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Starfield will serve as the "starting gun" for additional first-party releases, Xbox says (www.gamescensor.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Is it just me, or does the Xbox brand seem in a really bad place - outside of Gamepass - right now? Microsoft's strategy of rotating contractors through its first-party development studios seems to have squandered a lot of talent. Games are being held back by the requirement that all features are available on the Series S.

It sort of feels like they're so focused on the Gamepass revenue that they've just let their console business wither outside of that. I only have a PC and Switch this generation, but none of the games that have made me consider a console have been on Xbox.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Gamepass revenue

Gamepass market share.

In the past the advantage to consoles from a business perspective was ecosystem locking people so they could milk profits. That's why you saw consoles be really cheap but have their games cost more than their pc counterparts and why there were so many more console exclusives than now. The market has changed and that's no longer viable.

So instead they offer subscription style gaming at a huge loss, make it a no Brainer to get until people are locked in and competitors have lost relavency. Then they'll jack the prices sky high. Just like with TV streaming.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

Yeah, the comparison to what's happened in the TV and Movie streaming space had occurred to me. Major studios burned down their existing businesses to try and jump into the streaming space, only to very quickly hit a hard cap on the possible number of subscribers.

Gaming is obviously a very different market, and apparently, console and PC gaming make less revenue than the Mobile/Freemium market, so maybe Microsoft sees it all as moot at this point.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

So instead they offer subscription style gaming at a huge loss

It's not at a loss, unless you mean the console itself. Game Pass is profitable.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Outside of Game Pass, it hasn't been in a great place for a while.

Games sell consoles, and they were fortunate to have lightning-in-a-bottle in Halo as their big launch game back in 2001. For exclusive software offerings, they've been coasting on that while also having some success with Gears, Fable, Forza. Thing is, when their competition isn't shitting the bed, that hasn't been enough.

Xbox has had some very favorable external, unusual circumstances over the years, starting from a not-insignificant number of consoles being sold as DVD players (especially when PS2s were out of stock). Sony launches an overengineered console hostile to both developers and consumers, leading to Xbox 360 being the go-to third party console. Finally, the fact that the Xbox brand never got a foothold in the Japan market becomes less relevant by the day as the home console market there continues to shrink.

Services like Game Pass hit a subscriber cap pretty quickly, so if they want growth there, they have to sell more consoles. Microsoft has done what they can to get those exclusives over the years, being early to invest in the indie space, and acquiring Mojang. Now since Game Pass, they are even more aggressive, picking up Bethesda and ABK. I don't know if any of this will lead to something along with Master Chief being the face of the brand, but Xbox will be in a much better place if something does get there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Yeah, it's crazy how much they are squandering their properties. They haven't even released a Fable title since 2012 or Gears since 2019.

Gears 6 and a new Fable are on the way next year, but the Series X and S came out in 2020. That's two premium franchises not on the newest generation for 4 years.

Not to mention how bad Halo Infinite was.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Games are being held back by the requirement that all features are available on the Series S.

I still don't understand this argument they have almost identical CPU power. The S can do pretty much anything the X can do but at a lower resolution. They were actually really smart about how they specced them out to allow this.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

BG3 is the one I'm thinking of. Specifically, the issue was the Series S didn't have enough RAM to allow them to do split-screen, a feature that has been notoriously difficult to implement. Even 343 had to throw the towel in on that one for Halo Infinite.

Though apparently, that position has changed, and now BG3 will be able to launch on Xbox without that feature.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

"Almost identical" doesn't cut it. The CPU disparity, especially with the much worse memory pipeline, is a big deal.

The lesser memory isn't a big deal when you use high res assets and can just lower the resolution, but it's a huge deal when you use a meaningful portion of it for actual mechanics.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The CPU is only 100mhz slower and identical in every other respect so it really is good enough to be considered the same. But yes I suppose memory bandwidth and size can be an issue downporting games.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Slower is slower. Yes, the fact that it's not literally identical is a massive problem when you're requiring identical behavior.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

it's actually 200mhz (had to fact check that) a 6% difference, which is surely made up by not having as many draw calls to do and hardly anyone has that as their fundamental limit anyways, when a game runs at 60fps (or more) on the X and 30 (or 60) on the S there's clearly a ton of headroom. Almost all games on these systems are certain to be GPU limited on the Series S.

The memory is a significant enough difference to matter though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Resolution doesn't change the number of draw calls.

There are plenty of CPU limited games, and they wouldn't have bothered giving the X a higher clock if it didn't mean anything. Anything short of actually identical is a problem when you intend to demand identical features.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

lowering foliage draw distance, LODs, Volumetrics, particles, crowd density etc. does lower your draw calls though.

Yeah, the series X has a faster GPU that can take advantage of the slightly higher clocks for higher framerates or additional detail/objects.

Practically speaking that 6% makes no difference whatsoever in terms of whether or not you can do something. Maybe the series S drops a few frames below it's target when something intense happens, that's going to be about it.

The memory bandwidth is shockingly halved with 2GB of it running at 1/10 the bandwidth of the X though, I see that being a huge issue in many titles.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I feel like they've been saying something to the effect that 'the games are coming ' for a good while now, and either they don't turn up or land in such a way that people immediately forget about them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

They kind of said that about outer worlds.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'd make a joke about the pistol having repeatedly fired blanks over the last couple of years, but I think that's the point of a starting gun isn't it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I guess everything that came before was a false start?