Was funny when they said they needed more original games like Hi Fi rush after firing the people that made Hi Fi rush.

The problem at this point is not so much that they don't have games - they have released plenty in the past few years and most have been received positively.

The problem is that they released those games too late, and by that point, the ship had already sailed. After a streak of disappointing years with the XOne, they needed strong titles to pair up with XSeries. Instead, they released jack shit for an entire year, and after that the disappointment just grew further with the likes of Halo Infinite, Starfield and the weird vampire game nobody asked for.

By that point, everyone already got themselves a PS5, a Switch, a gaming PC or a handheld device. Xbox needed to show their fans they believed in their mission and were capable of delivering strong titles on their platform, but everyone saw their releases and said "Meh".

The strong titles eventually came, but by that point they had already decided to port them over to the competition to offset the cost, and everyone saw the writing was on the wall for the platform.

Spencer can go on stage spewing whatever bullshit he wants, but nobody outside of the most diehard Xbox fans believe that the platform has a future - and it's very hard to convince people to invest on your platform when it's not certain how many more years it will be supported, and whether your store will remain accessible or shut down a few years down the line.

Have you considered firing half the workforce and pushing AI harder? I think that might fix it.

They had all that free marketting from people assuming the third one would be the 720 and they ditched it in favor of calling it the Xbox One, which everyone was already using for the name of the first Xbox. Still baffled by that one.

Yeah, totally agree on this. If you put the last two names in front of me and asked which was newer, I’d have no idea. The new one has multiple versions too so it makes it more confusing.

I mean, after the 360 they had XXXbox sitting right there and they acted like they were too good for it. Prudes.

Microsoft suck at naming things in general. It's a problem across every single branch of the business, people keep calling Office 365 0365 because Microsoft insists on calling it O365 and people think that's a zero. Also the name makes no sense anyway, why not call it Microsoft Office Online?

Then we have Microsoft Azure, except they renamed that to Entra despite the fact that both names are stupid. Then of course there is the entirety of the Windows OS lineup.

Don’t know what you mean. Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X all make perfect sense and leave zero grounds for confusion at all

I think It's called Xbox Series 365 Office Copilot Pro+ for .NET

Microsoft is trying to make Xbox into Windows: Where 3rd parties make the hardware and then license the platform from Microsoft. It's a vastly more profitable model. Especially if they get all those end users signed up for a subscription service.

The problem is that the world thinks of "Xbox" as a console (and a specific kind of controller). To pull this off Microsoft is going to have to re-brand Xbox entirely by making people think of it more like a game-specific app store that runs on Windows and special handheld hardware. It won't be easy.

There's a bigger problem with this plan though: No real coordination with the Windows OS team. Windows on handhelds sucks. The past twenty fucking years of Windows development has been almost entirely focused on improving enterprise features with very little attention paid to end users or gaming.

Growth in Windows gaming has come despite Microsoft's investments. Not because of them. In fact, I'd argue that if it weren't for Steam, Windows—as a gaming platform—would be a fraction of what it is today.

Don't get me wrong, though! I love this new Xbox roadmap! Windows gaming has been holding back Linux desktop adoption for far too long. The latest benchmarks that show games on SteamOS vastly outperforming the new Xbox-branded handhelds pretty clearly demonstrates all that bashing of Windows by Linux nerds was deeply accurate.

It turns out that Linux on the desktop really is superior! 🤣

the xbone was the last console I bought. Soured the pot so bad on what I enjoyed about console gaming. I already had a PC, but still enjoyed the couch casual sessions that seemingly don't exist, and haven't for over a decade

Nah, I'll just keep gaming on a cheap Linux PC and fuck ever buying a console again. Honestly at this point a 5 year old GPU gives you access to 99% of all games ever made, why spend so much to play 4 shitty 'AAAA' games a year?

We passed the point of diminishing returns for graphics years ago. There's no point in keeping up with the latest hardware anymore.

But consider... Steam Deck.

Bungie didnt want to make halo games anymore though

Microsoft's original plan was to own the living room the way they own the office space. Not just gaming, but all your movies, TV, shopping, etc. could be done through the XBox.

Kinect was a particularly big jump in that regard. There were demos of AR-type stuff where you could see yourself wearing clothes you might want to buy. You could move around and the clothes on screen would move with your body. There's some promo videos of that, but nothing concrete ever came of it.

Now they have slagging sales for two generations, and a AAA industry that struggles to make a real hit and is laying off a lot of people. They can't even hold onto the core gaming market much less get their tendrils into the rest of the living room. They then release a handheld that's basically an upgrade of an existing handheld that wasn't selling very well, but now with XBox branding.

Is this a problem for the rest of us? No, not really. There's plenty of alternatives, and we don't need to care. Is this the result the money people at Microsoft envisioned when they started this ~25 years ago? No, not at all.

I think that xbox controller are the best controllers for PC, so I don't need all the advanced features, but otherwise, you are right.

Their market is now clearly gamepass + Windows. Microsoft is banking on their market share to sell gamepass and capture the market.

That'd still be better than Xbox S, Xbox Series X, Xbox One S

Streaming has plateaued, and I don't see anyone overcoming that plateau. The console market is coming to an end, but the transition is to PC gaming, not streaming, and we can measure that.

Steam will end up pushed out of the market

This has been explicitly attempted 3 times already, and that really didn't work out well for anybody who tried it.

Epic Games Store still resorts to bribing people with free games to keep their monthly active user numbers up, hemorrhaging money to attract users who are rarely interested in anything more than freebies.

EA and Ubisoft tried to forgo Steam releases in favor of their own stores and launchers in an attempt to keep 100% of the revenue. They eventually relented, releasing their games on Steam again. Even Blizzard joined in, adding Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 to Steam.

And Microsoft's attempt to dethrone Steam by releasing games through the Windows app store just ended up with Valve funneling considerable resources into helping Linux and WINE become a viable alternative to Windows for gaming.

Unless Valve enshittifies or legal shenanigans ensue, they're pretty unlikely to be pushed out of the market. No single game or game series is good enough to capture the entire market of Steam users and permanently drive them to alternative platforms. On top of that, Steam has a huge following of users who are loyal to the company, which is both insane and insanely hard to compete against.

or they will also become Streaming Platforms

Maybe, maybe not. I don't see it happening, though. Valve makes money hand over fist from digital sales alone, and they have more to lose in pissing off their customers by selling subscriptions than they have to gain by selling subscriptions.

I am concerned about GOG and PC hardware prices, though.

I can't see streaming games being anything other than a niche market. It puts the burden onto the streamer, in order to be competitive they look after constantly be upgrading their offering, they will have to have multiple server centres around the world, they will always be beholden to crappy ISPs who just don't upgrade their infrastructure.

With local hardware you shortcut all of that, upgrading of your hardware is done by the user so they're not going to complain if it's out of date, you don't have to have any server centres, and the ISP issues either don't matter for single player games that were massively reduced for multiplayer games, now they don't actually have to send video over the connection. .