Alienware’s Frank Azor talks gaming, VR, why he doesn't use an Alienware laptop and why we need bones.
Dear team,
Xbox has always been different.
We started with a simple idea. Games should bring people together through shared experiences. That led to the first Xbox in 2001, Xbox Live in 2002, and new ways to connect, from friends lists and achievements to parties and play across devices. Today, Xbox reaches over 500 million players around the world, with some of the most important franchises in entertainment.
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If they go back to exclusive games it at least shows that they are finally getting it. They would be turning down immediate money for something that will potentially workout in the long term.
Only issue is they've already opened Pandora's box. A lot of their base has moved to PC or jumped to PS. So will be a long road to get back on track.
We have been saying this from day one exclusives are a must if you are going to be selling hardware look at Nintendo and Sony before Jim Ryan. That's the proven formula. You had some that were deluded and blinded by loyalty accepting that multiplat was the future and that MS was merely getting ahead of where the industry was headed, but at least they can finally see the light and agree with what everyone has been saying for a decade+
True, blame it on the rabid fanboys. MS can do no wrong and spinner this multiplatform move. While the actual fans moved on.
I feel like with the new Xbox coming they are hoping to bring back those old fans and then if it goes well. Bring back exclusives.
If the new console is performing like series x and one. Naw they staying multiplatform.
Actual fans dont move on... they can add to their hobby while waiting for the next new release. If you believe what you typed then I guess PS fans moved on too.... you know, since its been a Sahara for 1st party games this gen.
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I think it's too late, xbox sales were diving even before ABK, they got even worse since then even long before the full multiplatform push. I'd be surprised if they even went back to timed exclusivity at this point, Helix is basically a PC and is going to be expensive, they already struggle to sell cheaper xbox consoles, it will be low volume and they'll have a very small 'console' base to sell to, which has already been conditioned to just play via gamepass anyway.
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.
They would lose out on a lot of CoD sales tho. Doesn't PS make up most of the sales?
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
I agree. I mean once they went multiplat, in theory there should be no going back especially when you have games that have sold really well on other platforms.
Microsoft are the ones that announced that they are reevaluating. So I'm just guessing on what their end goal is. Right now Xbox as a hardware is not a must buy for anyone but fans of the brand because their games can be played elsewhere. Going exclusive would solve this, but you lose out on a ton of money instantly which has always been what the company does not want to do so not really sure what their "reevaluating exclusives" means unless they are pulling a Phil Spencer and are just saying what people want to hear and will continue to do what they are currently doing.
Despite all of that, it's clear that Microsoft's Xbox division is broken beyond repair.
PlayStation is currently draining money on flop after flop. It's Sony that needs to re-evaluate their strategy
Wonder how much money was lost on perfect dark, hellbalde 2, 300 million lost revenue
by putting cod on gamepass. The recent Jason schrier news that Xbox has cancelled dozens of projects, spent 70 billion just to see Xbox sales further collapse and gamepass see little growth.
The fact is this has been PlayStation's most profitable generation and they are making loads of money and selling plenty of consoles and games. While MS won't give you any sales figures or profit numbers for Xbox, says it all really.
It isnt. But I dont think they mean in 'games', rather, footprint.
They own the OS but as far as gaming is concerned, Steam dominate. I imagine the VAST majority of people who use the Xbox app/launcher are PC gamepass subs. No ones buying their 3rd party PC games through Xbox PC.
and many gamers prefer SteamOS for gaming over Windows too. If only Valve would be more uncompromising to the anti-cheat makers that locked out non-windows players, more pc gamers would have moved onto SteamOS by now and not looking back to Windows. overall, Win11 is a terrible, bloated, unoptimized OS which is not what many people want
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.
Why did Sony push Shuhei Yoshida out of his role leading PlayStation's first-party games? He'd overseen some huge successes. Well, apparently, he didn't listen.
Yeah I can see that for sure. Shuhei Yoshida should have been in charge not Jim Ryan.
It should be free highway for him now.. but Sony are too stupid to see this, especially that moron Hulst
Wtf why all that anger. PlayStation is dominating on every level. Besides I think there is a little more to hiring a CEO than just who is available. Its not like its a athlete your team wants to buy.
S2Killinit
live service failures, chasing trends, closing studios. yes dominating
Sony is Dominating because competition is not existing. Compared to previous gens this is the poorest in terms of software offerings.
Last gen we got Uncharted 4 Lost Legacy and TLOU2 from ND alone.
This is so far a remasters gen, with no competition to lift up the quality
..."PlayStation is dominating on every level"....
...Really???
PlayStation are soon heading into a new generation in the not to distant future. They currently have the worst customer satisfaction they've ever sustained as a company. The company is heading for a huge crash while at the same time they'll need to be planning how they are going to try and win back that favour and the build up to their new releases.
Yes financially they're winning but they're going to have to ride out this complete public corporate disaster. No one has faith in the company or the product anymore. They've damaged their public image so much this generation. Greed can kill anyone.
He would've done the same thing and fire Jim Ryan and Shuhei would be the villain. Why?
Because Elite creates the narrative and distraction for gamers, users and citizens.
More confirmation that Jim Ryan is the culprit for what has happened to Sony. Hulst needs to go too. What sucks is that a lot of the good top heads at Sony are no longer there. I wish that guys that were forced out prematurely by Dumbo Jimbo like Shuhei and Layden came back.
Yep. Yoshida was responsible for bringing one of the best games of this generation to playstation (Stellar Blade). He is an actual gamer and is in touch with what gamers want (creative, fun games, not GaaS and agenda pushing). He also seems like a genuinely nice guy if you watch some interviews. Of course they got rid of him.
Makes you wonder if MS even thought about hiring him after Phil and Sarah were leaving. He certainly couldn't make their situation any worse.
All the gamer/consumer lead heads are gone across PS and Xbox. shuhei gone phil's gone (questionable) but gone. The future of gaming is somewhat uncertain across the board.
