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[Xbox] This is the Old Thread. Go to the Shiny New Thread.
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This is what I'm doing
Also want to point out that I am not angry. I honestly don't want the Xbox console to go away. Having only Sony and Nintendo being the players in the game wouldn't be very good for us consumers. This entire discussion is just fascinating to me and I can't wait to see where it goes.
Would that actually help keep the divide? I dunno, but a man can dream.
Let them all bring something unique to the table instead of 2 versions of the same thing + Nintendo.
Got one for my Switch and I'm probably gonna start using it for my PC too once my Xbone one dies (the stick is drifting a bunch)
Yeah I love this damn thing. It's so comfortable and light. I might like it more than the Pro Controller.
The wife uses hers for her Switch and the Steamdeck when it's docked. There are some annoyances using it on PC because a few games don't recognize it correctly, but it's overall an amazing device. Really one-ups the Switch Pro controller.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
My XB1 pad that I use on PC is wearing down and getting some stick drift, so I guess I now have a Genshin Impact 8bitdo Ultimate heading my way tomorrow morning (don't care about Genshin but the design is pretty)
Pretty much my point is that committing to anything that far out is not how the business operates, and taking something non-committal and extrapolating that into a confirmation of something else entirely is just silly. The corporation has literally not yet decided - talking about it as if it is a certainty (even if obviously it is a very possible scenario out of many) is the purview of hysterical armchair pundits on social media.
They spoke about as plainly as you could get for a corporate-speak "podcast" when it came to their decision-making criteria - they're dipping their toes into a new strategy by using games which, by their metrics, are basically all tapped out in terms of selling a console. At this point, no-one is buying an Xbox console for fuckin'... Sea of Thieves or Hi-Fi Rush.
And you know? I personally wish this was the case - I've literally written an entire essay on how Hi-Fi Rush was my GOTY 2023, because I adore that thing from toe to tip - but the reality is that it's a niche game where the absolute leader IP in that subgenre took 4 years to break over 7 million in sales.
I had the joy of experiencing those things 12+ months ago and nothing about the decisions being made today devalues that joy at all. Obviously, I accept that not everyone thinks that way. But if taking these smaller creative darlings and/or old live-service titles multiplatform after hitting their theoretical limit as console exclusives is what it takes for the broader public to stop thumbing their nose at Xbox Game Studios the software publisher and finally go "hey wait, Xbox actually make really fucking great games", I will happily accept the deprioritization of the plastic box on my shelf for as long as it takes. I am tired of evangelizing for games I love in a landscape where the prevailing discourse in games media is the hand-wringing bringing their longevity into question because they don't fit the accepted definition of a broad-appeal "system seller".
And if it makes future games on the scale of Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Grounded etc. a more financially reasonable proposition to shareholders in this capitalistic hellscape, I would rather they do that than calcify themselves around hedging their bets solely on old $300m albatrosses with 6 year development cycles that people sneer at anyway.
IOW:
Oooh a Chongyun controller, that's cool!
... give me a Dehya one.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
So I guess my Xbox is really more of a legacy machine now, with my 360 and XBO collection on it.
Jokes aside, while I doubt there is any benefit in making this "about me", it's probably been pretty evident that even before the last two weeks, I haven't been on the forums much (I've even been absent from of my favorite pastime, answering complicated technical or purchase-related questions with even more complicated answers), and I spend even less time in other threads: I've been kind of busy. In literally an hour, I'm leaving to cover a demonstration against the Israeli war in Gaza (as an unpaid photojournalist, or as most people call them, "a dude with a big camera") in front of my local city hall (which means I may've just doxxed myself, lol). I haven't been playing much in the way of videogames, except for jumping onto my PC in the evenings after work. I've also severely culled my social media use in general since 2023, which might make me the only for-hire photographer in North America who doesn't have an Instagram page (double lol).
I've edited to post to reflect the merger of Xbox Live Gold into the basic core tier of Xbox Game Pass, which the general subscription information might be the only actual useful part of the OP at this point, as well as deleting trailers for games that have already come out to my knowledge. Enjoy, and try not to burn through this one too fast.