Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking As Microsoft Brings Games To PS5 (kotaku.com) 25
In its third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, Microsoft reported a 30% drop in Xbox console sales, after reporting a 30% drop last April. "It blamed the nosedive on a 'lower volume of consoles sold' during the start of 2024," reports Kotaku. From the report: In February, Grand Theft Auto VI parent company Take-Two claimed in a presentation to investors that there were roughly 77 million "gen 9" consoles in people's homes. It didn't take fans long to do the math and speculate that Microsoft had only sold around 25 million Xbox Series X/S consoles to-date. That puts it ahead of the GameCube but behind the Nintendo 64, at least for now. Given the results this quarter as well, it doesn't seem like Game Pass and Starfield have moved the needle much. Maybe that will change once Call of Duty, which Microsoft acquired last fall along with the rest of Activision Blizzard, finally makes its way to Game Pass. Diablo IV only just arrived on the Netflix-like subscription platform this month. But given the fact that the fate of Xbox Series X/S appears to be locked in at this point, it's easy to see why Microsoft is looking at other places it can put its games.
Sea of Thieves, the last of four games in this initial volley to come to PS5, dominated the PlayStation Store's top sellers list last week on pre-orders alone. CEO Satya Nadella specifically called this out during a call with investors, noting that Microsoft had more games in the top 25 best sellers on PS5 than any other publisher. "We are committed to meeting players where they are by bringing great games to more people on more devices," he said. If players there continue to flock to the live-service pirate sim, it's not hard to imagine Microsoft bringing another batch of its first-party exclusives to the rival platform. Whether that means more recent blockbusters like Starfield or the upcoming Indiana Jones game will someday make the journey remains to be seen.
Sea of Thieves, the last of four games in this initial volley to come to PS5, dominated the PlayStation Store's top sellers list last week on pre-orders alone. CEO Satya Nadella specifically called this out during a call with investors, noting that Microsoft had more games in the top 25 best sellers on PS5 than any other publisher. "We are committed to meeting players where they are by bringing great games to more people on more devices," he said. If players there continue to flock to the live-service pirate sim, it's not hard to imagine Microsoft bringing another batch of its first-party exclusives to the rival platform. Whether that means more recent blockbusters like Starfield or the upcoming Indiana Jones game will someday make the journey remains to be seen.
The fallout from Halo Infinite continues (Score:3)
Re:The fallout from Halo Infinite continues (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to emphasize: I'm not talking about the big titles, I'm talking about the smaller ones. The Katamaris and the Zack and Wikis and the Endless Oceans, etc. The little charming games which you need to fill out your catalogue.
Obviously, this is skewed by my own preferences. I don't care about FIFA or Call of Duty or Halo. But Microsoft's catalogue really does seem to be lacking in every generation.
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I think it's mostly just about the fact that the Japanese developers have rejected Microsoft
That's been true ever since the original OG XBox due to blatant domestic industry pressure. Turns out when two of the biggest names in your industry, that have a government backed monopoly on you getting to release your products to consumers and for what cost, dislike competition most will simply fall in line and ignore the competitor. (For fear of angering their betters and suffering higher publishing / development costs in their biggest markets as a result.)
To be fair, there are some good Japanese made
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Microsoft is trying to keep PC gaming going because it's a big reason why consumers buy computers with their OS on them.
Microsoft needs that to happen so that they can sell "OEMs" (most of them don't design most or all of "their" machines anyway) their OS. Competent corporate users don't want anything to do with a bundled license, only small businesses should be using those at this point.
It's too bad Kinect wasn't more successful, for Microsoft that is. It would have helped them if they could have different
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That's rewriting history. The 360 got many Japanese exclusives such as Blue Dragon, Beautiful Katamari, Otomedius G, Ninja Gaiden, Lost Odyssey, D4, Wartech, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio Future, Dead or Alive, Chaos;Head and Steins;Gate, Espgaluda II, Deathsmiles, Akai Katana, DoDonPachi, Infinite Undiscovery, Dream Club, and they got Final Fantasy and Resident Evil to finally go multiplatform and come to Xbox. For a while games like Virtua Fighter, Outrun 2, Star Ocean, Tales of Vesperia, were actual
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They did the same thing with the Forza series as well. They promised this amazing new graphics engine for Forza Motorsport for Xbox Series X, but when it came out it was bug-ridden and only looked marginally better than it's predecessor. It really felt like they were resting on their laurels and just re-released the same game as before with a spotty new coat of paint on it.
Re:Is Cloud Streaming killing console sales? (Score:4, Insightful)
Cloud gaming ranges from mediocre to awful. Maybe some people can stand it but if you can detect extra input lag in the 40-100ms range, it's pretty wretched. Stadia should have served as a warning to everyone of how bad the input lag can get when you try to stream the entire game over the Internet.
Re:Is Cloud Streaming killing console sales? (Score:5, Interesting)
40-100ms would be nice. I have gigabit fiber direct to my house and it's not even playable then. Anything requiring fast action is out. Think 200+ ms. I've tried Geforce Now, Stadia, and Luna, and they're all just as bad even with a "Premium" subscription. I can't see how the product is even viable. It's definitely telling that Google realized this and got out early.
I think what they might do, though, is design games around this latency, hiding its poor performance like how they hide the poor accuracy of controller thumbsticks. It's possible there's a killer app lurking somewhere in there, maybe in the MMO space, marketed to kids who can't afford a console.
Re: Is Cloud Streaming killing console sales? (Score:3)
The "killer" apps are things like turn based games. Or even traditional non-action RPGs. I know. Not the hot titles that are gonna sell a service.
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It depends on the service running games on a server colocated near you. Think Netflix-style caching servers. If you aren't physically near any of the streaming services' game machines, yes, it can get a lot worse than +100ms input lag.
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Maybe that's the problem, I've been using the router provided by my ISP which is a piece of shit. It SHOULD be better, I agree. It's hard to find routers with an SFP port and I haven't wanted to mess around with SFP media converters. Regardless, if that's the hardware they've giving people then that's the experience people will have except for the tiny minority of nerds who like to mess around with network hardware.
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Microsoft has bought up tons and tons of developers so they could lock the games to their platforms but the problem with that is modern games are so incredibly expensive they can't really afford to let the PlayStation 5 platform go unless they want to massively subsidize their gaming division and their CEO doesn't like that. Hell even Sony is talking about putting their games out on the Xbox.
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Xbox series x is getting old (Score:2)
It needs a product refresh. Sony is refreshing the PS5 with better specs, but not MS.
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Sony is segmenting a generation of their console, something no one has ever done before. The refresh isn't good enough to be a new generation, so they're doing this half-assed thing which is going to irritate a lot of people with games targeted at the new version of the system that don't run well on the old one.
Their console is already the sales leader in this generation, they're just screwing with success at this point. You're supposed to ride out the console as long as it's profitable, and take the time t
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What do you call the PS4 Pro, if not "segmenting a generation of their console"?
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*squints*
What planet are you living on? The current generation of Xbox was segmented from the get go, to the point where the raw power of the low end isn't majorly more powerful than their previous console(XBOneX), it just has an SSD and some nifty new tricks. What's more, that low end has publicly caused them problems with at least two game releases that I know of, and who knows how many more in private. Whereas the PS5 Pro isn't going to be powerful enough in the CPU sense to cause issues with game releas
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Whats up with the PS5 (Score:1)
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It's worth noting that there has been a decrease (Score:1)