We all know Xbox 360 has played the foil to the PS3 this generation, and the competition has pushed both platforms to exceed gamers expectations. And with the next generation Xbox and PlayStation launches imminent I feel as though I’m the only one concerned about the next Xbox and how Microsoft will make it rival the next PlayStation. And I’m not saying the next Xbox won’t be a smash hit just concerned it may lose the race this time do to Microsoft’s lack of foresight.
In an exclusive interview with Game File, new(ish) Xbox boss Asha Sharma and Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty explain their vision for Microsoft’s gaming division
Starting today, Game Pass Ultimate drops from $29.99 to $22.99 a month. PC Game Pass will also drop from $16.49 to $13.99 a month. Prices may vary by region.
Beginning this year, future Call of Duty titles won’t join Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass at launch. New Call of Duty games will be added to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass during the following holiday season (about a year later), while existing Call of Duty titles already in the library will continue to be available.
Its nice there is some kind of drop... but is that all they really value CoD to be, a lousy $7 a month?
I was hoping it would drop by $10.
That $7 equates to $84 per year - which is more than COD new ($69.99 + tax).
So - you can get the exact same thing - and save a few bucks - or you can skip COD and pocket the savings or use toward another game - or games if on sale.
That’s how I’m taking it - and is enough for me to sign back up after canceling the day it went to $29.99.
It's unlikely that COD is going to be the only title they stop offering day one, but we'll see how they play their hand.
Including Call of Duty in Game Pass is just leaving money on the table. When the Elder Scrolls VI releases hopefully Microsoft doesn’t launch it into Game Pass. Then it can make more profits and use it give more value to Xbox console owners!
Can’t wait to hear how this will be spun extremely positive. 🤣
I wonder why knowing Microsoft thick head something must has happened in the background in the levels of Xbox one and Kinect 🤷🏿
Any price cut is a good thing in this day and age, but it also reveals a flaw in GamePass' design that we've all been calling out for years... it's unsustainable, especially with day and date releases on new games. COD won't be the only game they exclude, they're setting a precedent with it that they'll likely expand upon in the future.
At least they're being realistic about it now. I bet in the future we're going to start seeing them try to subsidize the high price of new consoles by making you buy 2-3 years of gamepass with it to get the console cheaper. I'm still not sure that'll be enough to save either the hardware or gamepass, but we'll see.
price cuts are good, the removal of Call of Duty is clearly something they are planning to leverage. But considering everyone around N4G claims Call of Duty sucks, it's not a big loss now is it?
Well, they're removing their biggest game from being Day 1 on the service so GamePass users can buy it instead. That's the intention.
They increased the price to $30, then removed COD and dropped it to still be above the old price.
It's an understandable compromise but the consumer Ultimately is getting less.
Think the calculation is that *most* COD users don't play that many games and aren't interested in GamePass. The GamePass users who do like COD would just buy it anyway. MS reportedly lost out a lot of money last year putting COD on GamePass.
Well Call of duty could just be the beginning. What other games can they trim from the service to get the price down? How long before it's just the Xbox core first party studio games and not the one to everquired?
Create an interesting scenario with Call of duty as well. Will people wait a year to play it? Does that split the fan base? Will it hurt to Call of duty more than a benefits Game pass? These are all legitimate questions which we will find the answers to in the coming years
And I don't consider my post negative spin just realistic observation. At the very least this backtracking can be seen as an admittance that the previous strategy of gamepass was not sustainable as most of us said.
I'd get rid of the EA and Ubisoft+ too. That should bring the price down more. The only game from either of those parts of the service i played was jedi Fallen order / survivor. both of which i also bought on disc so it was more of a convenience i didnt have to put the disc in to play when i was playing them via remote play. And really that is why i still use GPU and PS+. its the convenience of having the games ready to play from a remote location. I havent picked up my consoles controllers in at least a few years. I guess that makes me a bad gamer, but so what. i'm still playing the games, just not physically on the machines themselves. GCloud and Portal are my go to now.
They’ll say no one is buying game pass so they had to drop the price , even though it’s been extremely profitable.
Why remove CoD if it's *extremely* profitable then? Why even increase it to begin with?
Always funny seeing those that defended the price hike go "how you gonna spin this now!" after the price drops.
You should be thanking those that called it out. Obviously this is a good thing especially with everything increasing nowadays.
Also, what happened to the reason why that the Activision acquisition was good for gaming was that CoD would be day one on GamePass? Another backtrack on that I guess...
What removing CoD on GamePass shows, is that it's not sustainable for for the more popular and/or bigger budget games because of the sales you lose out on like people have been saying since inception. It never made sense to put CoD on there unless you thought it's popularity would draw in a lot of subscribers which it obviously didn't. And if it was as sustainable as people claim they wouldn't have increased the price while putting it on there in the first place.
In my region, it’s still more expensive than it was before the last price hike, but it’s a far more viable price point.
Losing Call of Duty from the service, honestly, has zero effect on me, and given they chose to make it so, it’s probably not the big seller they originally thought. Overall, it’s really good news, but I still think they have work to do on the tier structure, having Premium and PC at the same price point with different features feels odd.
Yep take COD out. Them waiting a year is interesting but it make sense. They don't want certain ppl waiting 4 to 6 months they want fomo and maximum sales. Wait a year while the new one releases.
Ok so far so good.
Senior Director and Video Game Industry Advisor at Circana Mat Piscatella has revealed Starfield was the best-selling video in the US based on dollar sales for the week ending April 11th.
For the week that nothing else of note launched.. I’m sure it will sell some copies but look at what released that week
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It’s not a requirement to buy games every month or whenever one is released. I don’t think people are going to spend $70+ on something they don’t care about.
I have talked about not being able to get into this game at launch. I still haven't given it another go, even though I think it looks great and has come a very long way since launch. Some people just want it to fail, even if it is a great game. I know why, we all do.
Starfield didn't just have the best sales for a week, but it was pre-ordered on PS store, with very nice numbers. I really need to start it again, on my PS5 though. So I can see how it is now. It has had some major updates.
I am looking forward to it all over again now.
Its not that people want the game to fail. Its that Bethesda wont ever improve their games if you guys keep calling slop like starfield great games. Pure as that. Formulaic, chasing the trends, slop.
Like Bethesda has fallen off since FO4.
Ive a PC 4070, no interest in Starfield since the beginning since despite Bethesda owning some serious FPS legacy within their ranks...They just like seem to hate good shooting mechanics.
I dont see whats the appeal and thats ok. But how can you guys call it great? By what metric? The story? The Gameplay? The package all together? Hell I'm enjoying Crimson Desert, but I've got my issues with some design choices, but I do think the game is better as a whole than its individual parts. Is that the case for Starfield?
To be honest alot of you starfield stans dont make a great case for yourself, since I've never heard a starfield say what it is they enjoyed about it other just it being another Bethesda game that feels familiar yet new to them. Yall dont make the case on whats so great about starfield that keeps you coming back.
What does it do that makes it great that everyone like me is missing?
Like I wanted to like the Starfield, but after seeing its first trailer, it pretty much came out like I thought it was. Bethesda has been coasting off prestige for years now. and honestly starfield is proof of that.
I'm fine with the game being janky Bethesda-core etc. For what it's worth it's more polished than previous games have been and the shooting mechanics are fine, feels pretty good even.
What I'm not fine with is it just being completely dull in every way. Even if they managed to resolve the structure of the game constantly sending you back and forth through maps and loading screens it's still going to be dull. The original The Outer Worlds did Fallout in space better, and that was hardly perfect (I haven't played the second one so I can't comment on that). At least The Outer Worlds had some interesting characters, enemies and locations. Starfield has none of that. They can argue that it's more grounded/going for realism or some nonsense (yet it's still doing Star Wars/Firefly style space travel) but it's fundamentally dull.
I dropped loads of money on a copy of this game at launch and I've no desire to get my money's worth out of it, I pretty quickly cut my losses and moved on. I don't know what happened to the writers for Bethesda, I presume they all moved on and have since been replaced by Jenny from accounting.
I agree with @CrimsonIdol
I played the game to completed, but it's version of NG+ simply didn't appeal to me, so I never went back to it.
There's base-building, but it really serves no point, other than, there's base building. If you're into that, you have it, but I didn't touch it at all, as it wasn't part of the story ... At all.
The main character models are "ok", but the NPCs are just bad.
And IMO, people shouldn't be OK with a Bethesda game being janky. They're a big company, and should be jank-free by now!
I've given it another go and with the new more modular difficulty i managed to balance it a bit like Stalker 2 and it has been a lot more enjoyable this time around. The free roaming in space also helps a bit. Still prefer older Bethesda games, but it's growing on me
ever so slowly.
Digital Foundry showed how bad the game runs even on PS5 Pro and crashes. It can’t even hold 60fps and not a looker to begin with. 🤷♂️
I found out. I loved FO4 and wanted to judge Starfield for myself. I should have waited for a sale.
It's still as Bad as it was on Xbox. Of cause some playstation user's are curious and because there is a lot of them then the sales are gonna be somewhat okay for small time period. But still a very sad story what starfield turned out to be. Maybe the biggest disappointment in my gaming life.
I went into the article expecting a terribly biased and poorly written piece, since the site is called Sony-gamer.com after all. However the writer gives informative and well-thought out constructive criticisms that you rarely see when people write about the less-than-shiny aspects of a console/manufacturer.
Main points for those who can't be bothered to click through:-
1. Justification of XBL fees if PSN has equal features (x-game chat etc).
2. First Party studios, not enough studio power to create new IPs for a new generation in order to differentiate the new Xbox from competitors.
3. May no longer be the 'easy to develop for' system and the advantage of multi-platform developer preference will no longer exist.
Personally I would add to that:-
4. Unlikely to have a 1+ year head start.
5. Too close an integration with windows 8 could lead to easy piracy unless, as Gabe Newell predicted, MS close the platform up around us. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/t...
Hey guys, this article is just some ps3 fanboy talking about microsoft's lack of vision compared to that of sony (because Move didn't copy the wii, and Kinect never happened)and how Nextbox is going to be hard pushed to give ps4 compotition.... its a bs opinion piece... no need to reed...
I'm not really concerned Microsoft will lose, in fact I'm concerned they'll win.
They got Kinect 2.0 so that already guarantees it to be a hit with little kids. Microsoft will have a hard time convincing hardcore gamers though. Why buy an Xbox Next when the next-gen Call of Duties and Battlefields will also be on the PS4, and on top of that PS4 will have that amazing 1st party content.
@Balcrist
XBox 360 gets hacked too. In fact its super easy to mod it and pirate games on it. If anyone is laughing here, its Sony and Microsoft.
If you were referring to PSN, then here's the thing: It only got hacked ONCE. That's it. It's old news. It doesn't "keep getting hacked".
I personaly dont see MS turn away from the revenue
generate by Xbl, in fact i see them add more feature
that will make it worth the price no matter what thier rivials do
.also dont see them going full tilt in first party delvelopers
,they will work with the ones they have but maybe create a release
schudale so the game do turn profit & continue thier 3rd party partnerships.as the rest it was an intredting read.
I love my Xbox and cant wait for the new Gear of War and the New Halo game to come out. But with that said, after experiencing the PSN+ and what it have to offer i have to say that the Xbox Live subscription is no longer an attractive thing. I can be paying almost the same amount on the PSN+ and get free games every month when compare to Live the best part it is not mandatory. I just think it sucks that I have to pay for xbox live to get access to my Netflix and hulu account which i also have to pay for. I think if Xbox want really win the console war they need to remove the mandotory xbox live subscription fee.