No

Is this the real reason everybody is trying to sue valve these days?

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."

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.

I will slog through so many menus and weird support numbers to talk to a real person.

After letting go of Tango disregarding their massive success, that part is pretty obvious.

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..."

Microsoft owns King. The candy crush franchise creator.

AI can say anything you tell it to.

And several you don't.

There are legitimate reasons to dislike the monopoly behaviors that Valve employs.

I guess they're going to go all-in on AI despite only 3.3% of MS365 subscribers paying for Copilot. Stonks?

Enshittifying

Tax write-offs like Batgirl?

Azure is by far their biggest money maker if I recall

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.

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.

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.

While true, you don't see anyone else at all even trying to be better than Steam, unfortunately. :/

This was beautiful to read, and I feel the same as you. Thank you so much for sharing such a heart warming story. :')

One can only hope

🌍👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀.meme

Despite the division they're closing making way more money (aka > $0) than the one she was moved from

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

Quick FYI: it's Elder Scrolls VI, you added an extra 'I' by accident

I went to walmart to look for a new xbox controller for my xbox one x and they had maybe 12 games for the Xbox series X and NONE of them were anything i would ever want to purchase. Also the series X is a trash piece of equipment that has constant overheating issues, you cannot replace the hard drive if it dies, and it looks absolutely horrible design wise. They also had zero consoles in stock, while Best buy had about 12 open box Series X that people had returned for one reason or another at the outlet store.

So looks like even retailers are giving up on it.

The xbox one x was the last good console xbox made and even it has a ton of heat related issues with the HDMI circuit.

Xbox just cannot make a high quality gaming system, they just can't. It's been 2 decades and they still can't get 90% of their consoles to last more than a year or 2.

Look some people may say Xbox has confusing naming scheme, but it's very simple, number just goes up:

First one is Xbox one. Noone in Microsoft is dumb enough to call "one" console that isn't first of the series. Then Xbox X (because X is Roman 10) then the Xbox 360.

Very easy

Lol is this an actual ”feature”? Can’t tell anymore.

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.

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.

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.

More than likely they'll just sunset Xbox the platform and rent you the ability to play games on the cloud using your phone, smart TV or computer. And all those franchises will be rentable first, then maybe buyable some day later.

Among other things they have huge data centers that are going to be unused come AI collapse - they just need to figure out how to run games on those GPUs, as they're very very different from gaming GPUs.

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.

I think they are sunsetting whole company.

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!!

Not surprising aren't they sundowning their whole company?

Wtf I just came up with the same comment without reading yours first.

So yeah, I agree. They must have done the calculation that it's easiest to just not exist and lay everyone off.

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.

May as well. Not like anyone still uses it. They've done a bang on job of running everyone off

I can only hope.

The PS5 version of GTA6 is going to sell pretty well then

Announcing the Xbox One 2 SL XLS SE Pro, which is the basic version, and the Pro version, the Xbox Two 1 SE SL XS SLB Enterprise, both of which are vibe-coded Windows apps that stream Gamepass games without installing anything but take up 100GB of hard drive and still run your GPU at 100% somehow. The latter costs twice as much and you get a different Minecraft cape with it. They update on a completely separate schedule to the rest of Windows, but if you run either one and the updates aren't in sync it deletes your Documents folder.

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.

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.

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."

You mean Microsoft? I hope but I doubt it, they have a lot of companies locked in their products

I had to go back and read your post twice because I was getting Xbox One X and Xbox Series X confused with eachother. I even know there is a difference, but holy god are those names bad. It's still confusing even when you know to look for it. I have no clue who decided that was a good idea. Then again, I look at their recent naming schemes and I guess I should just be happy they didn't fuck up the Xbox branding even harder.

Some products from just this one article. (Note: Microsoft 365 Copilot App, and probably others, aren't even in the article.) Can you tell me the difference?

• Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
• Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Microsoft Copilot
• Microsoft Security Copilot
• GitHub Copilot
• Microsoft Copilot Studio

To play games coded by a shitty AI, full of bugs and as many microtransactions as possible ...

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

Are those games still making that much money? Compared to gachas?