I wonder if MS will jump the gun on the next gen early. Game Pass finally seems to be starting to deliver the steady stream of new releases they promised all those years ago, but it's happened too late in the gen for them to make the ground up. A new console might put them back in the spotlight again, especially if it's more reasonably priced than Sony's ridiculous PS5 Pro.
I'm still happy with my Xbox, and have never really been tempted to jump ship to PS5 - 90% of what I play is available on both platforms anyway. But I'd like to see them pick a strategy and stick to it, and I hope that involves selling consoles and making games.
That's interesting. I was in CEX yesterday and wondered why the couple of Series X's they had were marked up at RRP.
I think the best hope for Sony is that they'll be kept in check by Steam/Steam portables and the upsurge in mobile gaming some regions have seen.
Seems like they are in stock some places (Argos) but they seem to have discontinued the All Access program. The links to it are all dead or not updated, lists several retailers who pages don't have the correct links etc.
All a bit odd.
Quite surprised this hasn't become a thing in the specialist press. Normally, those fuckers are all over that stuff. Probably too busy making up nonsense about Switch 2.
They have been leaking the Xbox Handheld Stuff this week.
I enjoyed that, especially the photoshopped Game Gear folks used to illustrate the story.
That would be a dream personally! The ones I saw all used mocked up green and black ROG Ally's. Which also looks good.
I have my Ally docked and working as a console/PC on the TV in the bedroom now as been getting that set up last week and played Yakuza 0 on it for about 4 hours yesterday, and feels like that could be a good angle for also marketing a handheld Xbox device with GamePass.
Just put XCloud on Switch 2. Job done.
I see that BDS have asked everyone to avoid Microsoft products. That's certainly enough to sway me from Xbox to PlayStation if I were buying one. Although who knows when/if I'll be buying either again.
Not sure this is the correct thread for this, but had the Xbox Handheld (which I get was just leaks at this stage) just looked like a regular Rog Ally and Ally X but with Xbox theme and branding, then I would have been really excited. However, the form factor of the one leaked is not a nice looking gadget. It looks well janky and like some odd JoyCon grip holder.
Another mad round of layoffs at Microsoft. Alongside all the job losses, Everwild (Rare) and the new Perfect Dark have been cancelled.
There’s a lot of negative opinion online about this, although these two feel like games from the mad days before Xbox got their act together. They’re Halo Infinite-era vapourware, made when big announcements at E3 were all the rage. Now that we’re getting an actually impressive flow of games on Game Pass, the cancellation of these two might just be the final farty tailwind of a bygone era.
Got to wonder if Rare are done for now though. The level of corporate mismanagement over the last ten years with all these acquisitions has been mad.
Losing Perfect Dark hurt, that teaser/conceptwhatever they showed looked a great direction to go in. Hopefully Rare find their feet. @_@
Phil Spencer should be fuckin' ashamed of himself. Prick.
I believe he's making his fucking exit as well soon, just burnt everything to the ground and left
MS really do have the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, don't they? Finally, after years of promises, they're finally getting a steady stream of great games out, cloud gaming is coming together, and Game Pass is better than it's been for years… and now this.
Fundamentally I think it's that they're not a gaming company at heart and they see gaming as just a revenue stream. Someone high up has looked at the money they make from Call of Duty and decided that they don't need all this other stuff that doesn't make as much money. That's probably all there is to it. It was the same even back in the Xbox 360 era when they decided to turn their incredibly successful and beloved console into a Kinect machine because all the money was in the Wii. They're fundamentally hopeless at this stuff.
