Does Microsoft actually want people that only play F2P games to buy a Series S? They lose money on each sale, and only regain it on either getting their cut from games sold or from subscriptions.
Certainly economically pushing F2P only players off the platform makes sense. I don’t know about the cost of “goodwill” but the move certainly seems logical.
That’s a great point. In their overall ecosystem (Windows, Series X, Series S, Android/iOS/browser streaming) I think they would want free to play games only on Windows.
Looks like no price change for now AND free to play games won’t require Gold anymore.
Sorry PlayStation-nauts - no easy victory today. Maybe Sony will finally implement true save sync to actually compete with Gold now. Oh, wait! That’s FREE on Xbox without Gold - but Sony charges for inferior service!
WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CH—
oh, guess they did. Never mind.
Every time the Xbox executive team shows their whole asses is a pretty easy win for the PlayStation business, even when they have to abandon their bad ideas so quickly. You know why I feel good about being a PlayStation customer? Because I never have to worry about them getting this far with such a boneheaded move.
F2P are incredibly profitable, dude. Platform holders get a cut of all those skin sales and battle passes.
Well, that was fun. We laughed, we cried, we all got a good cardio workout. Now we can talk about stuff that matters - Donut County is a pretty cool little game, kind of a bite size Katamari Damacy. Think it took me two hours to beat. And if you have Game Pass, it’s available to play for less than $120 per year!
Everyone keeps telling me I should play that…
Like when they told us that we would work extra hours so that we could afford that PS3?
Like when they broke the PS store?
Like when they fucked up parties on the ps4?
Sony does dumb shit all the time dude. Most corporations do. You just imagine that it’s not dumb.
Donut County is a great Game Pass game. I played it at launch, and my only regret is I thought the cost was a bit high for the length.
Everyone’s right.
Like when Sony forgot to tell it’s developers they needed to add a flag to enable PSTV support in their Vita games?
Like when Sony chose proprietary memory cards over standard microSD for the Vita?
Like when Sony refused to give refunds even for pre-orders?
Backtracking that quickly tells me that they either have shit Xbox market analysis, (to not be able to predict the visceral reaction of their customers) or shit Xbox strategic thinkers (to believe they could raise the price without damaging the brand) or shit Xbox leadership, (to approve the scheme) or some combination of the three.
I guess good on them in the end for making F2P really free.
Roller coaster ride. Microsoft fucked up, but reversed course and left Xbox consumers in a better position.
Critics got to mention green underwear, fake news accusations, and how super proud they are to be a Sony fan since Sony never ever makes mistakes, Scout’s honor.
So even trade?
Kinda wild that we went from a price hike, to no price hike and F2P games being truly free on Xbox for the first time ever, in less than 24 hours, lol.
The backlash felt like something the company wouldn’t be able to ignore, but even then this is pretty nuts.
Anyway, back to the embarrassing fanboy stuff.
I’m happy that everyone exercised enough restraint not to accuse the other side of being Trump supporters. That’s a rarity these days!
Now we can all have a great weekend with our chosen console.
It’s fine if it’s free. It’s extremely light on substance, I paid a couple bucks for it when it originally launched on iOS and regretted it.
Yeah it makes me wonder if there was an internal conflict about the change and now the other side is getting to do a lot of "I told you so"s this morning. It’s good they course corrected so quickly though as opposed to waiting until Monday.
Now if the collective internet had just ignored this all and not talked about it like @divedivedive wanted then Gold would still be getting an unprecedented price hike and the free-to-play change wouldn’t be happening.
They take a cut of all v-bucks sales on their platform too. I think they make plenty of money on Fortnite.
Every game with microtransactions (which at $20 for a player skin ain’t so micro) provides revenue for almost zero effort to the console maker. They just have to keep the lights on.
Good point, score one for internet hysteria!