The reality is that Game Pass isn’t going to revolutionise anything right away. For now, it will enhance Microsoft’s value proposition and help differentiate it in its on-going efforts to chip away at PlayStation’s dominance. It is a way for Xbox to put extra focus on its first-party exclusives (both new and old), without having to actually release more games. And it could even help broaden the console’s appeal amongst a more mainstream customer.
Yet long term, Xbox is putting the pieces in place for a future without hardware. Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure could eventually be used to offer an on-demand gaming service that’s accessible across multiple screens, much in the way Netflix is today. It has the tools at its disposal to radically change how it distributes its content to gamers.
This isn’t Xbox giving up. Far from it. This is just the company doing in games what it does so successfully elsewhere - create a strong platform from which to deliver high quality software.
Ah, this video just reminded me to cancel my Crackdown 3 pre-order. Thanks.
Bluehole was reportedly valued at $4.6 billion back in September, so several million might not quite cut it :)
It’s MS trying to quietly back out of the console hardware market. Once they release their 360 emulator on Windows 10 they can just carry forward with Xbox as a gaming service rather than a hardware ecosystem.
Don’t taunt me with this wonderful, impossible future.
Now the thread is starting to sound familiar.
If this was even remotely true, there would never have been an Xbox One X.
Anyway, I wasn’t even a tiny bit interested in Game Pass previously, but I definitely am now. If you plan to get just two MS games a year (State of Decay 2 and Forza Horizon 4 for me), it pays for itself, and everything else is just gravy (Sea of Thieves, Crackdown 3, unannounced games and the back catalogue).
I don’t think so. The X can be seen as a transition measure, to help them establish gamepass etc. Without the X the brand was falling very far behind.
That makes exactly as much sense as Sony getting out of the console business because they have PSNow as a streaming service.
Microsoft has been trying to sell hardware since forever. The Xbox is the only area they’ve been remotely successful in. The Zune and Windows phones were utter failures. Surface tablets were a bust. Surface laptops aren’t exactly setting the world on fire.
If I didn’t play games I would probably have a Surface laptop.
Kind of the opposite since PS Now is giant racks of real hardware for some insane reason.
If I had infinite money I’d get one too. But what market do they serve? Companies buy Dell or IBM workstations in bulk. Gamers buy or build desktop PCs. Home office people buy HPs from Staples for $350. Why does the Surface exist?
Surface was a $4.3 billion business in 2016.
Surface exists to push the PC forward. MS realized that if they want PCs to innovate, they need to show the way. They own the platform. The OEMs weren’t doing it, nor could they.
Yeah, the Surface is doing well. The only bust was the ARM-based unit.
As far as consoles going away due to streaming, only if MS Labs or somebody else has found a way around the whole “speed of light” issue. If you’ve ever tried playing a shooter on a streaming service, you’ll know they’re laggy AF. Heck, even at home streaming my X1X or PS4Pro to my laptop, I won’t play anything that requires faster reactions than, say, Witcher III, and the local lag is nothing compared to the best performance I’ve seen on services like PSNow and OnLive.
I’ve fallen in love with my Xbox One X because of its additional power, BC, enhancements, BUT I’m glad I also have a PS4 pro because most of the console games I’ve spent a lot of time with over the past few years have been PS exclusives: Uncharted, Bloodborne, Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn - even the Little Big Planet games. And things like Nier, Persona, Last Guardian at least have some interest to me, and several of the 2018 games I’m most looking forward to checking out are only available on the PS4: Last of Us 2, Shadow of the Colossus (which I’ve never played), Days Gone and maybe Spider-man and Death Stranding. Playstation is just killing xbox on exclusives.
…and I think this making Microsoft games available Day 1 on game pass is another great, very ballsy move, by Microsoft - it’s pretty cool to be able to play the next Halo or Gears at the time of release for a grand total of $12, if you don’t see any value beyond playing through the campaign. Microsoft continues to play catch-up, but they are the company pushing forward and taking risks these days, while Sony is playing it very conservatively.
Yep. I have a very nice EERO mesh network and it has made remote connections to my system using the Win10 Xbox app more solid and responsive than they have ever been, but games like Pinball FX2/3 or Darksiders are not really playable due to lag.
Thin-client gaming is just not a realistic universal solution. Game Pass is the opposite of thin-client gaming, it’s realtime-authorization gaming on a full-power client, leveraging the DRM system that was so poorly presented back at E3 2013. It’s so realtime, that any hiccup in the house’s internet will cause an interruption in Game Pass games with a “Do you own this game?” screen (I let the family use my original Xbox, so I’m operating only on XBL authentication in my office).
I think it’s also a way to make it a lot more likely that a critical mass of players are available to play (and thereby add value to) a multiplayer-primary game like Sea of Thieves or the next Halo.
Many of these exclusives to Sony are actually being developed in-house. Sony has, somehow or another (I mean that I don’t have information on), created a system for cultivating in-house developers in a way that Microsoft seems to have a very hard time doing so.
My guess is it’s a corporate cultural problem. MS is a software company first, and internally they seem to have a hard time figuring out what to do with software that’s not directly related to the OS or Office / Enterprise… and then the winds blow and suddenly they decide the rent for that internal studio is too damn high. Whereas Japan has long had the conglomerate model of corporation where they can have often completely unrelated industries under one umbrella. Sony seems to manage software developers as just another random cog in the conglomerate wheel, and don’t feel the need to strangle the baby in the crib as compulsively as MS does every few quarters or so.
So MS is just not able to put up exclusives without esssentially throwing bags of money at third party developers, where many or most of the highly regarded marquee games on Nintendo or Sony are developed internally.