Which is it?
The fact that you’re trying to explain something bizarre should tell you everything.
Haven’t they already proven it by being Game Publisher of the year in 2021?
To me, the only thing they need to prove is that they can do it consistently. That a great year in 2021 needed to be followed with a great 2022 (which was pathetically weak). But then again, Sony hasn’t had 2 good years this generation either.
Media bias.
Starfield alone will not change the narrative. The reputation of Xbox is low because they got themselves there over years. It’s going to take a lot of great releases over a long period of time to change it around.
Nintendo and Sony do have their own blemishes, but they are few and far between. They get way more right than they do wrong.
Stop making excuses for leadership within Xbox making missteps and expect they learn from them. Stop feeling sorry for them. They are in charge of the destiny of the Xbox brand.
Perspective: Halo Infinite should have been a slam dunk and 343 fucked it up. You can’t miss on something that big, with so many eyes on THE IP that built the house of Xbox, and come out on the other end okay.
They should have delayed Redfall further. It shouldn’t have followed the excellent and super polished Hi Fi Rush. There should have been someone in the chain of command within Bethesda who said “this isn’t good enough yet” and had the balls move it out again. It is sad to me that I can no longer believe that “Arkane doesn’t miss.”
There needs to be someone within Xbox who is putting a seal of approval on games to assure it fits a first, better or best seal of approval.
Xbox and Bethesda leadership know Starfield needs to be excellent. They should have been putting as many resources behind it as possible to exceed expectations.
How many good games does GamePass need to offer to be worth it? A year of Ultimate is the cost of 2.2 full price titles here in Canada. This is moronic. The idea that it needs multiple slam dunk titles every month is crazy. If it did it would be providing a slate of games greater than Sony and Nintendo combined for hundreds less in cost/year.
There’s literally nothing wrong with a great AAA game a quarter and a ton of good indies and filler inbetween. Makes it a helluva site better value than Netflix is these days.
The whole article is bullshit. “Yeah, they mightsubscribe for Starfield but they won’t stick around!”
Pure downplaying nonsense.
Game Pass subscriptions never go down.
how to make a ad to PS+ without saying it’s a ad (joke)
I’d like to see some of these replies. But personally, I would like to see replies from some of the content creators. Sometimes I feel like we need a good old debate, rather than this to and fro between Youtube videos.
Tim and Bill arguing at each other
Graeme: “Ah, good- political discussion.”
Bill: “We’re just shouting at each other.”
Graeme: “Same thing.”
TOTK has few to no glitches
Yeah I just Youtubed it myself and I only see that there’s a duplication glitch. There was another video called “TOTK Funny Moments - Tricks and Glitches” but there didn’t seem to actually be any bugs in the video.
I’m sure some people are hitting a bug of some kind at some point but it’s definitely one of the most polished games, well, ever.
Especially when you factor in how complex the physics system is.
It’s a technical marvel imo.
I made no pretense of speaking for anybody else than myself.
I don’t think it’s helpful to talk about biases et al, or some sort of conspiracy, or similar. It’s not particularly illuminating.
The main issue, across gaming, imo, is a tendency for people to view everything through a particular lense. That is, what ‘competes’, rather than what is ‘good’. I do think it’s true Sony kinda set the rules of engagement, but not because they’re some malevolent force, but because they make good things people enjoy. The issue comes not in Sony, or in those games, but in the way they’re received. Fan culture and winner-takes-all mentality celebrates these things in a way that means other things that aren’t them get savaged, quite unecessarily.
It’s also true this happens more for Xbox than for Playstation, even when Sony has multiple ‘less than stellar but still very enjoyable games’ - those games (Days Gone, Destruction All Stars, Sackboy, etc etc) find their place and are accepted and enjoyed. They’re given license by the way TLOU or GOW are very very successful and very well made.
The issue I have with this is it’s not treating those games as good in and of themselves - they’re ‘OK, becuase the competition is so in Playstation’s favour that we can indulge these games’. A game shouldn’t need another game to valorise it, to make it ‘acceptable’. That’s weird, but it happens time and again, and the shadow example is MS: Pentiment, Grounded, Hi-Fi Rush etc are only ‘so’ good becuase they don’t fit the competition narrative. Fuck off: they’re just good, that’s actually what matters. The only thing that should matter is you sitting down, with your pad, and playing them. One of my favourite games of the last gen was Recore. Broken as shit at launch, and still I loved it. Ditto Journey (only played on PS4): not broken as shit, but very short and ‘small’ - and I thought it brilliant.
See also how on a few occassions a Playstation game gets a lower Metacritic rating than an XBox one (GoT, HZD / Halo Infinite, Forza) - and given usually Metacritic is the bible in the competition narrative - but in these cases any flaw of the former is waved away, because the genre/production values feel right, and in the latter, gaps or genre become a problem in accepting those games as worthy of more than 'oh yeah, cool, but’. Halo is a ‘failure’ at 87 because it lacked MP content/Forge, but GoT is ‘amazing’ at 83 because it’s very stylistically cool. There shouldn’t be a ‘but’! Get rid of the ‘but’! It does nothing but distract us from the games themselves. Critique and engage with these things as you see fit, but don’t pretend there’s consistency, don’t pretend it’s all about a game’s qualities, don’t pretend the wider noise isn’t influential.
Like whatever the hell you like, play whatever, just stop, all of us, please, giving these stories so much power. I use the review scores example merely becuase the stories valorise those, if I had my way they’d be nuked off the face of the earth. None of this detracts from wanting MS to make good games that don’t have issues at launch, and that are really fun. The problem is I’m playing them already and constantly being told they don’t ‘count’. I want to celebrate games, not corporate profits.
It’s a reflection of modern society (especially social media) & not exclusive to any particular industry or fandom, whether it’s gaming, movies, sports or politics.
People fight, mock, antagonize, embrace tribalism in every facet of their existence & embody a “I hate what say, what you buy, what you wear, what you look like” mentality & they all share a common trait: they enjoy hating. Just check the NeoGAF homepage for example, it’s just a circlejerk of wankers enjoying hating on Xbox all day every day. But if Xbox wasn’t the focus of their hatred, it would be something else.
Sony just has a boatload more of these types of people because they’re the higher selling brand. Just like Marvel also has a whole load of them, or Apple, or any popular sports franchise as well.
Could Xbox be better? Yep. But the anger & hate we see directed at the brand is so disproportionate it’s hard to overlook the fact this is a societal issue, not a gaming one. People just wake up in the morning & feel like they need to hate on something, so Xbox it is.
I feel like this is important to state in case a reverse antagonism occurs & people start ‘hating’ the PlayStation brand… which would be absurd. It’s just a game console.
The Series X is awesome, I know this because I have one. I bet the PS5 is awesome as well because I had a PS4 & it was very good tech. Both systems have great games, good games & bad games. That’s all there is to it really.
The Plume Network compares Destin Legarie’s article and Jon Clarke’s article:
Huh, pretty good video. Nice shout out, looks like a cool channel too.
Yeah Plume is good.
Please don’t take this personally, but why do people keep posting this inane garbage? All they want is for their articles to be shared. One of the fundamental rules of the internet is “don’t feed the trolls”
Even if someone is posting a link to a stupid article with the intent to ridicule it (like you are here Joe, and I promise this isn’t about you in particular, moreso me getting crotchety as I age) that just gets more eyeballs on it. It’s creating more chances that someone will click on it in outrage and hate-clicks are just as lucrative as sincere clicks. Just resist sharing it, roll your eyes privately and move on with your browsing!
Regardless of your perspective on media bias, you can choose to not feed into the cycle of negativity.
On-topic: Good video. I think that the main issue Xbox-primary or Xbox-only people have to contend with is that the alternative is seen as the default. The kind of person who is interested in comparing platforms on message boards and whatnot isn’t approaching the conversation from a neutral point of view; it’s not “what does Xbox offer?” it’s “what does Xbox offer that PlayStation doesn’t?”
Essentially, when it’s taken as read that owning a PS is the default state, it’s easy to dismiss multi-platform games, which puts more emphasis on exclusives. I don’t think it’s a controversial statement that MS first-party offerings are more diverse than Sony’s. This means that the “list wars” fools (who again, are essentially trying to talk themselves out of wanting an Xbox) can argue in bad faith (Racing games don’t count, GaaS aren’t real games, AA games don’t count, good games by acquired studios don’t count because organic growth but bad games by acquired studios do count, ad nauseam).
What can you do? Ignore it and embrace the good parts of the hobby: enjoying unique experiences, playing with friends, making new connections. I read about and discuss games online because I like games and am looking for shared experiences (Wasn’t the writing in Lost Odyssey great?), recommendations (Bounced off Hollow Knight a few times before it took and wouldn’t have given it a fair shot otherwise) and tips (Follow the quest markers for a bit when you start Tears of the Kingdom, you’ll get important gear)
Basically, if you’re letting the 24/7 news cycle that needs to drive people against each other to be profitable dictate how you engage with something you ostensibly love, you’re letting yourself get manipulated! Yeah, it can suck, yeah it’s unfair, but what does it matter?
Just play games, not social media 
I wonder if at this point, Xbox should just embrace their dude-bro image and stop trying to win over Sony/Nintendo fans…
Double down on FPS, bald-headed marines, Doritos, Mountain Dew and lots of shouting.
There are a number of issues at play here.
There are a number of people in the gaming industry that dont like MS and Xbox. You have people like John Linnneman at DF who openly wrote that he hates Xbox and wishes MS never got into gaming for instance, as well as other Journalists who have their favourite console. The reality of the gaming industry is that its hard to get clicks, and without the clicks you dont have a job. This pushes them to do clickbait articles that get clicks and get shared around on social media. One of those is anti xbox articles.
However, MSs ability to continually shoot itself in the foot gives those Journalists all the ammunition they need to keep a steady flow of anti MS srticles coming. I mean, the head of Arkane in France saying that they cancelled the PS5 version just as MS was trying to convince regulators that they wont cancel COD on PS is just comedy gold. But if that was the only one. Everytime Phil speaks there are takeaways for days after. You have MSs own first party studios releasing Ghostwire and Deathloop in worse shape on Xbox, and not giving Xbox owners the ability to get a physical copy of the game, all while PS owners had that ability. I could go on, but I think the point is pretty well understood by most fair minded Xbox players.
The only way this stops if for consistent releases of good games over a number of years, which I think will happen from here on out.
This year we had HiFi Rush, Redfall and will have Starfield and Forza, and maybe Hellblade 2. In 2024 and 2025 we have games like Fable, Avowed, Contraband, Project Midnight, State of Decay 3, Zenimax Onlines new game, Project Cobalt and Indiana Jones as a good guess all making their way to Xbox. Gamers are fickle, and if Xbox has a good couple of years and PlayStation is a bit thin, people will turn on Sony as well.
The only way is to grow Gamepass. Same thing happened to Netflix and Steam. you create a community that is big enough not to care about extermal point of view and make its own rules.
We already see the impact with indies. Before it was “Gamepass is hurting sales”, now it is “We wish It is easier to enter Gamepass”.
You can see the parallel with Netflix coming from “Netflix movies are not movies and puting movies on netflix is bad for business” to “Scorsese is making its last movie exclusive to Netflix”
Sorry, would you have a source for this? That sounds a bit nuts.