Massive layoffs and studio closures and mergers like Obsidian merged with Bethesda.

New Xbox to cost $1200-$1800.

Gamepass limited to 15 hours a month for Ultimate.

No, the Game Pass limitation is for _streaming_ the games. You can play and download as much as you want.

New Xbox cost is not confirmed.

Might not be confirmed but it was part of an article that MS approved of. They appear to be testing the waters.

I'm not a big gamer but unlimited cloud gaming seemed too good to be true to me.

It works perfectly on a fast home connection over ethernet, mind blowing how responsive it is and load times are non existent.

But as far as I can tell most people subscribe to game pass anyway? Why buy the hardware at all when I can just cloud game in the same subscription. .

I suspect if the threat of AI cloning pans out as some say, we may see a sharp return to streaming - perhaps devs releasing on streaming platforms only - as an ultimate form of anti-piracy

Series/S costs 1000 Euros and Series/X costs about 1700 right now so it'll likely be even higher unless ram prices finally crash.

At least here in the UK, that's off by a lot.

Here, Series S is £400-£430 for 512GB or £500-£520 for 1TB.

Xbox Series X is £600-£620 for digital 1TB or £50 more for the disc version. That's much more than I paid for mine a year after launch (£450 I think), but luckily still nowhere near 1700 Euros.

It'll probably be an app instead of its own thing in the future. For Pluton-enabled systems only of course.

> Hadn't heard about Xbox

Indeed you’re seeing the consequences of their past decade+ of management

The sales have fallen off compared to the Playstation.

A quick google search turned up these global sales numbers: PS3 87.40 million, PS4 117.20 million, PS5 96.44 million. Xbox 360 85.73 million, Xbox One 57.96 million, Xbox Series X/S 35.68 million.

I'm usually late in getting new console generations (didn't care for paying for new generation premium), so I remember looking to buy an Series S/X a year ago and it wasn't anywhere, there was wild speculation about a new generation or those handheld things taking over.

It seems to be back in stock now, but at a cost of about 1000 Euros for a Series/S I'm not really feeling enticed even if GTA 6 is around the corner. They probably really shot themselves in the foot by not having units out a year ago and now fewer will buy due to pricing.

Well, speaking for myself, paying the new console premium for my PS5 turned out to be a decent deal given used ones go for about the same at the moment...

Their console is no longer their primary objective though, xbox live is where it's at - tons of people did the math, why buy a console when you can get a subscription with tons of games for 3+ years for the same money instead? It's a really attractive offering for people who don't play games all that much (that is, more than 2 hours a day).

I think Sony is shooting themselves in the foot with the digital only consoles too - unless they maintain a very attractive set of exclusives at all times, people will just choose whichever digital subscription is best or cheapest for them instead of something tied to a particular console.

I think they've broken the trust with exclusives and don't think they can get it back quickly, almost all of the best PS4 exclusives that I can think of ended up on PC anyway. Exclusives won't be a factor for me when weighing up a PS6

Xbox Live subs are something like half of what they projected. This is why they are closing so many studios and laying people off. Xbox Live is not bringing in the money.

They need to sell consoles to get people to become subscribers.

They seemed to have backtracked on the no-console approach. In fact, their entire Xbox strategy seems to have flipped 180 in the last year.

Nothing to do with today’s outage though.

Xbox Live is the old subscription service, it has since morphed into Xbox Game Pass which is the monthly subscription to access a bunch of games (as well as online features Xbox Live offered before)

Xbox Game Pass was an attractive offer for consumers when MS was getting people onboard and the price was so heavily subsidized that it could never have been a sustainable model. Once they tried to start bumping the price into something profitable people immediately said "okay well that's clearly not worth it, I'll just cancel."

They attempted to make it $30/month last year before backtracking. At $360/year, even factoring in the new $70 price of AAA new releases and ignoring you can wait a few months to buy them cheaper, you had to be buying 5 new release games per year at launch just to get close to breaking even with the subscription price. 6 before you save money. So...

> It's a really attractive offering for people who don't play games all that much (that is, more than 2 hours a day)

No, it's absolutely not worth it for these people. Even at the current prices they backtracked to ($280/year if you want to play new releases on day 1), if you're a person who doesn't game that much, it's cheaper to just buy a few new games per year. If you're not a frequent gamer, why would you of all people need access to a massive library of games?

I personally have a backlog of 45 games I want to play written down in a note. And those are just the ones I wrote down. Most of these games you can get for peanuts. I just played through Fallout New Vegas for my first time. It regularly goes on sale for $0.99, or $5 if you want all the DLC. I got 90 hours of playtime out of that.

The idea any casual gamers should be paying for a subscription service to a Netflix-style game library is nuts to me. These aren't movies and tv shows you'll be flying through every evening, they're big games that can take weeks to play even if you're putting in a few hours per day.