Support NeoGAF

[StealthGoblin]

I can see why. If more and more of the games you’ll come to rely on from 3rd parties are in the direct control of your major competitor then that makes it hard to break into that market.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Which again proves that entrenched companies in a mature market is hard to break in to. Most of the time the market remains static and it takes a major move to change the status quo.
Google didn't make any major moves and dropped out. It had nothing to do with MS at all.

That's a fair enough way to look at it. Google could've done more, that's true. But if we're talking about Microsoft specifically, the idea to justify the acquisition strategy with "well we need to see a shift in the market leader console sales-wise because it's been long enough", IMO is not a good enough justification. If that's what people think in and of itself will bring competition, they have to understand that isn't necessarily the case.

We'll just agree to disagree agree. I think Starfield, Perfect Dark Zero, Fable, Redfall, Forza(Motorsport & Horizon), Gears and Halo are all examples of AAA development on Xbox. To say they are 'barely' making AAA games seems pretty laughable.

I think those can be AAA games, sure, but they simply don't have the budget of a HFW, or GOW Ragnarok, or a GTA V or RDR2. That's clear just by looking at them compared to those games. AAA fills a spectrum in terms of budgets, size and scale; I think MS's marquee games occupy the lower to mid part of that scale and Sony's marquee occupy the higher end of that scale, and that's fine I suppose.

Well I won't argue that Sony and MS are doing things differently with regard to business model with MS focused more of their sub service and Sony focused more on single day one purchases. The studios MS has acquired have a wide variety of genres and game types and it is not accurate to claim most are any particular type.

You mentioned Ninja Theory but there is also Doublefine, Obsidian, Inexile, and Compulsion Games. They have all made single player games and are very similar to Sony purchases. That is what is necessary to have a successful subscription service. Variety. You can't rely on GaaS exclusively or single player titles either.

"Similar" yes but to the majority who have played those games and the Sony ones you feel are similar, not comparable in terms of overall quality. Very few people would be pressed to choose Hellblade over TLOU Part 2 or GOW 2018. Few would probably choose Psychonauts 2 over R&C: Rift Apart, etc. But these are mainly subjective tastes, it's just that a majority of people would objectively lean to a certain choice subjectively if presented with those options, I feel.

But I agree that a sub service needs software variety. I'm just questioning if subscription services are going to ever become such a necessity in gaming, that they will justify that type of investment for the long-term across the board. That is something we need to wait and see on.

I did notice you didn't mention Sony is trying to move to more GaaS titles and will soon be pushing moremicro transactions themselves. Probably like GT7 had. It sounds to me that MS was on to something or else Sony would have continued to happily ignore whatever MS was doing. It's good to see Sony trying to get more game variety and I've never been opposed to GaaS so I'm looking forward to seeing what they do.

GT7 isn't the best example because its MTX implementation has caused a lot of headaches and upset some folks. As well, MS are hardly the only company doing GaaS or MTX; I think Sony have likely been more inspired by games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, and COD into pursuing that strategy over anything MS has individually put out over the past several years, if looking at the differences in revenue & profit numbers between Fortnite/Apex/COD compared to say Halo, Forza, Sea of Thieves and the such.

Personally I'm not really against Sony pursuing more GaaS titles, same as I'm not really against MS doing so. But the games have to be suitable and built with that approach in mind, else you end up with failures. It's just that GaaS/live-service in general isn't my bag in terms of games, though because the vast majority of those games are FPS, RTS or MMORPGs, that might have something to do with it.

Like, if there was a big live-service GaaS rhythm game like Guitar Hero/DJ Hero/UmJammer/Gitaroo Man, or a really big & cool live-service GaaS-structured fighting game, I would be playing those types of games a lot more. GaaS/live-service is just the model, it's the genre and perhaps the IP that matter more to me. That's why I'm interested in Sega's Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi games, and why I hope they turn out well. Because if they can bring back the gameplay that made the originals fresh & cool, just now incidentally supporting a live-service model, then I'll be down to play them.

They should probably take some notes from Nintendo and Splatoon 3 on that front.

 

[lefty1117]

Google is known for killing products, this is nothing new really. MS had the better strategy and they won. That's about it. Funny how people are all for competition, until somebody actually wins.

 

[Ozriel]

Oh, is it because you have to pay for GamePass? Like how you had to PAY for Stadia? Would that suggest, then, that for paid services you maybe HAVE to buy developers and/or publishers? And if that is the case, Google's claim of MS's aggressive buy of publishers like Zenimax/Bethesda basically pushing them out of the market, has some validity?

Google never claimed Microsoft's purchase of Zenimax 'pushed them out of the market'. Harrison's comments were made against the backdrop of them closing their first party efforts, not when they exited the market.

I can assure you that Sony isn't making the claim to the CMA that MS studio purchases is forcing them to close down the likes of Naughty Dog or Sucker Punch.

Also, Geforce Now has paid tiers...and they aren't making claims of being forced out of the market.

In fact, quoting Harrison directly, he blames Stadia's demise on a lack of interest and growth.

• Ultimately, Stadia chief Harrison said the main culprit was a lack of growth: “While Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected.”

Folks spent years deriding Stadia and Cloud streaming, and now all of a sudden, there's this desperate push to pitch it as a brilliant service that was killed by Microsoft's aggressive purchase of a publisher whose games were on the Stadia platform, remained on the Stadia platform post acquisition and STILL got DLC post acquisition.

 

[levyjl1988]

I can never see Google, Amazon, and Apple entering the console gaming space. This is only reserved for Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, and Steam.
Any more players and it will feel bloated.

 

[Kagey K]

This is clickbait. I've googled a billion things and can't find any way or quote that corroborates this.

 

[graywolf323]

This is clickbait. I've googled a billion things and can't find any way or quote that corroborates this.

Stadia Leadership Praised Development Studios For 'Great Progress' Just One Week Before Laying Them All Off

Developers at Google’s recently formed game studios were shocked February 1 when they were notified that the studios would be shut down, according to four sources with knowledge of what transpired. Just the week prior, Google Stadia vice president and general manager Phil Harrison sent an email...

kotaku.com

In his Thursday Q&A with staff, he pointed specifically to Microsoft’s buying spree and planned acquisition of Bethesda Software later this year as one of the factors that had made Google decide to close the book on original game development.

 

[Kagey K]

http://[URL][URL][URL]https://kotak...ised-development-studios-for-great-1846281384

[/URL][/URL][/URL]

Again how?

Why would MS buying Bethesda make Google stop developing a game?

Did the Activision purchase make Ubisoft shut down Assasins Creed?

Or the Bungie purchase stopped Nintendo from making a game with Retro?

If Stadia was on a 1 game make it or break it track, and Bethesda purchase was the one that broke it.

How serious were they?

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

Again how?

Why would MS buying Bethesda make Google stop developing a game?

Did the Activision purchase make Ubisoft shut down Assasins Creed?

Or the Bungie purchase stopped Nintendo from making a game with Retro?

If Stadia was on a 1 game make it or break it track, and Bethesda purchase was the one that broke it.

How serious were they?

You want to give logic to something that doesn't have it. Because is about how Stadia's failure can be justified by many factors.

 

[Kagey K]

You want to give logic to something that doesn't have it. Because is about how Stadia's failure can be justified by many factors.

Right it makes as much sense to me as Google shutting down Pixelbook, because MS has Surface and Sony might revive Vizeo.

 

[Rambone]

Stadia died for a single reason (well more then one but this was the biggest). It targeted the WRONG demographics.

They wanted hardcore gamers to buy in and play on stadia. meanwhile hardcore gamers pay for high priced video cards and hardware to play games on PC. Why would you pay to stream when you could pay to own and play locally? There was little to no benefit to playing on stadia.

The other issues like it using a crazy amount of bandwidth, not having a great game selection, only useable on PC. Meanwhile competing systems allowed play on a large range of devices, targeted casual gamers, and were included with other features for value.

I don't think any average gamer would be able to take Stadia seriously anyway once the novelty of streaming wore off, the platform became antiquated really fast.
- No raytracing support and not all games were running at 4k 60fps. There is very little reason to choose the Stadia version of a game if you have a PS5 or Series S/X and/or a PC with similar capability.
- Stadia you need to purchase games individually, this has turned out to be a con for me. Services like Xcloud and Luna, the entire library is open (Luna was at least at one point). GFN, just piggy backs your existing library off of Steam/GoG/Etc which is incredibly more useful.

 

[The Fuzz damn you!]

The studios MS has acquired have a wide variety of genres and game types and it is not accurate to claim most are any particular type.

Cool. I didn’t say that.

You mentioned Ninja Theory but there is also Doublefine, Obsidian, Inexile, and Compulsion Games. They have all made single player games and are very similar to Sony purchases. That is what is necessary to have a successful subscription service. Variety. You can't rely on GaaS exclusively or single player titles either.

Yeah, I mentioned (some of) those - crpgs make for good long engagement and make a good fit for a subscription service. But, of course, I was talking about trends, not absolutes.

I did notice you didn't mention Sony is trying to move to more GaaS titles and will soon be pushing moremicro transactions themselves.

That was implicit in my mentioning Sony acquiring Bungie. No doubt there’ll be a greater push there - many of their internal studios are now working on multiplayer titles. It’ll be interesting to see how strongly they push micro transactions and season passes there. I suspect the answer will be “a lot”.

It sounds to me that MS was on to something or else Sony would have continued to happily ignore whatever MS was doing. It's good to see Sony trying to get more game variety and I've never been opposed to GaaS so I'm looking forward to seeing what they do.

I don’t think Sony would ignore any entrant into the gaming space - they’ll be paying very close attention to anything that could disrupt their cash-cow.

I do think that part of MS’s strategy here is to starve Sony of revenue. Lowering the price of entry at the same time that Sony is increasing it puts downward pressure on Sony’s pricing tactic (which, obviously, hasn’t worked if that is their intention). It’d be interesting to see how much of a loss MS has taken on GamePass and the acquisitions that are feeding it, and what their expectations are around a timeline for profitability - that would give some indication as to how much (if at all) they consider GP a loss leader. But, of course, they’ll never release that info.

 

[DarkMage619]

That's a fair enough way to look at it. Google could've done more, that's true. But if we're talking about Microsoft specifically, the idea to justify the acquisition strategy with "well we need to see a shift in the market leader console sales-wise because it's been long enough", IMO is not a good enough justification. If that's what people think in and of itself will bring competition, they have to understand that isn't necessarily the case.

When did MS say this? They made more acquisitions because they want more guaranteed content for Game pass. I don't think they care about being the console sales leader seeing how you can play all their games without buying a console at all. The competition will be to get people into their ecosystem and I think they are well on track to do so.

I think those can be AAA games, sure, but they simply don't have the budget of a HFW, or GOW Ragnarok, or a GTA V or RDR2. That's clear just by looking at them compared to those games. AAA fills a spectrum in terms of budgets, size and scale; I think MS's marquee games occupy the lower to mid part of that scale and Sony's marquee occupy the higher end of that scale, and that's fine I suppose.

Again we'll agree to disagree. Sony's single player titles look nice but that is not the end all be all for quality. In addition most of MS' titles have extensive multiplayer modes and offer significantly more longevity.

You also have no idea how much their titles cost to produce. Some keep claiming that Game pass is unsustainable. How could that be if MS is only producing low budget games? I'm will to simply say people have different tastes. MS won publisher of the year in 2021 so I'd say that isn't too bad for the company supposedly producing lower tier products.

"Similar" yes but to the majority who have played those games and the Sony ones you feel are similar, not comparable in terms of overall quality. Very few people would be pressed to choose Hellblade over TLOU Part 2 or GOW 2018. Few would probably choose Psychonauts 2 over R&C: Rift Apart, etc. But these are mainly subjective tastes, it's just that a majority of people would objectively lean to a certain choice subjectively if presented with those options, I feel.

I disagree for the reasons I stated earlier.

But I agree that a sub service needs software variety. I'm just questioning if subscription services are going to ever become such a necessity in gaming, that they will justify that type of investment for the long-term across the board. That is something we need to wait and see on.

When did anyone say it was a necessity? Game pass remains an option that can be used or ignored. It appears to be working for MS and they are the only ones pushing that model because it makes sense for them. Don't forget Sony had game sub services first. MS just found more success with it.

GT7 isn't the best example because its MTX implementation has caused a lot of headaches and upset some folks. As well, MS are hardly the only company doing GaaS or MTX; I think Sony have likely been more inspired by games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, and COD into pursuing that strategy over anything MS has individually put out over the past several years, if looking at the differences in revenue & profit numbers between Fortnite/Apex/COD compared to say Halo, Forza, Sea of Thieves and the such.

If you say so. I'd say the timing is pretty interesting though.

Cool. I didn’t say that.

You claimed MS' studio acquisitions were for long term engagement. I don't necessarily agree. They have games of all sorts of lengths, both single and multiplayer. Again variety is what works for a sub service.

Yeah, I mentioned (some of) those - crpgs make for good long engagement and make a good fit for a subscription service. But, of course, I was talking about trends, not absolutes.

I don't necessarily think there any particular trends other than lots of variety like I mentioned earlier. I agree Sony is far more focused on single player story driven titles though. They may change that going forward.

That was implicit in my mentioning Sony acquiring Bungie. No doubt there’ll be a greater push there - many of their internal studios are now working on multiplayer titles. It’ll be interesting to see how strongly they push micro transactions and season passes there. I suspect the answer will be “a lot”.

Hopefully they'll do it with more finesse than GT7.

I don’t think Sony would ignore any entrant into the gaming space - they’ll be paying very close attention to anything that could disrupt their cash-cow.

I do think that part of MS’s strategy here is to starve Sony of revenue. Lowering the price of entry at the same time that Sony is increasing it puts downward pressure on Sony’s pricing tactic (which, obviously, hasn’t worked if that is their intention). It’d be interesting to see how much of a loss MS has taken on GamePass and the acquisitions that are feeding it, and what their expectations are around a timeline for profitability - that would give some indication as to how much (if at all) they consider GP a loss leader. But, of course, they’ll never release that info.

Sony has proven that they will do whatever is best for their bottom line. They won't take a loss to provide more value to their customers. It appears like they want to follow the Apple model of offering the 'premium experience'. I'm not a fan of them raising prices on consoles or extra fees on games but their fanbase is quite loyal and will pay extra with little complaint.

MS can't do that to their customers because they will bail on them. Look at how Xbox fans reacted to the Xbox live gold price hike. MS had to roll it back and offer free online for f2p titles (something they should had done a long time ago). It will be interesting to see how things shake out but I will always appreciate a good value and right now MS is making the right moves for me as a customer. I don't care about how much money they spend I care how much they charge ME.

 

[Sweden85]

MS sold 24 millio Xboxes, 86 million 360s, and ~50 million Ones.
Sony went from 150 million to 87 to 115 across the same generations.
Nintendo went from 20 million GameCubes to 100 million Wiis, to the WiiU, to the Switch.

Clearly, consumers are quite willing to shift loyalties in this industry.

The barrier to entry is, in large part, the cost of games development. When MS entered the industry, high-end budgets were in the single-digit millions, with some notable exceptions pushing into tens of millions, and development time was on the order of.a year or two. You spent less and you recouped your cost relatively quickly. These days, high end budgets run well into the hundreds of millions, and can take a decade to pay off - if they ever do. That is much harder to justify with a new game dev company - entrants into the industry need to buy up a proven studio that can justify that kind of outlay.

Now I’m not saying MS buying Bethesda was THE reason that Stadia folded - you’re right, their business model was shit and anyone can see that. I’m not even saying that it was necessarily a significant contributing factor. I don’t know and I’m not going to pretend that I do. But it’s not difficulty to see how it could be A factor, nor that it’s indicative of an issue within the industry that could well be exacerbated by this recent spate of acquisitions.

I don't think loyalty shift that much, it's much more what the casual player buys.

 

[The Fuzz damn you!]

You claimed MS' studio acquisitions were for long term engagement. I don't necessarily agree. They have games of all sorts of lengths, both single and multiplayer. Again variety is what works for a sub service.

Long-term engagement works economically for a subscription service. You can’t run a sub service at $15/month by releasing $70 game every quarter. Different strategies.

I don't necessarily think there any particular trends other than lots of variety like I mentioned earlier. I agree Sony is far more focused on single player story driven titles though. They may change that going forward.

That’s a trend. Sony’s focus is on single-player day one purchases, like you said, MS’s focus is elsewhere. Different strategies - that’s a trend.

Hopefully they'll do it with more finesse than GT7.

Ugh. I was looking forward to GT7. I despise any model that incentivises studios to gate experiences and progression behind micro transactions. I don’t know whether that’s Sony’s decision or just Sony turning a blind eye to Polyphony’s focus on profit over engagement, but it’s shit either way.

Sony has proven that they will do whatever is best for their bottom line.

Every corporation does this. They are legally obliged to do this. Market leader will abuse their position, market runners-up will attempt to undermine market leaders. MSdies this, Sony does this, Apple does this, Alphabet does this, Amazon does this - no-one is on your side.

They won't take a loss to provide more value to their customers. It appears like they want to follow the Apple model of offering the 'premium experience'. I'm not a fan of them raising prices on consoles or extra fees on games but their fanbase is quite loyal and will pay extra with little complaint.

Yep. Saying you’re “not a fan” of such practices is expressing your discontent with capitalism. Good luck with that!

MS can't do that to their customers because they will bail on them. Look at how Xbox fans reacted to the Xbox live gold price hike. MS had to roll it back and offer free online for f2p titles (something they should had done a long time ago).

Yep.

It will be interesting to see how things shake out but I will always appreciate a good value and right now MS is making the right moves for me as a customer. I don't care about how much money they spend I care how much they charge ME.

Of course. Take advantage of what you can while you can. I’ve never invested in the MS ecosystem — been a Sony man since the mid-90s — and I’m old enough to remember the anti-competitive abuses of Netscape and AMD. Sony is exactly the same, of course — I also remember rootkits on CDs and Janet Jackson’s poorly-concealed nipple — but I prefer shorter, more impactful experiences these days. I also have a discount sub to Sony’s service but can’t see myself extending that beyond whatever I managed to rack up - 2025 I think. Subscription services incentivise artificial gatekeeping and, like I said, I despise that.

 

[The Fuzz damn you!]

I don't think loyalty shift that much, it's much more what the casual player buys.

That “casual user” is much more likely to shift loyalties. That’s almost what defines the demographic.

 

[Sweden85]

That “casual user” is much more likely to shift loyalties. That’s almost what defines the demographic.

Yes, and my respon

That “casual user” is much more likely to shift loyalties. That’s almost what defines the demographic.

Yes, then we agree..the casual loved the Wii because of Wii sport, the PS2 due to DVD and so forth. Now people don't want to pay for games anymore due to the gamepass model.

 

[Bernd Lauert]

You can’t run a sub service at $15/month by releasing $70 game every quarter.

You can if you have enough subscribers.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

When did MS say this? They made more acquisitions because they want more guaranteed content for Game pass. I don't think they care about being the console sales leader seeing how you can play all their games without buying a console at all. The competition will be to get people into their ecosystem and I think they are well on track to do so.

"Say" it? It's called reading between the lines, and looking at their moves from the big picture. Some time ago they expressed concern about slowing growth in cloud. This is a bit of time before announcing the ABK acquisition and the strategic partnership with Sega, both of which (especially the latter) mainly concerning Azure.

ABK had signed on to partner with Google back in 2020 in using the Stadia technology and servers, after deciding to move off of Amazon AWS. Back when Minecraft was acquired, MS gradually moved their stuff off AWS and onto Azure. 100% safe to expect they will do the same with ABK's services and content towards Azure. You don't spend $69 billion on something that doesn't also benefit your biggest corporate division, especially considering what a money sink Xbox has been for the past three generations (360 would've generated a lot more profit if not for RROD).

You think Satya's dumb enough to come out and say "Yeah, we're buying publishers so we can grow our strengths in cloud and amass even more clients to justify existence and growth of Azure"...when that's one of the main points of concern among regulators investigating the acquisition? C'mon

Again we'll agree to disagree. Sony's single player titles look nice but that is not the end all be all for quality. In addition most of MS' titles have extensive multiplayer modes and offer significantly more longevity.

How's that working out so far for Halo Infinite? Gears 5? Bleeding Edge? Forza Horizon 5? You're speaking about a subjective opinion on your part, but then try to use subjective measurements like "longevity" to justify that opinion.

At least I can point to actual numbers bringing into question the "longevity" of the aforementioned games (or certain features outright shut down, like the eSports league for Gears 5).

You also have no idea how much their titles cost to produce. Some keep claiming that Game pass is unsustainable. How could that be if MS is only producing low budget games? I'm will to simply say people have different tastes. MS won publisher of the year in 2021 so I'd say that isn't too bad for the company supposedly producing lower tier products.

How much do you think Pentiment costed to make? Grounded? Battletoads? Do you think Forza Horizon 5 is a $100 million game considering it's a racing game using a pre-existing engine, lots of pre-existing assets & settings from previous releases, etc?

Also don't even bother bringing up "Publisher of the Year" awards, considering the one you're referring to is from a flawed aggregate with a host of problems in standardizing aggregate clustering of the reviews they receive for various games, let alone unable to do anything against review bombing (apparently). How a game somehow wins "Player's Choice" and is almost effectively dead less than a year later, tells you all you need to know about these "awards", in certain cases.

When did anyone say it was a necessity? Game pass remains an option that can be used or ignored. It appears to be working for MS and they are the only ones pushing that model because it makes sense for them. Don't forget Sony had game sub services first. MS just found more success with it.

Really? It's been a common talking point by many people, that cloud gaming and subscription services are going to eventually become the de-facto way to play games. Logically speaking, if that were to happen, it'd mean the marketshare of people playing games that way would significantly dwarf those playing locally on console, so there would be much less reason to keep manufacturing consoles, money-wise.

We're already looking at the real possibility of physical discs as standard disappearing with 10th-gen consoles and physical still accounts for over 20% of the way people play games. In a future where consoles only account for some 20% (or less) of total gaming revenue, why wouldn't companies start phasing out console manufacturing for local play?

Also it's very questionable to say MS has found "success" with GP. Again, they don't report GamePass revenue or profit figures, for something that is supposedly so successful. They barely even provide sub counts anymore, and that's something ALL the other subscription services do at least quarterly, from PS+ to NSO to Netflix to HBO Max and so forth.

Heck, Sony provided sub and revenue numbers for PS Now and that was a relative failure (tho really, they barely ever pushed the service after the first two years) compared to GamePass...yet MS are cagey on the only numbers for GP that mean a single damn to the wider market in evaluating its actual success

If you say so. I'd say the timing is pretty interesting though.

Dude, what timing?

 

[The Fuzz damn you!]

You can if you have enough subscribers.

Well… no, you can’t. A game budgeted at the equivalent of one intended to sell tens of millions at $70 needs to actually bring in or retain more subscribers than is reasonable to expect. You can’t just say “we have the money, let’s throw $200,000,000 at a game for the hell of it,” or at least you can’t do it long-term - you need to be able to justify the need for that game to retain $200,000,000+ worth of subscribers within that 3-month timeframe. Napkin maths says you need 13 million people who would leave the sub with out that one particular game, or who will join in order to play it but refuse to join without it, and that’s without even considering marketing costs or tax. If your sub service relies on that one game to bring in or retain those kinds of numbers, it is not a healthy service.

 

[DarkMage619]

Long-term engagement works economically for a subscription service. You can’t run a sub service at $15/month by releasing $70 game every quarter. Different strategies.

The long term engagement comes from the variety MS offers on their service. People forget but MS has more than just their first party titles so they cover pretty much all genres and single and multiplayer titles. I agree they have a different strategy and it appears to be working for them just fine.

That’s a trend. Sony’s focus is on single-player day one purchases, like you said, MS’s focus is elsewhere. Different strategies - that’s a trend.

I still believe variety is the biggest trend but yes different strategies.

Ugh. I was looking forward to GT7. I despise any model that incentivises studios to gate experiences and progression behind micro transactions. I don’t know whether that’s Sony’s decision or just Sony turning a blind eye to Polyphony’s focus on profit over engagement, but it’s shit either way.

It's good for Sony's bottom line though and that's what they are focusing on.

Every corporation does this. They are legally obliged to do this. Market leader will abuse their position, market runners-up will attempt to undermine market leaders. MSdies this, Sony does this, Apple does this, Alphabet does this, Amazon does this - no-one is on your side.

Every company wants to make money true. Not every company does it by raising prices on consoles and charging upgrade fees on games. I kind of think if a company is saving me money that company IS on my side. When they stop caring about what I want as a customer and over charging they are against my interests.

Yep. Saying you’re “not a fan” of such practices is expressing your discontent with capitalism. Good luck with that!

MS is about as capitalistic as they come. Still saving me money and offering plenty of consumer friendly policies. Those things are not mutually exclusive.

Of course. Take advantage of what you can while you can. I’ve never invested in the MS ecosystem — been a Sony man since the mid-90s — and I’m old enough to remember the anti-competitive abuses of Netscape and AMD. Sony is exactly the same, of course — I also remember rootkits on CDs and Janet Jackson’s poorly-concealed nipple — but I prefer shorter, more impactful experiences these days. I also have a discount sub to Sony’s service but can’t see myself extending that beyond whatever I managed to rack up - 2025 I think. Subscription services incentivise artificial gatekeeping and, like I said, I despise that.

Been on PlayStation since 95 myself. I can see the difference between them then and now and some changes have not been for the better.

"Say" it? It's called reading between the lines, and looking at their moves from the big picture. Some time ago they expressed concern about slowing growth in cloud. This is a bit of time before announcing the ABK acquisition and the strategic partnership with Sega, both of which (especially the latter) mainly concerning Azure.



You think Satya's dumb enough to come out and say "Yeah, we're buying publishers so we can grow our strengths in cloud and amass even more clients to justify existence and growth of Azure"...when that's one of the main points of concern among regulators investigating the acquisition? C'mon

People always attribute some sort of sinister motive to MS even in absence of any actual proof. People have to 'read between the lines' and focus on what isn't said. Bottom line ABK acquisition benefits Game pass. Phil Spencer came out directly and said he plans to add ABK games to the service. It make sense for them to leverage their own internal infrastructure to make that service even better but I'm focused on what affects me as a customer and that's Game pass.

MS has made little effort to beat Sony at console sales. Again if that was the goal they wouldn't use that cloud tech you were talking about to bypass forcing customers to buy the new console in the first place. You can play new games over the cloud. No one else is even doing that.

How's that working out so far for Halo Infinite? Gears 5? Bleeding Edge? Forza Horizon 5? You're speaking about a subjective opinion on your part, but then try to use subjective measurements like "longevity" to justify that opinion.

You mentioned Bleeding Edge but not Grounded? Curious. Forza Horizon 5 won game of the year in several publications. Halo Infinite also rated well but clearly they need more multiplayer content. MS objectively has many quality games and in some genres better than Sony titles like racing for instance and FPS which Sony doesn't even make. It IS subjective and like I said we'll agree to disagree.

At least I can point to actual numbers bringing into question the "longevity" of the aforementioned games (or certain features outright shut down, like the eSports league for Gears 5).

Game longevity for MS comes from people staying subscribed to Game pass and getting new people to sign up. Those actual numbers show MS has the most popular game subscription service.

How much do you think Pentiment costed to make? Grounded? Battletoads? Do you think Forza Horizon 5 is a $100 million game considering it's a racing game using a pre-existing engine, lots of pre-existing assets & settings from previous releases, etc?

What is your point? MS has big budget games like Halo, Gears, and Starfield. They also support passion projects like Grounded and Pentiment. Looks like they are allowing the developers to make the games they care about. It works fantastically when you want lots of variety on your sub service. It's different than doing several remasters of older titles but each platform can follow their own strategies.

Also don't even bother bringing up "Publisher of the Year" awards, considering the one you're referring to is from a flawed aggregate with a host of problems in standardizing aggregate clustering of the reviews they receive for various games, let alone unable to do anything against review bombing (apparently). How a game somehow wins "Player's Choice" and is almost effectively dead less than a year later, tells you all you need to know about these "awards", in certain cases.

There is no need to downplay a fact. Unless you can provide a superior objective way to rate games, the aggregate sites are our best resource. Just because a person doesn't like the outcome doesn't change the reality. There is an excellent chance Sony will win this year and I hope you will accept those results. I will.

Really? It's been a common talking point by many people, that cloud gaming and subscription services are going to eventually become the de-facto way to play games. Logically speaking, if that were to happen, it'd mean the marketshare of people playing games that way would significantly dwarf those playing locally on console, so there would be much less reason to keep manufacturing consoles, money-wise.

The tech is not ready for cloud gaming to replace local play. As long as the internet infrastructure is all over the place it may never be ideal. There is a reason streaming is only a compliment to traditional gaming on Xbox and PlayStation. It will be that way for the foreseeable future. It is a lot different for movies where a minimal internet connection is needed for a good experience.

We're already looking at the real possibility of physical discs as standard disappearing with 10th-gen consoles and physical still accounts for over 20% of the way people play games. In a future where consoles only account for some 20% (or less) of total gaming revenue, why wouldn't companies start phasing out console manufacturing for local play?

Digital games and cloud streaming are completely different animals. Companies will certainly phase out optical drives just like on PC. That doesn't mean that they will move to the cloud and stop making hardware. Isn't this thread about Stadia? Didn't they just miserably fail? I think cloud will remain an option next to traditional gaming.

Also it's very questionable to say MS has found "success" with GP. Again, they don't report GamePass revenue or profit figures, for something that is supposedly so successful. They barely even provide sub counts anymore, and that's something ALL the other subscription services do at least quarterly, from PS+ to NSO to Netflix to HBO Max and so forth.

The success is in the subscription numbers. The main detractors against the service always question how much money it makes over if it offers a quality experience to customers. I've never heard a good argument on why Game pass is bad for consumers. Phil Spencer said it was sustainable. It makes enough money to support the content it has. As long as it is sustainable I don't care about how much it makes for MS I care about how much it saves me.

Heck, Sony provided sub and revenue numbers for PS Now and that was a relative failure (tho really, they barely ever pushed the service after the first two years) compared to GamePass...yet MS are cagey on the only numbers for GP that mean a single damn to the wider market in evaluating its actual success

MS gave out Game pass numbers at the beginning of the year. It was 25 million people. It was by far the most popular game subscription service. It is a success and there is no indication that will change any time soon.

Dude, what timing?

Sony has been recently following lots of moves MS has made previously. Look at how many games they are putting on PC. There is even talk of them doing day one for some titles. This was unheard of before for Sony. Look at the revamp of their game subscription service. Why did they change it after Game pass got so successful? Why did they complain about the service to the Brazilian regulators? If you think their moves to GaaS titles is taking place in a vacuum and has nothing to do with what MS has done with titles like Sea of Thieves that is your choice. I just thought it was curious.

 

[Little Chicken]

Sony has been recently following lots of moves MS has made previously. Look at how many games they are putting on PC. There is even talk of them doing day one for some titles. This was unheard of before for Sony. Look at the revamp of their game subscription service. Why did they change it after Game pass got so successful? Why did they complain about the service to the Brazilian regulators? If you think their moves to GaaS titles is taking place in a vacuum and has nothing to do with what MS has done with titles like Sea of Thieves that is your choice. I just thought it was curious.

Sony rarely innovates, they take their cues from Microsoft and Nintendo.

 

[Banjo64]

I think Perfect Dark Zero are examples of AAA development on Xbox.

 

[reksveks]

Sony provided sub and revenue numbers for PS Now and that was a relative failure

Revenue numbers of PS now? Link?

They gave annual updates very much like GP

 

[Bernd Lauert]

Well… no, you can’t. A game budgeted at the equivalent of one intended to sell tens of millions at $70 needs to actually bring in or retain more subscribers than is reasonable to expect. You can’t just say “we have the money, let’s throw $200,000,000 at a game for the hell of it,” or at least you can’t do it long-term - you need to be able to justify the need for that game to retain $200,000,000+ worth of subscribers within that 3-month timeframe. Napkin maths says you need 13 million people who would leave the sub with out that one particular game, or who will join in order to play it but refuse to join without it, and that’s without even considering marketing costs or tax. If your sub service relies on that one game to bring in or retain those kinds of numbers, it is not a healthy service.

Quick napkin maths:

5 year dev cycle (it's a bigly $200m game after all)
You want one game per quarter
Which means you need to develop and release 20 games per 5 year cycle
20 games times $200m = $4b in cost for the 5 years
$4b divided by 5 years is $800m per year in cost or $67m a month
Let's add another $33m a month for all the other costs (servers, advertising, smaller games, 3rd party deals) = $100m a month

Would you argue that it's not possible to have enough subscribers to make $100m a month? Gamepass is already easily doing so. It's definitely viable.

 

[DenchDeckard]

Such bullshit, stadia killed itself with its business model and decisions...just like every other failed Google experiment.

 

[Tefl0n]

So much salt… Stadia was a bad value from the get go and there was no confidence that it would last for more than a few years before being canned.

 

[Kamina]

Phil Harrison is like King Midas, except everything he touches doesn't turn to gold, it turns to shit

 

[nikolino840]

 

[The Fuzz damn you!]

Quick napkin maths:

5 year dev cycle (it's a bigly $200m game after all)
You want one game per quarter
Which means you need to develop and release 20 games per 5 year cycle
20 games times $200m = $4b in cost for the 5 years
$4b divided by 5 years is $800m per year in cost or $67m a month
Let's add another $33m a month for all the other costs (servers, advertising, smaller games, 3rd party deals) = $100m a month

Would you argue that it's not possible to have enough subscribers to make $100m a month? Gamepass is already easily doing so. It's definitely viable.

Oh, it’s definitely possible, that’s not the question. It’s also possible to spend $100m on instant pudding and mailing that out to your subscribers. The question is whether it’s a financially justifiable use of resources. To give a slightly laboured example, you don’t see Netflix pushing out regular Hollywood-budgeted blockbusters. They have the money to do so, but they’ve decided that’s not the best use of those funds - they’d rather throw out a larger number of smaller titles that cumulatively appeal to a wide range of users. Although, having just typed all that out, I went and had a look to see that they apparently spent $200m on Red Notice and The Gray Man, which is surprising, so maybe it is more viable that I thought. Still, I think MS will reserve their bigger budgets for longer-term titles (Halo, Starfield, Elder Scrolls, whatever else) over shorter narrative-driven big-budget titles.

 

[adamsapple]

Hopefully R* does the same for that one guy with 6000 hours in Red Dead 2.

That shit is life altering levels of devastating.

 

[anothertech]

The pain. The anguish...