Looks like top management has completely given up on gaming following the disastrous acquisitions of Activision and Zenimax.
They’ve killed their first party studios, their hardware and now their last remaining thing which was the game pass.
Always remember, Fitgirl is free.
This was always inevitable. The slow, agonizing death of the console has been obvious since the seventh generation, as has the methods by which that death would come: the PC and the necessity of subscriptions.
Consoles are now just a cost-cut PC and they’re necessarily going to be a worse deal than a PC because they’re unable to perform basic general-purpose computing tasks.
One-time sales simply aren’t good enough to create the infinite growth capitalists desire, and the profit margins and timeframes of (especially AAA) game development are simply too scary for capitalists to want to pony up the cash. We’re going to continue seeing this sort of retraction happen across the entire entertainment industry and in other industries in coming years.
Execs forcing MTX and Subscriptions into AAA titles is the death of AAA Gaming. Most AAA are shit nowadays anyways.
Absolutely. Monetization has always been the problem. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall necessitates worse and worse monetization schemes.
It’s a mirror to the death of the weekend car. Something purpose built for cruising or offroading. Everything in every aspect of daily life is becoming general purpose.
I’m not smart enough to know this, but it seems like consoles would be really useful if they were more self-contained? Like games come in cartridges and sometimes those cartridges have additional hardware so the game runs smoother with better graphics than it would on PC. I suspect this is too costly, which is why consoles have moved away from the cartridge.
One of the advantages of the Super NES, for example, was you just plugged games in and there were zero load times. I know the N64 and various Gameboy games had additional hardware built into some cartridges to do things the console wouldn’t normally be able to do.
I think if a major company (Sega?) put out something like the Playdate it would do very well. The desire for more graphical power was a mistake and limitation breeds creativity.
Unfortunately, cartridges are crazy expensive, especially if you’re adding extra hardware. Baba Is You and Undertale are both great games that would seem like ideal games for a simple modern console, but tbh I would not pay $140 for either game.
On the same treadmill as every other media subscription service. The market demands growth which is fine when you’re growing your subscriber base. When you’ve reached subscriber saturation, the only thing you can do is start raising the price. This was always the end-state for Game Pass.
Game Pass was always doomed from the start. It’s not a Netflix situation where there’s functionally infinite content out there that would otherwise be more difficult/expensive to procure, so the price point of a subscription was never going to work long term. Why would you pay $30/month to play AAA releases when there’s only ever 4-6 AAA releases in a given year, and you probably only care about maybe 2 of them at $60 a piece? Why would you pay $30/month to rent indy games that cost $20 to own forever? You’d be better off taking that $30/month and throwing it into a savings account to pay for future games and pocketing whatever you don’t spend every few months.
Phil Spencer is a prime example of failsons never facing consequences for their ineptitude even when they’re objectively fucking over their fellow capitalists.
Phil Spencer did literally nothing good for Xbox it’s crazy. The 80 billion deal for Activision and 20 billion for Bethesda is crazy.
Gamefly makes it work with plans going from $9-$23 per month, but all of their tiers have more games than MS Game Pass does and has them available for all consoles + PC, so it’s a much better value proposition if you’re the kind of person who wants to play a different game every week or so. The only hangup is dealing with sending DVDs through the mail, but for a huge section of the market that’s still faster than downloading.
I always thought the point of Game Pass was to starve their competition, not to make money itself
Why would you pay $30/month to play AAA releases when there’s only ever 4-6 AAA releases in a given year, and you probably only care about maybe 2 of them at $60 a piece? Why would you pay $30/month to rent indy games that cost $20 to own forever?
no joke. i know there are doofuses out there that will happy keep adding to their subscriptions of various services/products, because $8, $10, $15, $30 a month “isn’t much”, and maybe im showing my age, but video games were generally a cheap proposition. systems were expensive, so you only got one and you buy a game a year, it ends up being pennies per hour.
i think most people who play video games are doing so on a pretty limited budget, because its a hobby that lends itself to people on a budget. you get a game a year and play the shit out if it. it ends up being far cheaper per hour than going to the movies or paying for cable tv, even back when movies were a few bucks and cable wasn’t like more than $40/mo.
Entertainment companies keep trying to pull shit at exactly the moment consumers are looking for where to cut expenses.
This is the sort of environment where successful consumer boycotts can just spring up organically because hey, we could be spending that money better elsewhere
Fitgirl is not Empress. I got confused. Please don’t blame me for my poor neurology.
Fitgirl is a chud who spreads transphobic screeds in her readmes
Are you sure? I’ve seen this from empress but not fitgirl. Searching just brings up old drama threads between the two of them with empress being transphobic.
the readme is usually a text file most people ignore, that’s downloaded along with the game.
with instructions on how to get it going and sometimes some ramblings of the packager/cracker or whatever.
I know what a readme/nfo is. Empress was including transphobic ramblings in her NFOs, but I’ve never seen this from fitgirl. The reason he might be confusing them is there was a big drama between the two a few years ago, and empress was being super transphobic at that time. Along with them both being women, the only two I can think of from the piracy scene tbh.
iirc that was around when the harry potter game was coming out right. yeah i get what you mean now.
deleted by creator
I’m pretty sure that’s Empress not Fitgirl.
You’re right. I’m permanently confused. Not on this particular issue, but in general.
You can’t comeback from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbWgUO-Rqcw
And they never did. Get fucked zionist cucks
lol this video is so funny.
“Games” should be the word that gets over said in these launches.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
took long enough
When it went up from $15 to $20 I stopped paying automatically, figured I’d just sub some months. Like when Blue Prince came out, I paid for a month.
Now it’s doubled? I’ll never re-up. I have a Series X — I’ll never buy a game new for Xbox at this point.
When my last computers went out, I replaced them with Macs. They doubled the price of Microsoft 365 so I dropped that too. iWork is fine (and there’s LibreOffice for non-Mac users (and for us as well) and that looks like it’s gotten better than last time I tried it). For free, I’m not complaining. If I were, I’d have decent options.
I feel like Microsoft is taking a nose-dive in more than just gaming.
When my last computers went out, I replaced them with Macs.
yikes
Mac hardware and software are decades ahead of Microsoft equivalents right now, if someone isn’t interested in Linux or high-end desktop gaming it’s completely reasonable to swap.
Yeah, I know, right? Imagine not needing all that spyware. It’s actually pretty great.
I can’t imagine having a chain so tightly around my neck that my reaction to seeing someone else lose theirs is “yikes.”
Yikes, indeed.
there’s some art software that’s better on mac but that’s about it. the hardware costs more because of brand rubes. i’m not defending microsoft but the user-case for macs is quite a bit narrower
Apparently putting all your resources in the copilot basket doesn’t work out well for other products.
My work computer has a copilot button on the keyboard…aging about as well as the Rdio button on my Roku remote.
In the future, they’ll have a billion instances of copilot subscribed to game pass at $100/month. The copilot instances will do mundane office tasks to make the money needed to subscribe. It’s foolproof!
and the oceans will steadily simmer
Microsoft is taking a nose-dive in more than just gaming
yes
this is all because of wokeness
$29.99/month
They saw the Switch 2 post record sales and decided people are willing to pay more. What they’ve failed to understand about that is that Switch 2 does for Switch games what PS2 did for PS1 games, it makes them better, and it works better. So even with underwhelming launch titles and increased price of games people still saw the value in getting it if they currently play their Switch, which they do.
The success of the Switch 2 is going to cause other very poor decisions from execs that don’t realise why.
Switch 2 is still a very bad deal imo. I’m just waiting for the Switch Emulator scene to start again so I can play like the 2 Nintendo games I want to play.
That it might be but it’s the fastest selling nintendo console of all time
They went all in on LLMs.
lmao
I mean the last step is to try to rentseek from steam
This is the main reason Valve invested so heavily in Proton (it was an act of self-preservation, not of kindness). They could smell that coming from miles away the moment Microsoft integrated their own app store into Windows.
Any port in a storm. I’m just glad there a slush fund for open source that isn’t just Red Hat/IBM
Good god Xbox dropped the damn ball. I remember the launch presentation for the Xbox One. It was coming in with HEAT. Coming off the xbox 360 (which had some issues, but was up against the ps3 so it did well), everyone was excited for the next Microsoft machine. But then, that E3 presentation would be a sign of were Xbox would be going for the next decade. They were going for a home multimedia system, but they focused far too much on TV and streaming. OOO hdmi passthrough, OOO kinect, but where are the games? Well, they are region locked, have always on DRM, and are being locked from resale. And of course, Xbox live now comes with games, moving to a subscription model entirely. Since then, the Xbox series X and S have less features, less games, and less love from fans.
I’m doing my part by not buying any games touched by any of the studios acquired by Microsoft, and certainly not a locked down gaming console where it’s a general purpose PC that… only plays video games? And doesn’t let you use it in any other way for any other purpose? Lol. Lmao, even.
