Gaming Xbox Series X|S

Which of these do you prefer

  • Microsoft Game Pass

  • Xbox Game Pass

Results are only viewable after voting.
Reiver said:
Hopefully Sony "retire" big Hermen as well.
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Agreed. Industry as a whole looks so bleak now. Studio closures, AI push, AI affecting hardware prices. It's so grim.

Bojan11 said:
Spencer was clearly fired, and Bond left because she got overlooked for this AI numpty. I mean usually in a size of this corporation, the boss stays for a few months and then hands the reigns over to the new boss. Leaving so suddenly suggests he was fired and that’s what Kinda funny are saying.
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Yeah, with the timing being not long before the 25th anniversary celebrations and the anticipated release of games belonging to their big three IP/four including Fable, and Bond posting on LinkedIn about wanting more feedback to improve Xbox accessibility features just a few hours before announcing she's leaving it definitely happened out of the blue.
 
I don't think Spencer was fired, but I do think his retirement maybe came earlier than he first planned (with the 25th anniversary of Xbox coming up). Bond, hard to say, either she was fired or when she got passed up decided to bolt. She's been positioned more and more to the centre of things over the last couple of years and seemed like she was going to take Spencer's post.

I'm sceptical of the changes, but not much is going to make a difference at this point. A.I. is going to fully infiltrate gaming development, I think that's unavoidable given the costs of AAA game development and the supposed efficiencies A.I. will bring. I don't think Sharma is really going to make much of a difference with that.

The one thing I can't wrap my head around the response to it is people complaining in some areas about Sharma having no history in game software, when they spent ages ragging on Spencer who has been in the games side for decades. I've even seen some nonces suggest her not having games development experience is a problem, as if being a CEO means she has a hands on role in how the games are made. Some people just have an aptitude for learning quickly and making strategic decisions at pace. Some Resetera twats calling it a Nepo hire is just fecking dumb, and their general reactionary takes are highlighted by the fact that a bunch of them couldn't even take five seconds to not assume Sharma was a man. For a supposedly progressive forum more than a few sure showed their colours in the thread about this.

As I say, I'm sceptical, but that would hold with anyone they put in to be honest, simply because of the situation they are taking over.
 
Bojan11 said:
Terrible appointment. It’s like Man Utd appointing whoever the u-16 manager is. Even resetera are calling her a nepo appointment. And I’m not buying her cringe tweets too. Xbox is dead in a year and will be sold to Tencent or Saudis. They might keep some of the studios like Activision as nobody would buy them especially with how COD has being performing recently. But the others are going to be sold or closed.

Spencer was clearly fired, and Bond left because she got overlooked for this AI numpty. I mean usually in a size of this corporation, the boss stays for a few months and then hands the reigns over to the new boss. Leaving so suddenly suggests he was fired and that’s what Kinda funny are saying.

Booty must have nudes on Nadella or something for him to be promoted. As for Spencer, I thought his reign was crap @Alock1. Pissed all the good work that Allard and Moore did. I know people are going to put the blame on Mattrick, but he left 13 years ago and Spencer didn’t do anything besides buy and shut studios, kill Halo and Gears.
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Spencer was very good at wearing cool video game t-shirts and convincing gamers he was one of them. I'll give him a tiny amount of credit for being a slightly less soulless exective than someone like Jim Ryan and at least knowing more about video games, but that's not exactly a high bar. Every defence of him that I've read or heard over the last few years seems to boil down to peolpe saying he was just reluctantly following orders from Microsoft's upper management. It might be true, what do I know, but in that case pretty much anyone could've done his job.
 
Gaming as a whole doesn't look too bad, If anything the barrier for entry is quite low especially if one is open to experiencing indie games.

But don't think there's much future left for home consoles(Nintendo notwithstanding), we've basically seen the death of the old proprietary exclusive model and after that the benefits of owning one looks diminished by the hour.
 


Already bullshitting. I am sure she’s hearing, but Satya ain’t listening. He wants all MS games on every format. She’s even replying to idiots like Grummz and Smash JT. Just better off not bothering with social media. It didn’t help Spencer.
 
Red the Bear said:
Gaming as a whole doesn't look too bad, If anything the barrier for entry is quite low especially if one is open to experiencing indie games.

But don't think there's much future left for home consoles(Nintendo notwithstanding), we've basically seen the death of the old proprietary exclusive model and after that the benefits of owning one looks diminished by the hour.
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Ah yeah, cause pc gaming has a notoriously cheap entry point. How’s the price of RAM these days?
 
Red the Bear said:
Gaming as a whole doesn't look too bad, If anything the barrier for entry is quite low especially if one is open to experiencing indie games.

But don't think there's much future left for home consoles(Nintendo notwithstanding), we've basically seen the death of the old proprietary exclusive model and after that the benefits of owning one looks diminished by the hour.
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This has been said since the PS3/360 days. Of course it will happen at some point, but it is overplayed.

As for the entry barrier, it's always been reasonably easy, especially when Steam really took off. If anything, it's harder these days with both the saturation and also "indie" teams being well funded.

But what do people think will happen to the indie scene when home machines/PCs go away and everything is subscription and AI?
 
Massive Spanner said:
Ah yeah, cause pc gaming has a notoriously cheap entry point. How’s the price of RAM these days?
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It'll get better, it was pretty alright a while ago before ram prices went overboard.

It looks bleak if one purely concentrates on aaa games and their increasingly abysmal optimization but look beyond that in games outside that qualifiers and add the gargantuan heap of past games available now due to the entrypoints of now easily being capable of running the most demanding games of the past and simulations and it's not all doom and gloom.

If anything by letting the big boys crash and burn one might see them learn a thing or two.
Redlambs said:
This has been said since the PS3/360 days. Of course it will happen at some point, but it is overplayed.

As for the entry barrier, it's always been reasonably easy, especially when Steam really took off. If anything, it's harder these days with both the saturation and also "indie" teams being well funded.

But what do people think will happen to the indie scene when home machines/PCs go away and everything is subscription and AI?
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Things are overplayed until they aren't, as of now the only major advantage provided by a home consoles is their relative advantage in dollar to power ratio compared to a desktop and better optimization but then you'd still have things like having to pay subscription for basic online functions.

As to your second point what makes you think PCs and such might go away? And as it relates to Ai I rather be an optimist and belive it'll lower the entrypoint for developers enabling them to automate certain repetitive tasks inherent in both the development process and game mechanics themselves, rouge likes for example were already quite popular many of which mostly rely on randomly generated levels or assets, perhaps there's potential in integrating Ai to create more engaging variations and scenarios or to make the zombie like npcs of open world games more intractable and bring about more emergent and interesting interactions.

Maybe my optimism is misguided and the deliberate nature of designing games will clash with the aforementioned applications but I rather hope for the best.
 
Red the Bear said:
It'll get better, it was pretty alright a while ago before ram prices went overboard.

It looks bleak if one purely concentrates on aaa games and their increasingly abysmal optimization but look beyond that in games outside that qualifiers and add the gargantuan heap of past games available now due to the entrypoints of now easily being capable of running the most demanding games of the past and simulations and it's not all doom and gloom.

If anything by letting the big boys crash and burn one might see them learn a thing or two.

Things are overplayed until they aren't, as of now the only major advantage provided by a home consoles is their relative advantage in dollar to power ratio compared to a desktop and better optimization but then you'd still have things like having to pay subscription for basic online functions.

As to your second point what makes you think PCs and such might go away? And as it relates to Ai I rather be an optimist and belive it'll lower the entrypoint for developers enabling them to automate certain repetitive tasks inherent in both the development process and game mechanics themselves, rouge likes for example were already quite popular many of which mostly rely on randomly generated levels or assets, perhaps there's potential in integrating Ai to create more engaging variations and scenarios or to make the zombie like npcs of open world games more intractable and bring about more emergent and interesting interactions.

Maybe my optimism is misguided and the deliberate nature of designing games will clash with the aforementioned applications but I rather hope for the best.
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It is incredibly misguided to think that AI will stop at level design.

This is how it always happens, like with DLCs, patches, microtransactions, subscriptions...not enough people look forward enough to see which way the wind is blowing.

Thankfully there's a pushback happening, with people studying art and calling out developers. Obviously Expedition33 was a high profile one, but there have been numerous "indie" developers cancelling projects and a few even closing down (well, likely changing names) because of it.
 
I have zero confidence in AI being used in a responsible way to assist efficiency in development, rather than it being used to crank out slop. That comment about roguelikes and randomly generated levels is exactly the sort of misconception I see all the time. The reality is that most good roguelikes are just as handcrafted as anything else out there, just look at the likes of Hades and Returnal. Their individual components are handcrafted and chained together semi-randomly, but a ton of balancing and testing goes into getting that to work well.

The idea that you can just hand that over to AI and tell it to generate something fun is a fantasy, unless you put a ton of effort into correcting its rubbish, but at that point what have you gained? What will really happen is a bunch of talentless hacks will try just that and crank out horrible, generic and unenjoyable slop. Maybe initially it will have some novelty value and people will jump on it, but they'll quickly figure out it's all crap and move on from it.

Oh and btw procedural generation has been used in game develop for many decades and is nothing new. Studios have used it for ages and will continue to use it where it makes sense. It's always evolving in sophistication, but it isn't the AI revolution some people seem to think it is.
 
Ainu said:
I have zero confidence in AI being used in a responsible way to assist efficiency in development, rather than it being used to crank out slop. That comment about roguelikes and randomly generated levels is exactly the sort of misconception I see all the time. The reality is that most good roguelikes are just as handcrafted as anything else out there, just look at the likes of Hades and Returnal. Their individual components are handcrafted and chained together semi-randomly, but a ton of balancing and testing goes into getting that to work well.

The idea that you can just hand that over to AI and tell it to generate something fun is a fantasy, unless you put a ton of effort into correcting its rubbish, but at that point what have you gained? What will really happen is a bunch of talentless hacks will try just that and crank out horrible, generic and unenjoyable slop. Maybe initially it will have some novelty value and people will jump on it, but they'll quickly figure out it's all crap and move on from it.

Oh and btw procedural generation has been used in game develop for many decades and is nothing new. Studios have used it for ages and will continue to use it where it makes sense. It's always evolving in sophistication, but it isn't the AI revolution some people seem to think it is.
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Yep. As I basically said above, people never look far past the end of their noses.

Not to mention that AI isn't and never can create anything new, it has to be trained on data. And that data won't be coming from just one game.
 
The new CEO's Xbox account was started on Jan 15 and has been blitzing through games to rack up achievements
 
So it’ll play pc games, so basically a dumbed down windows interface. Honestly probably the best move Microsoft could have made.

Edit: I guess that’s why Sony won’t make pc games anymore
 
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Dan said:
Sounds very expensive.
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Think it’s going to cost around £1000 from the rumours that I have seen. It’s probably going to be pimped out to other manufactures like ASUS and then MS can quietly withdraw from the console market.

I hope they allow people to play their Xbox library on PC.
 
Well, I guess that's all they can do now. I still expect them to have very few exclusives. Is there anything on the slate which won't be coming out on PlayStation?
 
Like the last two generations have been anyway?

Honestly, even I'm not sure about how this is supposed to be a thing. And no it has little to nothing to do with Sony pulling PC games, as this machine will still have to have a specific environment or it will end in even more disaster.
 
So, I have game pass with my phone plan and have been playing on cloud.

I recently got a 4k oled to and I’m wondering if it’s worth buying an Xbox series x? Any thoughts appreciated! I’m reading that cloud graphics are closer to that of series s
 
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