TedNugent
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2013
- Messages
- 6,362
Just fucking die already Microsoft.
How many of you are on Windows 10 right now, and are you ready for loss of security patches next year?
Just fucking die already Microsoft.
Ironic considering you could play that shit on a Wii? I would think that sportsballers would tend to the Xbox.Europe is PlayStation land, and they mostly just seem to play EA soccer video games. Unless you’re trying to sell a soccer video game Europe largely seems to not really matter.
The nice thing about Sony is that they actually had decent first and second party support. God of War, Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Gran Turismo. They had some decent teenybopper adventure and kids games. Of course, the amount of software was nuts back during PS2 and PS1 era. The shelves at the gamebox stores were like a fucking ocean of PS2 DVD cases. Most of which was shovelware, but still. If you wanted to fill a dump truck of mediocre games, PS2 got you.
Modern consoles basically are PCs, just with mediocre specifications. They are using AMD integrated graphics and x86-64 CPU with standard RAM and SSD, nothing stupid or zany.Does it even matter at this point? Consoles already destroyed PC market with complete consolization, even if they are gone all 'modern' designs will stay.
Lol that wasn't evil console's scheming, their inferior CPUs, or anything like that. That was your beloved PC developers selling out and abandoning the PC out of greed when it was completely unnecessary to do so, spearheaded by the equally greedy Microsoft. This ruined PC and console gaming both. This exact event. PC developers and manufacturers in their evil greed. Nintendo and Sony and whoever else in the console sphere of influence had fuck all to do with it. Initially at least. At some point they responded to PC devs invasion of the console market and it wasn't pretty for console gaming either. A race to the bottom.
Just look at PC gaming today, going pretty strong in terms of popularity. Consoles on the other hand have dipped somewhat. The xbox and sellout retard games were completely unnecessary. They could have doubled down on PC gaming in 2000, but no, lets just ruin everything out of greed. Fuck em all.
People forget, the PlayStation 2 didn't have a GPU, and the Playstation 3 was some kind of monstrous hydra with a 7 core in-order processor. Most console processors now have out of order logic processing and standard multi core CPUs. Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are running the same kind of hardware that runs in a desktop.
That's also been kind of a godsend because I remember before the PS4 and Xbox One were announced, AMD was sitting around 3 dollars a share, and now they're nearly at 200 dollars a share, mostly because they have pretty much exclusively been manufacturing console graphics. Same with the Steam Deck, the Asus ROG Ally, and the MSI handheld. It's all AMD hardware. That's been a big deal considering that Intel and Nvidia were kicking the shit out of AMD for like a decade in the desktop market. It was one of the few things keeping their only competitor in the game with an ample cashflow, and they even have an advantage over Intel in that their integrated GPUs have been significantly faster even when they lag in raw CPU performance compared to the top end Intel chips.
That standardized hardware has also made consoles less of walled gardens and made it much easier to do things like....porting the entire Uncharted series, Ratchet and Clank, God of War, Last of Us, Halo, etc etc to the PC. It's made console and PC porting back and forth as well as cross platform development much less hellish. That's why, frankly, Microsoft could easily transition to being a software publisher and not lose much....if they end up sinking in the hardware market, oh well, they literally own Bethesda and Activision.
Microsoft has also been a pretty decent steward in the sense that they allowed Steam to thrive, Microsoft games generally play nice on Windows, and they don't seem to be bothered by PC gaming in parallel with Xbox, even encouraging it with GamePass. Also, the original Xbox basically was a PC, it had a Pentium 3 and an Nvidia GPU (hence why Half Life 2 and Doom 3 ported so easily, despite the relatively shitty hardware specs). I absolutely loathe Microsoft as a company, and I refuse to run Windows these days or buy an Xbox, but I don't recall them ever getting in the way of my gaming. It is, after all, the reason why 95% of Windows lemmings will never switch to MacOS or Linux, and Microsoft knows this...
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-...t-inclusion-actions/help-customers-feel-seen/
Questions to Consider
- Are you telling new stories or sharing new perspectives within the product experience?
- Do all of your characters/player depictions look the same?
- What steps have you taken to ensure characters are represented respectfully and authentically?
- How have you validated assumptions you have made about your audience to check for blind spots or unintended stereotypes?
- Would you feel proud to show a member of a community how their culture/character is depicted within your experience?
- How are the wide range of customers depicted within your products, content portfolio and communications?
- What process have you used to validate how different groups of people or cultures are represented in your experience?
- Are you reinforcing any negative gender stereotypes?
- Are you unnecessarily introducing gender & gender barriers into your code or design?
- Are you creating playable female characters that are equal in skill and ability to their male peers. Are your female characters equipped with clothing and armor that fits their tasks? Do they have exaggerated body proportions?
- When the story allows, do you show male characters who display a full range of emotions, including joy, sadness, and vulnerability?
- What % of screen time (on screen presence, speaking lines, heroes) is held by different gender/racial identities?
- Do you have a process to review key decisions with the lens of Helping Customers Feel Seen?
I don't understand why anyone would try to buy Bungie anyway.The Xbox exists to fuck with Soyny.
They'll never, ever make their money back from the Activision buyout, it was purely spite to deny CoD revenue to playstation. They went full retard in panic and paid through the nose for bungie, so much that they're now gutting their own developers to balance the books.
MS nearly got away with it until the CMA cucked the deal and forced concessions.
Critically, is Gamepass actually making money for Microsoft? Is it making any money for publishers and developers?The influx of studios they got in the Activision deal can be used to flesh out their Xbox Game Pass service which is making a few billion a year and growing.
Did they really? Christ, that's depressing. I'll admit, I was kind of jaded by the retrospective hatred of D3 and the consistently shrinking subscription numbers of WoW retail and classic.But they announced back a couple months after Diablo 4 came out that they reached 12 million players. So it probably did pretty go for them despite all the problems.
Well,Yeah, Xbox Game Pass makes money. Back in 2021, just on consoles, Game Pass made $2.9 billion. Their user numbers are up from then.
Phil Spencer said last year they spend over a billion on bring third party games to the service.
Phil Spencer said:But first, for context, Spencer talked about how things used to work when budgeting and greenlighting a video game. The Microsoft exec has been producing games for long enough that he can remember when the financials were relatively straightforward. A publisher could set a sales goal (say, 800,000 units), set an earnout goal (how much money they want to make), and set the price of the game (usually $59.99). From there, a video game’s publisher and/or studio could set a budget.
However, the financial calculus has changed. In 2024, most games are sold across multiple storefronts, often steeply discounted mere weeks after release or included as part of subscription services on launch day. Plus, the games themselves take many years to create with the help of hundreds, if not thousands, of team members, sometimes spread across the world. All of this adds up, and as Spencer says, it can cost “$300 million to build a video game.”
Spencer explained how this cost forces three substantial problems: one for all big-budget games, one unique to console exclusives, and one that spans the entire industry.
- The cost “really reduces the risk that publishers are willing to take.” Where previous games needed to sell a few hundred thousand units to justify their cost, new games may need to sell many millions of units. “If you’re a publisher, you know that’s a pretty big number in a world that already has a lot of video games coming.” said Spencer. “How are you going to establish this thing? Am I willing to take the red on new IP — on a new kind of game — when the earnout risk is that high? I think it impinges on the creativity of this industry, which I don’t love. Creativity is like the cornerstone of what we should be about in gaming.”
- This cost is particularly prohibitive for exclusives that can only reach so many players. As Spencer explained in our conversation about the perils of exclusivity and walled-garden consoles, these games need to make additional money to justify the console maker subsidizing the cost of the console. As Spencer explained, “[The case for] exclusivity gets pressured as the cost of the game goes up.”
- According to Spencer, the console market has not grown in the past year. Though Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch consoles continue to sell, Spencer notes that many console gamers are simply upgrading — or, to put it another way, they’re not new to the market and won’t contribute to growth. And without new customers, “everybody else’s customer is your success state,” said Spencer. “You can’t succeed unless you draw in customers from other publishers and other platforms. And because you’re not finding new customers with the games that you’re building, everybody’s kind of fighting over the same-size pie.”
These problems have had a very real, substantial, and immediate human cost. The industry has seen consistent and mounting layoffs, including a particularly rough start to this year. Shortly after Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, the company announced it would be laying off 1,900 workers from its gaming division.
Polygon asked Spencer if the ABK layoffs were part of this wider trend, or if there was something unique about the layoffs as they pertain to the current Xbox business.
“It’s a little bit of both,” said Spencer. “But I’ll say the thing that has me most concerned for the industry is the lack of growth. And when you have an industry that is projected to be smaller next year in terms of players and dollars, and you get a lot of publicly traded companies that are in the industry that have to show their investors growth — because why else does somebody own a share of someone’s stock if it’s not going to grow? — the side of the business that then gets scrutinized is the cost side. Because if you’re not going to grow the revenue side, then the cost side becomes challenged.
Commenter on Polygon said:Meanwhile, other press from MSFT, as recent as January:
"Xbox content and services revenue increased by 61 percent at Microsoft during Q2, largely driven by the Activision Blizzard merger.
Overall, gaming revenue increased by 49 percent to $7.11 billion, with 44 points of net impact from the Activision Blizzard acquisition, to become the third-most lucrative product offering for Microsoft (behind Server and Office). Microsoft CFO Amy Hood suggested that growth matched expectations."
But we can't fund a AAA game for $300 million. Greed greed greed
Microsoft has fired thousands of customer service employees in recent years, and replaced them with AI.
Is this good or bad?
Is this good or bad?
Could mark the beginning of PlayStation moving back towards being more Japan-centric, that rumoured PS portable might be a way of semi “resetting” the platform and moving things back (my speculation, of course).
Is this good or bad?
Could mark the beginning of PlayStation moving back towards being more Japan-centric, that rumoured PS portable might be a way of semi “resetting” the platform and moving things back (my speculation, of course).
Apparently he wants to increase profits by releasing more PS exclusives on PC.
He also wants to kick Bungie in the nuts for fucking up their development timelines.
Totoki's a finance guy (he describes himself as being “obsessed with growth”), and the only person that has a higher rank than him is Sony's CEO himself. So I'm not surprised he wants more PS games on PC. It seems like it's his way of putting SIE in recovery mode and just trying pull in as much money as possible via software.Apparently he wants to increase profits by releasing more PS exclusives on PC.
He also wants to kick Bungie in the nuts for fucking up their development timelines.
Phil Spencer took over Xbox in March 2014, btw, a few months after Xbox One's launch (Don Mattrick left Xbox in July 2013).Since taking over both Xbox and the Gaming division, Spencer has advocated for cross-platform play, as well as launched key initiatives, such as reintroducing backward compatibility to the Xbox platform, the purchase of Mojang and Bethesda, the further development and support of Minecraft, the introduction of Xbox Game Pass, launching the Xbox Adaptive Controller, an increased focus on PC gaming, porting some Microsoft published games to other platforms including the Nintendo Switch, the launch of xCloud, and increasing the number of first-party development studios.