I think they fucked up with the series s/x. The Balder’s Gate 3 release made me realize that their policy that games needed to have the same features enabled for both the s and x essentially meant that even if you spend the extra money on the x, it will be held back by the s merely existing.
Comment on Xbox Console Sales Continue To Crater With Massive 42% Revenue Drop - Slashdot
Carighan@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Well… could it be that they saturated?
I mean, the consoles been out for a while, I suspect at this point everyone remotely interested has one?
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 4 months ago
optissima@possumpat.io 4 months ago
That’d make sense, but that’s still a negative sign, as PS5/Switch have yet to meet saturation.
MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Thing is, they don’t need to sell consoles anymore. They’re in the game pass business now. This is why they’re pushing gamepass on phones, PCs, Samsung TVs and Firesticks. They don’t really care about selling you a box under the TV anymore since they’re usually sold at or near a loss anyway. They just want you on the subscription wherever you can play it.
Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world [bot] 4 months ago
I think I’ll just stick to playing retro games in emulators for free without a subscription. Sure I miss out on the latest and greatest games, but graphics aren’t everything to me, the gameplay is more important to me. Plus, I really despise having to have subscriptions for everything. If Game Pass works for people, more power to those gamers, but I’m tired of giving what little income I have to billion dollar companies. /rant
Aielman15@lemmy.world 4 months ago
“MS doesn’t care about selling Xbox console” is a lie they have been pushing for a while now because their console sales have been tanking for that many years. They would LOVE to sell more consoles, they just can’t, so they attempt to spin the story a different way so that the shareholders are still happy. What, you want to know about sales? But who cares about sales, it’s all about engagement! Look at those big, happy numbers we are showing you!
Nobody enters a business with the idea that “whatever, even if we don’t sell enough, it’s fine, we still had a great time”. MS didn’t became the world’s biggest corporation by being lazy.
That’s great until you consider the fact that GamePass doesn’t operate in a vacuum. To put games on their service, they have to pay developers. They then need to please shareholders who want subscribers and revenue to increase. The fact that they increased the price twice in a row and effectively doubled the price of GamePass overnight suggests that they are not pleased with the current revenue. Heck, we don’t even know how many of those 34m subscribers are paying customers, and how many just got into GP by paying $1 or benefitting from some other deal. I was one of those 34m back in February, because I got a year for free with the Rewards program (back when it was still worth something; they axed that one as well, because of course).
Sure, but that’s the same as Don Mattrick asking customers to “stick to their X360”. The choice is not between buying games on XOne or subscribing to GamePass on your phone. The choice is between an Xbox, a PS5, a Switch or a PC. Two of those choices means that they have lost a customer (you can’t subscribe to GP on PS or Nintendo consoles), and I’d be curious to know how many people are subscribing for GP on PC instead of just buying games on Steam. You don’t need GP to play online on PC as you do on console, and the prices are cheap enough that you are probably saving money just buying those games instead of renting them.
And let’s not talk about how terrible the user experience is on their PC storefront compared to literally any other competing storefront - I’d rather buy a game on Epic than use their Xbox store, and that says a lot. I had a game on PC thanks to the Play Anywhere program (bought it on Xbox, got the PC version as well), but I had to buy it again on GoG to mod it because MS considers their game files more precious than the holy grail itself and wouldn’t let me go anywhere close to them, let alone touch them.
deranger@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Just wanted to comment that the Xbox/MS store games are fine now. They used to be in some shitty encrypted directory but not anymore. I have Gamepass for free from a ton of Microsoft rewards points and primarily play GP games on my Xbox, but I’ve played a few on PC as well and I’ve not found it to be too much different from Steam. You can go to a directory and see all the game files as expected. The always online bit sucks though, the recent Microsoft outage due to Cloudstrike kept a lot of people from playing games.