A forum for discussing and organizing recreational softball and baseball games and leagues in the greater Halifax area.
Yep, Xbox Is Bleeding Out
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I think it’s more about tsunamis of content now. Graphics have been on a track of diminishing returns for ages now. Today it’s all about generating hundreds of skins, weapons, badges, hats, drops, whatever. It would explain why everybody’s salivating over generative AI.
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After Xbox one, I was unable to understand what the next version was. And when people can't even name the product, then yeah.
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Microsoft is an empty shell of a company drifting on the momentum of it's achievements from 20 years ago. It's another victim of shareholder sharks. It's taking time to die, but it's getting closer. There's hardly any Microsoft products that are worth a damn these days.
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they put all thier development into AI, and they are frantically trying to cram it into everything else,.
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Neglected Pixels? Lol, truth is they were always poorly made midrange phones sold at high end prices. Google has never made good hardware, not even accidentally.Literally never heard this opinion before. Why are they bad?
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Neglected Pixels? Lol, truth is they were always poorly made midrange phones sold at high end prices. Google has never made good hardware, not even accidentally.Don’t worry, they’ll kill off and abandon the pixel line soon enough. Remember Nexus? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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I’ll play out my remaining games that I purchased for my Series X and then bail for the PlayStation (or maybe steam box) ecosystem. I’ve never owned a PlayStation or steam computer, I went straight from Dreamcast to Xbox and have been buying each generation. They got online gaming right, but now they’re so rudderless it’s astonishing. What a shame, after the 360 they had all the momentum and squandered it.
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Next victim of their downward spiral: gamepass and with it, the Xbox brand and the IP they own. I wonder who will they sell it to or if they'll sit on it.A couple months ago when the Game Pass price hike was announced, I checked my profile to see what tier I was in: how much I was paying. Turns out my account had expired, was tied to a credit card I haven't had for a while. I really only play single- player games and apparently nothing on Game Pass interested me.
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But what if we cram it full of AI bloat/spyware? Could we entice you then? - Microsoft, probably
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Neglected Pixels? Lol, truth is they were always poorly made midrange phones sold at high end prices. Google has never made good hardware, not even accidentally.My pixel 1 phone was fine. Went back to Samsung after that though.
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Don’t worry, they’ll kill off and abandon the pixel line soon enough. Remember Nexus? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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We’ve seen the buyout/burn down methodology against a lot of smaller companies; it sounds a bit like Microsoft is doing that internally to Xbox division. It’s all I can think of to explain so much of the intentional damage. So, the console war is now basically Nintendo, Sony, and Valve.
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One of the main retail store in my country always had a big fucking toys catalog for Christmas. 100s of pages. It has like 15 for gaming this year. One reference to Xbox. Only one. It's not the console. It's not an accessory. It's not a game. It's the ROG handheld. It's wild how low it is. Even when people mocked PS3, it was still fine.
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Microsoft just messed up the whole naming convention after the 360 I think. You had the Xbox "one" which was a name people often used to refer to the original Xbox. Then you have an Xbox One S. Then Xbox series X which is a genuinely terrible name. Oh, and the Xbox series S which is not the Xbox One S. Sony to their credit got it right from the beginning. Simple 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. No medals for guessing what the name of the next Playstation will be.Yeah, as someone who has never owned an Xbox I have little to say about the Original, I remember the 360 as an unreliable red ring of death piece of junk, the One had that galaxy brained name. That's the kind of decision you can't make snorting normal people cocaine, you've got to have that Fortune 500 executive cocaine to name the third product in a series the "One." The "One" was announced as being a privacy invasion machine that might someday have video games patched onto it; always on internet connection and a required Kinect. That got backpedaled, and everything else I know about that console was Yahtzee saying there weren't any games for it then he stopped mentioning it. After the "Please stop calling it the XBone", was there a One S that isn't the Series S? And the Series S and Series X are almost as bad as Linux software names. Best Buy employees across the English speaking world have to stop to enunciate "The Series ESS, or the Series ECKSS?" It's like they watched Nintendo kick themselves in the dick naming a console the Wii U, and took it as a challenge. Microsoft has done an amazing job generating apathy for their gaming division.
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Microsoft is an empty shell of a company drifting on the momentum of it's achievements from 20 years ago. It's another victim of shareholder sharks. It's taking time to die, but it's getting closer. There's hardly any Microsoft products that are worth a damn these days.
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Games, like movies and TV, have become so expensive to make because studios and publishers have consolidated so much that they can’t keep the machine running with modest budgets to make modest profits. They have to slop together content with the lowest effort to extract the highest revenue from microtransactions and season passes because every game has to be a Call of Duty/Fortnite/Pokemon level hit or the studio is shuttered by the publisher. Great games are still being made, just like great movies that aren’t remake or superhero slop are being made. Just not from big money but independent studios instead.Well, putting together a trailer with Aerosmith or Beatles music playing over it isn't helping the ballooning "development costs" either. Neither is studios overhiring and then figuring out you can't just hire 500 people and then not let them go. Game studios have become bloated. Overstaffed. And so have their games. They just can't understand not every game needs to be a 150GB+ open world game, or have the latest realistic graphics. Small games are okay, good even. Imagine how much more detailed a game could be from a AAA studios if it launched with highly stylized retro inspired graphics. They will never do this of course, but just imagine it. Imagine how much more there could be, with way less time and money being required to do it. A single barrel that might take an artist a whole day to make could easily mean multiple variants of barrel in the same time. They could drop a 20GB game that feels like a 200GB game, and do it in like 6-12 months. It would be so easy to split their already massive studios into like 20 smaller teams of 50 or less people to work on these kinds of smaller games and they could pump them out quickly. Just flood the market with these highly concentrated titles. But they won't, because its easier to convince a shareholder to make billions from a single game that looks really good visually but plays like trash with MTX for short term profit than it is to convince them to play the long game and make trillions with the volume of smaller games sales and the massively reduced development costs. Its all about short term profit these days, and its why all the businesses in the world seem to be racing each other to the bottom. Because why play the long game.when you might be dead before you hit the jackpot? Nevermind that you can't take any of it with you to the grave.
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The writing has been on the wall for a while. I remember hearing quotes about wanting to turn Xbox into a Steam competitor back in like 2018. I was honestly surprised when they released the Series. I was pretty sure we would get some sort of streaming only console after the One X|S. I imagine going forward, in addition to the streaming services, we are going to see Xbox leveraged as “certification” for other manufacturer’s hardware where consumers can be assured that this device meets some set spec for this year’s Xbox games.They couldn't go full steaming at that point, X Cloud wasn't fully ready, and gamer sentiment was against it on the whole. The Series S was intended for this use, but the timing was off. So they set about building up infrastructure using massive AI investment money, which also increased the price of hardware, eventually releasing a console costing over $1000 pricing most gamers out of owning the top end hardware, making the Series S type devices much more appealing, and getting them onto the streaming service, raking in fixed income off everyone, and raising prices when the investors want another payout.
