Microsoft has no reason to care about PC gaming. Steam is the dominant distribution platform which means Microsoft doesn't see a cent out of most PC games. Until Microsoft creates a true Steam competitor like Origin, they aren't making money off the platform.

Obviously I'd love to play Halo, Forza, or Sunset Overdrive on PC, but it certainly wouldn't make fiscal sense for Microsoft.

MS <----

I think people are forgetting Microsoft's code once across all platforms intentions. Windows 10 will, or should, bring tons of new games to both PC and Xbox. DX12 being the key to Microsoft making money from it. Microsoft's ability to offer customers a game that works on multiple platforms for one price is an advantage they have over others. Buying Nokia and designing Lumina phones that work seamlessly with PC and Xbox sets MS apart.

Steam install base is over 100 million now :)

Ever since the Xbox was released MS abandoned the PC platform for their kids toy :)

It's their loss PC gaming is doing much better without them.

They lose PC sales for their game software, but if Xbox games were available on PC, there would be little incentive to pick up an Xbox. MS doesn't make money off those thousands of third party games on PC because they don't control the distribution. But on the Xbox, they get their cut from the publisher for each copy sold.

The funny thing is notebook GPUs vastly outperform PS4 already. You can run the latest games like Far Cry 4 on ultra settings, 1440p and 60fps on a laptop GPU now.

And that's a game that's considered to be poorly optimized.

@DanzoSAMA I don't understand how you can say "PS4 master race" and also have a Tomb Raider avatar.

@radler

I remember when the 360/PS3 came out and looking at laptops back then, even if you dished out 3k you would never get anything close to what a tower or console could achieve graphically. Now you can get sub 2k laptop with 970m SLI that actually beat out a desktop 980, that's very impressive for something so small.

http://i.imgur.com/mpjzV8l....

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".