Daily /r/Games Discussion - Free Talk Friday - September 20, 2024

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It's F-F-Friday, the best day of the week where you can finally get home and play video games all weekend and also, talk about anything not-games in this thread.

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Scheduled Discussion Posts

WEEKLY: What Have You Been Playing?

MONDAY: Thematic Monday

WEDNESDAY: Suggest Me A Game

FRIDAY: Free Talk Friday

[u/Effective-Priority62]

Is there any chance Microsoft might improve and make a monumental comeback in the next gen to end Sony's monopoly? Or has the massive debt of the Activision deal ruined them forever?

[u/RareCheetah3162 → u/Effective-Priority62]

It's always possible. The games industry is kind of unique in that there are these clear sudden transitions to entirely new platforms every 6-8 years that always provide opportunities for the console manufacturers to totally reverse their fortunes. Look at Nintendo, who went from a massive hit platform with >100 million sales in the Wii, then an absolute failure with the Wii U selling only a tenth of that, to an even bigger hit with the Switch selling 140 million. Look at Sony going from the best-selling platform of all time in the PS2 to a platform that just barely matched a competitor from Microsoft, who had only been in the industry 4 years when they launched it, only for Microsoft to drop the ball themselves the next gen and get into their current state. In the exact same year a company can launch the most profitable franchise of all time and a platform that underwhelms and fails (1996 brought Nintendo both Pokemon and the N64). This medium is an unpredictable rollercoaster.

Microsoft have a lot of valuable studios under their belt now. It's possible that they could launch their next-gen platform at a good price a year before Sony's and have those studios populate the first-year lineup with strong exclusives. It worked to make the Xbox 360 a success, coming off a generation where the PS2 was utterly dominant. It's also possible they could become successful doing something more unexpected, like making their next platform Windows-compatible for games and releasing a Steam Deck + dock style device to compete with the Switch 2.

The trouble is that game development cycles are a *ot longer now than they were in the PS2/360 days. That makes it harder to turn things around by funding a bunch of big exclusives for a new platform. If it takes 4-5 years to make a game, your next platform's launch titles have to begin development while your last platform is still new.

[u/Effective-Priority62 → u/RareCheetah3162]

Sorry for the incoming paragraphs of the long rant that I wrote, I just needed to get it out. You make a great point, though. I'm just not very confident in Microsoft finally learning after nearly two generations since the Xbox One disaster. But I'm hoping they're actually cooking an incredible comeback with the next Xbox and lineup.

What irks me about Microsoft currently, is that they don't seem to be course correcting anytime soon. I think they're actually pretty comfortable not being on top and just selling subscription/cloud services and sponsoring a few games. Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond still in charge and not willing to steer the ship into a new direction. I think MS will not even bother with the next Xbox being the world's most powerful machine at launch, and will probably take advantage from all the outrage directed at Sony to quietly make the next console being much more focused on digital services and streaming, and having an optional disc drive (just to not piss off their install base who still own discs).

If they were actually still interested in the console race, we'd start hearing all those mid-gen industry rumors by now, about how the next Xbox's specs will blow PS6 out of the water in overall power and performance, and maybe hopefully, that they're actually making games for the next Xbox's lineup. If MS did this and expanded dev mode support in the next gen so Xbox can finally smoothly run even PS3 emulation, the free marketing from the media would be insane.

Of course, they still need to also get third party devs back on their side, as so many have skipped Xbox now when it's more profitable to develop a game optimized for either the PS5 or Switch and then port it to PC. The biggest problem with Xbox is the one they themselves caused. PS5 still has exclusives in both third and first party, even if they all eventually come to PC over the years. No one, not even casual gamers are interested in Xbox when most of it's exclusives are relatively obscure and also always day one on PC, while all their friends and more famous games are on the PS5 and Switch.

My only hope for the Sony monopoly to end is for Xbox to turn this around, but I see no signs of them doing this yet, it seems like they still haven't hit rock bottom. The future seems bleak, and while I can play great games on the PS5, it's sad to look back on the last 3 previous Playstation consoles and how soulless the PS5 looks like in comparison. The PS3 specially, was a behemoth of a media center, its first models could even run linux, along with the PS2.

The PS5 is ass-backwards in all those regards, the video player sucks, can't play local music or store photos, no native web browser app, can't use all the Dualshock 4s you own except on backcompat mode PS4 games, can't even manage local save files other than either deleting them or uploading to the cloud, and their first party games is a barren landscape of just one or two big releases per year, not to mention the absurd PS Plus prices. Or the Classic PS1 and PS2 titles you can buy or acquire via PS Plus, run like they're in a dogshit laptop and not the most powerful console in the world, which should have an emulator on par with PCSX2 or better. Or their zero effort in investing in PS3 emulation, when they can sell remasters, remakes and streaming them via PS Now.

It's basically one huge money-milking subscription machine, I'm savvy (or poor) enough not to throw much of my money into it and share games with friends, but it's sad knowing how powerful this console is, how magical the playstation brand used to be, and what could have been. And more disheartening still, that my only hope lies on the people at Xbox eventually pulling their head out of their asses, hopefully within the next 10 years so I can feel the effects in 20. And no, I don't really like dealing with PC other than work, study and easily playing some old games on my laptop, maybe getting the next Steam Deck eventually.

I've always been a console player that casually goes back and forth in this hobby, but seeing the state of the industry now sometimes makes me wanna just stop. Thankfully there are a lot of games and franchises I still like to keep up with, but it will be a long time before I bother getting a PS6 because I'm suspicious both PS and Xbox are still a long way from any course correcting. Hoping I'm wrong about Xbox.