Xbox (Series X - $750 and Series S - $500) - 10/11/20

[Peppermint Lounge]

360 dominated Western markets. It released a year before PS3, it was cheaper and the easier development platform. PS3 managed to recover though and had good momentum going into the subsequent generation. PS3 pips 360 for overall sales with the final margin in the thousands I think. It’s pretty amazing how line ball sales are over that period of years.

PS5 and XSX are reportedly the smoothest developer rides yet. It will be interesting to see what the final specs are and whether the more powerful platform has a meaningful edge in all-platform games.

[Ambrose Burnside]

If they're both the same (high) price then that's OK (I guess), I'm just worried that MS will go full retard, price themselves out of contention from day one, hoping that MOAR POWAR will make up for the price differential. When it never has.

No first party exclusives might be a long term win in terms of managing generational change, but Sony will milk that for all its worth from a marketing perspective. How is Halo Infinite next gen when you can play it on an OG Xbox One with a Kinect still plugged into it? Here's *insert PS5 exclusive here* Only on PS5!

Will be interesting to see. The industry needs a strong Xbox.

[Mavy]

Kinda works two ways I guess. Though being able to move straight to a new console with no compromise BC has to be a plus.

Do we know whether the next gen games that support back to the OG Xbox One will be a single purchase or still a separate package?

Buying the one game that works on all consoles would be a win for game sales.

[Ambrose Burnside]

Pretty sure it's one purchase, like a more advanced "enhanced for Xbox One X" or whatever the wording is for games now.

Will be monumentally stupid if you have to buy your games again, and goes against all the good work MS has done with BC where you can just pop in an Xbox or 360 disc into a One and play it. Seriously one of the most underrated moves this gen.

[Madmya]

No chance you'll have to buy your game twice.

[unfnknblvbl]

No chance, you'll have to buy your game twice.

FTFY

[Madmya]

I definitely think I've jumped the gun on this. But I can totally see them being Good Guys Microsoft here.

[Ambrose Burnside]

I agree with Madmya, with the caveat that I reckon they will be hamstrung by requiring compatibility with an OG One. Sure, Halo Infinite will most likely be 4k and run at at least 60 fps on the Series X, but I doubt it'll look much better than running on the One X, because they won't be able to tap into all of the extra POWAR until they're confident enough people have upgraded they can start making games exclusive to Series X

Will be interesting to see what third parties do.

[Peppermint Lounge]

Madmya is right. There’s no way MS will do anything within the launch window that has so much as a whiff of cunt about it.

[unfnknblvbl]

Microsoft have certainly been good guys recently with everything else in their business, but I really feel that the Xbox is part of the old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish mentality.

[Ambrose Burnside]

Microsoft have certainly been good guys recently with everything else in their business, but I really feel that the Xbox is part of the old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish mentality.

For their sake I hope not, cos they've failed miserably if that's been their goal the last three generations

They're no closer now than they were when the original Xbox launched. Probabaly futher behind, Nintendo is much stronger now than the Gamecube days

[Madmya]

With SeX being a backwards compatible machine, it would be odd to be able to buy the bone version of Halo Infinite and play it on SeX but not vice versa. They're blurring the lines of generations, so I reckon it'll be much more like a PC - it'll recognise you're playing on a particular machine and adjust accordingly.

[Mavy]

Probably similar to buying the DVD, Blu-ray, and Digital versions all in the one box. Though this will probably download the assets as required depending on the system.

Could imagine the disc being nothing other than a license in the future.

[Ambrose Burnside]

Already like that on PC. My Mass Effect Andromeda "disc" is just a cardboard circle with a code printed on it

[unfnknblvbl]

Microsoft have certainly been good guys recently with everything else in their business, but I really feel that the Xbox is part of the old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish mentality.

For their sake I hope not, cos they've failed miserably if that's been their goal the last three generations

They're no closer now than they were when the original Xbox launched. Probabaly futher behind, Nintendo is much stronger now than the Gamecube days

I'd say they're much closer.

They embraced console gaming with the Xbox OG
They extended it (XBL, XBLA, social networking, etc) with the XBox 360

With the XBox One and Series X, they're getting close to extinguishing consoles as a "thing" - we have a desperate lack of exclusive games. We have a refocusing of attention away from the machine itself; Play Anywhere and Project XCloud, for example. We have a machine that wasn't even focused on games from the very start; who the hell wanted an HDMI input port? Who the hell wanted their gaming console to somehow manage their entire lives for them? Hell, this machine even takes 57849230 years to install a game before you can even play it!
And now, we're not even having exclusive first-party games at the launch of a new console!

I'm not saying they're getting rid of gaming consoles altogether, but more that they want to reshape people's ideas of what they are and what they do.

[Ambrose Burnside]

Well yes, but that's very different from what's meant by embrace (a new market, and dominate it because everyone uses your exisiting product, like IE built into Windows), extend (that market with proprietary shit you own and control), and extinguish (competition that can't use said proprietary shit so are locked out of the market you now dominate).

It's arguable both Sony (holding out for ages against multiplayer crossplay, and mods, proprietary storage on Vita etc) and Nintendo (back in the NES days for sure, but they're still fucked. They somehow just won a case in Europe preventing people from getting refunds on online pre-orders WTF) are both closer to embrace, extend and extinguish that Microsoft is with Xbox.

But yeah, they're definitely trying to change what a console is. But they've almost been forced to from a position of weakness because they can't keep going the way they have been if they want to remain in the industry.

[Ambrose Burnside]

Lots of legitimate-looking images out there now. Main criticisms I've seen is no USB-C ports, and no DisplayPort.

[unfnknblvbl]

DisplayPort I can live without on a console, but no USB-C is an unforgivable sin these days.

I do wonder what that slot is on the back though. I hope it's for user expandable NVMe...

[flipswitch]

Kinect 3.0.

[t0mby]

Hopefully the port is for an expandable X64DD or a Mega CD-X.

[Ambrose Burnside]

Gaming was once again the most disappointing part of the picture. The decline of the gaming business—which shares the "Personal Computing" category with Windows and Surface—continued for another quarter, with a drop of 11 percent for Xbox content and services. Microsoft claimed it failed to beat the previous year here because an unnamed third-party title drove big numbers then.

On the bright side for Microsoft's gaming efforts, the company plans to launch major new Xbox hardware and games this fall, and Nadella claimed Xbox Game Pass subscribers have doubled in number this quarter.

[lestat]

The lack of RDR2 skewed the numbers, besides that services/subs are up and hardware is down. Which is to be expected at this point in the generation cycle.

Saw some leaked NPD totals for 2019.

Leaked 2019 US sales data:

2019 YTD
PS4 - 3.85m
XB1 - 3.05m
NSW - 6.5m

2019 December
PS4 - 645k
XB1 -780k
NSW - 2035k

Launch aligned number
PS4 - 14.31 million
XBO - 12.67 million
NSW - 17 million

Other info:
- Switch December sales is the highest for the current Generation consoles.
- Nintendo Switch 2019 YTD number is the highest since 2011 XBOX 360.

AMDs fall in semi custom revenue also backs up the trend of falling hardware sales for ps4/xbox. Switch is belting both of them right now, they really need new hardware to drive some interest back into the platforms.

Personally I think I might be done with consoles, not enough games came out on them imo to warrant their existence especially since the same games are appearing on PC now. Switch has a place because of its portability angle.

[Ambrose Burnside]

I look forward to next week when you're dumping PC for Series X. And then the flip back the following week

[t0mby]

I look forward to next week when you're dumping PC for Series X. And then the flip back the following week

It's funny cos it's true.

[lestat]

I look forward to next week when you're dumping PC for Series X. And then the flip back the following week

It's funny cos it's true.

It is true and I've learned my lesson on where I belong.

MS being 100% all in PC makes this easy for me. You ask the MNR guys, I've been playing with them on PC for a while now, works great and cross play is a big thing now. There is no Fear of missing out now.