It’s cute you think we will believe this crosses some sort of line for you.
Honestly there might be fewer reasons to buy a PS now than an Xbox. With gamepass, its like you dont even need to buy a game. Just get an xbox and gamepass and youre pretty much set.
Well bless your heart. I do believe I’ve mentioned more than once that if they had released the PS5 with some degree of BC for its previous generations then I would have bought it day one (obviously, that presupposes I would have been able to get my hands on a console day one). But since that isn’t the case, since not only can I not just stick one of my PS/PS2 discs into a PS5 and start playing but also in the very near future I wouldn’t be able to (re)buy from the PS e-shop, yes that absolutely crosses a line for me. Now as to whether you personally believe that or not, I don’t much give a damn.
So because you can no longer buy games that never worked on the PS5, that’s too far? You position isn’t even internally consistent. I mean, imagine if they add BC for PS1 and PS2, why do you assume they would not sell those games again digitally for the PS5? Closing the PS3/PSP/Vita store has nothing to do with that possibility. For all we know it makes it MORE likely to happen if they no longer have to dedicate resources to a dead storefront.
The article also kind acts like PS Now barely exists, and like there’s a lot of games on it, certainly more than a handful of PS2/PS3 titles.
I don’t know what part of this is confusing you, so let me try to step through the process. I have a pretty sizable collection of PS and PS2 games that I still enjoy playing. I have a functioning PS2 that can currently play both libraries on, but of course that could fizzle out any day. Yes, at this particular time, PS and PS2 consoles are pretty easy to find and don’t cost a great deal, but I’d like a little more future-proof solution.
Before the PS5 was released, they were talking about backward compatibility in general terms, but for quite some time we had no idea exactly what that would entail. My pie-in-the-sky hope was that the PS5 would have some degree of BC for all its previous generations. I’m not looking for 100%, not even close - Microsoft has been at this for years and isn’t even at half their libraries. But some kind of effort or recognition of older games that were still pretty fantastic would have been nice. But we know how that ended up.
So here’s me today. I can’t play those games on a PS5. I could potentially buy electronic copies that would work on, what, a PS3? But only for a little bit longer. You ask, why do I assume they would not sell those games again digitally for the PS5? My reply is, why would I assume that they would? Has there been any mention of them doing such a thing? Might be worth pointing out any future plans before, I don’t know, shutting down the old store?
As far as PS Now goes, sure I’ve given it a look. It’s got a decent sized library, but I notice that it’s missing a bunch of games that I play pretty frequently like R-Type Final, Gradius V, Contra Shattered Soldier. But sure, lots of stuff. But I don’t really need a Playstation for that do I? The website says I can stream the entire library to any Windows PC. So who knows, maybe one day I’ll do that. If I feel like I need yet another subscription service I guess. But more likely, I’ll just keep cranking along with my PS2 with my fingers crossed.
When Dave says Microsfot is focused on old games right now because it’s all they have at the moment he’s not wrong, it’s like how Sony was super into indie games at the start of the PS4.
Let’s look at what Sony and Microsoft will have released by the end of June since the launch of the new consoles
Sony
- Demon’s Souls (major remake)
- Sackboy: A Big Adventure
- Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
- Astro’s Playroom
- Destruction AllStars
- Returnal
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
- MLB: The Show 21 (on Playstation and Xbox)
Microsoft’s list, including Bethesda after acquisition
- Death Loop on PS5 and PC (NOT on Xbox at launch)
So Sony is putting out a new game on Xbox Series before Microsoft, and Microsoft is putting out a game on PS5 before they put one out for Xbox Series.
There’s a reason they are focused on BC and spending big bucks on 3rd parties for Game Pass, their first party is non-existent for the near future. Yes three years from now there will be a lot of great stuff thanks to all the companies they’ve recently bought, but that’s not a compelling case as to why you should buy it today.
There has never been a brand new console sold without new games the way they are selling Series X. It’s unprecedented.
Due to supply constraints lacking 1st party exclusives isn’t really that big of a deal at this point in time. Hasn’t hurt sales one bit.
Clearly Microsoft is a weaker 1st party developer, much more so than all the other major platform stakeholders. I mean the last Halo game i’ve played was… Meridian on Mac? MS today seems more interested in perennial franchises - Forza 4, Sea of Thieves, State of Decay, ect., and those are well done enough though not possessing much overlap with, say, someone interested in Mario or Sony first party franchises. They also seem to have difficulty greenlighting games that aren’t at least multiplatform and/or aren’t PC centered. And resurrecting Age of Empires 2 from the graveyard was more like a company letting someone in the mailroom on their spare time work on a project no-one else cared about until they did, something that came to fruition after years and years of piddling around on a very small scale, which makes it feel like these tenuous and small steps forward feel incidental and opportunistic rather than deliberately planned. By far the biggest game Microsoft has made in years is Flight Simulator - but Nintendo nerds probably don’t care about that one bit.
I think this is what makes people like Dave worried because the “traditional” way of doing things is that effectively first party games are the console and everything else is gravy. Clearly that’s much of the appeal of the Switch now - it’s basically a purveyor of Nintendo branded games, with a bunch of ports and crap elsewise. A Switch without Nintendo first party games is an overpriced toy. To that point of view not having a strong first party lineup is just not how consoles are made, and feels “wrong” and threatening.
But while i can’t say for sure its clear that a big difference now is just how many 3rd party games are being made today, and that Microsoft seems not only happy to invite most of them on its platform but basically be the platform for them. I’m sure Microsoft would be happy to become the Steam of Consoles and if Nintendo and Sony both wanted Mario and Last of Us on an Xbox they’d be more than happy to invite them on (and take their % cut of the revenue). That is a very PC centered business model and not traditionally how consoles have been done, and the Xbox seems aimed at the “back end” rather than the Title centered front end. That is a more industrial mindset than console players are used to.
But, as far as i can see, Microsoft would have no interest in pushing Nintendo or Sony out of gaming, which i think is somehow the worry about them. If anything they would be happy to be the opposite.
So it will be interesting this generation to see how the console market responds. It will probably take years for this to trickle down through consumers. As i’ve said before i think brand identity is incredibly durable and there isn’t much Microsoft can do in the short term. If they did though apparently a large number of vocal gaming consumers would have a collective paroxysm. You can already see this with the reactions of horror to Sony first party games now coming to Xbox. If Nintendo were to release Mario Party and Breath of the Wild on Xbox the pulling of hair and rolling on the ground in anguish would be heard around the world; because to that frame of mind the whole enjoyment of a console is the exclusive use of its 1st party games and without that exclusivity the world is turned upside down, cats and dogs live together in harmony, and all that is right with the world is now wrong.
But if all that matters to consumers if what first party games are on a console, then Microsoft is setting themselves up to be fighting a massively uphill battle. Of course there is a lot of opportunity cost here. All the money they’re throwing at Gamepass isn’t going to first party development. That’s why in some ways games on Gamepass feel “first party-lite” or even “second party” since in a sideways way they are getting subsidized by Microsoft almost like a first party developer, and it’s probably right to see Gamepass games as something in between a first party and a third party game.
Sony why? :-(
Sony reverses course after being told it’s a bad idea by literally everyone.
Damn that Sony, always making bad, anilti-consumer decisions and then having to backtrack, unlike those other guys.
Not really a mult-platform comparison but since is the defacto console wars thread I figured this the best place. Anyhow, the extremely positive Returnal previews seems to have gotten the Xbox fanboys really buthurt. I was doing a twitter search just see the general reaction and I was met with a surprising number of posts basically saying it was just copying Recore…
Even the Xbox fanboys didn’t play enough Recore to know what it was like…
If anyone is wondering why cross-play is so rare.
I’m a little surprised that Microsoft has never earned a profit on hardware. I’d have thought they eventually started earning a profit on 360 hardware, for instance.
I’d say it depends of semantics of the statement. My guess she’s referring to console generations rather than actual individual SKUs. I’d say it’s possible that, at some point, there was a SKU of the X360 or Xbox One late in their respective cycle that wasn’t sold at a loss - if you look at the production cost of that particular unit vs. its sales price. But even if there was a profit at that point, it was so small it would never make up for the losses made in the years prior to that. Not to mention the R&D investment required to have a console ready to begin with. And lest we forget: the X360 RROD fiasco also cost Microsoft quite a bit. IIRC they originally anticipated costs of up to $1b for all the replacement logistics.
With the RROD there was no way they were turning a profit on hardware 360 gen. They probably had to replace/fix millions.