Not at all. That's what people thought, but that was an unfortunate bi-product of what they were intending to do and that is to move the industry forward into the digital era like movies have.

The only thing they need to apologies for in my opinion, is their somewhat shambolic attempts to explain their policies.

I get what you are trying to say but you are confusing things a bit. As a consumer, the only choice you have is to buy or not to buy.

there are terms and conditions that come with almost every purchase and if you buy you generally have to agree to those terms and conditions.

I am simply trying to clear up that confusion of people saying "they were taking away our rights." It is more of a privilege than a right.

Not saying what MS was doing was right or wrong but the context that people use to define the situation is phrased incorrectly.

The use of the term "rights" is far to often misused in place of the term privilege. Like how people say driving is a right. it isnt a right its a privilege and once people use the terms in the correct context, it makes all the difference in stating a point.

Thats probably only the launch supply. It will probably come with the update in the future.

World wide

Sony doesn't make you pay for online. They make you pay for multiplayer, whereas MS makes you pay for online to play multiplayer.

Neither one should actually be doing it, but at least Sony, realizing MS's misrepresentation, are more forward with it.

It's never good to think in terms of fanboys. You can never get a good point across.

At the same time, the original Xbox was still relatively new when compared to Nintendo and Sonys consoles. Xbox had room for improvement at that time. Simply saying they increased threefold is only good in terms of how MS performed compared to its OWN previous generation, not relative to any other company.

lol the wii u has video chat with the game pad and tvii just not as fancy as MS but it is still there. you don't think a firmware update can add these so revolutionary features to the ps4.MS is on it's third try trying to win a console war.the bills made to the superbowl four times but making it there is nothing if you don't win.

Deebo, the problem with adding it later is they've allotted 1gb for OS. I'm not sure how much is actually being used, but not sure if new features will take more than the 1gb and therefore take away from the 7gb available to the game devs. Also, when its not an original feature from launch, devs normally don't take advantage of the feature.

What you said might very well be true someday. Who knows? What I will say is that the issue is going to be with the message. So far, MS has done a poor job of messaging. I liken this to the PS3 launch. The average consumer saw a $600 game system. They didn't take the time to see (or care) that they were being given the cheapest and probably best Blu-ray player available at the time. This was Sony's fault for not advertising this. MS has a choice, as most gaming companies. Either grab the core with the games, or grab the casuals with the features. It will be close to impossible to get both with a broad stroke approach. As I said, you might be right...but it will come after a price drop, serious proof of all concepts, and far better PR messaging.

A cold, bleak, dystopian future that was controlled by Microsoft then yes we did.

These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse

Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.

They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.

If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.

It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie

Yeah with FSR 5 they should be able to offer a much cheaper version of Helix.

Series S is what has killed Xbox Series so... Will they dare?

The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.

Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.

Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.

LucasRuinedChildhood,

For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:

1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.

2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".