[hbn]

It was pretty rich seeing armchair video game industry analysts act like the new CEO was gonna usher in a new age for Microsoft's gaming division because she got to announce the updated logo and some games that would have obviously been in development long before she became CEO.

Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the intervention from marketing and HR in their products.

To me it's mostly unfortunate that this has left PlayStation with no direct competition because they've noticed and leaned into the not-giving-a-shit attitude after they had such a great console generation with the PS4. It's kinda crazy that we're already almost due for a new console generation and there's very little appetite for new consoles after this generation where it feels like it barely got started. And between graphics almost certainly at the point of diminishing returns, and hardware prices like they are right now, I can't imagine there's a market to sell something more capable than current gen consoles. The industry is in a very strange state.

[tracker1]

To me, the graphics abilities have been there for a decade... what we need are better games and gameplay. More fun games without gotcha, pay to win, loot box efforts. Too much effort is going for dazzling graphics at the expense of overall gameplay. How many people are still playing CoD, WoW and so many other games from over a decade ago? How many refreshes of Final Fantasy have we seen?

The graphics can only carry you so far. There's indy adventure games with SNES level graphics that have millions of daily users.

[freedomben]

> Too much effort is going for dazzling graphics at the expense of overall gameplay.

Yes, 100%. I love good graphics, but game play is the most important thing. If you don't have good gameplay the graphics mean nothing. A game with great game play and great graphics is something to behold.

I recently finished Split Fiction and they really nailed it. I hope studios take notice!

[folkrav]

Split Fiction is fantastic. My wife, about 0% gamer when rounded down, is still talking about it months later. I had a blast too - the game manages to be extremely fun and a decent challenge for both gamers and non-gamers alike. We'll be replaying it, but swapping characters next time.

When we played it, we had just finished It Takes Two, which was also great, but Split Fiction immediately dethroned it. I can't wait to see what Hazelight comes up with next.

[3eb7988a1663]

Is Split Fiction easier? While I thought the platforming in It Takes Two was fairly pedestrian, it was challenging enough that I was unable to get the other half to tough it out to the end.

[MarkSweep]

Split Fiction has a couple of mechanisms that make it accessible for people who are not experienced gamers. There is a general "reduce damage done by enemies" setting that make dodging attacks unnecessary. If you get stuck on something, there is a "skip to next checkpoint" button. This is very helpfully for the one or two really oboxiously hard parts. This is an improvement in accessibility over the developer's previous game It Takes Two.

I'd highly recommend Split Fiction, both for its game play and story. It is also superior to It Takes Two in that there is no part where the games "to continue playing, press X to dismember your daughter's anthropomorphic stuffed animal to make her cry". That was a jarring and unpleasant shift in tone for an otherwise mostly light-hearted game.

[rcxdude]

TBH, the whole of It Takes Two made me think 'these people are pretty terrible, I'm not sure I want to help them'. The stuffed toy bit was just the cherry on the cake. Good gameplay, not very good writing IMO (Split fiction is better but still... irritating at times)

[folkrav]

Some spots were a bit hard with Split Fiction too. There is a third-person shooter styled section my wife got pretty frustrated with at one point. But the overall game was good enough that she got over it.

[blauditore]

This has been a recurring theme since the dawn of video games: Everyone talks about graphics (devs and gamers), but ultimately the good and beloved games are the ones with great gameplay.

[swinglock]

It was more interesting when there were real tangible improvements. Game graphics has been like smartphones for a good long time now. Performance and feel (low latency and high consistency) still matters though, that is not solved, but it's also never marketed. Quality is not included with a UE license.

[z3phyr]

Also dazzling graphics has been mostly visual instead of experiential, that is, with the advances in GPU capabilities, we do get beautiful effects, but the intractability with the said infra is seems to be stagnant (and in some cases regressed)

The way things interact in the game world peaked around mid 2000s, just in time when CPUs started to not follow moors law.

As of now, interactive environments are still almost as good as half life 2 from 2004. Gaming is all about the feel of it, which also includes the visual component.

[grg0]

I think graphics peaked ~2015. But interaction still leaves a lot to be desired; we still have slipping and characters who can't walk stairs in AAA games to this day. Making characters more physically grounded and present seems like the obvious thing to improve to me.

[mfro]

This is something audiences are clearly desperate for today. I think it's obvious when looking at the huge success of Helldivers, Bodycam, Ready Or Not, Arc Raiders, (none of which are particularly innovative) players appreciate high quality, tactile and grounded world interaction.

[jjmarr]

Counterpoint is Roblox, which had one of the most innovative game engines ever. It could multiplayer simulate thousands of blocks of destructible terrain in 2006.

This feature was mostly ignored by the playerbase because developers found it easier to create static setups and focus on iterating on other parts of their gameplay.

[grg0]

The technological innovation still needs to be fun, though. Red Faction: Guerilla (2009) had destructible buildings to the point that they were constructed by laying down blocks in a physically correct way and letting the physics engine handle the rest, and blasting the hell out of them in the middle of open combat was incredibly fun.

[ColdStream]

This is something 'The Last Guardian' absolutely nailed! Everything was just so grounded.

Yes, as a game it had a lot of flaws that many other games also had, but the things it excelled at were absolutely unique.

[mathgeek]

What did it excel at that hit the right notes for you?

[ColdStream]

It is sort of hard to describe but I would say specifically the animation system.

Everything has weight and flows spectacularly. They used a combination of key framed animations and procedural to have limbs conform to surfaces and have additional physics applied when needed. Combined with the physics system on the characters feathers and clothing, it all just ties together very well. It had a long development time of 9 years, before that became almost a standard, and it was basically just spent perfecting that system.

It also helps that they threw the bulk of the GPU time on the giant character to give it highwaulity shadow and highlights to ground it in the environment so well.

But the environment is a little bit of a let down in that the assets are clearly from the original Ps3 version they were working on. They cleaned it all up well enough with decent enough AA with everything being well 'grounded' but there was only so much they could do. There are a lot of assets that show the original memory limitations.

The problem was that the frame rate would drop terribly due to a lot of their decisions. And this is after they reportedly they had to significantly reduce the animations system capabilities over the Ps3 version because it was original designed to work with the Cell's strengths. Also took over a year just to port from the Ps3 to Ps4 due to the hyper specific tech they had built. Probably one of the few titles where the Cell's strengths shone well over the Ps4's architecture. If feels like if it was done today with modern GPU tech, they could do something amazing with this. But I think it is going to be permanently stuck on Ps4.

If you haven't played it, I wouldn't give it a hard recommendation because the gameplay is very fiddley in trying to conform to the animation system and most people just don't really get into the vibe of it all. But do check out a few minutes of it in action on Youtube and just to see how it all flows.

It is an wonderfully flawed ambitiously frustrating masterpiece. The vision is strong, some of the tech is strong, but the gameplay is a little weak and some parts of the tech is weaker.

I do see that the creator Fumito Ueda with Gen Design has a new title being funded by Epic called "Gen Altus" and it looks like they are taking all their skills over to UE5, it is going to be fun to see.

[ColdStream]

Still occasionally fire up Red Faction Guerilla just to see the promised future we never got.

[wincy]

This is where Nintendo is at. It’s hilarious how much fun me and my kids are having playing games like Animal Crossing, Super Smash Bros, Mario Party, Pokemon Pokopia, and the surprise smash hit has been Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. My kids make all the neighbors and have them get married and laugh about it and it’s just such a goofy concept. The graphics are good enough that you no longer notice there’s graphics, just the art.

Switch 2 is a fantastic console with an astonishingly fun first party library, and Nintendo just over there doing their own thing like they’ve always done.

[disgruntledphd2]

Nintendo are basically the only people who held out against in game spending, for which I salute them.

I spent a few years in and around the industry and there was so much insanity around the need for in game monetization that it just made things much worse.

And because the game studios didn't care about it, none of the money stuff worked, making executives even more upset.

All to catch some vision of F2P money which is an entirely different business that these companies couldn't possibly support.

It's very sad for the industry overall (this particular decision is MS killing stuff off because the margins aren't good enough to funnel more cash into GPU gods).

[johnnyanmac]

Nintendp dabbled briefly with it. But they know their audience and very much did not want to risk any PR hit by associating too closely with the typical gacha/lootbox model. They saw the Roblox/Fortnite smoke long before most of the industry and turned off very quickly.

But there's one specific statistic to why Nintendo can keep doing what it does in a way no one else can: 98% retention rate. You get into Nintendo and you basically never leave. Even for Japan, that's well above the 70% retention rate you'd expect. Keeping that kind of institutional knowledge for an entire career makes them really good at what they do, and the unfortunate decades of Japan's economy meant they were less tempted by amassing huge loans or risks on experimental stuff.

Maybe they didn't become trillionaires, but it means they amassed a huge war chest and can weather storms that US companies are currently in the middle of.

[kridsdale1]

Apple has similar retention. Almost all the senior leaders were ICs or low level managers there 20 to 30 years ago.

[ravenstine]

There's a lot I don't like about Nintendo, but the one thing I admire about them is they understand that fancy cinematic graphics aren't what make a great game.

[mathgeek]

There are many great quotes by Nintendo folks about this approach. One of my favorites:

> I like to think of it like buying a car. Admit it. Your left brain looks at a vehicle in terms of the numbers. What's the horsepower? The towing capacity? The 0-60? That's our competitor's approach. But your right brain is different. There's only one question out there: sitting behind the wheel, where will this baby take me? In other words, do you want to go just a little bit faster, down the same streets you've always driven, or down a new road, to places you've never seen before? That's the difference with Nintendo DS.

[tracker1]

Absolutely... They've been able to make a lot of games just fun even if the graphics aren't stellar. To this day, I wish they'd have released a Wii Sports Golf as a separate title with several courses.

[YackerLose]

Tomodachi Life sounds like The Sims but with rounded corners.

[kipchak]

There's a bit of Mad Libs in there as well, you can for example add your own conversation topics or draw your own food items or pets which the characters will then talk to each other about.

[boca_honey]

Nintendo is great for children, yes. I wish there were something like them for a more mature audience.

[kridsdale1]

What does this mean exactly? Because Mature games are designed to appeal to 14 year old boys.

Are you referring to some kind of David Lynch of gaming?

[boca_honey]

Yeah, I don't mean "mature" in the sense of the rating system, which does in fact mean "made for 14-year-old boys."

I don't like or understand David Lynch, but you get what I'm trying to say. There is no one in the video game landscape doing something similar to what Welles or Kurosawa did in cinema, or what Yorgos Lanthimos and Ari Aster are doing now (or Matt Reeves and Guillermo del Toro, if you're not into arthouse stuff).

Every time someone argues about this, they cite the same old examples (Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, some narrative indie game)... but those examples usually lack in gameplay, which is, in my opinion, the most important part of what makes a video game its own medium.

I hope to see in my lifetime someone do to video games what the French did to cinema in the 50s and the Americans did in the 60s: graduating the medium from a disposable entertainment artifact into an art form for the ages. The medium is still young, it's not impossible.

[rocketvole]

I feel like these games exist- they just aren't popular, or are typically subpar in one way or another. The problem is that I feel like video games have become like music- there is innovation happening in genres, but there are so many and have fragmented off so much that I cant really recommend to you a game I find to be genius because there's a good chance that you can't appreciate the gameplay. That's not a knock on you or anyone else as a gamer.

[kanwisher]

like story driven games that Sony is famous for. Imagine a Spiderman, a last of us, or Uncharted. Large story driven games largely for older 30-40 year old market

[mlrtime]

Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll... not quite 14 but close.

[mvdtnz]

> Too much effort is going for dazzling graphics

Could have fooled me. I haven't seen a meaningful improvement in game graphics for at least a decade.

[Cthulhu_]

There's improvement in tech - check out the Unreal Engine's tech demos for example - but that doesn't really translate into visible end results because one, modern hardware can't handle all the bells and whistles, and two, when you're playing it all just blends into the background, and composition/art direction trumps details and fidelity every day of the week.

That said, the tech isn't wasted, it's also used in film graphics and animations and the like. And photo mode, where games can open up all the registers because framerate isn't as important then.

But yeah. Unreal tech demos, or if you have a PS5, there's a free tech demo called The Matrix Awakens that showcases advancements from a few years ago (heck it's been 4 years already).

[ColdStream]

We are well into the diminishing returns era now. It not done via better art designs, now you have to push significantly significantly harder to get improved results via brute forcing it.

I am very cautiously optimistic about this. It seems there has been a lot of tooling change over to integrate ray/path tracing into systems.

Once this becomes a little more ubiquitous we might start to see some decent stuff but so far it has been 7-8 years since the first ray tracing hardware came along and it is still far from implemented consistently.

[tracker1]

I think there's a lot of room to grow in terms of ray/path tracing, etc... but I think it's studios and not real-time gaming that will really see the benefits near term. Bamers Nexus did an interview with a new Graphics MFG that's working more into that direction, but their near term focus is the professional space.

[monkpit]

> gotcha

Gacha?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gacha_game

[Cthulhu_]

They're the same picture

[throwaway894345]

I’ve been saying this for 20 years. I care much less if the game is visually stunning than if the core game is fun. It could be a paintball themed FPS for all I care as long as the core mechanics are fun and the story is engaging, I care very little. Also, good graphics don’t have to be hardware intensive—not everything needs to seem photorealistic.

[account42]

Cutting edge graphics can even be actively detrimental to a game by lowering performance and limiting game design.

[rawbot]

> limiting game design

It's what RPG players have been saying all this time about voice-overs.

It is sold as an accomplishment, but it limits the scope and writing of a game.

[Cthulhu_]

It's... odd that while Steam is the biggest PC gaming platform and the biggest platform for new, unique, interesting games ever, Microsoft isn't investing more in the people developing games for it. Microsoft can use it to filter out the slop, make offers to the best games, offer help with porting to consoles, and (probably most importantly) offer to put them into the xbox live program, because the xbox live subscription is xbox's biggest source of recurring revenue.

Access to Steam's library for a fixed monthly price would be huge. Actually I'm surprised Steam/Valve isn't offering that yet, it'd be huge, and for their new consoles it would be a perfect fit.

[freedomben]

> Access to Steam's library for a fixed monthly price would be huge. Actually I'm surprised Steam/Valve isn't offering that yet, it'd be huge, and for their new consoles it would be a perfect fit.

As a consumer, I really hope they never do that. I hate subscriptions and strongly prefer to just buy games. Once there's a subscription option, I would imagine the great sales would get significanty watered down. If you're a game seller and you can get that sweet sweet recurring revenue, it's too strong a temptation. We've seen that story play out time and time again in SaaS (and even some desktop applications now).

[muyuu]

you don't get the insane profit margins they want without those predatory practices, not in this industry and if you do it's a one-off and not something you can do every fiscal year

[soulofmischief]

I do still play a good bit of Black Ops II Zombies... which came out in 2012. Treyarch took notice, and the last CoD was a crappy attempt to cash in on the fact that the last good CoD game was over a decade ago.

A few great games I've played in the last 8 years, about the span of a generation, a mix of AAA and indie:

- Red Dead Redemption 2 https://store.steampowered.com/app/1174180/Red_Dead_Redempti...

- Cyberpunk 2077 https://www.gog.com/en/game/cyberpunk_2077

- Supraworld https://store.steampowered.com/app/1869290/Supraworld/

- Outer Wilds https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/

- Mini the Hollower https://www.gog.com/en/game/mina_the_hollower

- Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo https://store.steampowered.com/app/2870350/Pipistrello_and_t...

- Shadows over Loathing https://store.steampowered.com/app/1939160/Shadows_Over_Loat...

- Animal Well https://store.steampowered.com/app/813230/ANIMAL_WELL/

- Dwarf Fortress https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

- EMUUROM https://store.steampowered.com/app/1634360/EMUUROM/

- Dispatch https://store.steampowered.com/app/2592160/Dispatch/

- MOUSE: P.I. For Hire https://store.steampowered.com/app/2416450/MOUSE_PI_For_Hire...

- Split Fiction https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001120/Split_Fiction/

- Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles https://store.steampowered.com/app/1004640/FINAL_FANTASY_TAC...

If you want to see what modern AAA gaming should be and haven't already played it, I highly recommend Cyberpunk 2077. It's not perfect, mostly due to time constraints, but it excels in most categories, and it looks and plays great. No microtransactions, no DRM and the one DLC is very good. It's on sale for $18 on GOG. No DRM should be enough reason to signal to the market to produce more games like this. Also, the developer owns the GOG storefront and so 100% of your profits go directly to them.

I also cannot recommend Supraworld enough to anyone who likes classic 3D platforming and puzzle games such as Portal or Antichamber. Supraworld has ruined other platformers for me. The developer, David Munich, is a puzzle maestro who has already put out other successful games such as notpron https://notpron.com/ and Supraland. His philosophy for puzzle design is going to influence the genre for decades to come.

And of course, if you haven't played Red Dead Redemption 2 already, it's a bonafide masterpiece, deserving of 10/10. The game is an absolute behemoth in terms of development/marketing costs and profit, and is just a sight to behold. I know it borders on last-gen because it came out in 2018, but the ninth-generation of consoles was where it found its home, since the eight generation could barely handle it. Dan Houser left Rockstar after finishing this game due to being a 50-year-old man completely exhausted from inflated development cycles, so this might be the best game Rockstar will ever make.

Of course I could go on to recommend dozens of other memorable recent indie games, but I definitely think AAA has mostly stagnated. Cyberpunk 2077 initially released 6 years ago. Red Dead Redemption 2, the modern gold standard, released 8 years ago. I have heard great things about Clair Obscur, but I haven't given it a chance. There are some worthwhile remasters, like the Shadowman remaster and upcoming Thief Gold remaster done by the Kick brothers at Nightdive Studios, or the recent Final Fantasy Tactics remaster.

Game production could stop today and I'd probably be good for the rest of my life. There's still such a vast back catalogue even after playing all of the classics. With development cycles for groundbreaking AAA titles closing in on a decade and production costs surpassing half a billion, I get a sense that a mature ecosystem of AI-augmented tooling is what might end up bringing some sanity back to this business.

I'll also point out that in the 80s, AAA video games have been $40-70 since the 80's. If the price of games had gone up with inflation, we'd be paying $100-150 per AAA game, there would be more money in the industry and ideally better salaries and working conditions across the board. As consumers, we need to stop and analyze the perverse incentives driving this market and figure out how to have better dialogue with developers so that we can come to an agreement on more realistic prices but less anti-consumer bullshit.

[MYEUHD]

> Also, the [Cyberpunk 2077] developer owns the GOG storefront and so 100% of your profits go directly to them.

That's no longer the case since a few months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46422412

[soulofmischief]

Thanks for sharing that, I had no idea Michał bought it out! Before clicking your link I was worried it was going to be private equity.

I can live with the cut just going to Michał, but it was cool that for a while you could purchase a AAA game with no microtransactions or DRM on a storefront where 100% of proceeds fed back into the same studio not just publishing the game, but developing it. To me that was a huge selling point of CP77 among all the others.

[msftgreed]

> Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming.

That's the thing -- for a while they had figured out gaming. The xbox and 360 were solid consoles with lots of great internal and external games. Halo was incredible.

Then the company did the thing that Amazon did, Blizzard is doing, and all the big tech companies do -- they thought their big war chest meant they should make bigger games. Budgets ballooned, game timelines extended. Now they are stuck with games and studios with 10 year dev cycles trying to create the biggest, the most incredible, the most expensive games.

There's SO many devs out there making incredible games for fractions of the cost. It's a shame Microsoft (and others) keep thinking that reaching for bigger means better outcomes. No one wants "the game only Microsoft can make", everyone wants another great Zelda. Or Gears of War. Or Satisfactory. Or Mina the Hollower. Or UFO 50. Or Animal Well.

Hell, people want a game about shelving 3000 books in an Arcane library. Let games be smaller, more exploratory, more creative experiences. Let your studios get weird with it. Let them explore spaces and take risks. Stop sinking tens of billions into games. Start sinking tens of millions into them.

[pibaker]

> No one wants "the game only Microsoft can make", everyone wants another great Zelda. Or Gears of War. Or Satisfactory. Or Mina the Hollower. Or UFO 50. Or Animal Well.

This IMO is a display of what is wrong with a lot of online gaming discourse — it is dominated by people who spend more time playing and critiquing games than 99% of the population and has a tendency to overemphasize indie darlings and ignore the massive commercial success of mainstream titles. Forza 6 released in May and is wildly popular among normie gamers. So is your yearly call of duty instalment which is now a Microsoft property. Go ask people coming out of a Walmart if they know what is Animal Well and they will probably think you are soliciting donations for a local animal shelter.

I'm not saying you can't criticize mainstream AAA games. I get they are boring, formulaic and increasingly rely on predatory business models. But if you want to talk about business and what kind of games companies should invest into, you can't just ignore the massive commercial success AAA already enjoys or the fact that most indie games flop anyway.

And yes, people will play games that can only be made in an established franchise by a major company. Forza is able to license real world car models from companies like Porsche because it is a well known and safe brand backed by a big company. Not to mention games like Microsoft flight simulator or GTA.

[msftgreed]

Sure, I love a Forza Horizons (I'm not much for mainline Forza), but those games aren't really experiencing the same scope creep as the the rest of the industry.

Call of Duty is, but it's also noteworthy that sales of CoD are slumping. Hard. Like down-by-60% hard. And the gamepass numbers aren't really boosting it back up.

Also, I think you'll find my list absolutely included big games. Gears of War? Zelda? These are not "indie darlings".

[Cthulhu_]

Sales is one thing, recurring revenue is another. Their mobile titles are also huge.

[operation_moose]

AKA "we just passed the 8th anniversary of the Elder Scrolls 6 announcement trailer"

Also worth noting Skyrim first came out on the 360; an honor shared by GTA5, but at least they have an imminent release.

[caconym_]

I think another big issue they have is their insistence that most (ideally all?) of the people working on their games should be temporary employees. When your most valuable studios get out of the business of providing secure and sustainable employment, you lose the ability to build institutional expertise. When you treat your creatives like a commodity, you'll get generic assets and writing regardless of budget. When you focus on everything but the games themselves, it shouldn't come as a surprise that your big franchises degenerate into undifferentiated revenuemaxxing slop and unique new projects that might get people excited die on the vine.

Overall I think western AAA game development is dead. The executive class killed it with their greed and incompetence, and as long as these huge corporations are allowed to keep buying smaller studios/publishers and shutting them down a few years later, nothing is going to change.

[ColdStream]

It was once the Wii with anemic hardware and waggle ended up outselling the 360 that MS changed. They went from pushing forwards to chasing trends.

I agree, they need to be focusing on smaller projects that take risks. Maximum 24 month dev times but with modern tooling could do some special things. Maybe if after 6-12 months they see something that is gold, they can give it more resources but that would be on a case by case basis.

[axus]

I felt like the Kinect was pushing forward, and not chasing the Wii. Never owned one, but the tech sounded cool

[zapzupnz]

It was 100% chasing the Wii. It didn't chase all that hard, either.

[dannyw]

I might be looking at the Kinect with rose-tinted glasses, but bringing depth and camera-based pose tracking to the masses in 2010 is pretty impressive.

Sure they were chasing the Wii, but they did try to innovate on the hardware and capability front, and back then VR was nascent, but investing in this area for gaming made sense then (it was very easy to imagine VR games being the 'next big thing').

Unlike Nintendo, Microsoft couldn't really figure out good and fun gameplay for Kinect. Basically only dancing games took advantage of it well IMO?

[zapzupnz]

And some sports games, which is where it seems clear they just wanted their own Wii Sports.

Not so much the game itself so much as the excuse for the masses to buy a console for a game even grandpa can play.

[pibaker]

> Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the intervention from marketing and HR in their products.

Gaming is like cuisine. Can it be art? Sure. But most people will never visit a Michelin starred restaurant in their whole lives. They go to McDonald's and their local equivalent. Mainstream games have been like McDonald's for a long time. It's not about being a thought provoking artistic expression. It's about engineering a predictable entertainment experience that the average Joe can enjoy while being half checked out after a day of work the same way he enjoys a Budweiser or a Big Mac.

Of course, no critic will ever be caught praising McDonald's for its culinary artistry. But it doesn't matter. People will keep spending money on it, and the business continues. Same deal for gaming.

[ColdStream]

Thus the yearly Call of duty titles.

[doctorpangloss]

i don't know, it's hard to generalize about audiences this big.

[djhworld]

> Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming.

I feel they kind of did in the Xbox 360 era. Maybe it was just down to luck because Sony dropped the ball in the early years of the PS3 and Microsoft got the jump on them a bit.

The 360 was amazing looking back on it, Xbox Live, trying out innovative ideas like 1vs100, attracting lots of publishers to the platform for games, Xbox Summer of Arcade.

I was a big OG Xbox fan but even then I knew deep down it was never going to catch up to Sony with the PS2. Then the 360 came out and it was brilliant.

Sadly they threw it all away with the Xbox One and while recovered some credibility somewhat with the Series X, it's definitely not the same as those golden years of the 360.

Maybe the 360 was an aberration in Microsoft's history and the years since then have just been a regression

[dannyw]

Xbox Live Arcade, and the accessibility it bought for smaller studios and indie developers was massive.

You could say it's just a response to Steam and the PC gaming indie scene, sure, but the 360 era is definitely one where Microsoft hit all their strides. Then they ruined it with the Xbox One.

[MisterTea]

> And between graphics almost certainly at the point of diminishing returns, and hardware prices like they are right now, I can't imagine there's a market to sell something more capable than current gen consoles.

I haven't bought a console since the Xbox360 and Wii. But I have a friend who still games pretty heavily and is low income. He can not afford the latest PS5 and is still on a PS4. We were talking the other day and he said "I love consoles because they are simpler and cheaper than a PC but now I can't afford either. The graphics aren't getting much better so what am I paying for? What happened to $400-$500 consoles? Remember when consoles were 200-300?" Of course those last few prices were 90/00's but I agree, the cost of a new console is quite insane for not much gain.

[biggestfan]

> Of course those last few prices were 90/00's

Two years ago, you could get an XBOX/Switch for 300, or a PS/Steam Deck for 400. Granted, the PS and XBOX were digital only. But now the cheapest XBOX is 500, the Switch 2 will soon also be 500, the PS5 starts at 600, and the Steam Deck is 789. Things have been going up slowly, but the last year has been absolutely killer.

[WorldMaker]

$200 in 1985 (NES launch price/date), adjusted for inflation is just shy of $600 in 2026. RAM and GPU prices are really hurting the consoles right now, but compared to inflation benchmarks up until about 2020 they were considerably below inflation.

[WarmWash]

If there are next gen consoles, they will likely be over $1k with current memory prices.

[Narishma]

At those prices consoles would no longer make sense. I don't think there would be enough people who could afford them to have a good enough install base for AAA games. And non-AAA games don't need any more hardware than what we already had last gen.

[schnitzelstoat]

They are talking about purchase plans like Klarna etc. and like people have for their iPhone. Because it's going to cost as much as an iPhone.

[ErneX]

I read that when they designed the Xbox Series S and X they knew it was going to be difficult to lower prices down the road because wafer costs were increasing every year. Which is why they launched with 2 models from the get go, one cheaper than the other. And even so they were losing between 100 and 200 dollars per console.

Now things are even worse with the RAM and SSD components crisis. The Series S has now the price of the Series X when it launched.

[taybin]

I'm in software and I do alright, but I'm still on a PS4 too. Just can't justify the upgrade when there's still so many great old games available. Maybe when the next Horizon Zero Dawn comes out, I'll be forced to upgrade, but I'm taking my time about it.

[PS5has3Games]

Same here. At no point has the PS5 held more than 3 total exclusives I wanted. Mostly by virtue of them constantly de-exclusivating them. Right now, only Astrobot and Demon's Souls (which was there since the start) could even convince me.

I don't think I'll need a PS6 honestly, I am okay with waiting or going without titles sony is releasing.

[whizzter]

The pandemic and scalpers really destroyed peoples apetite for the "new thing" when this generation came out, and with that boost missing studios saw little point in going exclusive perpetuating the vicious cycle, it's just in the past few years that there's really been exclusives for this generation that didn't also support older consoles.

And even then, already the PS4/XbOne generation added stratification making it more "PC-like" with the XbOne-X having heftier hardware (not to mention it being PC-like compared to PS1/PS2/PS3/Xbox360), that then continued with the Xbox-series-X and Xbox-series-S.

Consoles aren't specialized hardware for "magic experiences" and everyone knows this, it's just another "device" that happens to be connected to a TV with a controller where people are gatekeeping software availability.

[maples37]

Microsoft also didn't do themselves any favor with that naming scheme. In the current generation (I think?), you have: - Xbox X - Xbox S - Xbox Series X - Xbox Series S

Compared to: - PlayStation 5 - PlayStation 5 Pro

or: - Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Switch OLED - Nintendo Switch Lite

Anyone who's literate in English (and knows that OLED means "nicer screen") can immediately rank the PlayStations and Switches into "good, better, best". But with the Xbox, how is anyone supposed to know which one is which? Is the Series version better or worse? Is it a whole new generation, with whatever backwards-compatability implications that a new generation brings? I need a chart and I probably still won't be able to tell you if you ask me in a month.

[hbn]

Slight correction. Last generation was the Xbox One (already a confusing name because some people thought that was referring to the original first Xbox)

A few years into the generation they updated the Xbox One, putting it into a smaller form factor called the Xbox One S, and at the same time released a spec bump model called the Xbox One X. I don't believe any of these are still available for purchase.

The new generation has the smaller/lower-powered Xbox Series S, and the higher-specced Xbox Series X. Leaving the overall generation with seemingly no name, other than "Xbox Series" I guess?

But yes, the names are terrible because S and X both refer to consoles from last gen and current gen.

[aczerepinski]

As an anecdote of how bad the naming is, I own one of these, but couldn’t tell you which one.

[Gigachad]

You could hardly come up with a worse naming scheme if you tried.

[dannyw]

AMD's Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 would like to have a word with you.

[bobbob1921]

This is absolutely correct, I game on Xbox pretty much every day or every other day, I have been with Xbox since 360 or whatever the first one was called. I am still constantly confused by the naming. There also was another revision to the top of the line Xbox series X and the Xbox series X digital edition. I can’t imagine someone looking at the naming scheme pre-release and saying yes, let’s go with that.

[DanHulton]

I mean, the first one was just called Xbox.

(Tiny rant - and even THAT name sucked. Internally, since it ran on DirectX (already a name that only a mother could love), it was called the DirectX Box. And rather than come up with a real name, they got attached to their lazy idea and shortened it to Xbox. They have made miserable naming choices for this thing since day one. Since BEFORE day one.)

[esprehn]

Is Xbox really worse than Play-Station?

It's a pretty good name actually because it's unique, easy to Google, and is never ambiguous in conversation. It's all the suffixes that made a mess of it.

[botanrice]

I've had an Xbox I got from a friend and I legitimately don't know which Xbox it is lol

[maccard]

I’m sorry but Nintendo don’t get a free pass in naming. Switch v switch Oled is as clear as Xbox series vs Xbox ones

Nintendo, the company who released the Wii, wiiU, gameboy color, game boy advance, DS, 2DS, 3DS; all of which are similar but vaguely incompatible?

[DanHulton]

Switch vs Switch OLED is fine, comparatively, because you are forgetting about the worst (non-Microsoft) naming choice of all consoles: the New 3DS.

This lead to situations where you could have a new 3DS that wasn’t a new New 3DS, and didn’t play the games you bought with it. You could also, somehow, have an old New 3DS, a logical impossibility.

Anyone in charge of naming anything that just calls it the “new” thing should be fired for not taking their job seriously.

[opan]

The OLED Switch has the same specs and is the same gen, just a different screen. Like the Vita 1000 vs Vita 2000, they play the same games. Xbox One and Series are different gens.

[maccard]

Why is switch oled ok but Xbox One X vs Xbox Series X not ok?

[zeratax]

just like the person you responded to already said: cos there is like basically no difference between the two. unless you care a lot about screens (in which case you will know what oled means) just get the cheaper one.

[freetonik]

Don’t forget the “New 3DS”.

[maccard]

Wow how did I manage that.

[krige]

Good Ol' New Nintendo 2DS XL naming scheme.

[Cthulhu_]

> Consoles aren't specialized hardware for "magic experiences" and everyone knows this, it's just another "device" that happens to be connected to a TV with a controller where people are gatekeeping software availability.

Arguably; Sony and Microsoft have both played it safe for a long time, with their consoles mostly being "just for video games", but it wasn't always like this. Current-gen has VR additions, but the previous generations had things like Kinect, the PS camera addon, things like that. But they seem to have given up on fun things like that, they were innovative but probably not a sweeping commercial success like idk, subscription services.

Nintendo still makes their stuff unique though. The Switch is great, portable, detachable controllers for multiplayer and wiimote-like interaction, etc.

[llm_nerd]

When she was announced it was broadly assumed that she was being brought in to kill the division.

But then she did some minor, pandering actions and suddenly everyone was "oh boy! A new era of xbox!" Only it was all a ruse to ensure people didn't jump ship too quickly and make the bleeding too heavy. They want people to keep pumping money into a platform heading to the graveyard.

[sometimes_all]

> Only it was all a ruse to ensure people didn't jump ship too quickly and make the bleeding too heavy

You go when we tell you to go! Not before!

[torginus]

I had the sinking feeling from the start, that a total stranger was brought in to do a butcher's job.

[websap]

Microsoft is not an engineering company any more. Just look at their products. They placed ads in the start menu and file explorer. Azure is one of the worst clouds when it comes to features and reliability.

Microsoft is a dying company, and they are trying not to end up like IBM, but their fate is inevitable.

[naikrovek]

>It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the intervention from marketing and HR in their products.

truth. far too many MBAs in that company. "Let's monetize Solitaire!!!!" Only an idiot would even come up with that idea, never mind follow through on it.

[danpalmer]

> It's more art than engineering

I'd say games can be either art or hype. Call of Duty is not art, really, it's hype. In the same way that no one thinks Marvel films are moving film forward, but they are hugely popular. GTA is somewhere in the middle, being mostly hype driven, but based on solid "art" in good gameplay. Indie games tend to be art over hype.

Microsoft can't do the art because it's too big, too safe, and it can't do the hype because it's not cool.

[Cthulhu_]

It can be art even if you don't consider it artistic. CoD is an example of military art. Marvel is American blockbuster art translating American comic book art to the screen. They are their own kind of artistic expression and achievement, even if you personally don't consider them art.

[account42]

This is reductionist to the point of making the term useless.

[dannyw]

Mass culture isn't the same thing as art.

[jasondigitized]

More capable than current gen consoles is going to be local AI. Calling it now. It won't be as much about graphics as it is about selling some notion of human like NPCs and smarter enemies and some other use case they can sell to the masses.

[andrekandre]

  > human like NPCs and smarter enemies and some other use case they can sell to the masses.

npc ai has been capable of being much more realistic for a long time, and smarter enemies as well; if enemies in a game are too smart it stops being fun which is to say enemy ai being too stupid or not realistic enough is a non-problem and current-gen hardware is in no way a blocker to such aims anyway

[dannyw]

~Turing-test-passing NPC AI already exists in lots of multiplayer games to hide queue lengths or dwindling player counts.

[philistine]

Console generations are a cultural construct. And just like the bit wars of the 90s, they are cultural constructs that cannot explain the current situation.

We have not left the PS4 era. Both Sony and Microsoft use modern CPU and GPU in the PS5/Xbox Series that can 100% replicate the previous console. They use the exact same online store, ushering in a modern era where old devices will lose access to the store, but the store's never gonna close. All of this makes the use of generations to describe console gaming obsolete. We don't talk about generations in phones, or laptops. Same thing with gaming.

[ramijames]

It's not just appetite. The market is crazy right now and people don't have money to drop $600-800 on a new console.

[flohofwoe]

> Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming.

They had it figured out perfectly in the Xbox360 generation (and for PC games by the late 90s), but I guess that the MS Games and Xbox divisions had a lot more freedom and were more decoupled from the Microsoft org chart back then.

[dgellow]

The gaming world also evolved a lot during that time period

[asdaqopqkq]

PS should move back to Japan, yen is cheap and the dev salaries are cheap.

[zemo]

huh, I'm not sure where you saw that reaction, the reaction I saw was universal condemnation of the appointment of Asha Sharma.

[pikseladam]

she had already choosen the coo as a scapegoat :)

[0x457]

Don't forget gifting of translucent Xbox.

[u2rarmchair]

I mean, here you are too declaring a XBOX defeat. You are no better than those armchair industry analysts. The 10th gen hasn's even properly started, we don't even have rumors of WHEN it will be.

Not saying that I disagree. I absolutely agree. I think Xbox is downright moronic to buy Bethesday on a promise of Starfield being a massive hit, and after it hilariously fails, they throw out a bunch of studios just so they can focus on their next thing even more.

It's just, come one. You have to see how ironic and conceited your opening paragraph was.