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Global sales of XBox are so bad developers wonder if supporting the console is worth it for them
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YeuEmMaiMai
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I am pretty much done with new games and systems. I rarely use my XBox One S outside of blue ray/dvd player.
Today's games suck and there is no reason to be involved in any of that.
PS2? Check
GameCube? Check
XBox 360 with HD-DVD Check
PS3 as Blu-Ray player and a few games? check
Wii U? Check
XBox 1 S? Check
SNES mini? Check
1up Packman countercade? Check
1up Packman tabletop Arcade? Check (fixed it)
11ty billion games on a self booting hard drive on my Dell Insprion G15 gaming laptop? Check
The oldest system is the PS2
Not buying any of this new garbage way too woke way too expensive
Today's games suck and there is no reason to be involved in any of that.
PS2? Check
GameCube? Check
XBox 360 with HD-DVD Check
PS3 as Blu-Ray player and a few games? check
Wii U? Check
XBox 1 S? Check
SNES mini? Check
1up Packman countercade? Check
1up Packman tabletop Arcade? Check (fixed it)
11ty billion games on a self booting hard drive on my Dell Insprion G15 gaming laptop? Check
The oldest system is the PS2
Not buying any of this new garbage way too woke way too expensive
Given the current cost of living issues which vary depending on country, coupled with the fact that everything is becoming a back pocket pilfering subscription service nowadays that is quickly becoming an unaffordable luxury, I disagree that $17.00/month is reasonable. Personally, my back pockets lost enough that I'm cutting back on such luxuries.
The Xbox Series S is a great BD player however.
Just charge more for MS Office. People will pay it as they need mah office suite. But as stated, the idea is to entice developers back to your software store.
Prince Valiant
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I could accept a fee knowing I was connecting to a dedicated server (probably wouldn't be willing to pay but I wouldn't feel insulted by it). Paying to play a game that connects directly/P2P is unacceptable to me.
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I wouldn't.
That might help but they clearly make a good amount of cash from that with the gamepass stuff. Sony raising PS+ to $80 last year finally got me to quit their service that I rarely used for my PS4. It was maybe useful for 1-2 years but only at the $30 discount price I sometimes found. I've never paid for any Xbox monthly stuff but I regret buying my 360 and Xbone. The original Xbox was okay, at least I played several games on it. If MS had put out Halo MC collection on PC I would never have bothered with the Xbox One. After all that, no consoles interest me anymore except maybe a steam deck. Exclusives aren't worth it, not when they keep releasing them on PC years later or at the same time.
ManofGod
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$17 a month is incredibly inexpensive, especially when you consider the fact that you get EA Play as well, as well as being able to play on your PC and XBox. Considering it is the only subscription I have, I am good with it.
DukenukemX
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Depends on a lot of things. Is the Switch 2 backwards compatible with Switch games? Nintendo has a history of not doing backwards compatibility. Will the Switch 2 be $350 and under? Will the Switch 2 slow down when removed from the Dock? Valve put them in a hard place.
When the Switch was released, there's was nothing like it. There's a lot of clones now, with far better hardware. The Steam Deck can also play Switch games.
PS5 is basically alone. You could count the Switch, but the Switch can't play modern games like Baldur's Gate 3. Steam Deck can.
I really doubt better hardware will fix the Xbox. The problem is that the price of PC hardware has dropped enough that it's competitive against consoles again. A competent PC may cost $300 more, but it'll beat the Xbox in cheaper games and no subscription fee.
I mean that at some point during the development of the Xbox, it was just a gaming PC. That or WebTV. It ended up running an Intel CPU with Nvidia graphics. At this point it just makes sense that Xbox should be a Windows PC with a user interface made for gaming.
View: https://youtu.be/a3CMSJZgSLk?si=82YUVvB9yMph0oHq
This right here is the cancer of the gaming industry. These people need to be fired NOW! For some reason a group of people think that racism and sexism is OK against white straight men. You don't fight racism and sexism with different racism and sexism. These people make it seem like we were rooting for the wrong team. The idiocy of these people is beyond comprehension.
Combined with every other monthly subscription, it's a luxury.
ManofGod
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Combined with every other what monthly subscription? Oh, and calling it a luxury means what exactly? After all, with what they provide, I can actually do things, be active with people, enjoy playing games and stimulate my mind, if I want. All the other subs would mostly have me vegetating and doing nothing.
Edit: By the way, I literally have no pay for subscriptions, in so far as streaming services go.
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Non-white dudes have to fight to prove they exist in the video game industry? Clearly she’s never been to Asia, just like the Xbox.
Props to Microsoft for hiring a person as their head of global marketing who appears to be blissfully unaware that their two primary competitors are headquartered in Japan.
DukenukemX
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She's the head of global marketing and she assumes that white men are the majority? China has the largest gaming population in the world, and I don't think they're mostly white men. Minorities is a US thing, not a worldwide thing. Also by her logic, we should also single out white women. Someone at Microsoft should fire her immediately. The Xbox brand does not need this source of negativity.
DEI is a solution desperately trying to find a problem that simply doesn’t exist, but in spite of that, activists have achieved a stunning level of elite capture and set off a bizarre moral panic. Like all moral panics, people will ignore the evidence in front of their own faces if it challenges the narrative they want to believe. In this case, there’s a myth that gamers are all a bunch of racist, misogynistic white males who outright refuse to play anything with “diverse” characters, despite the myriad of popular titles with a “diverse” or female protagonist and Asian video game studios and companies who revolutionized the industry and achieved international success.
Darunion
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You clearly don't hang out in trade chat
They've done a lot of backwards compatibility. Wii plays gamecube. Wii U plays Wii. GBC plays gameboy. GBA plays GBC and GB. DS plays GBA. 3DS plays DS. Switch, Gamecube, N64, SNES weren't though.
Could go either way, but launching a new console with no library seems like a bad bed today. Otoh, if they time it with a new mario kart, another 3d mario, and a zelda, that could be enough.
Darunion
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I am still amazed that the switch doesnt have its own mario kart yet, 8 being the one that came out on the wiiU.
DukenukemX
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Most of Nintendo's attempts at backwards compatibility was in the past. The Nintendo DS was the best machine ever because it could play GameBoy, GB Color, and GBA games. Then at some point Nintendo released the DSi and threw that all away. Same with the Wii where it was backwards compatible with GameCube games until newer version weren't. The 3DS is probably the only console where Nintendo did maintain backwards compatibility. Compare that to Xbox where Microsoft did try with each console generation to be backwards compatible, even if it was with an emulator. Last I heard, the Xbox Series X can play all previous Xbox console games with some having issues. Sony did backwards compatibility up until the PS4 where it wasn't compatible with any console before it. The PS5 is compatible with PS4 games.
A lot of people assume that the Switch 2 is fully compatible with Switch 1 games, because it makes sense. But it's also Nintendo's business model to resell you games that you've already bought.
DukenukemX
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DEI is trying to solve a real problem, but not a problem that needs solving. Suits at the top are looking at statistics and see that white men are one of their biggest customers, and realize that there's an untapped market of Asian, Black, middle eastern men and women who they can exploit for money. Particularly in the American market where white men make up an overwhelming majority of gamers. So of course to help capture those customers, they trying to diversify by putting in more relatable characters in games. Makes sense, except we've done that forever.
- Lara Croft in Tomb Raider 1996
- Samus Aran in Metroid 1988.
- Jill Valentine in Resident Evil 1996.
- Princess Peach in Super Mario Bros 2 1988
- Every fighting game ever made.
- Every RPG ever made.
We've been doing it since the 80's and 90's and we liked it. A lot of guys like playing as female characters in World of Warcraft. It was never a problem that needs solving. China has far more people playing video games and nobody cares. They also play mostly on mobile, but that's for a another time. But men do like attractive women in their games, which is now a problem for Microsoft. Women are now playing more games because guys like to look at women playing games over men through Twitch. Microsoft needs to stop enforcing stupid DEI and focus on making a good game.
View: https://youtu.be/JsTcMPIhm-8?si=liqfnTnngkpIyiac
bigdogchris
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Where does the money come from to maintain the infrastructure?
It doesn't make sense to think a 1 time sale should grant indefinite access to online resources.
How does Steam do it?
Subscription doesn't include game servers by the way, so you don't pay for them, and game publishers always take them down after a certain amount of years.
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Sorry, allow me to clarify what I’m saying. There is racism, sexism, etc, that exists in the world, I’m not saying that there isn’t. Unfortunately, DEI has actually become a catalyst for identity politics by dividing people by race and gender which has promoted division, racism, misogyny, and misandry rather than their supposed mission statement of eliminating those things, but that’s another discussion.
Applied to the business of gaming, however, this is not a problem that actually exists (at least not on any scale that would impact sales or corporate earnings), but DEI consultants have managed to make millions of dollars by convincing people that it is a problem and that they are the solution to solving it. I grew up gaming in the 80s and 90s and I never once heard any gamer complain about having to play as a character who was a woman or a “visible minority” or any label that DEI consultants want to apply. This was never a topic of discussion in any gaming circle I was a member of, or lurked, until the DEI folks came out and made a big deal about it, and then convinced game studios that they had to create stories and narratives with this and that identity, it was good for business, blah blah blah. The only discussions I now see in gaming circles regarding the race and gender of characters is typically a response to one of these consultants or game studios creating a game around a character of identity XYZ, making a big deal about identity XYZ rather than the story or characteristics that make them compelling beyond identity XYZ, and then telling their target audience, who has never cared about it, that they’re all a bunch of terrible people and need to spend money on their game and embraced character with identity XYZ as some weird form of absolution from their sins and demonstration of good moral character. Naturally, people are pushing back on this nonsense, and DEI consultants are pouncing on that by saying “see, told ya you have a racism problem, now give us more money because we will fix it and make sure the cancel culture mob doesn’t target you”.
The only thing the suits should be understanding, at this point, is that telling your core audience how much of a POS you think they are is bad for business. Concentrate on making good games and your sales will go up no matter what the characters look like.
Darunion
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Pretty sure counterstrike skins finance all of it
What infrastructure? An online connection doesn't require any infrastructure implemented by console manufacturers, you connect directly to game servers hosted by developers.
I mean this is not true.
Steam just endlessly funds all their shit by virtue of them taking a cut on everything.
I'm not reading all of this thread because I don't really care. If they want to make more realistic women in video games, Lara Croft and Aloy should be fucking jacked. I'm sorry, but if you spend all of your time hanging off of shit, climbing, fighting. Doing basically the hardest form of calisthenics you're going to look a bit saucy. Women and men have roughly the same muscle building potential, the main difference is the puberty we go through, and how that makes certain parts of your body more dominant. It's why women generally prefer squats to bench, exposure to estrogen tends to make you more lower body dominant. Now, there are exceptions to every rule. The best bench presser in the world, pound-for-pound is a 40 something mom named Jen Thompson who can rep 315 at like a 140 pounds of body weight (there's a formula that factors age in too to determine who the top benchers are in the world, she's either at the top or near it).
My issue is these chicks who climb all day should be yoked as fuck. Atleast Cammy and Chun Li look they could kick a building down, because that's how most of the top female squatters and deadlifters are built. They can have big legs and look attractive too, just put a damn weight room in the croft mansion. If anything is sexist it's making women look soft as shit when there's some meaty chicks in the world, it can still be aesthetic, but realistically they'd have some massive lats, rear delts, rhomboids, etc. I have news for everyone, there are some good looking legitimately strong women in the world (have you watched the olympics ever?) It's more inclusive and realistic to have them be a little sauced looking.
If xbox wants to sell more units, find a way to get steam on the console. It would blow playstation out of the water. None of this crap actually matters, they don't have any content on their console that anyone cares about. It's for people who don't want to bother with a PC because you can get everything from Xbox and more on one. If you add steam somehow it's a game changer.
My issue is these chicks who climb all day should be yoked as fuck. Atleast Cammy and Chun Li look they could kick a building down, because that's how most of the top female squatters and deadlifters are built. They can have big legs and look attractive too, just put a damn weight room in the croft mansion. If anything is sexist it's making women look soft as shit when there's some meaty chicks in the world, it can still be aesthetic, but realistically they'd have some massive lats, rear delts, rhomboids, etc. I have news for everyone, there are some good looking legitimately strong women in the world (have you watched the olympics ever?) It's more inclusive and realistic to have them be a little sauced looking.
If xbox wants to sell more units, find a way to get steam on the console. It would blow playstation out of the water. None of this crap actually matters, they don't have any content on their console that anyone cares about. It's for people who don't want to bother with a PC because you can get everything from Xbox and more on one. If you add steam somehow it's a game changer.
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I am not sure which part you mean it is not true, Xbox like steam also take a cut for game sold on their store (physical or online), specially when the publisher host the game server, that cut would be more than enough to finance the part match making and other part hosted by microsoft.
Which is a different conversation that if it is a good idea, Xbox online service and its price I feel is far to be their problem historically.
Both claim seem extraordinary to me...
https://www.powerlifting.sport/fileadmin/ipf/data/results/2023/bench-press/scoresheet_m_cl.pdf
The gap is massive at the same weight class, 321.8 pounds is obviously a lot for someone under 150 pound, but some male in the lighter 66 kilo category can do almost 400.
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AmongTheChosenX
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having idiots like this "market" your company just shows the level of incompetence that MS is touting here...
bigdogchris
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And where do developers get their money from, 1 time sales leading into perpetuity access to the game? It doesn't make sense to make the claim it doesn't cost anything to host online games.
If a game is continuously selling maybe you can make the point that they factor that into the box price. But eventually sales are going to slow. Then who pays for it? For how long? Who determines when they've spent enough to shut it off?
There used to be these things called private servers which is where the vast majority of games were run. They were paid for and run by players and they were happy to do so.
However, this left way too much control out of the hands of the publishers (and not able to charge huge amounts for maps) and so they went on a campaign to kill off private servers using various means. Now they could charge you for simple things you used to get for free and killed most of the modding community for these games. Also, having control over the servers meant they could shut them down anytime they wanted in order to force you to buy the latest iteration of the game which was probably worse than the previous one.
As for the original point, MS and Sony don't host these online games except and unless they are first party titles. It's not costing them a damn thing. Those subscriptions for online access are nothing but an idiot test. I say idiot test because you'd have to be pretty stupid to pay in perpetuity for something that was always included previously. Not to mention it still doesn't cost anything for the non-console people playing the same games.
Flogger23m
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That burns, but is quite truthful. Some of the biggest games are Japanese. Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Mario, etc. Though it is worth pointing out that many of these games generally do feature white characters, but there are many Japanese games like the Yakuza and Persona series that clearly feature and are centered around Japan and Japanese people. So even then her her statement doesn't track well.
End of the day most games will cater to white/east Asian because those are the developed parts of the world where video games will generally sell.
White men make up the majority because white people are the largest ethnic group in the US. I don't think the ratio of other ethnic groups are different from whites; many, many Asians play video games. No shortage of black men either. It is certainly split along gender but I really question if ethnicity has any noteworthy split. Example, is 20% of white men are avid gamers, I assume Asians are also around 20%.
For women the split often comes because women like other types of games. Things like Animal Crossings sell well and cater to women. But when it comes to violent games, generally they will appeal to men more. We see the same thing with movies and books. Men are more likely to watch something like John Wick, whereas many women would prefer something less violent.
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I doubt >50% of even american Xbox gamer in the US (and no chance for gamers if we open it to the phones, browser, switch, etc...), depending on how white Hispanic get counted.
According to this:
https://playtoday.co/blog/xbox-statistics/
68% of the American Xbox players were male, 55% white, that would make for around 38% of them white male, African American vastly overrepresented vs white (it could be a different mix of PS5 vs PC vs Xbox vs Switch preference or just that black American median age is lower than whites American or not perfect stats).
The point being made here being a bit of a strange one in many ways.
Unlike Hunting, downhill ski, etc... gaming on a Xbox does not in any way need to be teached by anyone, you parents not doing it is not an issue at all, it is incredibly easy to pick-up, require no training, knowledge, kid picked up and showed their parents, quite cheap, and so on. And if you buy a Xbox on amazon, bought a game, played the game, 0 person in that chain of event even knew your race/gender so the concept of not feeling invited because no one look like you, being intimidated, etc... will really be quite soft.
It seem to try to apply things to a situation where it make little sense, and unlike some sports or constructive activity, it is not like it matter if someone does not play video game, it is not something we should ever strive to happen, it is a bit of a last resort activity, like watching tv.
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DukenukemX
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I can solve this problem by going back in time. Let people do their own hosting. We used to have this tool that worked on multiple games called GameSpy. People still do it in Minecraft.
We also had a solution to all this in the past, and that's with anthropomorphic animals. We do it all the damn time, and anyone can relate to them. Sonic the Hedgehog is a hedgehog. Not saying we should always make games with anthropomorphic animals, but it does remove the ethnicity problem.
This is all about creating a problem while also having a solution to it. You can see Chris Kindred explain this. You gotta scare them.
View: https://youtu.be/Iq86DnmX2xY?si=nHqZsgqraiuUFcxR
I believe the suits think gamers are stupid. This is why so many people like Chris Kindred talks down to gamers, because the suits think gamers are the dumbest group of people in the world. They're explaining this while snorting coke off a hookers ass. All they want to hear is how they can get more money to snort ever more coke off even more hookers asses. We have a lack of diversity in video games? Quick, hire Sweet Baby Inc so we can pump those numbers up to expand our potential coke snorting.
If we're being realistic then women wouldn't stand a chance against men in a fight. You know how we fix that in video games? Lara Croft has guns, Samus Aran has a power suit made by aliens, and Princess Peach has magic that allows her to float in the air for a very long time. Lara Crofts build looks perfectly fine for someone who does acrobatics.
View: https://youtu.be/K_XHCnDUDlg?si=h4cJtx4HcgPnqboS
First, Lara Croft has an exercise room in Tomb Raider 3. She's not a weight lifter, but more acrobatic. Second, even if that were more realistic it's also not something people want to see. We don't play video games for realism. Kratos doesn't even have a shirt on, and yet he survives all kinds of attacks. He's got plot armor, I mean he's a god.
View: https://youtu.be/MGpFEv1-mAo?si=FlvNeu1Jao5RIphA
Steam would be a game changer for Xbox, but there's a lot of games that aren't on Steam either. The problem for Microsoft is that they don't get a cut from Steam when a game is bought and played on the Xbox. They don't deserve a cut from Steam anyway, and this does put them up against Valve who hasn't lost to any other competing game store on PC. Just make it a Windows PC with an Xbox UI and get it done with. That way Xbox can run Steam, Epic, EA, and etc.
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Sexy anthropomorphic animals, right?
Darunion
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I'm just gonna stop you right there....
Since you are always a fan of linking images to reinforce a point
here you go
Please don't give Microsoft any ideas. I'm loving Valve's attention to Linux.
Oh no not Seaman!
Darunion
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I don't get to bring that one out very often lolOh no not Seaman!
I never said that. I stated that infrastructure isn't required on behalf of console manufacturers, furthermore I never stated it doesn't cost anything for developers to host game servers.
Bring back the days where it was possible to host your own damn game servers with none of the leveling bullshit so prevalent in modern FPS shooters. Some of the best multiplayer game play I ever had was playing low gravity HL2DM running custom maps with mates at work, awesome days - And the server was hosted on a Linux box built by myself.
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No, women and men do not have the same muscle building potential, and it’s not even close. Watch the women's fitness division at any bodybuilding competition and you’ll see what’s essentially the maximum muscle building potential of a woman, bearing in mind that the competitors have leaned out below what would be considered a safe body fat percentage for a woman and will need to put some fat back on in the days following the competition. The women’s heavyweight division basically doesn’t exist anymore, primarily because people don’t want to watch it or participate in it very much, largely because the competitors look like men, and they look like men due to testosterone use since testosterone is a primary factor for stimulating muscle growth, which men have plenty of and women don’t.
In terms of female rock climbers, if you know any who are very active in the sport, they typically look like really fit chicks, generally lean with clear muscle definition, but they don’t look like male bodybuilders. Lara Croft was drawn reasonably well for what she’s supposed to be able to do, at least in the remake of the series, IMO.
Isn't the head of global marketing Jerret West?
(That woman works as a global product marketing manager but does not seem to be the head of marketing)