Sherry Baldwin: "Microsoft has proven time and again that they're willing to spend money to make money. The first Xbox wasn’t what most would consider a success when it comes to sales, but did a good job of establishing a brand name. The Xbox 360 faced many preventable obstacles thanks to a flawed design, but has done very well to build on the brand name of Xbox and has even managed to gain respect in countries that aren’t called the United States – something the original struggled to do."
Square Enix launches Final Fantasy X 25th anniversary site, revealing new Nomura art, books, music releases, and merchandise.
Look I know VIII has its issues and all that but how on earth can the do big anniversary events with new artwork and merchandise for VII, IX and X yet VIII got sweet f*** all.
They could have given it something during its 25th anniversary yet all it got was a single Happy Anniversary post on their social media.
they should know that we are OG fans of VIII as it sold truckload as well. not as much as VII or X. I personally didn't like IX but X and VI are my personal fav.
Shadow Hearts 2 covenant is another game I love. I hope one day someone can make remake, I would be delighted
Final Fantasy VIII is great and you are always the first to defend it in the comments
Xbox boss Asha Sharma has discussed how component shortages will impact the company's plans for Project Helix.
When does this end? Its killing everyone. Consoles and PC. And for what? AI? The benefits of AI are completely outweighed by the negatives. And the government should have never allowed one company to buy up all the RAM.
This kind of proves this is an after thought product, most products like this are in r&d 5 years before they start mass producing. So they typically have the cost of components and things worked out long before assembly starts.
This is an assumption still, but I wouldn’t be surprised if project helix is similar to Scalebound,perfect dark and sod3. They had an idea but no actual execution other than concept stage. Being impacted by the ram shortage likely would also put this device 3-4 years out.
I’m not even sure MS has that endurance with Xbox yet
I mean.... what?
We're at a point that Samsung wont even provide their own phone department ram because they can sell it at higher prices to 3rd parties (AI). Its more profitable to sell the ram than make their own devices with it.
You think because R&D starts 5 years ago the 3rd party component manufacturers will honour that price? They'll sell it to whomever is paying the most today, not some gentlemens agreement they made years ago. AI farms will buy more volume at higher prices than any console manufacturer will. It'll be the same for Playstation.
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
Helix is going to be stupidly expensive
Instead of leaning into smarter upscaling techniques they're brute forcing hardware that will cost them dearly and it remains to be seen if it's genuinely going to provide a meaningful differential
I know in the oc.doace people like to brag about not using frame gen or dlss to get to high on a game but for the majority of players they happily use those technologies without a second thought
That's going to be ps6 vs Helix
While this does seem to be the case, I am encouraged by the statement from Microsoft about wanting to provide affordable options. If this means a Series S style Helix, at least there will be something affordable being offered.
It's called systematic inflationary. Yes we get it Microsoft, keep raising in the name ofall kinds of stuffs
Honestly if there was thing I learned from this generation is that new consoles arnt day one anymore.
I can wait 1-3 years.
Another important lesson from this generation: while Nintendo showed us that prices don't necessarily need to ever drop, we've now learned that waiting 1-3 years does carry some risk that prices increase. This generation is just bizarre in all the wrong ways.
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".
The Wii is now a retro console. Let’s get nostalgic about an often maligned system.
Crazy to think the WII is to the Switch 2, as the NES was to the WII back then. 20 Year difference.
My wife asks me to bust it out (heh) everyone once in a while to play bowling and tennis with the kids. There was a ton of slop on it but some good stuff as well.
Wii was great but boy howdy did it cause Microsoft to go on a dark walk with the Kinect and the disastrous XBox One launch that they arguably never recovered from.
Not nostalgic for me.. I was there.. anyone who wasnt a little kid realized it was a gamecube with shit tacked onto it, it was the "joke" system and was well below even the switch in terms of comparing it to the latest machines at the time. The machine was well loved by young people and "casual gamers" who now remember it 20 years on, or in most cases more of its sales came in the 15-20 years ago range not right at launch- but again its not nostalgic for people who were "gamers" then really, just for those who ended up with one in their house, the games , graphics, interface and online features were archaic already in 2006.
Microsoft will never achieve the top spot in the gaming industry. They simply don't have the talent. This generation has shown that $$$ alone doesn't make a great console. You have to have vision, creativity, and...oh, 1st party devs.
keep giving them hits.
GoFanboy.com Nuff said.
Its easy to be #1, just release sequels to the same old titles since the NES and watch the fans gobble it up every time. Throw in some shovelware and there you go.
This honestly feels like an article written to draw in hits with its controversial title as opposed to having intersting or worthwhile to say.