Dude, I didn’t say it’s a good idea. I’m saying if MS is hesitating to put COD on Gamepass, then their entire strategy is borked. I don’t want to hear about how Gamepass is now apparently unsustainable. That’s not what we were told.
They either live with their strategy & see it through until the end (that means putting COD & everything else in the service… without raising prices to ridiculous levels either, otherwise what’s the point?), or they quit & go third party. The stuff I’m seeing online at the moment in all these conversations or rumors (articles in The Verge or Bloomberg) makes it appear like MS is having second thoughts about the whole Gamepass day one shebang.
Well I’ll be blunt here: any prohibitive price rise or removal of day one first party titles would be MS reneging on their original mission whilst attempting to implement a half-measure with the goal of maintaining their current hardware customers, Gamepass subscribers… whilst also selling day one AAA games like COD at $70… aka a very bad idea.
Put COD in Gamepass, make an early access package, 1 week early premium and lock zombie behind the premium edition of the game so people are forced to buy the premium edition upgrade if they want zombie and I think it’d be a good compromise for COD honestly. I’ve paid for most premium edition upgrades on Gamepass as I think they’re worth it and I’d do the same for COD. Problem solved.
Also, add lots of extra things in ultimate for COD fans, might make PC and mobile players jump in for the monthly perks.
All the YouTubers you’d expect to cover it are indeed doing exactly that. I can’t even blame them. The Bloomberg article gave them a lot to work with. Especially the “more closures” seems to be hot. How the fuck did we get to Xbox looking so promising back when they started acquiring studios to this shit situation with a lot of uncertainty?
Let’s get all the horrible news over with already so that we can kinda look forward to a good June show. No wait, Hellblade 2 is quite soon, so that first. Hopefully it’s not full studio closures but at the worst downsizing, fuck.
Sounds more like speculation based on things everyone thinos/knows.
Gane Pass hurts sales? Yeah, we all think that and until someone breaches Microsofts security again and steals their financials we will never know by how much.
Activision focus? Yeah, ABK makes a fuck ton of money and it takes a lot of money to maintain. So yeah they want to put some focus on that, what’s stupid to me is the fact that the people they fired could have been helping with the work of other teams(like Bethesda does already) as they started the pitch for their own games on the side.
Still can’t get over Arkane and Tango closing and all these devs that have been impacted. I‘ve lost a lot of faith in the brand this year. They have been speaking a lot about their strategy in the past and it feels like everything has been turned upside down and is now the opposite of what they said (supporting games of all sizes and geographies in particular, exclusives promises). Acquiring ABK seems like a poisoned chalice now. I have trouble seeing them come back from this other than if their plan is now to be a huge EA-like kind of publisher. But that‘s Microsoft Gaming, not Xbox anymore, and I was sold on the Xbox promises all these years ago that have in many regards not materialized.
Lmao yes the people who actually heard him knew what he was talking about. They know how tango had Its main game flop, and how Hifi didn’t do enough to save that studio. They also know many of them are working on smaller games right now. And he assured them that they still believe in those smaller side projects, and aren’t getting rid of them. We’re still going to get games like Pentiment and Grounded. Why are you assuming you know what happened at this meeting better than the guy who spoke at it?
I think the irony is in isolation without any of the online discourse or rumors poisoning the well, Xbox with a Gamepass sub in May 2024 still offers a great time.
I mean my Series X works as advertised & I get access to hundreds of titles, new drops (I’m looking forwards to Lord of the Fallen tbh) & the MS Rewards system is still a viable plan for people who want even more discounts. It’s why I haven’t jumped ship to the PS5, i.e. because taken at face value (again, without considering the online chatter, articles or anything else), I still get more bang for the buck with the Xbox & have a better time.
But (huge “but” here), if the Actvision acquisition messes with this ‘harmony’ (like a price rise for GPU or the removal of day one first party stuff), then it’ll be a bit disappointing.
I think things went wrong with Mobil and in my opinion is the reason for the whole problem. The big bet at least seemed to have been that the EU and other regulators would have been able to break open Apple and Google’s walled gardens on mobil and they would have gotten a chance to open their own stores on this platform.
Phil Spencer was talking about working with other partners on their store however with Apple fighting this has resulted in Xbox looking back to consoles and PC which has been hit hard. It’s also what has raised the handheld idea.
I’m hopeful that Phil and his team have gone back to Satya to enlighten him on things and hopeful we will hear better news from here on.
I do believe he is. Its a shame that something like “next generation games take more manppwer to make and so Zenimax merged some studios to do so” is being contorted to be about game pass sustainability. Remember when Naughty Dog cancelled a game, laid off the multiplayer team and it was framed as focusing on single player titles?
Same thing. What a joke!
Oh wow. What insight! You mean Microsoft weighed the value of selling games vs. The subscription model…and the subscription model won each and every time? 2018 called and wants its news back.
And dont believe everything you read. CoD is game pass day 1. Game pass prices will adjust relative to the prices of games.
If Apple and Google making it hard for them to have their own store is the issue. Microsoft just needs to just employee Nadella’s put it everywhere approach and have Xbox release more games on mobile.
Mobile is quite competitive. They just said mighty Doom was closing and let’s not forget the other games that they tried on mobile all ended up failing. Also having their own store brings bigger benefits and brings that synergy. This could have been averted had Microsoft not exited Mobile and still supported the Windows phone. If anything, they would have still been able to see 20 to 100 million phones ship yearly and but now might have a decent user base of over 200 million on mobile to work with.
Having their own store also unifies everything allowing all their games to launch from one place instead of dispersing it all over.
I bet he wants something cheap around the budget of Pentiment but not Hi-Fi Rush (too expensive people!), of course polished AF and to be a super high quality game so it can get a lot of awards and be critically acclaimed. Add a short development time (we can’t wait 4 years like Pentiment people!) there too and you have the ideal “smaller” game.
Maybe he thinks that he can order 2-3 of those small, cheap, 2 year cycle dev time and amazingly good award-bait titles and they’ll just appear out of thin air. Sounds like a piece of cake, right? lol
Trying to paint Hi-Fi RUSH as something different than a “smaller game” in regards to Booty’s quote is embarrassing. Not to mention it only costed 10$ more than Pentiment at release.
I thought I could be doom and gloomy at times (who isn’t this week? Understandably so too.) but a few of my friends seem completely down on Xbox, with that I mean they genuinely believe it’s over. As in any day now we’ll get the news MS simply kills off Xbox. I realize Satya obviously holds that power, but they didn’t shell out insane amounts of money to get ABK to then just call it quits completely.
At least we have that certainty. Some folks overreact for sure, yes it sucks that the two studios got closed but let’s not go overboard just yet.
MVG is mistaken. It was 5 years, not 4 years to develop. 2 years with a small team, they ramped up for the other 3 taking developers from Ghostwire when available.
