort, a very unique controller with haptic feedback, they invest in VR, and now remote play
It's easy to call it "console wars", Sony just puts in more effort and as a result sells more consoles, that's as simple as that
johnnyanmac 782 days ago [-]
I wouldn't call it more effort per se. Their dividends are simply paying off earlier. They spent the 2010's trying to foster new IPs and move towards that cinematic moniker that people now see as Marvel-esque. I'm not sure if it was efficient from a sales standpoint, but it got mindshare.
Microsoft has had blunder after blunder since the later ages of he 360. their goals were loftier but were never realized. Even to this day, Spencer seems to say that Playstation isn't their primary competitor, it's Amazon and Google. They don't necessarily "just" want to be a dedicated gamer box. They tried and failed in the 2010's to be that "One stop home entertainment system" and much of their 2020's seems to be shaped by trying to become the one service you play on all devices, anytime, anywhere. We'll see how it works this decade.
dmonitor 782 days ago [-]
“console wars” got brought up multiple times in the most recent FTC hearing.
amelius 783 days ago [-]
Can we please treat them all as monopolies until we have at least 10 players in the same field?
Toutouxc 783 days ago [-]
10 players in the field of game consoles? I honestly believe that having 10 competing console platforms would make console gaming worse, just like everyone and their dog starting a streaming platform is much less convenient and much more expensive than just watching everything on Netflix was a few years ago.
dehrmann 782 days ago [-]
The PC market gets you there on the hardware side. It's really messy to have 10 software platforms for games, though.
Hamuko 782 days ago [-]
Yeah, people can barely handle having to install three game launchers on their PCs. Pretty much everyone I know would prefer to buy every single game on Steam, except those couple no-DRM fanatics that would prefer to buy every single game on GOG. Very few people are even superficially rooting for Epic Games Store.
amelius 782 days ago [-]
I didn't say we need 10 players, just that we should treat them as monopolies.
E.g. properly recognize the market power of a platform owner, and not let them get away with any abuse.
tchaffee 783 days ago [-]
That's like ten different types of USB that don't work with each other. Steam is the direction we should be heading in. Hardware doesn't matter and even small independent makers can be found and supported.
deafpolygon 781 days ago [-]
Nah, Microsoft is pivoting to take the whole pie.
They're going all in on Xbox GamePass - and to be honest, that's the future. Soon, hardware will be irrelevant, and we'll be streaming AAA titles on our phones.
Why? Because mobile gaming has outpaced console and PC combined. Everyone has a phone- and everyone will want a GamePass subscription. Apple is trying this (via App Store), but didn't go all-in. Google cancelled their Stadia project. Amazon is floundering.
Sony is happy with how this is turning out, because they think they can win on exclusivity. But it's only going to give them the lead for a little while.
costanzaDynasty 782 days ago [-]
There isn’t a console war. There are the same companies dancing around each other for 20 years.
This generation is about trying figure out how to expand past a console and expand eaches gaming platform and ecosystem across all devices.
bogwog 782 days ago [-]
> One of the biggest surprise revelations around exclusives was the reasoning behind Microsoft’s Bethesda acquisition. Spencer revealed that Sony regularly pays competitors to “skip our platform,” and Microsoft felt it needed to own Bethesda to compete
How is this a big revelation? Exclusivity deals have been a part of the console market since forever.
I agree they’re a bad thing for consumers, but I think this is a disingenuous argument since exclusivity deals benefit Microsoft just as much as Sony, and this acquisition is effectively just a giant version of one.
permo-w 782 days ago [-]
perhaps this is journalism-speak for "you should be interested in this" for people who don't know much about the topic?
782 days ago [-]
kmlx 782 days ago [-]
not entirely relevant, but i remembered this quote from “zero to one” by thiel:
> Consider a statement from Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s testimony at a 2011 congressional hearing:
> We face an extremely competitive landscape in which consumers have a multitude of options to access information.
> Or, translated from PR-speak to plain English:
> Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.
Eumenes 782 days ago [-]
Anyone remember when MSN ran the Internet Gaming Zone site? It acted as a portal or login system for AoE, Asheron's Call, etc. It was HORRIBLE. Microsoft has gotten lucky with some IP like Halo and buying big studios out, but they simply try to run a gaming company like a software biz, and its not really been well received.
hnthrowaway0315 782 days ago [-]
Games and hardware have been developed to this point when it is impossible for an outsider to share the pie. Back in the day of 8/16/32-bit consoles we did have more choices. I still think handheld has the market for maybe a couple more hardware developers, but maybe it is just me fantasizing.
stonecharioteer 781 days ago [-]
I own a Steam Deck, a barely used Gaming Laptop, a PS5 and a Nintendo Switch, and I have no plans of buying an Xbox. I'm even going to sell the Switch now that the Deck runs BOTW flawlessly and with cheats (I'm a casual)! I don't think I need an Xbox.
crawsome 782 days ago [-]
The original game pool for all consoles should put them all at risk.
I bought a PS5 and there's almost no games for it that aren't already on steam.
It's incomprehensible to me how Sony could win the console war when all the AAA games on PlayStation are either from somewhere else or are painfully cinematic.
monstertank 782 days ago [-]
I effing hope so. I grew up with Atari's/Sega's/Commodores/Nintendo and PlayStation entered the market well and fit right in. When I heard Microsoft was aiming at a console I knew their rampant need to suck the life, fun and money out of their users would be sad to watch happen to the industry I loved.
And despite spending weeks on a couch stoned with a mate playing thru halo...I still despised what hid behind their console-y veneer. Corporate bloodlust.
Whether it was their unique approach to online play (pay you bastards) or their game store shelf tactics (put us where the bastards will pay the most) or their absolute bs that gaming had to always be AAA (so those bastards pay us AAA prices)...I was always sad to see they didn't die.
From idiotic naming, Nazi like banning, jacked up game prices, exclusivity and religion shenanigans, hardware format warmongering, censorship where it didn't need to be and none where it should have been (I'm looking at you uno 360), or just plain creation of the most toxic gamer population known to man (Xbox live kids)...I one day hope to hear them go the way of Sega because unlike Sega, they deserve it.
THENATHE 782 days ago [-]
Frankly, I dont understand why most people go playstation. Think objectively about it: if youre on hnews, you're not the target for a console, as you probably either dont play games, or play games on the PC. Then, the majority of people probably have a switch because nintendo is a very common household name. Then once you surpass all of those groups, you have ps5 or xbox. But why do people buy a ps5 when gamepass is so good, and the only real difference is cost (xbox wins) and exclusives (this generation, there aint a huge difference).
Anecdotal, but I know a huge number of people that play games casually, and almost all of them have playstations if they arent PC/switch. Why? I have no idea. Nearly none of them have any interest in any playstation exclusives, they just bought a playstation because. Why? No idea.
arka2147483647 782 days ago [-]
People do not buy consoles, they buy games, and PlayStation has the best collection of them across all categories. Saying that can upset some, but i think its true. Also Xbox has a bit more “edgy” or action oriented brand, while PlayStation has a more wider whole family brand. All of this helps make the appeal wider in general, while Xbox can have more appeal in specific niches, eg shooters, for example.
ayemel 782 days ago [-]
Xbox has the highest rated racing game (Forza Horizon 5) which is one of my favorite gaming categories.
tacker2000 782 days ago [-]
PS has Gran Turismo. And we could probably discuss endlessly about which one is better.
ayemel 782 days ago [-]
Forza Horizon 5 is the highest rated racing game of all time on Opencritic. Sony has no open world racing game at all so it loses by default in this space.
throwawaylinux 782 days ago [-]
And how does that address the original poster's comment?
nixass 782 days ago [-]
Forza (any Forza game) is either blatantly arcade (Horizon) or toxic online experience (Motorsport).
Gran Turismo although has its own issues is miles ahead over anything Xbox has to offer.
Horizon is as racing games as GTA Online for that matter
cevn 782 days ago [-]
I think GT7 would beat it out in pure racing, it also supports VR which increases the fun 10x.
ayemel 782 days ago [-]
GT7 competes with Forza Motorsport, not Horizon. Motorsport is due for a new release this year, let’s see how that compares.
Sony has no answer to Forza Horizon—open world arcade racer.
goosedragons 782 days ago [-]
They don't really need it. There's 3rd party options like Need for Speed.
There's lots of first party titles MS has no one to one answer for either. They don't have a big mascot 3rd person shooter platform game like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart.
kruuuder 782 days ago [-]
> Think objectively about it: if youre on hnews, you're not the target for a console, as you probably either dont play games, or play games on the PC. Then, the majority of people probably have a switch because nintendo is a very common household name.
HN readers don't use gaming consoles? "Nintendo" is more of a household name than "PlayStation" or "Xbox"? Doesn't sound like a objective analysis to me.
danielheath 782 days ago [-]
From a quick search, the switch has 122m units shipped to 116m ps4 units shipped.
Based on that, I’d agree that Nintendo and Sony are on pretty comparable footing - certainly not that one brand is notably more widespread than the other.
kif 782 days ago [-]
As a person who has both, you gotta admit the care that Sony puts into their hardware.
This time around the Xbox Series X is arguably sleeker, but by God is the controller pure trash.
The Xbox’s controller vibrations resemble those of a cheap trimmer, whereas the Playstation’s controller has a much nicer feel.
It’s also a fact that many games are better optimized for PS5, even though on paper the Xbox should have a slight edge.
I don’t care about console wars, and I’m glad I have both of them, but some games are only on PS5, which is another reason people opt for it.
fleshdaddy 782 days ago [-]
Wow interesting. I have a feeling the controller thing is super dependent on what you’ve had more exposure to. I recently started gaming for the first time since I was younger and got the Xbox elite controller and love it but I can’t stand playstation controllers. The feedback feels wrong, buttons, everything. Granted like I said I haven’t used them much.
ayemel 782 days ago [-]
Xbox has always had more comfortable controllers imo. This gen it’s closer because PlayStation finally copied the ergonomics from an Xbox controller.
Jochim 782 days ago [-]
I've always found the original Xbox/Xbox one controllers horribly oversized and heavy compared to the PlayStation 2 ones. The early PS1 controllers without analog sticks were a bit small but personally they've always seemed to have the best balance of weight, size, shape, stiffness, and quality.
happymellon 782 days ago [-]
As I mentioned in another thread, dpads are still used especially in platform games that require precision and the Xbox dpad disk is horrendous.
I've had both playstation and Xbox, although I stopped after the original and the 360, and I can't imagine completing something like Celeste on an Xbox controller.
goosedragons 782 days ago [-]
The Series S/X controller dpad is a pretty nice and clicky dpad. It's a farcry from the mush of the 360 or original Xbox and a step up from the Xbox One (which was already a lot better). I picked up one recently and even though on paper it's barely different from the Xbox One controller they made enough subtle tweaks and design changes that I actually really like it despite never really being a fan of the Xbox One controller.
fomine3 782 days ago [-]
Current Xbox controller is just fine, but I feel it stopped evolution. I want to see any evolution for controller, like trackpad for aim on Steam Controller.
scarface_74 782 days ago [-]
This reads a lot like the feigned ignorance old Slashdot meme:
“I haven’t watched TV in 10 years. Do people still watch TV”?
It’s not hard to find real data that goes against your anecdotes.
happymellon 782 days ago [-]
For me it is still the controller.
I had an OG Xbox, and the dpad was horrible (ignoring the size of the thing). I hate the disk shape dpad and like the traditional cross that Playstation offers.
If they made a controller that was nice I might reconsider my options, but after also having to deal with Microsoft locking hard disks, and then doing the same during the 360 era soured my attitude towards them. And this is ignoring all the other bad will that Microsoft has generated over the decades.
I've stuck with Playstation, Nintendo and Steam and I don't see anything Xbox that I'm missing so unless something fundamental changes, I'll stick with Playstation over Xbox.
Why would anyone buy Xbox? No idea.
throwawaylinux 782 days ago [-]
> But why do people buy a ps5 when gamepass is so good,
You might have just fallen into the trap you were warning us about. Do they know or care about "gamepass"? They know "playstation" because that's what their friends had when they were kids, etc. Brand can be incredibly strong.
beardedscotsman 782 days ago [-]
To add to this, in Ireland the main retailer for toys was Smyth’s. They didn’t sell the original Xbox because they sold PlayStation and when Microsoft tried to get the Xbox 360 stocked by them, they initially refused saying when people want to buy a games console they come into the store and ask to buy a PlayStation or a games machine. Nobody was going in asking for Xbox. Microsoft had to do a massive deal with them to get shelf space and it was always in the corner away from the Sony and Nintendo stuff.
hobofan 782 days ago [-]
Gamepass is good, but PS Plus is also good. Arguably the main thing you get with Gamepass is more AAA games, but honestly, both iclude more games than you can reasonably play.
> exclusives (this generation, there aint a huge difference)
The difference doesn't need to be huge, it just needs to be there. For me personally, the backcatalog of From Software games (including 2020 Demon's Souls) and Returnal were enough to push me towards PS5.
> the majority of people probably have a switch because nintendo
I do also own a switch. It's nice and all, but for me competes in a different niche: portable indie game machine. Anecdotally, I also don't know anyone where a Switch displaces PC/PS/Xbox, so the non-overlapping group logic doesn't really apply.
dottjt 782 days ago [-]
Games. It's the same reason I also own a Nintendo Switch.
By the same token, I would happily own an Xbox as well if it had the games I want, but it's severely lacking in that department.
mustacheemperor 782 days ago [-]
For one, gyro aim is such an improvement for console shooters (at least for me) that I absolutely cannot downgrade to a console that can’t even support it.
ivandenysov 782 days ago [-]
A couple of reasons why I personally will buy PS5 vs XBOX:
- I already have a bunch of games for PS4, which will still work on PS5
- I try to avoid Microsoft when possible. They are too powerful and spread out for their own good. And yet I still happily use VSCode, Microsoft ToDo daily. Same sentiment goes for google products.
- I can fit PS5 under my TV. XBOX Series X won’t fit.
delta_p_delta_x 782 days ago [-]
PlayStation has a lot of exclusive games that have never come to PC, or only arrived on PC until significantly later—see: Killzone, Gran Turismo, The Last of Us until recently, Horizon Zero Dawn until recently, Dark Souls until recently, Bloodborne, God of War, Death Stranding. People want to play those games, and they want to play them now.
Jochim 782 days ago [-]
Thankfully, PlayStation exclusives do appear to be coming to PC more often nowadays. Hopefully the timed exclusivity window continues to decrease.
Death Stranding came to PC ~7 months after it released on PlayStation, which isn't too bad if they were focusing on finishing the game for the PS release rather than working on the port.
The delay in the FFVII remake was painful though, ~2 years before hitting Steam. It's a shame to see FFXVI release only on PS5 as well, the game looks interesting.
sumedh 782 days ago [-]
> if youre on hnews, you're not the target for a console
I dont think you know the HN demographics, I would assume lot of them are gamers.
thefounder 782 days ago [-]
Maybe console gammers are not that much into trying different games so gamepass is worthless. Personally I couldn't care less about a game subscription. I just want to buy the game I like and play it for 20 years at least!
ErneX 782 days ago [-]
PS Studios have been making consistently critically acclaimed games since mid-late PS3 times.
kolbebe 782 days ago [-]
My friends got playstations because their friends had them. They wanted to be in the same ecosystem so they could play together. Of course with cross console play, this is becoming less and less of a thing.
cevn 782 days ago [-]
Mostly exclusives. XBox used to be synonymous with Halo. Microsoft shit the bed with that franchise so Sony took over.
davedx 782 days ago [-]
I got a PS5 because we had so much fun on our PS4. We got a PS4 partly to play GTA V. Everyone has their reasons
christkv 782 days ago [-]
I suspect starfield will sell a fair bit of consoles when it launches
TheRealPomax 782 days ago [-]
What console wars? What year do you think this is that you still it a "war"?
TheRealPomax 782 days ago [-]
*still call it
rvba 782 days ago [-]
This reads like peo Microsoft propaganda.
theknocker 782 days ago [-]
[dead]
shanghaikid 782 days ago [-]
4090ti is much expensive than an xbox + game pass.
Since 2010 mobile gaming has eclipsed revenue of both console and PC gaming _combined_.
Also since 2010, console revenue has stagnated while PC revenue has continued to grow.
This is the landscape to evaluate the different gaming brands. Xboxes are nothing more than a user-friendly gaming PC brand. The total addressable market for Microsoft is much larger than what Sony could hope for. Sony is in the worst bind long-term, trapped in consoles without any leg up in PC or mobile. They invested in VR instead which never became a strong category. In terms of revenue, VR is barely competing with Arcades.
If you had to stack rank gaming devices, iOS would be winning the console wars, followed by Android. In a distant third would be PlayStation, and then Microsoft and Nintendo neck in neck.
If you look at it by company, Tencent would be at the top, then Sony, then Microsoft and Nintendo.
Microsoft is definitely in -- at best -- third place no matter how you count it. The FTC trying to restrict the conversation to an era of console war that expired over 13 years ago shows they have no business trying to regulate this space.
https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/mob...
This blog post by their head of product is a great example of the problems in the industry—he talks gleefully about all the manipulative techniques he pulled in from Zynga, and doesn't seem to have any clue that he's sacrificed the mission in pursuit of relentless growth.
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-us...
I feel for that lone engineer with 4 people breathing down the back of his neck.
It's kind of sad, that in the pursuit of cashing in on their "whales" that they've essentially neutered it as an educational app.
The viewport is a small number of inches, the types of games are wholly different, the controls are awful.
These are not only different consumer segments, they're wholly different products. The FTC is making the right call.
In my other comment, I pointed to this post by Duolingo's head of product as a good example of someone talking openly about exploitative practices without even really seeming to see the problem. This is honestly mild on the scale of industry discussions of how to manipulate people into giving more money.
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-us...
The game design patterns aren't new nor novel. Retaining players with repetitive grinds, using guilds to create peer pressure to stay, daily rotating events with a trickle of currency used to obtain desirable characters/gear. You could trace all that back to WOW and several Korean MMOs. The only difference is that they can reach a wider audience now, some of which they drew in from the console market.
What would the Switch have needed to accomplish to bridge the gap to mobile? Sell 1 billion units?
I think it's a bit silly to suggest that there isnt a decent overlap in the market. Any Japanese company has a mobile division, and they all utilize their console IP's there. They wouldn't do that if all their audience were candy crush players.
People usually have the latest Play Station or Xbox, not both, but lots of people have a Switch in addition to either.
Try to sell mobile games to "console/pc gamers", you just don't sell them, different market.
From a personal perspective, all my friends who play videogames avoid mobile like plague.
These were a bunch of weebs who also played stuff like Final Fantasy 14. And many mobile games marketed towards those current/former RPG players are similar in all but raw technical scope (and even then, we have Genshin impact now. That gap is closing). But sure, if your friend group focuses on FPS or fighters I can see a lack of interest.
No one has tried to really make a 3d platformer mobile game, though. I wonder how much of that is due to technical/logistical issues and how much due to lack of audience demand. There are some 2D platformers, so that's not the issue.
There's plenty of overlap between all of them. Hell, most mobile games are mostly adaptions of what are usually called casual or what used to be called "desktop" games on PC. Genshin Impact is an open world RPG, there's CoD Mobile and Mario Kart too.
There's a habit to separate various kinds of media in it's own little lockboxes and it's completely wrongheaded and old fashioned in an age where tech is consolidating so rapidly.
But they have largely separate audiences. The number of people for whom they are in legitimate competition is vanishingly small compared to those who are exclusively on one side of the divide or the other.
Mobile, console, PC, handheld? Potato Potahto. I can play PC games on a handheld. I can play Xbox games on an iPhone. I can play Switch games on a PC. I can play "Mobile" games on a TV box.
The industry is so busy categorizing that they missed that everything runs on everything now.
I play games on my PS5 and never ever on my iPhone.
When my friends and I talk about what games we are playing no one, ever, has mentioned a mobile game. We did discuss Pokémon go, but not one of us actually installed it.
The technical reasons for justifying segmented software markets have faded away. In spite of personal preference, your wife could play that exact same solitaire game on a PC or laptop if they wanted to, just like you could play PS5 games on your iPhone. Just like you should be able to play Xbox games on a PS5, or vice versa, with the only barrier existing to prevent this being the walls the platform holders themselves built. This absolutely results in market segmentation, but of the anti-competitive kind.
This will come to a head whenever AR glasses catch on proper, since that dissolves segmentation based on screen size. What's "mobile", when everything is mobile?
That's the market segmentation right there. My wife could play solitaire on her PC but she doesn't want to. She has her phone on her all the time. She is a very casual gamer. I, on the other hand, want to play games in surround sound with a large 4K TV. I have a switch but have never played it disconnected from the TV.
>What's "mobile", when everything is mobile?
The games. As as has been said on this thread, "mobile" games are actually either skinner boxes or casual games like solitaire. Console games are big investments in experiences - be the investment money, like GTA or Halo, or time and passion, like Celeste.
I hope that we will see some interesting games for VR/AR. So far there have been exactly zero high-investment games. Superhot, for example, was interesting, but played well without VR, and was short.
Here's the thing: I don't remember the last time I played a first person game other than Superhot. They aren't that fun. I don't have great proprioception in the real world, so how is that going to work in VR where I don't have legs? How will I time jumping off a building? How will I know when to strike? These are all reasons why most 3D games are third person. Games are fun.
Solitaire is a mobile game? It didn't start out like that! Not just that it was for a long time a PC game, but also as a card game that required a big ass desk to play. Same with gambling games. You've been groomed into expecting that different hardware form factors require different software ecosystems, but that is a box that the industry has drawn for itself (with a few notable exceptions trying to break out of it).
As for the AR/VR talk, I was speaking more generally, not about AR/VR specific experiences. Given the panacea of AR glasses with perfect passthrough in a pair of Oakleys, virtual screens can be any shape or size. At which point the hardware distinction between "big screen" experiences like movies and GTA and smaller, casual games like solitaire are effectively at an even footing on the same device. At that point does it make sense to have separate stores for different hardware?
Not that I think it does today. If I purchase Solitaire, I should be able to play it anywhere on anything. If I purchase GTA, I should be able to play it anywhere on anything.
But if you define the market that way, it probably also includes books, movies, television, and sports. Not so useful when working on antitrust.
I don't think that the categorization is actually helpful, if anything it distorts reality by making it seem as if Microsoft are on the backfoot regarding gaming. Meanwhile, Sony is releasing games on Windows.
I imagine contingent of people who spend big bucks on mobile games _probably_ wouldn’t be spending that money on AAA PS5 games otherwise.
Just curious if you are making that comment after reading the article, or is your general opinion? Because one of the big points of the article is that Phil Spencer said they tried to by Zynga, and the major reason they want Activision is for the mobile assets. This is Spencer’s testimony quoted in the article:
The deal, as we’ve talked about, expands our business to the mobile platform... the existing business that we run today as the third-place console business is a very difficult business to drive profit and margin. So the opportunity for us to expand in a meaningful way onto mobile, the world’s largest gaming platform, was really both a strategic and business opportunity behind this deal.
There's no doubt that a Console is far from the same experience most people have with a PC or a phone. Different, not better. Why do you think most that identify as a gamer own both a Console, a phone and a PC if it is basically the same experience? I own one of each for the exact same reason I own both a car a motorcycle and a bike: They are not at all the same or even related outside having wheels.
Is there a website that curates games?
Edit: turned this into an Ask HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36468335
It's kinda a joke, but when I asked myself the question "can I play anything interesting on mobile", the answer I found was that one.
Also, a console just works (99% of the time), and I don't have to fiddle with drivers and editing config files and the other random crap that can crop up with even the best PC games.
Another anecdata point - I have several hundred games for PC on Steam, and can’t remember the last time I had an issue with drivers or having to do anything to get games to run.
I just wish someone would make a motion-controlled RPG which had:
- the exploration and immersive story of Xenoblade Chronicles
- the amazing imagery and intricate puzzles of Pandora's Tower
- the endless grinding potential of The Last Story
- on-going content like to Diablo 3's Seasons
- the fluid transition between ranged combat and melee of Red Steel 2
- the wonderful archery of Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword on the Wii
and a story/world where constant replays make sense --- say something like to the Gates of C.J. Cherryh's Morgaine books. (and yes, I should spend more time playing Ring Fit Adventure, but )
The PS5 is really the only console with any amount of exclusives, and even then Sony is opening up to PC more and more.
So to answer OP, none are really worth by themselves. Online games obviously create different considerations though.
One reason is that the cheapest steam deck is twice the price of the cheapest switch while being much less portable. If you want a Switch-like TV experience you need to spend an extra $150 on the dock and a controller whereas that comes in the box on a Switch OLED with a vastly better screen for $350. The Steam Deck is obviously more capable but it definitely has tradeoffs even for someone willing to go through all of the effort of piracy and emulation.
Since the docks weren't initially available, I purchased a $20 USB-C hub from Anker on newegg (with passthrough charging, SD card, USB/USB-C/HDMI) although there are even cheaper ones some as low as $10 for HDMI only. It fits pretty easily in the nylon bag with the charger so it's now a portable dock which I can also use for work due to the full linux desktop on the steam deck (I combine it with a collapsing BT keyboard and mini mouse when not at a desk).
Controllers you can get pretty good USB ones for $10 with better form factor than the switch and easier to replace.
The openness of the steam deck really helps with peripherals.
Have you used the Steam Deck?
It's a janky experience if you try to use it in the living room. For one thing, the Bluetooth chip is terrible. I realized this when I emulated Donkey Kong, was doing terribly, then unplugged it from my TV and started winning in handheld mode.
The issue isn't the TV introducing lag, I followed instruction online to install the driver for the Xbox controller Dongle and the difference was night and day.
This is just an emblematic example. I had to buy a wifi extender because the Steam Deck literally crash itself (It will actually report "out of battery" when the battery is full) when it has a bad wifi signal, due to some sort of hardware flaw.
Steam Deck is a very janky experience, which perhaps isn't a surprise when you realize Valve has the highest profits per employee in tech, they accomplish a lot with a small staff, but they have huge resource constraints when producing products like the Steam Deck.
I think we had a few that tried.
We got instant classics released soon after the initial announcement: Daikatana, Duke Nukem Forever, etc.
If they haven't improved performance in TotK (or Switch 2 is out by then), I will play that game emulated on a PC.
Super Mario Odyssey framerate was better. Not great, but not "did Nintendo seriously consider this to be good enough to release?".
A gaming PC would be better in most ways but as far as value for dollar, xbone was well worth buying.
Not everyone buys top quality hardware.
But there are multiple drivers in the Xbox store and it took some research to see what had to be installed. There are still times I have to disconnect and reconnect the controller for the headset to work.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/_content/gc/ref...
I still occasionally play F22 TAW and Chamanche Gold. No issues.
I've had way more issues like you describe on Xbox with stuff like Halo Infinite than with stuff on PC like Destiny 2. That includes driver issues! (Headset sound on Xbox).
You might as well compare console games to casino games.
Sony has a stable of desired exclusives (and even exclusive series). Microsoft Gaming doesn’t earn a dime on PC hardware sales. Hell, even the Windows group doesn’t earn more than a couple of bucks on a Windows sale.
It’s Microsoft Gaming that is in a bind here.
Consider a future where TV sales dwindle, cannibalized by personal screens like tablets and headsets. Or imagine smart tv platforms clamping down on media that they don't get a cut of (anything over that 'obsolete' HDMI port).
Those trends are slowly underway, and part of the reason the console segment is not just stagnating, but shrinking. Sony has a big piece of a shrinking segment and no easy way to move to the other gaming segments. Microsoft on the other hand has 3 generations of games that run on Windows, which is still the dominant OS in a growing gaming segment.
If we could define the console wars as: who will escape the console segment before it disappears? That is the lens by which I say Sony has the worse hand. They're more likely to become an Atari or Sega at this point than Microsoft is.
But what does it matter that Microsoft owns the OS? They don’t see a dime more because of that except for the OEM Windows fee and tiny sliver from OS ads.
Steam is the predominant sales platform on PC, which again Microsoft doesn’t earn a dime from.
Sony has ported or is porting all their successful 1st party and 3rd party games. Nothing is stopping them from doing that for all the games they think customers care about. And the supermajority of customers care very little beyond current gen, maybe one gen back.
I don’t see consoles shrinking a whole lot either (once you cut out the spike from COVID). I use my PC with a bunch of fancy tricks and Big Picture and it still has plenty of weird bugs. The most recent annoying one is having to manually override DPI scaling on Ori, and choosing my TV as the monitor for Ori and Halo MCC. Funnily enough both Microsoft games (although I am not saying Sony’s games would fare much better).
Maybe that a revival of Steam boxes / Steam machines will change that in the future.. or hell, maybe the EU breaks open the console walled garden. Who knows.
It's a huge hill to climb to catch up to Steam's market share, but we've seen Microsoft leverage Windows to climb similar hills time and time again. The strategy is at least viable enough that Valve has been shaking in their boots for years, trying to build up a war chest of games on Linux. The Steam Deck is a great strategic accomplishment for them.
Consoles games aren't the same products than smartphones games. Only xbox, playstation and the nintendo consoles are in the same market (edit: and PC)
I do agree console war is outdated and not relevant anymore but it doesn't mean the FTC is wrong. Of course they may be wrong for an entire different set of reasons.
Consoles, handhelds and PCs can still make a ton of money even when studios are not centralized.
Edit: is pc gaming really growing? That surprises me, I used to really be in to pc games (late 90s). GPUs are ridiculously expensive, is it really big now? It was niche in my day
It really is that big a market.
But to properly reply to your comment: indirectly, yes. I'd go so far to argue that the rise of mobile gaming yet another reason why the Vita couldn't gain traction (releasing in 2013, around the time mobile games started to really show they can do more than arcade-y style minigames), and why Nintendo decided to pivot to a hybrid model. the 3DS's middling sales (for a nintendo console) definitely put some pressure on even the uncontested king of handhelds, so what chance would any other platform have?
Meanwhile Microsoft in this era would flounder with Windows Mobile and fail to gain traction with Windows 8S or whatever they were trying to do with tablets in this time, so I guess their enthusiasm to try that in their gaming division was negative. I'm honestly still baffled Valve beat MS to making the most obvious Xbox handheld, that we now know as the Steam Deck.
So I'd say it was competing the same way handhelds competed with consoles. There would never be apples to apples comparison, but the markets definitely tug on one another, the markets keep eyes on one another, and the audience have some significant overlap, enough to be kept in mind with marketing. Sony and Microsoft wouldn't be marketing cloud gaming on mobile if they thought none of their audience were interested in playing games on their phone.
Remember that the PSP was also a pretty good multimedia device pre-smartphone. So it lost that userbase as it became the Vita. But of course it's primary purpose was games and the Vita focused on that in its western marketing: "console gaming on the go". It couldn't sell itself on mobile style games if it ever expected to succeed, so while it may have overlap I can't say it was a direct smartphone competitor either.
And it took similar resources within Sony to develop and market it. Another of a dozen reasons why it failed: Sony decided very early on to put all its chips into the PS4, and ditched first party Vita support after the first year. This woildnt make sense for a phone competitor.
As a result, it seems that it's a different market.
Every time I want to play a game I have to consider if I want to bust out my laptop, turn on my TV system, or just swipe over to a game on the phone I'm already holding.
I obviously prefer to play my PC or PlayStation, but will play my Switch if I am in the bathroom, riding shotgun on a long car ride, etc. Mobile games, for me, are essentially waiting room games or something I will whip out if I have exactly 7 minutes to kill.
I don't generally think, "I want to game" and then decide which one is worth the effort in the moment.
And that does line up with the above link: most of that revenue os generated by a snall minority of gamers. Most games are indeed played for free for a few hours/days with no money obtained outside of Ads. But that whale market is small but insanely lucrative.
Also, manufacturer- and publisher-friendly, given the heavy restrictions on the platform. It's bad for preservation that the Xbox One hasn't significantly been cracked yet.
The current console generation came with a fairly large price hike and Microsoft responded by also releasing a more affordable but less powerful model.
The problem is that a non-technical consumer can go out and purchase a PS5 safe in the knowledge that they're getting the same gaming experience as anyone else that owns a PS5. Someone considering an Xbox now has to choose between the series S and X.
They now need to compare specifications, figure out which one is more powerful and worry whether the console will be able to deliver decent fidelity and performance in newer games.
On another note, it'd be nice to see exclusivity agreements die entirely. Microsoft has always been fairly good at making their titles available on PC and Sony is moving in that direction but still makes heavy use of timed exclusives.
Just give the console a number. And. Increment.
That's it. You can still have Pro / Slim / whatever models, but I have no idea why Nintendo and Microsoft both willingly threw away the easiest marketing strategy there is: your kid has the 4 and the 5 just came out. 5 is larger than 4 therefore the kid knows what to ask, regardless of age. The parent also knows what to buy because 5 is larger than 4.
Nothing convinces me that this isn't the reason why new Playstation models sell like crazy before any decent games are out. 4 was larger than 3 and 5 is larger than 4. That's it.
Nintendo got out of it by starting a new line of consoles with the Switch, but Microsoft's marketing just keeps giving this one away to Sony for free. It's unbelievable.
The Wii U on the other hand completely flew under most people's radar. People were over the Wii and then Nintendo releases the Wii U. Most people thought it was an addon tablet because that's all they kept showing, just Wii remotes and the tablet.
Compare that to PlayStation 4/PlayStation 4 Pro/PlayStation 5 (and yeah, I'm not going to argue that 'pro' isn't a stupid designation for a slightly-more-powerful-than-before console), but it's at least obvious where they sit in the lineup.
AFAIK, S is “no physical media”
AFAIK, “series” means “fancy”
I’ve only ever purchased XBox consoles and currently rock an XBox One.
Lemme fix your marketing, XBox: call the “no drive” ones “cloud” or “online” or “vapor” or whatever.
Call your next one 9006 so it is simultaneously “over 9000”, and puts you back in the semver race with PlayStation. /s
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/consoles/compare
Yes the names are not as easy to compare as PS5 vs PS4, but upon cursory investigation it's blatantly obvious that the X is more powerful than the S.
You wouldn't google Playstation 4 and 5 to find out which is which. I have no idea why Microsoft would do this. Try sending your mother out to buy one. Would she know which one to buy and understand the difference?
"it's not even obvious which is the more powerful model, there's no mention anywhere of what X and S stand for."
At a glance the difference between the X and the S could be like the PS4 vs PS4 Slim, or the PS5 and PS5 Digital Edition.
The part I emphasize is exactly the argument of the person you're responding.
Seems pretty intuitive..
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One#Xbox_One_X
It should be pretty obvious that Series > One > 360.
I think it’s absolutely baffling that somebody might find such a perfectly logical and reasonable naming system confusing.
What is obvious about series being better than 360? why would someone think that if they were just presented with those names and nothing else?
Why would someone think x is better than s without doing any research?
But why does Series > One?
Do they? I don't. At this moment, I couldn't tell you the name of Microsoft's newest console, because their naming convention is so convoluted. Meanwhile, I can tell from a glance that the PS5 is newer than the PS4.
Granted, I'm not a console gamer, but neither are (most) parents buying consoles for their children.
"Ehh, people will know what we're talking about" seems like a haphazard marketing strategy.
Edit: I googled it. Xbox X and the old one is Xbox One X? That is simply hilariously stupid.
Sony/Apple/Samsung have this one solid - just release the next semver and market the hell out of it. Don't make me confused when I'm thinking about paying you money. Note: even the ones that aren't "on the version treadmill" do poorly: "iPhone mini" vs. "Samsung Fold" etc are niche products and exist to essentially sell the mainline item.
It wasn't very long ago that kids were struggling to get their parents to stop calling xbox and playstation "the nintendo". Young parents today are probably comfortable with the brands of xbox and playstation, having grown up with those brands, but expecting them to be up-to-date on the latest models isn't smart. There can be a considerable gap in understanding between those who are tuned into gaming matters and those who might be making the actual purchase. The value of simple branding should not be underestimated.
If they want me to check on google, they failed.
Also it is funny that you attack people on.. hacker news for not understanding the versioning.
It just proves that microsoft does it in a bad way.
But fret not, there's an easy shortcut to see which Microsoft product is newer. Just try them side by side and whichever has more advertisements is newer.
In short, Ford doesn't release the Ford 5 because it knows the Ford 4 is old news. (Also, get a horse, ya durn kids.)
Anyway, research:
https://www.windowscentral.com/heres-some-interesting-stats-...
> Most Xbox One gamers reside in the 25- to 34-year-old bracket, followed closely by the 35- to 44-year-old bracket.
> 56 percent of Xbox One owners live with a married spouse or partner, 10 percent live alone, and 23 percent live with their parents.
> Many Xbox One owners have an annual income of around $75,000.
I'd say I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac, but both of those references are outdated these days.
I don't think non-numbers are a bad naming scheme, just the simplest. It means its easiest to keep up with and archive, but it can also mean it's hard to tell audiences what fancy new features you're marketing. If the Wii was the Nintendo 5 and the Switch was the Nintendo 7 I'm not sure if it would be quite as snappy in consumer minds.
Labelling the Switch as a new version of the Wii doesn't make much sense because it occupies a different niche, comparable to PlayStation/2/3/4/5 vs the PlayStation Portable.
PlayStation's addition of "Pro" in it's own naming scheme clearly distinguishes the more powerful console. Delaying the release of the pro model until later in the generation's lifecycle also helps reduce friction.
I don't know a single kid that would not know which models are current gen and which are better or worse. Argument about non technical parents is valid but any kid today will know which Xbox to get and will tell their parents. Kids these days know much more stuff than you seem to think, they spent 1/3-1/4 of their lives on the internet. My 11-12yo nephews built PCs just following youtube guides, they do video montages of their Fortnite games to put on youtube and almost every single friend of theirs is similarly familiar with current tech.
Xbox having lower numbers is purely fault of PS dominating the market over last decade, people will continue buying it cause they trust Sony to deliver exclusives and they have existing game libraries. I converted two Sony fanboys to Xbox with Game Pass and they both love it. Noone these days buys a PS "because they are confused with Xbox naming", 5 minutes of googling answers any questions. The only people who might really have an issue with this are boomers+ who are not even going to buy a console for themselves cause "games are for kids and a waste of time".
The kids may know and understand this, but parents may not. If you go to a store today, you will only find the latter two, and you won’t have an issue picking the one your kid asked for (i.e. the X). But when both generations were on sale, the parent might end up buying "One X" instead of "Series X" because it’s cheaper, or buying "360" instead of "One" because it’s clearly bigger (by 359 no less).
The Xbox line-up is just comical. I walk through any gaming department and see an "S", "X", or sometimes even both "S" and "X" on Xbox games. If it was just "Xbox 7" and "Xbox 8", you'd at least have some idea of what's going on.
It's like someone who knows nothing about cars trying to figure out SE vs LE vs CE vs XLE trimmings when looking at accessories.
Wtf, there are two different S's and two different X's? I thought 'Xbox One _' and 'Xbox Series _' referred to the same products.
Xbox One _ :: PS4.
Xbox Series _ :: PS5.
If he doesn't know, no way grandma and grandpa are going to be able to get him a birthday present.
NES -> SNES
GB -> GBC, GBA, GBA SP
DS -> DSi, 3DS, 2DS
Xbox is the opposite, if you get the cheaper console games will look worse and/or run at lower FPS. It only has one option for internal storage, leaving you with ~360gb after accounting for the OS, five or six modern games can fill that pretty easily. Official external storage costs about as much as the console itself.
For many people the trade-offs won't matter but it does make the PlayStation a much simpler choice if you're looking for a console for a kid that doesn't already favour one or the other.
Microsoft has never been able to do that.
Everyone subscribes to Game Pass, but nobody buys many games.
Kind of like how Apple hasn't "lost" any "laptop war"
Do we need Windows Azure .NET Live? No idea, maybe it's similar to Microsoft Active Core X except targetted at a different market? Here's a blurb telling us it's "For the smart professional", presumably as opposed to products which are only for dumb amateurs ?
Funny thing is, that video was made within Microsoft. It's fascinating that everyone can be aware of the problem, but they still can't steer the behemoth.
On the hardware note, I would not discount the impact that covid chip shortage had on the ability for MSFT to pivot on this problem.
HiFi Rush is exactly what you describe. Published by Bethesda but developed by a smaller studio. Very well received without requiring a huge investment.
I'm pretty technical but I'm definitely a casual gamer, the Series S serves me perfectly.
Xbox as we know it (the console) became irrelevant, but that'd be assumed by everyone incl. Microsoft the moment they promised to bring Xbox exclusives to PC. IMO that was the first visible point of them committing to change course for Xbox. If anything, nowadays Sony seems to be pigeonholed to their own world, while Microsoft seems to be thriving.
This might also be a case of Xbox having a different user segment, as compared to the PlayStation, and certainly compared to Nintendos offerings. I might be completely wrong, but PlayStation seems very much like the console for people who want large worlds, larger than life scenaries and single player games. Xbox is for when you want to play with friends, either in person of online.
What new games can you actually play in person, like splitscreen? Seems most don't allow it, or at best it's 2 player.
On Xbox we play Castle Crashers.
With one Switch: Super Bomberman R, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Overcooked 2 (these are also on Xbox), Zarvot, Mario Party, New Super Mario Bros. U, Super Mario 3D World
You can also play through Donkey Kong Country, Pikmin 3, and Untitled Goose Game with two players.
Consoles make money via licensing - each game sold they get a cut. Is MS willing to give that up? If no then they are still in the console business - and Windows is an internal competitor; MS earns nothing when someone buys a game for Windows.
I don’t know the statistics but I feel like that misses a huge market segment. Lots and lots of people just have laptops for school / work that won’t run AAA games. Moreover, lots of people want to game in their living room and, while I know they exist, I’ve never met anyone that hooks their PC up to their TV to do that. Doing so might not even cross the mind of less tech savvy people.
They earn money from each Windows license though and gaming helps to keep Windows relevant against Linux and macOS, especially for younger people.
But in general I think Valve has beaten Microsoft to the console-ization of PC gaming with the Windows-less Steam Deck. Maybe the Steam Machine is ready for a comeback.
The gain I get is how much easier it is to use. I'm fairly tech savvy, but Windows has been a curse and there've been too many times I've spent my intended gaming time troubleshooting Windows, or a game's display settings, or drivers etc.
Steam as software never felt great to me. I don't have the greatest eyes and I find it difficult to use. Xbox UI is just stupidly simple and intuitive.
I like that the Xbox gamepass experience is so streamlined I can sit down on a couch, turn on my controller, and that will turn the console and TV on and I can be playing a game in 10 seconds. On PC it just ain't even close.
No idea if PS5 has this, but XBox’s ability to suspend games and instantly start back in the game is indispensable for someone with a minimum of gaming time available!
I vastly prefer my Xbox. I sit on the couch, power up near instantly, pick a game. Play my games. Everything’s works. The UX is just sooo much better.
I have had both PlayStation and Xbox consoles every generation since the inception of both and every generation I just find Xbox more inviting. Maybe it’s some form of dyslexia but I also have never internalized the PlayStations button labels. Every time it tells me to hit a shape I need to look at the controller.
The main reasons why game studios love consoles, and the gamers as well, is the development and user experience of using them.
The last time Xboxes were remotely interesting to me was with the 360. Every generation since has been dominated by unremarkable competitive FPS games.
My PS5 also hasn’t gotten a ton of usage playing PS5 games, but there are finally some interesting ones brewing now. It’s been nice as a “PS4 Ultimate” with backwards compatibility though.
The first game I played after getting my PS5 was… Bloodborne. I’d tried it on PS4 then sold the PS4 as it offended my eyes how ugly the game was back in December 2020. Two years later when the PS5 finally became available where I could just walk into my local store and buy it, it looked very pretty on the new PS5 hardware once the market calmed down. Such a delightfully weird and creepy game.
PvE games are for unskilled gamers. PlayStation and Switch are the preferred platforms for unskilled gamers. PC is the preferred platform for skilled gamers who can afford a good PC. Xbox is the preferred platform for skilled gamers who are poor (Xbox controllers are better for shooters than PlayStation controllers).
Biology catches up fast, and it doesn’t matter what gaming hardware you’re using. I’d suggest chasing fun or develop competency in a longer term skill instead of working on your “skilled” gaming clout.
But what do I know, maybe I just need to git gud.
Now, you are free to argue that Quake has been dead for a while and competition isn't as strong but the guy's reflexes seem just as good as they did 20 years ago. Yeah, he's been around for some time.
There are many formidable old school guys in their 40s, even 50s, that still play high skill games and they will kick your ass.
I'm still in the 40-50 range. My reflexes and hand-eye coordination haven't deteriorated significantly. It's not about age, it's about practice, talent, and will.
I still kick some ass in CS, TF2 and Quake. I get tired a lot quicker, of course. But it's mostly my unwillingness to waste my stamina on games rather than work.
For what it's worth though, the really skilled FPS players have always been on the PC side.
Nerds. The word you’re looking for is nerds.
It is interesting the US is trying to block the last place player in the market from growing, which is also the only US company in the market.
Because acquisitions make markets less competitive, not more. There are a zillion US companies making games, and if the platform gatekeepers become an issue, then the US can force them to open up their platforms and quit their rent-seeking.
This is just simply not true as a blanket rule.
Also, I don't understand what you're saying. Activision is not in the console market, only Microsoft is. Buying Activision makes the console market more competitive because it makes Microsoft's console more compelling in that market, a market where they are floundering.
You could also look at the game market, which as you say has a zillion US companies making games, and Activision under Microsoft would have to continue to compete in that market.
How does this reduce competition, and in what market?
It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.
> Buying Activision makes the console market more competitive
Why should the FTC care about the console market specifically rather than the gaming market in general?
> How does this reduce competition, and in what market?
The very notion of "console exclusives" reduces competition because it removes incentives to compete on hardware cost or quality and instead compete only on whatever IPs a company happens to own.
It isn't, which is why the FTC often approves mergers.
> Why should the FTC care about the console market specifically rather than the gaming market in general?
They should consider both.
> The very notion of "console exclusives" reduces competition because it removes incentives to compete on hardware cost or quality and instead compete only on whatever IPs a company happens to own.
Why is competing on hardware cost or quality more valid than competing on exclusive content? And if that's the rule, why is the company with better exclusive content, Sony, allowed to acquire more studios, like Bungie?
Both are 1) buying a game making company, 2) making a game, 3) withholding it from the competition.
There doesn't seem to be many examples of them buying studios to take existing cross platform megahits exclusive.
Edit: They apparently bought Bungie recently? Wikipedia kinda doesn't include it in their list of PlayStation studios in a normal fashion so I missed it. I suppose that is buying a big IP in Destiny (in reaction to the MS-AB takeover?), although that's basically a 1 game studio (next to no-one is really going to care about Myth or Marathon), so it's still a fair bit smaller than the sort of stuff proposed with MS and A-B.
Many may not like it but it is not about what is fair, but what keeps the market healthy.
But windows gaming isn't like console gaming. You don't have to pay license fees to microsoft to publish on windows - its a general purpose platform thats relatively open. It has nothing to do with the console market for you to count it except to purposely misrepresent the market.
It would make Microsoft more competitive/powerful
Yes, because no one you know has an XBox, it obviously means that Microsoft isn’t selling any…
IMO the only of the big 3 that can truly be said to "built is library" is Nintendo.
Bungie is puzzling. Frankly, I’m not even sure what’s there to buy. All they got is Destiny that’s a pretty so-so game popularity-wise.
Who else has Sony bought?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Studios
Secondly, most of those game studios already have a close relationship with Sony, they can be considered 2nd party, and mostly make PS games. Sony’s competitors aren’t losing out much.
P.S. Frankly, I don’t think Sony ever intended to be in the game development business - they are a hardware company. There is a pattern to the game developers they buy - almost all of them are “tech wiz” developers; i.e. optimisation gods while gameplay of their games are usually so-so. The raison d'être of their acquired studios are to showcase the power of their hardware and coincidently provide development tool chain feedback as well as development knowledge which Sony’s “ICE team” will then share with other developers, not compete with their 3rd party developers.
That said this might have change in recent years as exclusives become a differentiator for their console.
The PlayStation all started with Ken Kutaragi who worked in Sony’s digital research labs. It started as the “Play Station” a CD addon for the SNES. But due to contract disputes Sony got dumped for Philips in a very public fashion - probably Nintendo’s biggest mistake ever. Sony went ahead on its own and created the “PlayStation” (aka PS1 today) and the rest is history.
Don’t see where Sony Music comes into the story.
Sony purchased Bungie to essentially teach them how to make successful live service games, not for the IP. They hold so much power inside PlayStation studios that they, as per the recent The Last of Us factions leaks, review and determine if a multiplayer title meets their requirements for success (factions didn’t).
I don’t think it’s a good thing (as I personally disapprove of the way Destiny operates & see a focus on these sorts of games from Sony as a major blunder) but the business logic of the purchase is obvious.
>Spencer: Can I promise? I am able to promise, yes.
The kind of obnoxious reply I'd expect from somebody on Xbox live, not their chief.
Maybe he was thinking out loud, but they should have known full well what the judge was asking and by refusing to answer the clarified follow-up they seemed to be doing whatever they could to weasel out of saying anything meaningful.
If that was their response, I'd have no issue with it. I dislike the "technically I can but won't" answer followed by silence. It shows an attempt to deceive.
It's a prod to get people to say what they actually want, instead of asking a vague questions with a stronger implication because it waters down the actual meaning of the words and is as weaselly as the response. Asking for the ability, requesting an action and giving a command are different things. Doubly so in hearings by government officials.
"Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
You obviously have information that is counter to this, I for one would appreciate if you could produce it. Xbox executives can then be charged criminally and prosecuted.
Is that written enough for you? 4 seconds of googling.
I remember the Xbox and Playstation being prohibitively expensive. I just looked it up, the Playstation was $749 AUD [1] and the Xbox was $649 AUD [2]. I had to wait yeeeears for the price to fall so I could get an Xbox.
Today, I can get a Playstation 5 Digital Edition for $649 AUD on the Sony website, or $794 AUD for the "normal" edition from Amazon.
The Xbox series X is similarly priced, at $749 AUD.
Given inflation since then, these are prices many teenagers could realistically save up for now.
[1] https://www.arnnet.com.au/article/82336/ps2_debut_november_3... [2] https://news.microsoft.com/2002/03/14/xbox-goes-global-with-...
The PS1 cost 299$ at launch.
Nintendo64 cost 199$.
Here is an article comparing it:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/every-game-console-pric...
Did a lot of online gaming on the PS1 and N64?
Inflation is simply a manipulative way of covering up fraud, but those vomiting the fraud.
Your #1 debt is likely to be a fixed rate mortgage. That payment gets less in real terms every time there’s inflation. And even if it’s not yours it’s still most people’s. So most people are helped by this.
Student loans also have fixed rates.
As someone who built a high end gaming PC and skipped the PS3/360 and PS4/Xbox One generations, the value proposition of the PS5 is just too good compared to buying a fully specced out PC! Which sure, it can be argued a midrange PC is the actual competitor, but if I decided to start PC gaming again I’d 100% drop $2000 on a 4090, definitely a personal problem), but I had an ultra high end rig with a 2080ti and games were still stuttering in 4K, then the crypto mining boom happened and I sold my GPU for more than I originally paid for it, and bought a PS5.
To do real 4K gaming these days is something like $3500! That’s not even including if you want to use a good monitor instead of a TV to push all those pixels to. I almost convinced myself “well I might use it for ML”, but even then I’m better off renting off of Runpod for a few dollars an hour. It’d take years to break even and by then a new better GPU will be out.
Alternatively, playing on PS5 has been a dream. The Demons Souls remake is a shockingly beautiful game, one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen, and God of War Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 16 are games that just work. If I want to play them away from my couch (one of my favorite features of the Switch), my Steam Deck streams them flawlessly using Chiaki4Deck (after a little bit of admittedly annoying config and adding a wired connection to the PS5, it’s a totally seamless, lag free experience. Played for 5 hours yesterday without a single drop.)
Even with a top of the line GPU gaming on a PC with AAA titles like Borderlands 3 and Monster Hunter World felt fiddly and janky, HDR setup was always confusing, and I’d have to identify why things were causing microstuttering which took me MONTHS to figure out. I also learned that games just sort of add experimental bells and whistles that a $1200 video card couldn’t actually run so I’d have to spend hours tweaking the settings for each game no matter how much hardware I threw at it. It just got tedious.
Games sold on the consoles have around a 15 usd flat royalty for big titles, not sure how that affected low cost games at the time. The 360 needed 5 games to brake even, but I believe they had an attach rate of around 3 at launch and that was unreal and unexpected at the time.
It's actually doubtful whether they were really selling at a loss per se even then, most likely the notional loss represented amortizable R&D. Which is a loss on your annual balance sheet but - if you understand your business, can finance the R&D cost affordably and have a steady nerve so as to stick with the plan - this can be profitable eventually. The era of straight up dumping (exporting products for less than their BOM price, which may be illegal in some international trade rules) was last century. In the Sega era it really was possible you'd spend $100 on the actual product, sell it for $80 and figure you'll make up for it on royalties.
This needs to be noted that it’s average as in 5 games per unit sold. So two consoles and 10 games sold to one person. The attach rate is a term related to games sold with the console at time of console purchase.
360 for sure was selling for a loss on cogs, that was rectified with the Xbox one that I believe was 400 cogs for 500 retail. It frustrated a ton of folk because 360 was 300 retail, but this was a clear change to make the console profitable without sales since they were worried people were buying it as a media device, hence the media focus of the Xbox one.
Just to be clear they managed to reduce the cogs with the Xbox 360 small and sold them at a profit without license sales.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/microsoft-to-raise-prices-o...
Maybe it's not the consoles whoch are cheap. It's just you sitting on that 300k per year FAANG salary.
I don't play Activision/Blizzard games or use Xbox so I'm not really invested, but I tend to oppose market consolidation and monoculture whenever possible. That said, lately game releases have been pretty lackluster with some major flops and lots of remakes coming out. If the underdog thinks they can turn the tide by acquiring a major studio, I don't particularly want the government in the way either.
Consoles have admirable hardware. It is a pity that consoles are walled gardens.
Steam on PC is my choice for gaming because I like Valve's platform and I prefer the versatility of owning my hardware platform despite occasional problems with drivers. PC gamers are accustomed to finding solutions.
But it would be excellent if an older generation console could at least also run Debian or Pop!OS. As it is, the older consoles are just techno-waste.
I don't think I'll ever buy another console. I'll probably go with PC gaming instead.
Physical titles still exist, my local library rents out PS5 games.
Loot boxes are mostly in free-to-play titles. Sony's big-budget games like Returnal, God of War, Ratchet and Clank, Horizon, etc don't have any predatory monetization. In fact of the above only Horizon had DLC, a $20 expansion pack that was well recieved.
The hardcore market, sure. There is less these days. AAA games are more and more targeted at american adults who are farther away than ever, and we just had 2-3 years of COVID that actively pushed people closeby to be at distance. Online multiplayer has taken over in those regards.
For me personally, I was always a huge platformer fan, so CupHead and Rayman Origins/Legends were some of my go to multiplayer expeirences for more gaming heavy friends back in the day (i.e. 6-7 years ago). As well as Kirby Star Allies that had drop in multiplayer. it looks like the upcomig Sonic Superstars will also support multiplayer as well
You see fast less intrusive versions of this when they are the too in the AAA first party games from Sony and Nintendo.
Microsoft seems to not go that route, I suspect it's due to gamepass.
GoW seems to be available on Steam, but doesn't even hit top 100 currently played.
As someone who's looking forward to both new Elder Scrolls and Spider-Man 2, I've only considered buying a console for the second: I'll just update my PC for the first.
I also having a gaming PC where I use an Xbox controller, racing wheel, or VR controls.
I still don't understand why people like the PS5 haptics. To me, they don't feel like they add anything and just drain the battery.
I also find the the PS5 controller the most comfortable I've ever used. I was strictly an xbox controller guy through xbox 360 and ps4 eras but the ps5 controller won me over.
I have two PS5 controllers, one for the PS5 and one for PC, just so I don't have to bother resyncing every time. If the PS5 controller extra features worked on PC without a cable it would be the perfect controller.
And yea I have gamepass too but who needs an xbox when they have a PC and the PS5 has the console exclusives I like.
Just, to offer another counterpoint.
In which PvP shooters are you currently ranked Diamond or higher?
That's a new kind of insult LOL. In my case, the slimmer side of PS5 barely fits my setup in a small room. Maybe my case is uncommon, but Xbox Series X won't fit my setup.
Also I never once mentioned PlayStation - this is HN, not an IGN comment section. We talk about technology from the POV of the people who make it, not “gamers” or whatever.
[citation needed]
PS5 is really the only one of the two with any kind of a design identity to it. The Xbox Series is just a box.
At least the name is accurate.
Having said that I do personally agree that physically the Xbox looks better. The software experience of the Xboxes I’ve used, however, really do remind me I’m using a Microsoft device.
Microsoft doesn't know how to create a consumer product. The Xbox owners I know were also PC gamers at some point.
The PS5 is designed to play games.
I don't know what the Xbox is designed for, it's confusing l,
Microsoft's design choices have been consistently ghastly.
I begrudgingly accept my workplace choosing their platform.
Why would I pay for that experience?
If Microsoft buys Activision/Blizzard, it's safe to assume that future A/B games will go the same way, and only be available on Xbox or Windows. This is problematic because Activision's IP portfolio is massive (including huge console annuals like Call of Duty), and Blizzard games are still extremely popular. If a normal game studio acquisition is like a comet colliding and adding its mass to the Earth, this would be like the moon crashing into the Earth.
it shocks me every time how few people here seem to understand that scale changes things. is this not a forum frequented by SV techies?
The question that myself and others in the thread have been asking without getting a clear answer is how could this acquisition make Microsoft a monopoly in the gaming space?
Even with the scale there doesn’t seem to be any legitimate path to Microsoft becoming a monopoly: video games is a $200b a year industry. Activision Blizzard’s 2022 revenue was $7.5b and combining that with Xbox’s $15b revenue still doesn’t even surpass PlayStation’s $24b. Is that a monopoly? I don’t see it.
Most of the comments here are uninformed on the law and the underlying market dynamics. My job involves analyzing the games market and there is no reasonable support to the claim that this deal will significantly harm competition in itself. Various parties might not like it for various reasons, but it would be pretty bog-standard, business-as-usual in video games. Activision is big but its portfolio isn’t big enough to single-handedly sew up the market for long. Huge swings happen every decade and no content or IP is guaranteed to keep its influence for very long. Xbox is in a distant third among consoles and MS would lose more money by pulling their biggest titles from the biggest console platform (PlayStation) than they’d gain by muscling more device share. They’d also degrade the value of the product because cross-platform play is basically table stakes and gamers would move towards games they can play together. MS is proving all this by offering all other platforms access to said content (which Nintendo and most others have accepted, but Sony has performatively refused). Some smaller content will be held exclusive, but that’s the running standard in the industry and has been for all time.
So, the FTC really doesn’t have shit here. They’re going to lose the ongoing injunction case and by all likelihood MS will close the deal before the July 18th deadline.
The UK’s Competitive Markets Authority is also holding it up (but notably, no other major regulator has objected, including the EU which has the most regulatory credibility). Playstation has a huge corporate presence and its European HQ in the UK, so the CMA is likely driven by local lobbying strength combined with similar political motivations (further bolstered by pressure from the current FTC commissioners, which has been reported). The CMA’s objection is (amazingly) even more poorly constructed, based on the argument that this will make future “cloud gaming” markets uncompetitive. I’ll spare you the details, but that is even more comically ridiculous than the FTC case. Once the FTC loses this injunction, the CMA will have to fold or else they will be embarrassed as a regulatory body by Microsoft closing the deal over their objections and showing them to have no teeth (and no clue).
How did these acquisitions make big tech more competitive?
“Big Tech” tends to refer to the companies.
Edit: To clarify further, I’m not casting those claims about older Big Tech acquisitions as wrong or misinformed. Nor am I trying to make any specific argument about the Democrats’ strategy / Neo-Brandeisian thought here. Just directly answering the question I replied to. I’m quite confident that this particular case against Microsoft, as argued by the regulators, is quite weak and that the political tail is wagging the dog here.
Mobile.
The real tax on innovation is the device + platform + payments + services duopoly where the gatekeepers get to pick winners (typically their own), tax everything, force tech choices and update regimes, and keep the customer relationships.
It's maddening that general purpose computing and financial transactions became this. Owned by a handful of giants.
I'm not implying one answer or the other, because I definitely don't know.
But people will ALWAYS point out the edge cases such as banking apps not working on custom firmware/rooted devices, and somehow that makes Android very bad and very walled garden.
I have been gaming since Atari (though the first I bought with my own money was Dreamcast) and even versus the Xbox 360 I'd say the Xbox One has been the console I'm least satisfied by. And Microsoft's strategy with the S/X nonsense and games now not working as well on some versions of the console versus others has put the stake in it for me. I'm going to be extremely reluctant to ever buy another one of their consoles. This generation has almost completely turned me off gaming. A lot of the other changes in gaming (gambling, loot boxes, monetization, abandoning single player gaming) have not helped either, but MS has definitely shot themselves in the foot hard as far as I'm concerned.
My son has a Switch, it might not be as powerful, but Nintendo literally got everything right in the way MS got everything wrong. You can actually play the switch when you have 5 minutes to play. It doesn't do super long updates. The games always work. The games don't get slower when an update is applied, etc.. It has excellent single player games and excellent multiplayer in the same room games. A lot of their games have great deployability.
My 360 broke twice (RROD, DVD drive failure) and my PS3 also broke, and yet I would still take either of those back over the Xbox One any day.
My kid is 10 and the other thing is the game selection on Xbox is terrible for having games that adults and kids can actually play together. The % of games with an M rating on Xbox is so high, and the longer I've played the more the M games seem repetitive. There are a bunch of Playstation games we're quite jealous of, but we haven't jumped on getting a PS5, partially cause they were hard to get? We have a family member who got a PS5, when we go over it is definitely a lot more fun. Another family member got an Xbox Series X and it has been a disaster of bugs.
That being said, its also obvious that Microsoft is playing at a different game and that it is largely fanboys and news sites keeping the "console wars" alive. (And I guess this case now but that's something else entirely) Every game that Microsoft publishes is day one also on Windows and on Game Pass. The box that is an xbox is just another avenue to playing games from Microsoft, but not the only way they care about.
I have an Xbox because it is my preferred console to play on (Xbox Live, the UI, Controller, etc) if I am playing on a console instead of a PC. I have a PS5 but that is only for exclusives.
Personally I am hoping this deal goes through because I want Xbox to be taken more seriously. Not because I want Microsoft to control these specific games or I want xbox to "Win".
But because I am particularity worried about a cocky Sony. We saw it before with the PS3 erra and we are starting to see it again with the PS5. They are making certain decisions that are not gamer friendly (cross play, paying for third party exclusives, and paying for exclusive content being some key examples). My concern is that unlike the PS3 erra where they stumbled hard, gamers are not pushing back against it this time and Sony is just continuing what they have been doing. For me personally an unchecked Sony/Playstation power in gaming is worse than this deal going through. They are both harmful for gaming, but I don't see a choice outside of it.
It was taken seriously by the 360 era. MS just bleed away all the good will the following generation, ceding significant market share to Sony. Now Sony is riding on the momentum from the previous generation to an easy 1st place.
> They are making certain decisions that are not gamer friendly (cross play, paying for third party exclusives, and paying for exclusive content being some key examples)
Was Sony buying any exclusives before MS attempted to take over Activision-Blizzard? (Those that they fund don’t count since it makes no difference to their competitors - the games wouldn’t be available to them either way; either it doesn’t exist if Sony doesn’t fund it or it’s exclusive to Sony if Sony did.)
Yes they were, they have been doing it for years including in the PS4 generation. The distinction between funding and paying for however is a complicated one since we don't know whether or not something would have existed if it was not for Sony stepping in.
A few examples of this practice from Sony:
FF7 remake (3 years ago) and FF16 (there is no way in hell you can convince we either of those would not have been made without money from Sony)
We know from yesterday Sony tried to make Starfield exclusive
GhostWire Tokyo and Deathloop (both of these have since come to Xbox but it is unclear if this would have ever been the case if Microsoft had not bought Bethesda)
KOTOR remake that has yet to come out
Death Stranding (The exact situation for this is a bit unclear, but I doubt sony specifically funded it considering it is on Game Pass but not on Xbox)
It is not a hard to find a list of third party exclusives that Sony has paid for.
And again this also doesnt even get into the exclusive content for games. Meaning someone playing on another platform is spending the same amount of money and getting less of a game. "But its just one mission" I don't care, we spent the same amount of money. Off the top of my head I know of Call of Duty, Harry Potter, Destiny 2, and I know there are others.
Does Sony still do it now? I’m a bit out of the loop. Which games have they demanded exclusive content and are they timed exclusive to MS?
Edit: I think the real issue with MS buying Activision-Blizzard is games that were original multi-platform, i.e. available on PlayStation and Nintendo consoles, becoming exclusive to MS platforms. PlayStation and Nintendo consoles will lose games.
No one cares that God of War is exclusive to Sony’s machines. No one is losing anything - you can’t lose what you never had.
IMHO if you cannot stomach say Sony buying EA and making all their sport franchises exclusive to PlayStation then you shouldn’t be OK with the MS and Activision-Blizzard merge either.
No one loses games. Previously published games will still be playable. They may not have access to new titles in those series, but they were never guaranteed that anyway. Just like with console generations, sometimes you have to buy a new box to play the next game in your favorite series.
It seems that switch owners may even get access to Call of Duty, which they never would have without the aquisition.
Halo's fall from grace as an IP, for instance, cannot in any way be blamed on anyone other than Microsoft, at multiple times and with multiple bad decisions. It's not due to one bad big screwup with the Xbox one; it's an ever-continuing quality problem with Microsoft.
Don Mattrick fucked up good and proper and Sony owes him a huge debt of gratitude.
Put the blame where it belongs: Don Mattrick screwed up the positioning and announcement of the Xbox One and they were never able to recover from that.
I used to keep a Ps4pro for their exclusives and they certainly were enjoyable. But... Seeing previous exclusives now make its way to desktop has me a bit sad about missing out on high fidelity gaming. I could have enjoyed God of war, horizon, rdr2 at higher frame rates and resolutions, if I were just a little more patient.
I'm not happy about the way Epic wrings exclusives, I shouldn't be a hypocrite for Sony.
I have thought about that option, and if Sony does continue to actually put out games on PC I will likely consider it. But I hate how long of a wait it is. And then we see how badly some of the ports like the last of us launch.
I have two of their best XBOX and I'm loving the game pass and their "game streaming" actually works.
In my mind, you can't get better value than XBOX for console games.
My kids have the switch, with all the mario titles, they're super cool too. But in terms of winning, XBOX has the best value proposition + powerhouse.
Speaking of value, you should not be using Apple but go with Windows or Linux. The reason you went with Apple is the same reason people go for Playstation instead of Xbox.
Sony sees this as a competitive threat and EU regulators are bad so don’t understand what’s happening - their restriction of the activision sale is itself anti-competitive because it locks in the existing business model (which is favorable for Sony) and reduces real business model competition which would benefit consumers.
All this focus on exclusives is dumb and part of the old business model.
What I don't get in return a _some_ JRPG titles that ps5 has access to. On the other hand, I also have a switch (which has some exceptionally great exclusives + some of the missing JRPGs), and quite a lot of the gaming portfolio is covered by having xbox+switch.
The only thing I refuse to do nowadays is playing on PC, at all. I am tied to this unhealthy seating position most of the day already, and with consoles I can move to the couch, not to mention multiplayer there. I get why PC gaming is better in several aspects, but body posture is the single thing I am no longer accepting here.
And I was able to get a Lenovo SFF Ryzen 5600 for £300 from ebay, which is cheaper, smaller and faster than the current consoles.
It's a shame that Valve don't distribute the current Steam Deck Linux, but HoloOS does effectively the same and that plugs into the TV just as well.
You don't need to compromise with PC gaming, and when I upgrade I won't be forced to buy all my games again to carry on playing Overcooked and Moving Out with the kids.
Maybe the CPU is faster but I doubt the GPU is.
So, unless you want to permanently move your PC (and lose your desk setup with a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse) OR to have another PC dedicated for your TV setup in a living room, then no, you can't play on PC while sitting a couch.
Sony/Xbox has the exact same amount of 1st party studios, yet Sony managed to deliver more games at a consistent rate, not only that, but Sony released a single SKU as opposed to 2 for Xbox, so they didn't confuse their customers, worse.. Xbox choose very confusing naming
Also Sony puts in the effort, a very unique controller with haptic feedback, they invest in VR, and now remote play
It's easy to call it "console wars", Sony just puts in more effort and as a result sells more consoles, that's as simple as that
Microsoft has had blunder after blunder since the later ages of he 360. their goals were loftier but were never realized. Even to this day, Spencer seems to say that Playstation isn't their primary competitor, it's Amazon and Google. They don't necessarily "just" want to be a dedicated gamer box. They tried and failed in the 2010's to be that "One stop home entertainment system" and much of their 2020's seems to be shaped by trying to become the one service you play on all devices, anytime, anywhere. We'll see how it works this decade.
E.g. properly recognize the market power of a platform owner, and not let them get away with any abuse.
They're going all in on Xbox GamePass - and to be honest, that's the future. Soon, hardware will be irrelevant, and we'll be streaming AAA titles on our phones.
Why? Because mobile gaming has outpaced console and PC combined. Everyone has a phone- and everyone will want a GamePass subscription. Apple is trying this (via App Store), but didn't go all-in. Google cancelled their Stadia project. Amazon is floundering.
Sony is happy with how this is turning out, because they think they can win on exclusivity. But it's only going to give them the lead for a little while.
How is this a big revelation? Exclusivity deals have been a part of the console market since forever.
I agree they’re a bad thing for consumers, but I think this is a disingenuous argument since exclusivity deals benefit Microsoft just as much as Sony, and this acquisition is effectively just a giant version of one.
> Consider a statement from Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s testimony at a 2011 congressional hearing:
> We face an extremely competitive landscape in which consumers have a multitude of options to access information.
> Or, translated from PR-speak to plain English:
> Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.
I bought a PS5 and there's almost no games for it that aren't already on steam.
It's incomprehensible to me how Sony could win the console war when all the AAA games on PlayStation are either from somewhere else or are painfully cinematic.
And despite spending weeks on a couch stoned with a mate playing thru halo...I still despised what hid behind their console-y veneer. Corporate bloodlust.
Whether it was their unique approach to online play (pay you bastards) or their game store shelf tactics (put us where the bastards will pay the most) or their absolute bs that gaming had to always be AAA (so those bastards pay us AAA prices)...I was always sad to see they didn't die.
From idiotic naming, Nazi like banning, jacked up game prices, exclusivity and religion shenanigans, hardware format warmongering, censorship where it didn't need to be and none where it should have been (I'm looking at you uno 360), or just plain creation of the most toxic gamer population known to man (Xbox live kids)...I one day hope to hear them go the way of Sega because unlike Sega, they deserve it.
Anecdotal, but I know a huge number of people that play games casually, and almost all of them have playstations if they arent PC/switch. Why? I have no idea. Nearly none of them have any interest in any playstation exclusives, they just bought a playstation because. Why? No idea.
Sony has no answer to Forza Horizon—open world arcade racer.
There's lots of first party titles MS has no one to one answer for either. They don't have a big mascot 3rd person shooter platform game like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart.
HN readers don't use gaming consoles? "Nintendo" is more of a household name than "PlayStation" or "Xbox"? Doesn't sound like a objective analysis to me.
Based on that, I’d agree that Nintendo and Sony are on pretty comparable footing - certainly not that one brand is notably more widespread than the other.
This time around the Xbox Series X is arguably sleeker, but by God is the controller pure trash.
The Xbox’s controller vibrations resemble those of a cheap trimmer, whereas the Playstation’s controller has a much nicer feel.
It’s also a fact that many games are better optimized for PS5, even though on paper the Xbox should have a slight edge.
I don’t care about console wars, and I’m glad I have both of them, but some games are only on PS5, which is another reason people opt for it.
I've had both playstation and Xbox, although I stopped after the original and the 360, and I can't imagine completing something like Celeste on an Xbox controller.
“I haven’t watched TV in 10 years. Do people still watch TV”?
It’s not hard to find real data that goes against your anecdotes.
I had an OG Xbox, and the dpad was horrible (ignoring the size of the thing). I hate the disk shape dpad and like the traditional cross that Playstation offers.
If they made a controller that was nice I might reconsider my options, but after also having to deal with Microsoft locking hard disks, and then doing the same during the 360 era soured my attitude towards them. And this is ignoring all the other bad will that Microsoft has generated over the decades.
I've stuck with Playstation, Nintendo and Steam and I don't see anything Xbox that I'm missing so unless something fundamental changes, I'll stick with Playstation over Xbox.
Why would anyone buy Xbox? No idea.
You might have just fallen into the trap you were warning us about. Do they know or care about "gamepass"? They know "playstation" because that's what their friends had when they were kids, etc. Brand can be incredibly strong.
> exclusives (this generation, there aint a huge difference)
The difference doesn't need to be huge, it just needs to be there. For me personally, the backcatalog of From Software games (including 2020 Demon's Souls) and Returnal were enough to push me towards PS5.
> the majority of people probably have a switch because nintendo
I do also own a switch. It's nice and all, but for me competes in a different niche: portable indie game machine. Anecdotally, I also don't know anyone where a Switch displaces PC/PS/Xbox, so the non-overlapping group logic doesn't really apply.
By the same token, I would happily own an Xbox as well if it had the games I want, but it's severely lacking in that department.
Death Stranding came to PC ~7 months after it released on PlayStation, which isn't too bad if they were focusing on finishing the game for the PS release rather than working on the port.
The delay in the FFVII remake was painful though, ~2 years before hitting Steam. It's a shame to see FFXVI release only on PS5 as well, the game looks interesting.
I dont think you know the HN demographics, I would assume lot of them are gamers.