In the UK at least there’s a persistent cost-of-living battle being fought, so we’re not spending as much as we were, and large game production has reached a tipping point where the number of purchasers aren’t growing but costs are increasing, so: studios contract; or games are taking longer to make; or games are made with a smaller scope. So basically, there’s less to upgrade your console for.

I mean, for me personally, everytime I think of upgrading from a Series S I find it hard to justify because most games run quite well.

All sounds pretty sensible. I do think it might feel annoying waiting minutes to download a model for the sake of generating a line of alt text the first time, though. It would probably be quicker to write the alt text.

It also didn’t release as a physical copy. New digital releases in the UK at least are always pretty expensive, whereas with physical copies there’s at least a chance of a small discount from a retailer.

It’s really quite bad imo, but it’s surprising considering how the consoles are basically the same, hardware-wise - the Xbox on paper might even be technically more powerful.

I think that if they’d been able to get out there with a couple of great 1st party games early in the generation it might have helped swing the market in their direction but they didn’t and now it doesn’t matter.

Sony is also encountering similar issues in terms of the cost of games being unsustainable and Moore’s Law kicking in. The difference is that they’re making games that move consoles and Microsoft just aren’t.

At this point, I don’t know what strategy Microsoft has at this point. If you say “Xbox everywhere”, what does Xbox even mean any more for the enthusiast? I don’t think Xbox is done, but if they were looking to be HBO before, they are now going for the Netflix approach - high quantity content, mediocre product - and possibly alienate the existing audience they have.

I say this as an Xbox Series S owner, I’m happy with my purchase, but as a consumer I don’t think I’ll be upgrading my console to anything Microsoft ship any time soon.

I think if you read through this and take it at face value, there is a pretty clear picture of what happened: https://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2024/03/30/a-microcosm-of-the-interactions-in-open-source-projects/

I can imagine them carrying on making consoles this generation but long-term Microsoft is a services company and over successive generations they have failed to recapture the lead from Sony since the 360. Ultimately, they just want to make more money and struggling in the hardware business is not an exciting place for them to be in.

I say this as a Series S owner: the writing is on the wall. I will likely not be purchasing another Microsoft console after this, though I’m not sure they’d be interested in releasing one. I want to buy and own games I can play locally on a piece of hardware, which probably means I have to return to Sony or go back to the humble PC. For anyone currently on the fence seeing this news, I don’t know why they’d consider buying into the Xbox platform and tying in all their gaming purchases.

I know it’s vastly underpowered compared to even the Xbox Series S but I still think there’s something magical about the way you can have these fully fledged gaming experiences in front of your TV or in your hands while on holiday using the same hardware. Of all the consoles I’ve owned, it’s probably my favourite.

The redesign is literally pointless and currently achieves nothing. I find that the user’s profile button having moved to the bottom-left so goddamned weird, as is the “Activity” button moving to the no-mans-land of middle of the sidebar.

I would be extremely surprised if at least one upgraded model of the Xbox doesn’t ship with a disc drive. It would completely alienate a section of their user-base that want a more powerful box and care about owning physical media. They also made this mistake before with the Xbox One - which Spencer himself has mentioned as a key reason why there’s such a gap in sales volume between XBS/X and PS5 - so to make the same mistake again would be doubly confusing.

Edit: just seen this story corroborated by multiple outlets, so this may well be the real deal. And if so, super disappointing and fucking duuuumb. As the Xbox Series X OG console becomes more and more the outlier, what are the chances that publishers will just stop producing discs for retail completely? So basically, really piss off your early adopters. I own a Series S at the moment, but I’m more likely to just switch to PS5 Pro model when it comes round instead of stick with the Xbox Series consoles.

This is a brain dead decision and nothing short of a complete 180 will perhaps save them, but even then the reputational damage is severe.

It is silly. The CMA has tunnel vision around this, and because the streaming issue was essentially the main point of contention this change in the deal puts them in a position where they’d look like hypocrites not to let it through. Microsoft just capitalizing on their ignorance (rightly so).

It’s a great base for general desktop use as well as server. Been using it on my PC for years now, and aside from a few 3rd party repositories it has everything I need. It just works and continues to work.

Even if you ignore the time it takes to download for those with low speed connections or data caps, the issue is made worse by a lack of competitively priced storage options for the Xbox Series consoles. PC owners by comparison have it much easier.

It would be to Microsoft’s advantage to change that perspective, which would reinforce why they might maintain their hard line of feature equivalence. I agree though, it appears to be the status quo.

The Series S is more powerful: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2022-steam-deck-vs-xbox-series-s-how-future-proof-is-the-valve-handheld

But the Steam Deck is a portable console, so the design considerations are different, so it’s a bit of an apple to oranges comparison. On pure numbers, though, Series S will perform better. (Steam Deck is still awesome though 👍)

I find it hard to believe BG3 would run that poorly at that low quality but I guess time will tell. It’s up to Larian how much they want to release on Xbox

Going back to the article, I think whether it hurts MS more to keep this promise over features or not depends a great deal on what the split is between Series S and Series X consoles. I would suggest it’s worse to sacrifice the Series S audience as there’s less sunk cost there compared to the Series X audience, who we might assume have more of an investment in the Xbox ecosystem from the previous generation, and therefore it’s harder for them to make the switch to PS5.

Honestly, it’s kind of on the developer. If they’d taken the Series S as the base line during development, they would have made life a lot easier for themselves. I think Microsoft are right to stick to their guns. It will seriously piss off their consumers if they can’t land good quality versions of equivalent games on PS5.

I actually think it could be more beneficial for players across both console platforms to encourage developers to build games which scale reasonably, and at the low end target a 30 FPS minimum frame rate whilst the Series S/PS5 get 60 FPS+ or improved image quality, or both. Instead of it just being a race to the bottom on performance just so we can have a little bit of ray tracing.

Also, as far as I’m aware, Baldurs Gate 3 hasn’t released on PS5 and is not due until September. I will be very interested to see how that goes, because I think the conclusion of this article is premature until we see that.