Xbox Series X

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purbeast0

No Lifer
Sep 13, 2001
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Definitely not what I expected to wake up to today, but makes sense. I wouldn't expect Call of Duty to suddenly become an Xbox exclusive; this is more about Game Pass and expanding into mobile. $120 per year (or more) on Game Pass suddenly becomes easier to justify when you know it'll include CoD on top of everything else.
I dunno that is what people said about Bethesda too and now those will be exclusive.

MS knows their only shot is to buy out the competition cause they have such stale first party IPs lol.
 

SteveGrabowski

Diamond Member
Oct 20, 2014
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Definitely not what I expected to wake up to today, but makes sense. I wouldn't expect Call of Duty to suddenly become an Xbox exclusive; this is more about Game Pass and expanding into mobile. $120 per year (or more) on Game Pass suddenly becomes easier to justify when you know it'll include CoD on top of everything else.

Nah as soon as this officially closes in June 2023 they'll start moving COD to only release on hardware that has Gamepass available, just like they're doing with Bethesda, Arkane, id, etc.
 
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Commodus

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I dunno that is what people said about Bethesda too and now those will be exclusive.

MS knows their only shot is to buy out the competition cause they have such stale first party IPs lol.

Activision is far more dependent on cross-platform Call of Duty than Bethesda is for, say, Elder Scrolls. Imagine if Bethesda released a new Elder Scrolls every year, and that company's fortunes revolved around that annual RPG selling as many copies as possible; that's what's at stake here. Cut PlayStation sales and Activision bleeds a lot of cash.

I'm open to possibilities, but my hunch is that Microsoft will 'let' Activision Blizzard offer CoD (and maybe one or two other franchises) on PlayStation while sewing up exclusives for the rest. It may offer CoD as an Xbox exclusive after a few years, or if Xbox sales take off and Activision won't stand to lose as much.
 

purbeast0

No Lifer
Sep 13, 2001
52,834
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Activision is far more dependent on cross-platform Call of Duty than Bethesda is for, say, Elder Scrolls. Imagine if Bethesda released a new Elder Scrolls every year, and that company's fortunes revolved around that annual RPG selling as many copies as possible; that's what's at stake here. Cut PlayStation sales and Activision bleeds a lot of cash.

I'm open to possibilities, but my hunch is that Microsoft will 'let' Activision Blizzard offer CoD (and maybe one or two other franchises) on PlayStation while sewing up exclusives for the rest. It may offer CoD as an Xbox exclusive after a few years, or if Xbox sales take off and Activision won't stand to lose as much.
I'm assuming it will be the same as it was with the other companies they acquired, in that they will let the existing contracts/deals/plans that are in place playout, but anything after that will be exclusive to the xbox platform.

There is really no reason to think otherwise. They did not pay $70 billion dollars to just get their games on gamepass.
 

Aikouka

Lifer
Nov 27, 2001
30,383
912
126
I'm assuming it will be the same as it was with the other companies they acquired, in that they will let the existing contracts/deals/plans that are in place playout, but anything after that will be exclusive to the xbox platform.

There is really no reason to think otherwise. They did not pay $70 billion dollars to just get their games on gamepass.

I think it comes down to whether Microsoft is willing to lose the revenue from PlayStation sales to get an exclusive title under their belt. Although, Call of Duty is big enough that it could get people to switch. I brought this news up to a friend of mine who plays the game with his wife, and his first thought was, "Well, I guess I'm getting the Xbox." (I made sure to note that nothing was a done deal nor was exclusivity announced yet.)
 

digiram

Diamond Member
Apr 17, 2004
3,991
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Cod will continue to sell on ps I presume, but will be available day 1 game pass. They’re no longer competing with Sony at hw level. They just want that sub revenue that Netflix has been enjoying.
 
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MrSquished

Lifer
Jan 14, 2013
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I think Microsoft has been getting smarter. This could be a good play to go along with their others.
 

purbeast0

No Lifer
Sep 13, 2001
52,834
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I think Microsoft has been getting smarter. This could be a good play to go along with their others.
It's never good for the end consumers when these large companies buy out the competition.

Look at EA/NFL deal as the prime example of what having no competition can do.

Remember when MS bought Rare and had them making shovelware crap for the Kinect?

We shall see though. Xbox is already the bottom of the barrel among the 3 consoles to me anyways and this didn't move the needle one bit.
 

MrSquished

Lifer
Jan 14, 2013
21,004
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It's never good for the end consumers when these large companies buy out the competition.

Look at EA/NFL deal as the prime example of what having no competition can do.

Remember when MS bought Rare and had them making shovelware crap for the Kinect?

We shall see though. Xbox is already the bottom of the barrel among the 3 consoles to me anyways and this didn't move the needle one bit.

I don't think it's great for consumers, but it's good for Microsoft. And they are lagging behind the PS for games. What do you expect them to do?

You don't play multiplayer shooters, so you aren't the target audience for this.
 

purbeast0

No Lifer
Sep 13, 2001
52,834
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I don't think it's great for consumers, but it's good for Microsoft. And they are lagging behind the PS for games. What do you expect them to do?

You don't play multiplayer shooters, so you aren't the target audience for this.
I'd expect them to create some new exclusive IP like Sony has done over the past decade. They have churned out multiple hits that were new IP's all while reinventing old hit IPs. You can do both.

What is MS newest first party IP that is exclusive to their consoles? Sea of Thieves? I don't think it did very well but other than that it is nothing other than Halo, Gears, and Forza, which are just tired ass franchises at this time with absolutely no imagination anymore.

Forza Horizon was awesome when that came out but part 5 is the same exact formula as the original one.

EDIT:

What ever happened to that one FPS they showed pre-launch that actually LOOKED like a next gen game? It looks like it was nothing more than a bullshot and the fact we haven't seen it makes me believe it was nothing more than that.
 

MrSquished

Lifer
Jan 14, 2013
21,004
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I'd expect them to create some new exclusive IP like Sony has done over the past decade. They have churned out multiple hits that were new IP's all while reinventing old hit IPs. You can do both.

What is MS newest first party IP that is exclusive to their consoles? Sea of Thieves? I don't think it did very well but other than that it is nothing other than Halo, Gears, and Forza, which are just tired ass franchises at this time with absolutely no imagination anymore.

Forza Horizon was awesome when that came out but part 5 is the same exact formula as the original one.

EDIT:

What ever happened to that one FPS they showed pre-launch that actually LOOKED like a next gen game? It looks like it was nothing more than a bullshot and the fact we haven't seen it makes me believe it was nothing more than that.
Sony buys studios. Just not as big and flashy. The article lists some of their other acquisitions such as the developers of Ratchet and Clank, the last of us and horizon zero dawn. Three different studios

 

MrSquished

Lifer
Jan 14, 2013
21,004
19,444
136
Also. I dig Microsoft game pass. Where is Sony's offering?

Now I know. I wouldn't have bought bf 2042. I could have paid for over four months of game pass ultimate by not buying bf, then another four by not buying Halo. At the end of the day, I like the model. I don't like a lot of games I buy. I'm going to start trying them via subscription now instead.
 

quikah

Diamond Member
Apr 7, 2003
4,068
649
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I'd expect them to create some new exclusive IP like Sony has done over the past decade. They have churned out multiple hits that were new IP's all while reinventing old hit IPs. You can do both.

What is MS newest first party IP that is exclusive to their consoles? Sea of Thieves? I don't think it did very well but other than that it is nothing other than Halo, Gears, and Forza, which are just tired ass franchises at this time with absolutely no imagination anymore.

Forza Horizon was awesome when that came out but part 5 is the same exact formula as the original one.

EDIT:

What ever happened to that one FPS they showed pre-launch that actually LOOKED like a next gen game? It looks like it was nothing more than a bullshot and the fact we haven't seen it makes me believe it was nothing more than that.

Sea of Thieves is extremely successful. Supposedly they surpassed 25 million players. Not my kind of game, but a lot of people like it.

Bright Memory Infinite? Released on PC a couple of months ago, not sure what happened to the Xbox port. Mediocre reviews. It is basically 1 guy developing it, so major delays are inevitable.
 
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purbeast0

No Lifer
Sep 13, 2001
52,834
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Sony buys studios. Just not as big and flashy. The article lists some of their other acquisitions such as the developers of Ratchet and Clank, the last of us and horizon zero dawn. Three different studios

Prior to purchasing Imsoniac though, they had tons of exclusives to the Playstation platform. I would consider them basically a first party dev since PS2 days with Ratchet and Clank. I honestly didn't know they purchased them in 2019 until I just googled it I would have assumed it was back in the early 2000s. Then Naughty Dog has been with them since around that time as well as Guerilla.

Huge difference buying those companies up 4 gens ago and making the part of Sony than what MS just did in buying Activision/Blizzard and where they currently are in the gaming space as a company.
 

purbeast0

No Lifer
Sep 13, 2001
52,834
5,713
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Sea of Thieves is extremely successful. Supposedly they surpassed 25 million players. Not my kind of game, but a lot of people like it.

Bright Memory Infinite? Released on PC a couple of months ago, not sure what happened to the Xbox port. Mediocre reviews.
Yeah same with Sea of Thieves not being my type of game. But at least they tried something new and people seem to enjoy it. They need to do more of that instead of rehashing the same old IPs and formulas to get me excited.

And yeah, Bright Memory Infinite is what I was referring to. I just watched some PC reviews and that game looks nothing it did in the Xbox Series X trailer they showed. I figured it was bullshot even at the time because it looked so much better than anything else.

 

Saylick

Diamond Member
Sep 10, 2012
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Prior to purchasing Imsoniac though, they had tons of exclusives to the Playstation platform. I would consider them basically a first party dev since PS2 days with Ratchet and Clank. I honestly didn't know they purchased them in 2019 until I just googled it I would have assumed it was back in the early 2000s. Then Naughty Dog has been with them since around that time as well as Guerilla.

Huge difference buying those companies up 4 gens ago and making the part of Sony than what MS just did in buying Activision/Blizzard and where they currently are in the gaming space as a company.
Insomniac has been around earlier than Ratchet and Clank. They made the original Spyro trilogy, and if I remember correctly their office was literally in the same building as Naughty Dog's back in those days. In fact, there's a lot of easter eggs between the PS1 Spyro and Crash Bandicoot games that referred to each other specifically because of their close relationship (literally!). I think one of the Crash games actually had a playable demo for one of the Spyro games (or maybe vice-versa). You'll never see something like that anymore, so I agree with you that it is a surprise that Insomniac wasn't acquired by Sony sooner.

Sony's style of acquiring studios is, in my opinion, the right way to do it because let's face it: acquiring a whole studio is a BIG risk when you can have a rock solid developer-publisher relationship and reap most of the benefits instead. As soon as you acquire the studio, you have a lot more control over what they make but you also expose yourself to the risk of a flop since they are now on your payroll. Sony is super cautious and conservative with who they acquire, hence why their mantra is "Quality over Quantity". Because Sony does not have the financial power of Microsoft, they need to pick and choose studios that have proven track records and are a good cultural fit, not just with Sony but also with Sony's other first party studios. For Sony, once you're a Playstation Studio, you're family. Each studio helps out the others and there is a ton of collaboration. This approach helps the studios collaborate and not reinvent the wheel if another studio has already figured something out, which ultimately benefits Sony. For example, Naughty Dog houses Sony's ICE team which was formed back in the PS1 days when they realized that a lot of what they were figuring out about the PS1 could be applied to help other first-party developers. ICE has been a crucial part of Sony's studios for every console generation ever since, and it's one aspect of the secret sauce that made Sony so successful. To use an analogy, Microsoft gobbling up IP as if it were at a buffet may work, but a good chunk of what they devour may be vomitted back out due to it not mixing well with whatever was already in its stomach or because there's simply not enough room in the stomach.
 
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MrSquished

Lifer
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Insomniac has been around earlier than Ratchet and Clank. They made the original Spyro trilogy, and if I remember correctly their office was literally in the same building as Naughty Dog's back in those days. In fact, there's a lot of easter eggs between the PS1 Spyro and Crash Bandicoot games that referred to each other specifically because of their close relationship (literally!). I think one of the Crash games actually had a playable demo for one of the Spyro games (or maybe vice-versa). You'll never see something like that anymore, so I agree with you that it is a surprise that Insomniac wasn't acquired by Sony sooner.

Sony's style of acquiring studios is, in my opinion, the right way to do it because let's face it: acquiring a whole studio is a BIG risk when you can have a rock solid developer-publisher relationship and reap most of the benefits instead. As soon as you acquire the studio, you have a lot more control over what they make but you also expose yourself to the risk of a flop since they are now on your payroll. Sony is super cautious and conservative with who they acquire, hence why their mantra is "Quality over Quantity". Because Sony does not have the financial power of Microsoft, they need to pick and choose studios that have proven track records and are a good cultural fit, not just with Sony but also with Sony's other first party studios. For Sony, once you're a Playstation Studio, you're family. Each studio helps out the others and there is a ton of collaboration. This approach helps the studios collaborate and not reinvent the wheel if another studio has already figured something out, which ultimately benefits Sony. For example, Naughty Dog houses Sony's ICE team which was formed back in the PS1 days when they realized that a lot of what they were figuring out about the PS1 could be applied to help other first-party developers. ICE has been a crucial part of Sony's studios for every console generation ever since, and it's one aspect of the secret sauce that made Sony so successful. To use an analogy, Microsoft gobbling up IP as if it were at a buffet may work, but a good chunk of what they devour may be vomitted back out due to it not mixing well with whatever was already in its stomach or because there's simply not enough room in the stomach.

Microsoft may or may not fuck this all up, but they need the assets to give it a whirl. Only time will tell what they do with all the IP they have now from Diablo to Overwatch to COD to Doom and all that.

I do like the subscription service. BF 2042 and Halo have opened up my eyes on that. I reinstalled BFV using my GamePass ultimate subscription and I'll be playing Forza soon too. That's a game I would never drop $60 on ever.

I am mostly a multiplayer FPS guy so I don't deal with platform exclusives much. There aren't many big FPS multiplayer games that are platform exclusive besides Halo that I have ever gotten into. Having the subscription service will help me explore my horizons since there aren't any great big multiplayer FPS that I have now to take up all my time.
 
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Commodus

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I'm assuming it will be the same as it was with the other companies they acquired, in that they will let the existing contracts/deals/plans that are in place playout, but anything after that will be exclusive to the xbox platform.

There is really no reason to think otherwise. They did not pay $70 billion dollars to just get their games on gamepass.

You could be right, but that would be a massive amount of money to leave on the table with an abrupt cutoff for PlayStation users in, say, 2023. If there is an exclusive, Microsoft might set it further out or otherwise 'transition' people to a world where CoD is Xbox-only on console. Certainly Activision can't drop work on PlayStation games until it knows the Microsoft deal has gone through.

Game Pass isn't the only thing. This helps Microsoft dive further into mobile, and of course it can make other franchises Xbox-only or Xbox-first on console. But we shouldn't underestimate how important Game Pass is to Microsoft — this is its chance to get recurring revenue from tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) of Xbox and Windows gamers on top of whatever Xbox or Windows PC they buy.
 

quikah

Diamond Member
Apr 7, 2003
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Game Pass isn't the only thing. This helps Microsoft dive further into mobile, and of course it can make other franchises Xbox-only or Xbox-first on console. But we shouldn't underestimate how important Game Pass is to Microsoft — this is its chance to get recurring revenue from tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) of Xbox and Windows gamers on top of whatever Xbox or Windows PC they buy.

Honestly, I think this is mainly a mobile play. CoD mobile and King make ridiculous amounts of money. Hopefully they can fix the cluster that Activision/Blizzard has become. Bobby Kotick doesn't seem like a very good leader in this regard, he is a great money man though.
 

Aikouka

Lifer
Nov 27, 2001
30,383
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Remember when MS bought Rare and had them making shovelware crap for the Kinect?

We shall see though. Xbox is already the bottom of the barrel among the 3 consoles to me anyways and this didn't move the needle one bit.

I think that heavily depends upon whether we're talking about the "same" Microsoft. I'm sure Phil Spencer is aiming for success like his predecessors, but he seems to have a bit of a "gaming-centric" focus... especially compared to the previous head, Don Mattrick. As they say, "the proof is in the pudding," and I think we can look to some of their previous corporate purchases to see where they end up going. On that note, Microsoft did seem to be a driving force that helped Double Fine finally realize Psychonauts 2. That company has always had funding issues due to their games (typically) being rated well, but not always selling well.
 

MrSquished

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Jan 14, 2013
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I think that heavily depends upon whether we're talking about the "same" Microsoft. I'm sure Phil Spencer is aiming for success like his predecessors, but he seems to have a bit of a "gaming-centric" focus... especially compared to the previous head, Don Mattrick. As they say, "the proof is in the pudding," and I think we can look to some of their previous corporate purchases to see where they end up going. On that note, Microsoft did seem to be a driving force that helped Double Fine finally realize Psychonauts 2. That company has always had funding issues due to their games (typically) being rated well, but not always selling well.

Exactly. Microsoft as a whole is functioning a bit differently since then. Ballmer is gone too and he didn't have the right vision for the XBox world either.
 

KentState

Diamond Member
Oct 19, 2001
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Finally decided to open up my XBX box and set it up today. Maybe I was expecting too much, but the experience really didn't feel any different than the XB1. Yes, the graphics are better and the games load quicker, but MS sticking to the exact same UI doesn't make the $500 purchase feel special. I bet my family wouldn't even be able to distinguish which one they are playing on if I put it in front of them. Guess it's a good approach if you are wanting an unified experience across everything.
 

JujuFish

Lifer
Feb 3, 2005
10,999
733
136
The Series X is the first Xbox I've ever purchased, and I've been pleased with it. I got it in order to hold me over until GPU prices become a little more sane (still rocking a 6700k/1070 combo). I loaded up 3 years of Xbox Live Gold, converted to Game Pass Ultimate, and it's been a great value as both a PC and console gamer.
 

purbeast0

No Lifer
Sep 13, 2001
52,834
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Finally decided to open up my XBX box and set it up today. Maybe I was expecting too much, but the experience really didn't feel any different than the XB1. Yes, the graphics are better and the games load quicker, but MS sticking to the exact same UI doesn't make the $500 purchase feel special. I bet my family wouldn't even be able to distinguish which one they are playing on if I put it in front of them. Guess it's a good approach if you are wanting an unified experience across everything.
Everything about XSX is underwhelming at the present time. Sure it's powerful but it still has no games. I'm still waiting for an XSX exclusive that I can't play on an old X1X that blows me away. Something that not Halo, Gears, or Forza.

The UI is god awful and MS has made their UI worse with every iteration. The best dash they had was the blades back on the 360. Everything since then has been downhill. What they have now is the most unintuitive UI possible.
 

Aikouka

Lifer
Nov 27, 2001
30,383
912
126
The UI is god awful and MS has made their UI worse with every iteration. The best dash they had was the blades back on the 360. Everything since then has been downhill. What they have now is the most unintuitive UI possible.

I've never been a huge fan of the categorization of their UI. I just need an easy, spaced-out menu for games that lists the games I have installed and then a game pass option so I can see what else I have available. If I recall, to see my games, I have to hit the Xbox button, and select it from the pop-up menu. In a sense, it seems more like their UI is designed to promote things to me (to buy) rather than make it easier to use the things I already own.
 
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