Why us as gamers continue to read such phuckery from irrelevant journalist. It is now to the point where any five year old can create a page and have an opinion. The blind minds and eyes continue to preach that there is good in the x1. Just stop it. High price tag, no direct ownership, every game must be installed, and a list other things. My biggest concern is microsoft didnt even have playable units at e3! Your product is supposed to be coming out in roughly six months and you don't even have working units? Running your games on nvidia graphics cards when the system is supposed to be completely amd? That is a huge red flag to me saying they are possibly rushing to market. At least sony had real sdk at the show. Like I have stated, love my 360, but thus thing has disaster written all over it and its sad to see people defending this product.

A game requires no maintenance so the comparison is irrelevant, this is called greed by Microsoft and they are trying to get everyone on board and blind fanboys are being used to defend their greed and with no incentive either.

Try selling your mobile or pc applications. A game is an app.

Yout argument doesn't work the way you think it does.

The joys of being the first guy to post a comment in an article. As soon that bad boy gets approved, a wave of replies crashes against you.

Also, it has been sufficiently brought to my attention that my 'Ford truck' analogy was not exactly the most pertinent to software ownership. My bad.

A $60 game isn't the same as a $60,000 truck.

Go to your Playstation library and pick any game and read the User Agreement. You aren't buying your game, you are leasing the software for your personal enjoyment. The User Agreementis very clear. The gaming experience is a consumable, not a hard good.

You can buy that Ford truck but guess what...if you don't pay the yearly taxes its illegal for you top drive it, if you don't register it, driving it is illegal, if you don't maintain a license, it's illegal to drive it..... you have to regularly purchase gas for it to work. But most of all, the price for a truck is significantly greater.... see how this is not necessarily the best example?

That truck analogy doesn't fit with games and here is why. A person who buys a game buys it for the experience and then can be passed on to the next consumer who will get that exact experience, no depreciation. The other major flaw is if that truck cost you $15,000 dollars the maker of that truck sells it and makes a small profit. Are you trying to tell me games cost $60 to make? If a game cost 20 million dollars they need to sell a certain amount of copies to make a profit. They have a one shot deal unlike movies. Movies also have a theatrical and home video market to work within.

What game publishers should be doing is looking for alternate revenue streams and controlling budgets. If Tomb Raider sells 4 million copies but Square says they lost money then their business is not feasible. They should be offering a rental market too to get revenue from and to also make money off the used market which until now they don't.

Actually your analogy is partially correct. Here is what I think. The game disc you own is the truck, the content in that disc belongs to the publisher. Look at it like the parts in your truck ( muffler, radio, etc) are patented and owned by the publisher (manufacture). The road belongs to Microsoft (console, cloud, etc). When you own a truck, you need a road to drive on. What I'm seeing here is that Microsoft is taking an advantage because they own the road. If you have a truck but no road, then you pretty much can't drive your truck on microsoft's road unless you pay a fee. Microsoft is trying to control who can and can't drive on that road.

It's hyperbole. It's the same argument that was used for piracy.

From the article:
"For several years, the video game industry has been fighting the second-hand market which represent a considerable loss of money to them"

No facts to show how 2nd hand sales effect new sales. If they were available it would be in the publishers best interest to show them.

Obviously, publishers would prefer people to buy new. It's why they say that 2nd hand hurts the industry...again the same way they did for piracy.

Online passes weren't invented to combat the 2nd hand market, they were made to recoup money from it, much like DLC is used today in many cases. EA and Sony have both gone on record to say the returns weren't as profitable as they had hoped, and in EA's case said that the damage to the companies reputation wasn't worth the money they made off them.

Many companies, and high level executives within those companies, have even said that the 2nd hand market is helpful to publishers. These kinds of statements have come from company execs that we would first think to be ready to block 2nd hand, such as EA and Ubisoft and everyone's favorite person to hate, Bobby Kottick.

I don't see them removing PC from the equation. Considering MS has a heavy enough investment in the PC market, it would be foolish to abandon them. I could see them taking away games from PlayStation or ensuring they are timed exclusives at the very least. Say what you will but if Call of Duty ends up becoming a timed exclusive to Xbox machines, that would hurt PlayStation, don't pretend like those games don't sell millions.

Their lifeline of solely the Xbox consoles is dry. Good-Great games on a 1st party scale can't be made at a loss so willingly - sent to the Xbox to only sell limited copies.
They invested billions scooping up studios and need to start making returns.
Sucks that nearly every company is publicly traded and have to be so shareholder biased but that's how it is.
Their words are strong but it'll take time to see what their actions accomplish. Lowering the cost of Game Pass and taking CoD off of it was a good clear start.

More like, allot of their base just played game pass. So now they need to encourage them to start buying again.

What exactly is the long term goal with exclusives though?

Because for the most part, the hardware side of things has never been the most profitable, even sometimes being subsidized for a period before breaking even. And that’s before the hardware component nightmare we currently live in.

The whole point of exclusives was to get more people to buy your console in order to have a bigger install base, which meant even bigger software sales.

But if their ports to PS5 are selling (for the most part it seems) quite well, then other than negating the cut Sony takes there, unless you are REALLY increasing your software sales on your own console, it probably doesn’t make that much of a difference?

Honestly I don’t even understand Sony’s decision to scale back on it for PC unless they weren’t even recouping the port expenses. They released ports when the hardware sales never really dropped, and now that all consoles will undoubtedly take a noticeable drop in sales due to the ridiculous prices, that’s when they decide they don’t want to sell to a larger install base to more easily recoup dev costs… it’s just weird

Unfortunately, the studios they buy wither under their leadership.

Microsoft still has a name with Xbox the issue is the casual games are not looking at the console because its not the same console their friends have. Look at that poll on how many users upgraded from xbox 365 to one and then the X. Part of Microsoft's downfall was thinking that the Wii was the market they had to be in when really it was the core market. If you get the core gamers you then get the market to. As I posted a few minuets ago on another post Microsoft putting exclusives on PS this gen could bold well if they hit next gen with all our games are staying exclusive from this new gen. They will then get gamers wanting Halo, Forza Gears but this is also where Microsoft fell over with the xbox one and X in terms of they did not have may quality 1st party games affter they fell into the Gears, Forza and Halo cycle. If they can get some old IPs back to bring back the old core gamers as well as fresh ips to bring in new gamers things could improve next gen. But as I said in my last post its all if buts and maybes at the moment. No one knows if the next home consoles will be to expensive that people move to pc as we are now seeing or look at the stem deck as a cheepier alternitive.

"Only issue is they've already opened Pandora's box."

That's very optimistic. It's not the only issue, far from it. There is a serious rupture between Microsoft generally and the public caused by their weird Game Pass price fluctuations, taking down physical game space in stores, and being the first to go nuts on hardware price hikes that they themselves played a big part in.

They're also charging beyond a premium for Helix which is just vile at a time when the economy is in shambles.

The company itself is really not doing itself any favors with the approach they're taking Windows. Even France is looking to ditch Windows in favor of Linux.

But the most offensive thing is this AI push. They're doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on the very technology they're using to replace a considerable proportion of their workforce... And the slap in the face is how they bake copilot into everything when nobody likes it—they couldn't even make Bing stick, so why on earth are they trying so hard? You know it's bad when people would rather use ChatGPT than Copilot which is killing their OS. But aside from their snatching up of farmland to build data centers (and reduce the agriculture capacity of whichever country allows them to build them), they made an AI-generated gamer gurl that loves AI the head of Xbox.

Even if we grant them the full benefit of the doubt, it hardly matters what Xbox wants to do if Nadella says no, and that includes exclusive games. Microsoft's relationship with Xbox is the opposite of Sony's relationship with PlayStation—Microsoft pulls the reins of Xbox, but Sony damn near went under for the PS3.

“If they go back to exclusive games it at least shows that they are finally getting it.”

Great strategy, especially after Forza selling 5 million on PlayStation and sea of thieves selling at least another million (2 million) for example. In March 2026, Xbox consoles sales ratio vs PS was 10:1.

In addition to that, with Gamepass, which unequivocally cuts out chunks of sales (Cannibalizing revenue from 1st month sales especially).

I’m sure going exclusive again after releasing everything on Ps5 is going to work out great for business.