Xbox Series X - The next Xbox that's boxy but sexy xXx

Ya, like I said, the level of detail could potentially have an impact… I can at least imagine it having an impact.

But being an exact replica of the apartment, rather than a fully artificial apartment that had the same level of detail… seems like it would be equivalent.

For those that don’t want the hassle of looking them all up, I just saw this video on Youtube where this guy cobbled together footage of these 30 games into one place. Enjoy.

Thanks! Some of those look really great. Including ones that he put in the section of games he has no interest in. Like that adventure game where you play as a mailman? I want to play as a mailman!

Yeah, and the weird post-apocalyptic-cthulhu-roadtrip game? How could that go in that category? His narration was annoying both when he offered his own opinions, and when he was reading company-supplied description. Ah, well.

The fact that they add the word “announced” to that list, means it’s pretty worthless as a compendium of what is ACTUALLY coming out this year for the console. It’s just a list of games we already know about.

And sure enough there’s been a couple of insiders since then who have said they are aware of at least a couple of major “exclusive” games slated for Xbox this year that simply haven’t been announced yet (either announced at all, or announced as 2021 releases, I’m unclear).

There’s several games on that announced list I’m interested in, though it’s pretty devoid of heavy hitters aside from Halo Infinite.

2021 was always the big question mark for me, as it regards Microsoft’s internal release schedule, so I’ll be interested to find out what those games are. 2022 is probably when the spigot really begins to open up from all of those acquisitions they’ve made since 2018. And of course it remains to be seen what games get delayed due to lagging COVD effects - I suspect there’s gonna be a lot of them hitting every platform.

But all those games, at least currently, are slated to be released this year.

Well this is odd, people have been speculating Gold would go away/become free and the paid service would be Gamepass. Instead Gold is getting a price hike


It’s been a couple years since I was a gold subscriber, I thought it used to be $60/year. Did I forget other price hikes since then?

Yeah, I’ve been out the entire One generation but I remember it being sub 60 for a year in the 360 days.

For comparison PS+ is $60 a year and Switch Online is $20 a year. Gold will now be $120

A few months ago, when I banked a bunch to convert into gamepass time, it was still $60/yr.

At this point, if you have an XBox, you really should get gamepass, because it’s an awesome deal.

Is it still included with game pass ultimate?

Yes, appears so.

This sort of seems the strategy, make Gold such a shitty deal that getting it with Ultimate comes across as a good deal so people upgrade.

Though lets hold off and see if Gamepass sees any price hikes this year as well.

I forgot the name of that pricing technique and had to look it up in Google. It’s the decoy effect.

Existing Live customers seem to be grandfathered into the old price, so yeah, it seems to be designed to steer new members straight to Game Pass Ultimate.

Games with Gold for February have been announced and for some reason there are five of them! Not a bad list either, though I can’t imagine too many folks haven’t played Gears 5 by now.

Wild speculation: this is a way to de-value the codes already in existence so they wont buy as much time w/ XGPU. Either that or to adjust the value proposition versus just buying into XGPU.

Yes, this is exactly what I predicted was going to happen when they discontinued selling 12 month Gold passes last year. They want to drive everyone to Game Pass Ultimate.

Pretty transparently a move to make Gold a bad value on it’s own, to push new users to Game Pass. And really shitty too. They also very clearly know it, which is why they put this news out on a Friday.

Game Pass is an amazing value, but trying to strongarm people into getting it like this is not okay. It also completely torpedoes the value of the Series S, unless you get Game Pass. If you just want Gold so your kid can play Fortnite or something, you’d be financially much better off getting a PS5 DE now.

I’d like to see Phil Spencer answer some press questions in his next round of interviews, about what he thinks makes XBL Gold such a great value over what PS Plus offers, that they can or should charge twice as much.

The fact that you need Gold for free to play games like Fortnite and Roblox is itself a shitty policy. Making that a $120/year bill is just obscene. Neither PlayStation or Nintendo block F2P games in this manner.

Yeah I think Xbox is the only platform where you need to pay to play the free to play games like Fortnite online.