- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
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I hate that Xbox is a joke now and that it’s going to die out. I hate that there is going to be less competition in the console space. I hate that Microsoft have no idea what the fuck they’re doing.
Playstation is next; Nintendo has the securist market with its portable console.
I would think hand helds like the steam deck would be slowly strangling it but the switch 2 sold like hotcakes.
We seriously need to get open source PC console community-made offerings up and running. To share the load of building that up. Community built up competitors and Valve will be enough.
Still I also would like to see some new players come in too.
Are there any companies that would do well in gaming? What if AMD made their own console?
Playstation is next;
80% of the xbox crowd is probably gonna buy a playstation. Maybe a few will go for a PC and the rest for a switch.
Couch goblins that look into the future when considering the cost of a console might find the steam machine worthy when it releases.
Need more private companies like Valve, and some community open source options built up too
Microsoft is quietly sunsetting everything they cant make money on with AI.
So, everything?
It feels that way. Every ongoing product MS has feels decrepit and ready to collapse.
They’re still scamming the shit out of businesses with their corporate software. Oh and they have Azure which I’m guessing makes money.
Isn’t it ironic? The only Microsoft product that makes money consistently is based on Linux.
Meanwhile, their biggest competitor is either Linux or UNIX. That is, if you accept that macOS “is UNIX.” It’s been UNIX certified for a couple years now, but it’s UNIX in name only. While Steve Jobs’ NeXTStep was based on UNIX, NeXTStep was also vapourware. Still, it became OS X which became the macOS we know and love (or hate) today. But the truth is, it’s UNIX 3 certified, which is a decades-old certification, and it only just barely makes that. So it’s a thing Mac users brag about. “A UNIX system! I know this!” Jurassic Park meme. And then of course there’s Linux. And of course Windows has the Linux subsystem. Still, non-*nix is going the way of the dodo, just like Win9x did when Microsoft realised WinNT was the future. First with the tranwreck that was WinME, but much more importantly with WinXP. And NT was good, but its time is up (or will be soon).
Azure is by far their biggest money maker if I recall
They can’t even make money with their AI, they only survive off the windows OEM licenses, Office 365 subs that businesses are locked into and their backend server and sql stuff. That’s enough to make them a walking dead for a long time.
And eventually companies will hopefully start cancelling those subscriptions to move to Open Office or Libre Office.
France is already starting that push by having government departments transition first, and are projected to save millions of euros in licensing fees each year. Once you get a critical mass of users on libre software, it’ll hopefully spread on its own
So, also AI?
The console wars have ended. The PC is victorious.
Some victory. PC sales have been plummeting in favour of mobile and now component prices. Console space is now done with any semblance of competition - Sony is a monopoly and will soon start behaving as such. And xbox’s portfolio of many many IPs will go straight to the bin.
Ah fuck I forgot about mobile and I hate to consider it.
Yeah. That old lady spending £3000 a month on gems for “Royal Candy Blaster Treasure Blitz Origins” is the gaming industry now. :(
There are some proper games for the phones. Most of them are ports like disco elysium, octopath traveller or balatro, but because the dont get a lot of downloads in app store and google play, the platforms tend to push free games over them. And that makes sense for them, because they also profit from every transaction and ad that those games show. Quality single pay games just have one purchase per player and the audience for them is way smaller.
I personally as a consumer see so much wasted potential with mobile games. I remember when i had one hand held machine for tetris and another machine with shmup while my tamagotchi was dying somewhere. When i got gameboy it was crazy how i could take multible games with me when going on a long trip. Now we have almost always in our pocket a machine with multitudes more power than anything back then, but because how apple and google have build their enviroments devs dont have incentive to make quality single purchase products because they wont get the visibility they need.
Sites like itch.io are too small to make a difference. It would need some big player like Steam to add mobile game category in to their app, but apple and google are making it really tedious to install and update anything outside their own controlled enviroments that understandably serve for their biggest audience, who are children.
No, many of them will go to PCs or Sony over giving up
One can only hope
In what world is Sony a monopoly when Nintendo exists?
The Switch 2 is not a dedicated home console but it is a console
Don’t get me wrong, consoles are dying too, memory prices have gone up and Sony is already shifting from making money from consoles to making money from subscriptions
Nintendo is just doing their thing and becoming the Apple of the videogame industry
You mean Tencent mobile games
Microsoft owns King. The candy crush franchise creator.
Are those games still making that much money? Compared to gachas?
No
No, the new player in the game, AI killed everything.
My PC will still boot when the people turn on the data centers in the next 6 months. Can AI say the same?
AI can say anything you tell it to.
And several you don’t.
I’d like to see you try to build a PC right now for less than $1,500. The cornered the market on all of the parts necessary to make a computer that can run games well.
Bro I am playing Webfishing and Space Station 14 on a T460s running linux. Caves of Qud as well. You’ve been lied to. You can game without any of that shit if you’re not trend chasing battlefield.
This is for the best. As someone who is forced to work with a lot of Microsoft infrastructure let me tell you things have never been this broken before. They keep doubling down on AI and it simply doesn’t work.
I feel you brother. It’s bad. They are pushing AI features at the speed of light but forgetting that other things need attention too. Log a support ticket and it spews out AI shit that I have already tried or doesn’t help.
My favorite last week was 2 dead support numbers and a third that let to AI which happily told me it has a solution that will fix the problem. The link it sent brought me to the bing search page.
I was so happy to finally talk to indian support a day later.
I will slog through so many menus and weird support numbers to talk to a real person.
didn’t the new exec come from their AI division?
Is this how they put her out to pasture? “Your AI division has been such shit that we’ll put you in charge of a division we plan to close…”
Despite the division they’re closing making way more money (aka > $0) than the one she was moved from
depends on what you mean with ‘AI’, like builder.ai
There are already a bunch of documented but umimplemented functions in a few Xbox related API, like GameInput.
My feeling on Xbox since Xbox One days has been pretty much “this is an awesome platform, you’re sitting on a gold mine Microsoft, what the fuck are you doing?”
The last bit of brilliance they did utilise properly was GamePass, and of course they cocked that up by getting greedy.
Last few years have been extremely rough. The only lucky thing about this is that instead of full Xbox exclusivity Microsoft was pushing Xbox/Windows cross functionality. …Yeah, I’ve been pivoting to PC, but Steam/GOG instead.
The Xbone is what made me go PC full time.
Been a Xbox gamer since the original Xbox with Halo CE. LAN parties galore. Halo 2 and the beginning of Xbox Live was amazing. Bought a X360 at launch, got Gears and Crackdown for the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. Halo 3 was peak.
And then Xbone announced. Always online. Kinect required. “Sports” “Live TV”. Yeah, not falling for that. “Can’t just flip a switch”.
Yeah I cancelled my Xbox Live sub and built a PC. 2500K with a 550ti. Haven’t looked back since. All of my friends in our group did the same, but some bought a PS4 as well for the SP games.
Microsoft just doesn’t care. They have enough money to not care. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time for Xbox and I’d be genuinely surprised if they release another console and I’d be even more surprised if anyone actually buys it. It’s a dead ecosystem.
It’s been a sad thing to watch. I was the biggest Xbox fan in my circles in the 360 & One days. But by the time Series X came out, I was so disappointed in their games that I still don’t own it. Microsoft bought so many companies that I thought would bring games. Yet, most of them aren’t producing anything.
Nintendo isn’t doing much better. I was a Nintendo stan for most my youth but now they’re the leaders in stagnant games and dark patterns. You just can’t trust corporations not to backstab you anymore. Indie and opensource only for me here on.
I think MS has been surprised and confused by the success of Xbox ever since the very first one came out. It kinda stuck, and the upper management probably never really had a good idea what to do with it, as it just never really worked with them being oriented on business offerings. Remember Ballmer going wild during Xbox One reveal? Yeah. I think during this gen and previous more and more of the business people came into Xbox, and thus the meandering of the brand. They have no clue what gamers want, they’re penny pinchers and pencil pushers.
Enshittifying
I love how corporations work.
"Hey, we completely fucked this up. We mishandled it, made decisions our customers hate, and now we’re scrapping it because we might lose money.
“Could we fix it? Sure. But that would mean changing the business model that made us money 20 years ago, and that’s terrifying. There’s a risk we might lose money.”
“And sure, the board won’t lose a dime personally. But the stockholders, basically meerkats who scatter at the first loud noise might panic. And we can’t have that. We might lose money.”
“Cortana, play a game for me.”
“Cortana, am I having fun?”Lol is this an actual ”feature”? Can’t tell anymore.
I remember news about a console giant that wants to introduce a “feature” that plays for you when you’re stuck in a game. In my childhood you had to look at the game manual for clues, ask your friends for help or sleep over it and try again days later. Nowadays you just look up a guide online. Soon you’ll press a button and the game will play itself.
I love how nobody here is getting me actual picture. They’re not going to sell Xbox to people anymore. What’s going to happen is they’re going to turn to a subscriber model where you have to log into a data center that they control and use your browser to play video games. Paying a monthly subscription for the privilege of playing their exclusive games. In fact I will bet money that the first product that will be introduced with this feature is going to be the highly anticipated upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6.
Mark my words. Either at the time of release or shortly thereafter they’re going to introduce the ability to subscribe to play GTA 6 in your browser on a remote gaming system. And then they’re going to phase out physical Xbox systems over the next couple of years.
This sounds… plausible actually. They have this big stake in GPU datacenters for AI, that are (and will be) burning incredible amounts of money and are not turning a profit anytime soon. That same crazy level of investement on AI is making hardware costs go up, especially gaming hardware.
But Microsoft, being the benefactors who have inherited the company from philantropist and kids-lover Bill Gates, have thought of us! They will share a bit of their shiny GPU datacenters’ plwer for gaming and all they will be asking for is a lot of your money. I can see that.
It won’t be GTA6. It will be an exclusive title like a rebooted Halo or Gears of War. They can’t risk losing the money on GTA when people just go to PS5 and buy the game outright there.
The Elder Scrolls 6, only available on Xbox® Game Pass© Ultimate Plus™ Cloud Gaming™®©
This has been tried before and never worked well. What makes you think its going to work any better now?
I even have a free controller google gave me when they tried it.
The only thing that makes me think it might work this time is that for some reason Microsoft has this magical ability to take a bad idea, make the shittiest possible iteration of it and have it mysteriously become the most widely-adopted standard against all logic.
It doesn’t need to work well.
It needs to sound like it will make more money for MSFT’s board.
You’re approaching this from the angle of ‘is this a sensible and sustsinable long term business strategy.’
Nobody cares!
They care about LINE GO UP BIG FAST NOW!
Microsoft Board: But Google lost so much money on Stadia!
Voice on speaker: but Google didnt have me, Bing.AI!
Microsoft Board: DONE. MAKE US RICH!
Attitudes like that are not how we got a trillion dollars in spare data center infrastructure to find a use for!
Those consumers will be happy owning nothing THIS time!!
Oh man, those stadia controllers. Not the stupidest $99 I’ve ever spent, but still pretty dumb.
Why the LLM-driven scarcity in computing parts of course, and a little bit of cartel behavior when Nintendo and Sony inevitably announce the same thing next year.
The PS5 version of GTA6 is going to sell pretty well then
To play games coded by a shitty AI, full of bugs and as many microtransactions as possible …
Is the game buggy? Worry not! Microsoft™ Copilot 365™ powered by Azure™ will analyze your gameplay in realtime, detect when a bug occurs, and redirect you to an AI generated troubleshooting page.
Unironically the AI is trained using episodes of The IT Crowd.
I love my AI future.
Fuck.
The old “we don’t want to put any effort into creating anything good, we just want to milk this for cash until we can’t anymore.”
My cloud computing teacher says the future of personal computing is just monitors connected to the cloud. Why couldn’t I have been born in the 70s?
I think they are sunsetting whole company.
That’s what their actions felt like for decades yet somehow they’ve always kept chugging along.
I can only hope.
You mean Microsoft? I hope but I doubt it, they have a lot of companies locked in their products
Nah, shifting heavily toward being B2B.
xbone was the beginning of the end. when the enshittification kicked in before we had a word for it.
Enshitification has been a thing since the 1940s. I remember in the 80s my grandma saying she used to get pretzels from the corner store. Big soft gooey chewey pretzels.
Now, in the 80s, I could only get a factory made crunchy pretzel rod.
And today? Unless you’re buying a whole bag, you can’t get pretzels at all.
Gone are the mom and pop bakeries too. :(
When I was 5 years old, I used to go to a bakery. And it was locally owned.
I’d go in, and I’d buy a brownie. And I’d do my moms shopping. Just lite stuff. Gallon of milk. Carton of cigerettes. Loaf of bread. Sometimes pancake mix. Then I’d buy a brownie from the bakery.
Every Saturday morning.
This went on for years. Until one day, I came in, clearly something wrong. I bought all my moms groceries. I’m 15 by this point. But I didn’t get my brownie. And so when Abeer (shop owners name) put my brownie on the counter, I said no. She could already tell something was wrong before the brownie rejection. But now she had to ask. I said “I don’t want a brownie today”.
She said “I’ll give you one. It’s ok if you don’t pay this week.”
I said “No. It’s not about money. I don’t want a brownie.”
She asked “Whats wrong?”
I said “Papa died…” and I burst into tears. Papa was my grandfather. He had died the night before. I just wanted to get in, and get out. Without talking really. But when she heard Papa died, she rushed around the counter and hugged me.
Here’s a woman who I’d grown up with. Every weekend talking for 30-60 minutes. She was the shopkeep, yes, but she was also a close family friend.
I was in this trance/haze of doing what I need to do, because I need to, but my mind was elsewhere. I was just trying to do my moms shopping, and get home in 5 minutes so I could curl back up in bed. Not to sleep, but just to try not to remember that I exist.
So when she ran around the counter to hug me, I didn’t even know what was happening. I thought she was still behind the counter, and now suddenly she’s hugging me.
I’m 42 now, but I cannot imagine kids today being able to understand the core concept of old school communities. They’ve been ripped out and replaced by walmart and other heartless souless corporations.
Can you imagine a 6 year old leaving his house, walking 10 minutes, entering walmart, and spending 30 minutes talking to the workers, telling them about the week at school? Showing her your TMNT toys you got for your birthday? Telling them various things about your life?
I cannot imagine that, but that was how the whole neighborhood was growing up. Every store a small community shop. Every adult knew every kid. Every kid knew every kid.
One time I was walking home and it started raining. So I just went onto the doorstep of the first house I saw that I knew a kid lived at. I’m just standing on the porch, waiting for it to stop raining. Suddenly Andys mom opens the door. She says “Andys not here right now. He’s over at James house.”
I said “Oh, ok. I’m just using the porch as shelter until it clears.”
And thats when Andys mom drove me home. Thats just how it was. A whole community looking out for the whole community.
Now anytime I go back to my old neighborhood, I don’t recognize it. C-Town pizza is gone. Obviously the video rental stores are gone. One time I even went and knocked on the houses of the kids I knew. Wondering if anyone I used to know inherited their parents old houses. Nope. I had a woman yell at me for disturbing her time. Wasn’t anyone I used to know.
But just looking around, I could tell the street layout may be the same, but this wasn’t a community. This was an isolated set of houses.
And now I’m sad. Because I miss those days. I miss the idea of everyone caring about everyone. I miss the wholesome nature of a new family moving in, and everyone just bombarding them with welcoming arms. I miss the idea of just going to my friends house, and walking in, Kramer style (minus the racism).
Now life is just cold and isolated.
That was a powerful story. Man, you said it all. Thank you for sharing that. :)
Fuck. This is the beauty and compassion we have lost.
This was beautiful to read, and I feel the same as you. Thank you so much for sharing such a heart warming story. :')
If you are ever on a road trip and go by a Wawa gas station, stop and get their soft pretzels. buy as many as you can and freeze whatever you don’t eat for later.
The german grocery store Lidl also has decent soft pretzels.
Agreed. I’m still convinced that the always online/DRM shit they pulled with the Xbox One at launch was a catastrophe they never recovered from. Even though they quickly reversed that decision after backlash, I think the damage was done.
yeah at the very least it signaled their intentions.
They’re sunsetting the platform alright, but nothing about it is quiet
I was thinking the same thing. We’ve known about it for years.
When xbox first hit the scene it was a breath of fresh air. Now its just a stale fart, its time for it to die.
I guess they’re going to go all-in on AI despite only 3.3% of MS365 subscribers paying for Copilot. Stonks?
The sunk cost fallacy is a bitch
They’re going to go all-in on paid streaming gaming services, like every major company for the next thousand years.
You will own nothing and be happy.
When you set an impossible goal (30% yoy profit margin for the gaming division), you know that you are killing off that division, just, slowly.
Satya just really wants an AI girlfriend that is also in everyone’s homes simultaneously, that he can use to spy on everyone for the NSA.
Not that it directly matters, but I did literally work for MSFT during the 360 3RR / Windows 8 era.
I kinda know at least a little about the uh, corporate culture.
Ain’t that quiet.
