The Big ol' Xbox 3rd Party Releases Discussion Thread (HiFi, SoT, Pentiment, Grounded) (Part 1)

Copium is a very powerful thing.

Hah, I thought it was intentional to piss people off.

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It’s been funny seeing people try to act like Hi-Fi Rush, back when it was the only one, wasn’t driving people insane. Starfield and Indy might have made things blow up more but they had already blown up over the first three rumored titles for nearly two months prior to that.

Starfield and Indy pushed me over the edge, especially Indy with them considering porting it just ‘months’ after release. I think those rumors not panning out made people more accepting of the smaller games hitting lol. I don’t think i ever considered them going ‘full third party’ until Indy hitting shortly after release.

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Yeah, it cooked for a long time and the lid blew off with Starfield I think. In part probably because the more games got rumoured the more people felt that their fears are coming true after all.

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Yep same here. I did not much care for any of it, until Jesse posted the tweet with the XboxEra article. That clearly had to be a joke I thought. And then it wasn’t.

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The later leaks said it was ALL the games going myltiplatform, so yeah, 4 games was way below the expectations of most people.

We were talking about Halo, Gears and Forza, the 3 historical pillars of Xbox going to PS… There’s now people disappointed that they won’t be able to play Halo on their PS5…

Today, Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy oldest games are on everything. They were exclusive franchises, or considered exclusives, but now they are multiplatform and no one bats an eye. It was insane to me that I could play FFVII on Xbox just a few years ago.

The only platform with true exclusives is Nintendo.

I still think that exclusives are important though. At least for a year or more.

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Reports vs. leaks vs. random people jumping in for their engagement is always the worst thing to figure out during things like this.

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I think another thing MS kinda betting on is their competitors (mainly Sony) are also moving in a similar direction, which is quite believable after the recent Sony financial call.

Consoles sales hit a ceiling 3 gens ago, the unit sales didn’t grow at the same pace as the rest of the industry, now the industry hit a halt, and console sales are the first thing that declined, combined with very thin profitability on itself so the writing on the wall that a pivot of business model is needed.

What I think some of the signals would be:

1- Sony accelerates their PC initiative, community-driven games are Day 1, and single-player games port to PC time gap reduced. eventually, everything is day 1 on PC.

2- Sony winding down third-party money-hat, it’s a practice mainly to punish xbox and drive PS5 sales, with Xbox now being a major publisher of PS, and willing to consider putting more games on ps, these moves would disincentive MS to go further.

3 - Sony eventually would bring their community-driven games to Xbox, such as helldiver, I mean Marathon is already announced for xbox, so it’s not like that out of the question.

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I think the problem was always hi fi rush not because it’s a big game but it because it one of the few games that Xbox had that had reviewed well.

& that was before anyone thought Xbox would be stupid/brave enough to drop their biggest game of the gen and the biggest licensed IP game that was due this year and could at the very least create some momentum & buzz for the brand.

The fact that they have clearly considered doing the above has made people accept the lesser of the 2 evils.

In my opinion doing the above is fine as long as they allow for their studios to get to release 4/6 games in front and meaning that they get 4 to 6 & 12 to 18 months of very good games released before do release elsewhere.

If they do it any sooner in my opinion they tank the brand and don’t allow for any FOMO to kick in on the other side or even to allow their fan base to at least saviour in having some very good games the others don’t.

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They bought their studios from 2018 on and games take around 5 years to make, we’ve only just entered 2024, so I’m not sure what people expect? They can’t just magically make games appear

There are definitely aspects Xbox and Phil’s leadership deserve to be criticised on whether it’s the terrible localisation, marketing, banking on xCloud instead of pumping more consoles out early in the gen and more but the game situation really isn’t the same

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, I know you try to be logical but markets aren’t just driven by logic. They rely a lot on emotion. That’s not me being a console warrior I’m far from that but me being logical understands that emotion plays a part,

You seem to be very dismissive of this and are straight down the line with facts and figures which is in part correct but it’s the whole answer. It’s mix of both. You allow the facts to guide you but need to understand how the reaction can ruin you.

The Xbox one reveal is the perfect example of how not to just bluntly tell people this is the way it’s going, I don’t want to hear you disagree with me & that resulted in the generation going tits up.

I totally understand why they are doing it, I thought with Sony’s financials and the delivery of the podcast was a great combo to get everyone to understand the state of the gaming business

But that is still a little tinged with frustration in considering them doing bigger games this year as opposed to after they’ve seen at least COD and Indy hit to see if that made any dent and created momentum for the brand

To at least put some credit back in the bank that allows them to make big decisions like a starfield, for optics especially, make it seem like they are working from a position of strength as opposed to weakness and desperation.

Thats why PlayStation get away with it because they look strong. If they make a mistake there’s always something else they can point to as strong which is great deflecting techniques.

Xbox can’t point at much, which is why many wanted them to have some games with any credit to at least be held back until they had a few more.

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Yep let’s be real.

The Hi-fi Rush and Sea of Thieves talk was whatever. It was going on for months and while some people didn’t like it there was no real or major outcry.

It wasn’t until the Starfield report that all hell broke loose. Lets not try and re-write what actually happened.

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You can scroll back in this thread and see that it was a cluster for a month before Starfield.

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Same, up until that point I had muted the thread and called BS.

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He’s responsible for the state of the games of the 1st party studios and cases like Forza Motorsport, Halo, Wasteland should not be acceptable.

Outside of Playground, im scared about the future XGS game launches, Hellblade 2, specially Avowed, Perfect Dark, South of Midnight, any of these games could be a 9, or a 7, any of these could be perfectly polished (doubt!) or a mess at launch.

Hope they’ll land 3-4 perfect launches and i will stop being worried about how good each future game is going to be, or about the state of these games at launch, but sadly their recent history is… oof

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The “cluster” before Starfield was absolutely nothing compared to the carnage that transpired after the Starfield report. It went from hardcore fans discussing it on message boards to GameStop employees advising people not to buy an Xbox because its games were going to PlayStation.

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I’m sorry Jesse but that is quite disingenuous.

The first month of this thread (Jan 5th - Feb 4th) was significantly quieter. It wasn’t until you posted the Starfield article (post 2615) on the 4th February when things went crazy in here.

In two weeks we have had double the number of posts compared to the entire month before (this will be post 7249!)

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I know yall don’t want to feel like the Starfield stuff was a huge contributer but it was IMO. Take it from someone who (considers themselves) is pretty far from the the concern side of things.

Indiana Jones was worse though lol

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If I’m honest I didn’t see anywhere near the same levels of uproar for Indy as I did for Starfield.

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