Reportedly, some third-party video game publishers aren’t sure why they should keep making and supporting games for Xbox consoles due to poor sales in Europe.
It’s been going on for years now, ever since Microsoft abandoned Gamescom and pretty much gave up on a European presence.
https://www.pcinvasion.com/microsoft-not-attending-gamescom-or-tokyo-game-show/
Seems like they did F up with the Series S, making it harder to develop for Xbox. It’s a bit of a shame, because I really liked the S for what it is: I was spending a lot of time in a different city for work, having many free evenings in an apartment, so I bought one and used it to watch movies/series and catch up on some games.
Now that I’m not traveling anymore, I stick to my PS5, and my Series S is in a box for many months now, though I’ll probably use it again when the new Senua game comes around. This shows that another key things would be a strong collection of exclusives to get people to buy the console, which is missing.
Man that article really made me think of the Larian BG3 XS debacle.
I hope this is just a bit overstated, because I don’t want to feel the pressure to buy an PS or build a PC.
I do want to buy a SteamDeck, and this only reinforces that decision though.
I have a SteamDeck and really enjoy it. Even if you get the base model, you won’t be disappointed. I play way more of my Steam library now.
The pc portable space is gonna get really interesting in the next few years, the demand is clearly there
Going from Xbox to PC is way easier than leaving PS for it. If thats any consolation. I had to ditch my PS library and data.
XBOX has seen the writing on the wall. People that want a console want a PlayStation. Everyone else wants a Steam deck or a PC and everyone else wants a switch.
But Game Pass makes all of that irrelevant. With game pass they don’t have to sell hardware at all which always involves taking a loss on hardware.
I figure the next thing we are going to see from them is a thin client that can stream games from XBOX Live+ Me Edition. For 39.99 a month you get Xbox Live and Game Pass and your games get streamed directly from Microsofts datacenter. On the other side, Game Pass for PC will be 30 for local play and 40 to stream and then in 2026 the Xbox handheld will launch which will be a Qualcomm AV1 decoder/Wifi Chip with an X on it that starts at $199, and includes 6 months of Game pass+.
This is the future they’ve been waiting for since The Xbox 360 Elite.
This is not the near future of xbox. Not for mainstream use, at least.
Video games streaming exists. It runs well enough with amazing internet that it’s actually even good enough to use. I did some playing on stadia back before it closed down. With my gigabit fiber internet, it only had a little bit of lag (felt like 20ms, i noticed it, but was quickly able to get used to it too) with the occassional hitch.
The problem is that gigabit fiber is reserved for people who live on the right street in a big city, and absolutely nobody else. And it id a requirement for game streaming to do well.
Once genuinely good internet is available to most everyone, then you will find game streaming services being mass adopted. Until then, game streaming will follow the other cool tech product that has huge market limiting requirements; VR.
Consoles like xbox are made for the casual user. You can’t have a product that works best for the casual user but has huge not-casual requirements to run it.
The next xbox thing wont be a thin client for streaming games, but the product after this one just might be.
I find poor sales hard to believe taking into account the pandemic and supply chain issues both consoles faced for a couple years.
PS5 has sold double the units of xbox series S https://www.vgchartz.com/article/460059/ps5-vs-xbox-series-xs-sales-comparison-january-2024/
PS5 also costs 25% more, so it’s not selling more because it’s cheaper. It’s just better and has better games. I’m not sure why that’s hard for you to believe.
Microsoft’s biggest mistake was making the S and not going all in on the X. Having two hardware specs makes developers lives so much harder and leaves a big chunk of the console base with poor specs you have to optimise the hell out of your build for. Whereas Sony put a single target platform in everyone’s hands.
I liked the Series S! Though, I would have bought the Series X instead if it was discless.
Please don’t take this as me being a dick, I’m genuinely curious. Why not just get a Series X and not buy disks?
Because it actually fits on a shelf, it’s way quieter, and can be thrown in a backpack if you want to take it places.
Those are the things I miss after upgrading from the S to the X.
Also “why not get an X and not use disks”… Well why pay double if you don’t need to use disks? The performance difference isn’t huge except on a few games made to utilize the X.
If there was no S then all games would have been optimized to the Xs level. Instead the S is compare able to the older Series X. The smaller form factor vs the mini fridge is basically the only thing going for it.
Indeed, a lot of people seem to only show awareness that the S doesn’t have a disc drive with no mention of how the S has a lower clock speed on the CPU, a 3x slower GPU, and 6GB less memory.
As a developer, those two SKUs are wildly different and are effectively different consoles. To have a smaller install base and multiple hardware specs, I can totally understand why developers are eager to give up on Xbox (I wonder how many devs had to write specific shaders for the S since the compute speed is so much slower).
Sony only differed SKUs on disc drive alone (which makes a lot of sense since even the people in this thread seem to have made their purchase of an S primarily on that feature).
