WRONG!

Until 5 years from now, people will see the direction that was supposedly to be taken.

Digitalization is inevitable. Like cassetes before, discs will be in the rear view mirror and when that happens DRMs will be common.

@p0wer

Until bandwidth becomes more affordable and readily available in places other than the states it's NOT going to happen. Hell I only get 120gb a month. 20gb per game PLUS streaming, music etc? Yea ok MS let's go digital.

^

If you haven't noticed, everything moves forward. For you to be so fixated on the idea in sense that we will not move forward is just ridiculous. FCC set a challenging that every state should have a community of fiber optics and Google answered that call with Google Fiber.

And with that threat to the neck of other ISP providers, watch em' slowly all fall in line.

Well said, thats how I feel.

I will look into getting a X1 sometime next christmas, but only if the price drops to below £300 and there is no kinect bundled in the box, also depends if there is gonna be a new Gears for it as well, one of my favorite ip's on 360.

"After the first year, exclusive games will be a rarity on the xboxOne, just like with the 360."

And that's where your wrong my friend. you make assumptions based off what happened to the 360. The 360 had at least 3 or 4 exclusive games that turned X1.

MS stated many, many times they still have allot more exclusive games to come.

If you think after the first year MS will Sony take all the first party glory and potentially make that 1 or 2 killer app game that's a system seller you have another thing coming.

When and if MS changes direction again they'll do it at the time when they have a big install base and casuals start making up the market.

you know, that time period where the rest of the world stops generally caring about new Ip's(except the internet) and buys the big bangers that they know and love.

@Diamond this isnt the only year MS hasnt had any big exclusives.. for the last 3 years about they have had only 1 maybe 2 exclusives a year that are worth buying. You said that 3-4 games turned into X1 from 360 games, that just shows the lack of support they have for their platform what will happen to the almost 80mil 360 gamers no more exclusives? Look at the ps3 4 AAA titles released this year (gow:ascension, TLOU, Beyond:Two Souls, GT6) and Sony still has exclusives for the ps4. Just shows you the night and day difference between platforms and that's why many pick 1 over the other. In the end its to each their own but people cant get mad for wanting to support the ps4 over xb1.

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".