- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
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Quietly?
XBOX COFOUNDER SAYS MICROSOFT IS QUIETLY SUNSETTING THE PLATFORM
More seriously, the distance between the X-Box OS and the Windows OS was always measured in inches. Maybe they finally decided to give up the ghost and just admit they were selling people mid-range PCs with a console skinned GUI.
I fucking hate all the prompts for the XBOX Game Bar in freaking Windows Server OS
I think there’s a setting that’ll turn that off.
But also… Linux Mint is a pretty easy lift and shift.
Oh I am all Linux where I can… I do not get to admin those servers so I am stuck with microslop
It’s not good for the consumer to have less competition on the market. But is there any legit reason to own an Xbox?
Only if you want to have the black and green version of Toy instead of the white and blue version, at this rate. Barring a handful of exclusives everything gets released on PS5 and Xbox now and maybe also a watered down port on the Switch/2. The current Xbox and Playstation are so architecturally similar to each other that they may as well be the same machine with the only difference being which asshole is at the helm, and for either of them you may as well have a PC.
Some backward compatible games run better than emulators
I hate that Xbox is a joke now and that it’s going to die out. I hate that there is going to be less competition in the console space. I hate that Microsoft have no idea what the fuck they’re doing.
Playstation is next; Nintendo has the securist market with its portable console.
I would think hand helds like the steam deck would be slowly strangling it but the switch 2 sold like hotcakes.
Nintendo has the securist market with its portable console.
hmmmm the Steam Deck is eating away at that cake… I know my son was an avid Nintendo fan and didn’t even look at the Switch 2 because his 3 year old Steam Deck is doing everything he wants
Nintendo has the securist market with its portable console.
Cause they actually try to make a console that’s not just “Discount PC With Coupon For Streaming Service”.
Even then, it’s mostly an under-powered PC that makes up the difference with a few gimmicks. Which is fine. But you’re still left asking “Why would I buy a PS6 / X-Box One+One+360Infinity when I could just get this shit on PC in another six months?” Other than tinkering with controllers, neither have done anything interesting since the Kinect flopped.
The only reason I got a Switch 2 is because a company selling them here in Denmark made a HUGE pricing error. So I got a Switch 2 and Mario Kart World together for just 99 DKK, or 15 USD.
Haha, there’s not much I wouldn’t buy at a 95% discount.
Nearly all my music gear was bought used, at about that level of discount. People buy interesting gear, and never get around to tackling the learning curve, and eventually sell it off super cheap.
If you can be patient, and watch for the exact right gear at the exact right price, and you are focused on performance more than gourmet brand names, you can build a nice home recording studio for super cheap. It took me about two years, but all my gear, and all my instruments, probably didn’t cost more than about $1500-2000 total, and most of it is brand new, or nearly so.
I once got a 2k camera + gear + extra (Sigma!) lenses for three fiddy. No Loch Ness monsters involved tho.
What online sites are good for this?
Facebook marketplace, eBay, pawn shops. You just have to be patient, and wait for the right deal. It won’t take long, musicians are notorious for buying gear that they never, or barely, use. They are also notorious for needing money, and dumping their old gear.
BTW, pawn shops used to be great for buying guitars and other musical instruments, but that’s passed. Now they put the good stuff on eBay, and the stuff in the stores is the junk that nobody would bite on. OTOH, you can still find good deals on other gear like recorders, interfaces, microphones, etc. I got a nice Focusrite Scarlett interface at a pawn shop for about $20, and it looked brand-new. I’ve used it every day, and never had a problem.
I just got a Boss BR-600 digital recorder, which has a built in drum machine, and a LOT of guitar pedal and amp effects, including a bass simulator that makes my guitar sound like a bass. It even has a pair of condenser mics built in. So I can literally record as if I’m an entire band. It’s also really thin, and smaller than a laptop, so it will fit in the pocket of my gig bag. It looked brand-new, and it only cost me $56, with the case, and the original price was $399. It’s so ridiculously cool, and it’s become my new favorite piece of gear, other than my guitars.
Now I can lay down a drum track, play a rhythm guitar part along to it, add a bass line, mix it all down to single stereo track, put it on a loop, and play some screaming lead guitar over it for as long as I want. What a blast!
Playstation is next;
80% of the xbox crowd is probably gonna buy a playstation. Maybe a few will go for a PC and the rest for a switch.
Couch goblins that look into the future when considering the cost of a console might find the steam machine worthy when it releases.
Need more private companies like Valve, and some community open source options built up too
We seriously need to get open source PC console community-made offerings up and running. To share the load of building that up. Community built up competitors and Valve will be enough.
Still I also would like to see some new players come in too.
Are there any companies that would do well in gaming? What if AMD made their own console?
When you set an impossible goal (30% yoy profit margin for the gaming division), you know that you are killing off that division, just, slowly.
Satya just really wants an AI girlfriend that is also in everyone’s homes simultaneously, that he can use to spy on everyone for the NSA.
Not that it directly matters, but I did literally work for MSFT during the 360 3RR / Windows 8 era.
I kinda know at least a little about the uh, corporate culture.
I think they are sunsetting whole company.
That’s what their actions felt like for decades yet somehow they’ve always kept chugging along.
I can only hope.
You mean Microsoft? I hope but I doubt it, they have a lot of companies locked in their products
Wtf I just came up with the same comment without reading yours first.
So yeah, I agree. They must have done the calculation that it’s easiest to just not exist and lay everyone off.
Nah, shifting heavily toward being B2B.
I love how nobody here is getting me actual picture. They’re not going to sell Xbox to people anymore. What’s going to happen is they’re going to turn to a subscriber model where you have to log into a data center that they control and use your browser to play video games. Paying a monthly subscription for the privilege of playing their exclusive games. In fact I will bet money that the first product that will be introduced with this feature is going to be the highly anticipated upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6.
Mark my words. Either at the time of release or shortly thereafter they’re going to introduce the ability to subscribe to play GTA 6 in your browser on a remote gaming system. And then they’re going to phase out physical Xbox systems over the next couple of years.
I saw a thread the other day, something like “What low-level conspiracies do you genuinely believe”; to which someone replied that they believe that OpenAI is being speedrun to bankruptcy in order for Microsoft to buy their data centres for pennies on the dollar.
And yeah, it all kinda seems that could be a credible outcome, at which point MS will have a huge amount of equipment all ready to serve game streaming to people who can no longer afford to buy a home computer to do the same.
Is it going to happen? shrug
Could it? Absolutely.
Doesn’t remote gaming require everyone to have an unmetered and fast internet connection? There’s still a lot of places where not everyone is that lucky.
That’s not Microsoft’s problem.
(I agree with you)
It won’t be GTA6. It will be an exclusive title like a rebooted Halo or Gears of War. They can’t risk losing the money on GTA when people just go to PS5 and buy the game outright there.
I said GTA 6 will be the introduction. Not the closer.
As any drug dealer can tell you, you have to give them a taste in order to get them addicted then you can start to really charge them for the good stuff.
Drug dealers don’t do that. You don’t need to create a market for drugs, if you’ve got decent stuff to sell people will buy it.
The Elder Scrolls 6, only available on Xbox® Game Pass© Ultimate Plus™ Cloud Gaming™®©
And how well do you think that’s going to work? Sounds like a shitty service maybe five people will subscribe to, and then it dies a year later.
We’ve had subscription services like this already. I don’t hear much of them anymore… Or at all… So I presume they’re all dead.
This has been tried before and never worked well. What makes you think its going to work any better now?
I even have a free controller google gave me when they tried it.
It doesn’t need to work well.
It needs to sound like it will make more money for MSFT’s board.
You’re approaching this from the angle of ‘is this a sensible and sustsinable long term business strategy.’
Nobody cares!
They care about LINE GO UP BIG FAST NOW!
Microsoft Board: But Google lost so much money on Stadia!
Voice on speaker: but Google didnt have me, Bing.AI!
Microsoft Board: DONE. MAKE US RICH!
Stadia was still a system you buy. What I’m talking about here is having a browser based gaming system where any computer could be used to play games, for subscription price of course.
There are in fact currently places on the web that offer such services for Minecraft.
And I’ll bet you anything they’ll make the subscription price really low at first. Borrowing from the Netflix model… Then, once consoles and PCs have been outmoded and no one owns anything, they jack the price up.
Stadia worked on chrome browsers. I think you needed their controller though, but I got mine for free with a Chromecast purchase. For TVs you needed a Chromecast or a Android TV
The only thing that makes me think it might work this time is that for some reason Microsoft has this magical ability to take a bad idea, make the shittiest possible iteration of it and have it mysteriously become the most widely-adopted standard against all logic.
Oh man, those stadia controllers. Not the stupidest $99 I’ve ever spent, but still pretty dumb.
Attitudes like that are not how we got a trillion dollars in spare data center infrastructure to find a use for!
Those consumers will be happy owning nothing THIS time!!
Why the LLM-driven scarcity in computing parts of course, and a little bit of cartel behavior when Nintendo and Sony inevitably announce the same thing next year.
This sounds… plausible actually. They have this big stake in GPU datacenters for AI, that are (and will be) burning incredible amounts of money and are not turning a profit anytime soon. That same crazy level of investement on AI is making hardware costs go up, especially gaming hardware.
But Microsoft, being the benefactors who have inherited the company from philantropist and kids-lover Bill Gates, have thought of us! They will share a bit of their shiny GPU datacenters’ plwer for gaming and all they will be asking for is a lot of your money. I can see that.
The PS5 version of GTA6 is going to sell pretty well then
To play games coded by a shitty AI, full of bugs and as many microtransactions as possible …
Is the game buggy? Worry not! Microsoft™ Copilot 365™ powered by Azure™ will analyze your gameplay in realtime, detect when a bug occurs, and redirect you to an AI generated troubleshooting page.
Just waiting for them to bring back Clippy as an AI agent…
Unironically the AI is trained using episodes of The IT Crowd.
I love my AI future.
Fuck.
The old “we don’t want to put any effort into creating anything good, we just want to milk this for cash until we can’t anymore.”
My cloud computing teacher says the future of personal computing is just monitors connected to the cloud. Why couldn’t I have been born in the 70s?
When computers were just a teletype attached to a mainframe?
Sure, but realize that the current level of personal computing is a smartphone, we’re not that far off from your home “PC” just being a display, KB, mouse, and maybe an interface for some external storage and peripherals. I wouldn’t be shocked if that happenes some time in the next 10 years.
That being said, I think there will still be a significant group of people who will own their own hardware.
It’s insane how Microsoft is handling Xbox:
- They have their own console and Windows
- They bought everything they could and now own most of the biggest gaming franchises outside of Nintendo: Activision-Blizzard. Minecraft. Halo. Call of Duty. Warcraft. Starcraft. Diablo. Candy Crush. Elder Scrolls. Fallout. id software. Bethesda.
They have everything in place and are still getting slapped around by Valve and Sony and are now talking about shutting down everything?
As a long time IT guy… this is how Microsoft does everything
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀.meme
Yes. Correct. Because they don’t know what they’re doing.
Just look at how they’ve positioned themselves in recent years: One, we always want to have the most powerful console to be the best. Two, we want people to be able to play anywhere with just a controller and no console required. Talk about a kingdom divided.
They thoroughly shit the bed, it’s an astonishing display of incompetence.
More than likely they’ll just sunset Xbox the platform and rent you the ability to play games on the cloud using your phone, smart TV or computer. And all those franchises will be rentable first, then maybe buyable some day later.
Among other things they have huge data centers that are going to be unused come AI collapse - they just need to figure out how to run games on those GPUs, as they’re very very different from gaming GPUs.
I love how corporations work.
"Hey, we completely fucked this up. We mishandled it, made decisions our customers hate, and now we’re scrapping it because we might lose money.
“Could we fix it? Sure. But that would mean changing the business model that made us money 20 years ago, and that’s terrifying. There’s a risk we might lose money.”
“And sure, the board won’t lose a dime personally. But the stockholders, basically meerkats who scatter at the first loud noise might panic. And we can’t have that. We might lose money.”
Microsoft is quietly sunsetting everything they cant make money on with AI.
So, everything?
It feels that way. Every ongoing product MS has feels decrepit and ready to collapse.
It’s been a while since I used any MS product but I’ve got the same feeling with Google products. Weird bugs are starting to accumulate and at the same time they’re cramming every corner with buttons for their new AI integrations, with no explanation of how they’re supposed to work. It’s a mess, the stuff they add in doesn’t even respect the original app design so they’re really starting to look like they’re put together with toothpicks and duct tape.
They’re still scamming the shit out of businesses with their corporate software. Oh and they have Azure which I’m guessing makes money.
Isn’t it ironic? The only Microsoft product that makes money consistently is based on Linux.
Meanwhile, their biggest competitor is either Linux or UNIX. That is, if you accept that macOS “is UNIX.” It’s been UNIX certified for a couple years now, but it’s UNIX in name only. While Steve Jobs’ NeXTStep was based on UNIX, NeXTStep was also vapourware. Still, it became OS X which became the macOS we know and love (or hate) today. But the truth is, it’s UNIX 3 certified, which is a decades-old certification, and it only just barely makes that. So it’s a thing Mac users brag about. “A UNIX system! I know this!” Jurassic Park meme. And then of course there’s Linux. And of course Windows has the Linux subsystem. Still, non-*nix is going the way of the dodo, just like Win9x did when Microsoft realised WinNT was the future. First with the tranwreck that was WinME, but much more importantly with WinXP. And NT was good, but its time is up (or will be soon).
Azure is by far their biggest money maker if I recall
Which is funny, because they keep shooting it in the foot.
I’m so happy that in the recent years Linux made leaps and bounds in terms of usability so now we have an alternative that actually works well, especially since Microsoft just stopped caring about desktop Windows users.
They can’t even make money with their AI, they only survive off the windows OEM licenses, Office 365 subs that businesses are locked into and their backend server and sql stuff. That’s enough to make them a walking dead for a long time.
And eventually companies will hopefully start cancelling those subscriptions to move to Open Office or Libre Office.
France is already starting that push by having government departments transition first, and are projected to save millions of euros in licensing fees each year. Once you get a critical mass of users on libre software, it’ll hopefully spread on its own
So, also AI?
My feeling on Xbox since Xbox One days has been pretty much “this is an awesome platform, you’re sitting on a gold mine Microsoft, what the fuck are you doing?”
The last bit of brilliance they did utilise properly was GamePass, and of course they cocked that up by getting greedy.
Last few years have been extremely rough. The only lucky thing about this is that instead of full Xbox exclusivity Microsoft was pushing Xbox/Windows cross functionality. …Yeah, I’ve been pivoting to PC, but Steam/GOG instead.
The Xbone is what made me go PC full time.
Been a Xbox gamer since the original Xbox with Halo CE. LAN parties galore. Halo 2 and the beginning of Xbox Live was amazing. Bought a X360 at launch, got Gears and Crackdown for the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. Halo 3 was peak.
And then Xbone announced. Always online. Kinect required. “Sports” “Live TV”. Yeah, not falling for that. “Can’t just flip a switch”.
Yeah I cancelled my Xbox Live sub and built a PC. 2500K with a 550ti. Haven’t looked back since. All of my friends in our group did the same, but some bought a PS4 as well for the SP games.
Microsoft just doesn’t care. They have enough money to not care. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time for Xbox and I’d be genuinely surprised if they release another console and I’d be even more surprised if anyone actually buys it. It’s a dead ecosystem.
It’s been a sad thing to watch. I was the biggest Xbox fan in my circles in the 360 & One days. But by the time Series X came out, I was so disappointed in their games that I still don’t own it. Microsoft bought so many companies that I thought would bring games. Yet, most of them aren’t producing anything.
Nintendo isn’t doing much better. I was a Nintendo stan for most my youth but now they’re the leaders in stagnant games and dark patterns. You just can’t trust corporations not to backstab you anymore. Indie and opensource only for me here on.
I think MS has been surprised and confused by the success of Xbox ever since the very first one came out. It kinda stuck, and the upper management probably never really had a good idea what to do with it, as it just never really worked with them being oriented on business offerings. Remember Ballmer going wild during Xbox One reveal? Yeah. I think during this gen and previous more and more of the business people came into Xbox, and thus the meandering of the brand. They have no clue what gamers want, they’re penny pinchers and pencil pushers.
Enshittifying
This is for the best. As someone who is forced to work with a lot of Microsoft infrastructure let me tell you things have never been this broken before. They keep doubling down on AI and it simply doesn’t work.
It’s been steadily downward since the release of Server 2012 when they started shoehorning every damn feature into increasingly bad web-UIs. I Worked on Microsoft environments since Server 2003 and I fucking hate that companies still use their garbage.
I feel you brother. It’s bad. They are pushing AI features at the speed of light but forgetting that other things need attention too. Log a support ticket and it spews out AI shit that I have already tried or doesn’t help.
My favorite last week was 2 dead support numbers and a third that let to AI which happily told me it has a solution that will fix the problem. The link it sent brought me to the bing search page.
I was so happy to finally talk to indian support a day later.
I will slog through so many menus and weird support numbers to talk to a real person.
didn’t the new exec come from their AI division?
Is this how they put her out to pasture? “Your AI division has been such shit that we’ll put you in charge of a division we plan to close…”
Despite the division they’re closing making way more money (aka > $0) than the one she was moved from
depends on what you mean with ‘AI’, like builder.ai
There are already a bunch of documented but umimplemented functions in a few Xbox related API, like GameInput.
I guess they’re going to go all-in on AI despite only 3.3% of MS365 subscribers paying for Copilot. Stonks?
The sunk cost fallacy is a bitch
Didnt stop them from killing windows phone
They’re going to go all-in on paid streaming gaming services, like every major company for the next thousand years.
You will own nothing and be happy.
The console wars have ended. The PC is victorious.
Some victory. PC sales have been plummeting in favour of mobile and now component prices. Console space is now done with any semblance of competition - Sony is a monopoly and will soon start behaving as such. And xbox’s portfolio of many many IPs will go straight to the bin.
Ah fuck I forgot about mobile and I hate to consider it.
Yeah. That old lady spending £3000 a month on gems for “Royal Candy Blaster Treasure Blitz Origins” is the gaming industry now. :(
There are some proper games for the phones. Most of them are ports like disco elysium, octopath traveller or balatro, but because the dont get a lot of downloads in app store and google play, the platforms tend to push free games over them. And that makes sense for them, because they also profit from every transaction and ad that those games show. Quality single pay games just have one purchase per player and the audience for them is way smaller.
I personally as a consumer see so much wasted potential with mobile games. I remember when i had one hand held machine for tetris and another machine with shmup while my tamagotchi was dying somewhere. When i got gameboy it was crazy how i could take multible games with me when going on a long trip. Now we have almost always in our pocket a machine with multitudes more power than anything back then, but because how apple and google have build their enviroments devs dont have incentive to make quality single purchase products because they wont get the visibility they need.
Sites like itch.io are too small to make a difference. It would need some big player like Steam to add mobile game category in to their app, but apple and google are making it really tedious to install and update anything outside their own controlled enviroments that understandably serve for their biggest audience, who are children.
In what world is Sony a monopoly when Nintendo exists?
The Switch 2 is not a dedicated home console but it is a console
Don’t get me wrong, consoles are dying too, memory prices have gone up and Sony is already shifting from making money from consoles to making money from subscriptions
Nintendo is just doing their thing and becoming the Apple of the videogame industry
No, many of them will go to PCs or Sony over giving up
One can only hope
You mean Tencent mobile games
Microsoft owns King. The candy crush franchise creator.
Are those games still making that much money? Compared to gachas?
No
I’d like to see you try to build a PC right now for less than $1,500. The cornered the market on all of the parts necessary to make a computer that can run games well.
Bro I am playing Webfishing and Space Station 14 on a T460s running linux. Caves of Qud as well. You’ve been lied to. You can game without any of that shit if you’re not trend chasing battlefield.
No, the new player in the game, AI killed everything.
My PC will still boot when the people turn on the data centers in the next 6 months. Can AI say the same?
Damn, I can’t wait to pillage and plunder the datacenters with the lads in a few months.
AI can say anything you tell it to.
And several you don’t.
Look some people may say Xbox has confusing naming scheme, but it’s very simple, number just goes up:
First one is Xbox one. Noone in Microsoft is dumb enough to call “one” console that isn’t first of the series. Then Xbox X (because X is Roman 10) then the Xbox 360.
Very easy
Announcing the Xbox One 2 SL XLS SE Pro, which is the basic version, and the Pro version, the Xbox Two 1 SE SL XS SLB Enterprise, both of which are vibe-coded Windows apps that stream Gamepass games without installing anything but take up 100GB of hard drive and still run your GPU at 100% somehow. The latter costs twice as much and you get a different Minecraft cape with it. They update on a completely separate schedule to the rest of Windows, but if you run either one and the updates aren’t in sync it deletes your Documents folder.
You forgot about z Copilot version where AI has unrestricted ring 0 access to every single device, including your peacemaker - but in return it spies on you 24h!
Xbox S One S Xbox:
Sexbox.
…Did I get it right?
“Cortana, play a game for me.”
“Cortana, am I having fun?”Lol is this an actual ”feature”? Can’t tell anymore.
I remember news about a console giant that wants to introduce a “feature” that plays for you when you’re stuck in a game. In my childhood you had to look at the game manual for clues, ask your friends for help or sleep over it and try again days later. Nowadays you just look up a guide online. Soon you’ll press a button and the game will play itself.
