I never realized how big NHL video game is in Canada until I started to look at sales. I have friends that play the game and say it’s the worst of the big sports games. I feel Canada keeps the series afloat
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It has nothing to do with video games but the main guy of OpenAI has been fired, Sam Altman, he is now the day after with Microsoft.
Inteesting thing, 650 of the 770 threaten to move to MS as a retaliation to OpenAi move.
MS could just have bought Open AI, without doing any acquisition move.
Xbox Series X : Amazon.fr: Jeux vidéo
395 euros for the Series X on Amazon.fr right now. That’s by far the best black Friday console deal I’ve seen (it blows the PS5 offers out of the water right now).
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If that happens Satya Nadella is a freaking beast:
https://x.com/MadAboutStocks_/status/1726647529906065681?s=20
My brother must be salivating with those MS shares he has 
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It will eventually, I think by next gen a lot of their AI tech will be more and more incorporated into games
It’s up to 700 employees now, they brought the ABK deal back from the dead and now might get the biggest AI company for nothing
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Satya cemented himself as the best CEO in the world today. Him getting OpenAI( or the majority of the employees) for basically nothing and closing the ABK this year after being on regulatory scrutiny has been short of amazing. Microsoft has been the winner of 2023 by far.
In other news, the gains Microsoft have on its market cap in just 6 hours is enough to pay the ABK deal and still have left overs lol( in less than 24 hours lol).
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This is only part of the picture. A lot of stuff attributed to Satya Nadella already happened under Ballmer, like the switch to Office subscriptions and the cloud initiatives (Azure etc). The stock market took some time to appreciate it all 
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I do wonder in the past Friday, anti-Xbox were celebrating and hoped AI push would collapse Microsoft. This reverse uno is unlike anyone can imagine. Hell, many are even saying this could be the biggest acquisition ever because they will pay $0.
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and people still wonder why companies are so hell bent on the GaaS train
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It’s starting to feel like Microsoft has lost the European market, which isn’t good. I know people heavily play PC gaming there, but the numbers still looks concerning for me in that region
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Every day here in Italy there are TV spots about PS5, Switch, Spider-Man 2 or Super Mario Bros Wonder. Not even one about Xbox. It’s almost like they don’t even try to sell consoles in Europe
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Their numbers are terrible there but they have never been good in EU and MS have done nothing to change that, I don’t know the exact reasons whether it’s because of bad localisation, marketing or whatever but there’s no reason Xbox can sell in the US/UK and not EU if they put the effort in
but maybe for now they are happy just focusing on UK/US and letting PC keep them relevant over there, I also think Xbox simply don’t care about the amount of consoles they sell in some regions, Brazil iirc performs better than any of the EU countries and they just massively increased the price of the S over there anyway
If they really cared about getting as many consoles out there as possible that seems like an odd strategy
The year on year decrease has coincided with the increase in price (550 euros for the Series X). I’m just looking on the French Amazon right now & the black Friday discounted Series X (395 euros) is currently 7th on the list of all video game related sales today, above the PS5.
People can talk about marketing, localization, visibility or even games, i.e. there’s truth in all those reasons, but I think the major determining factor will forever be the price. The economy is bad & 550 euros for a 3 year old console is just too much.
The 360 era wasn’t rocket science, it was massively cheaper than the ps3. When we compare to other manufacturers, the failure of the Wii U for example had its own reasons (too numerous to list) but one of them was the price, i.e. far too high in 2012 considering the specs.
Point being: do a permanent price drop on the Series X after black Friday (normalize $399) & you’ll see console sales take off.
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I think Phil really needs to set up people to be head of Europe and Asia . There’s no reason why a company as big as Microsoft can be this negligent to these markets. They need to get somebody to be head of Europe that handles stuff like marketing, localization, and building relationships with devs in these areas. I am always shocked to learn how bad localization is for Xbox, and it seems it’s gotten worse than what it was in 360 era. I think this is a major oversight by Phil that he needs to get his stuff in order this gen. I feel the same trend will happen next gen if they don’t have any effort in improving it
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Price is definitely a factor but definitely not the only factor or even the main one, PS has simply done a much better job with their big AAA releases for the last couple of years, that combined withy their constant marketing of major titles like Hogarts, Fifa, CoD etc
Lots of people say Series S is undesirable because of the power but really it’s because of the games situation, Xbox had no AAA games last year and took until September this year to finally release Starfield, that’s not gonna cut it when the competition were releasing major titles and marketing the biggest third party games constantly
If X or even the S had constant marketing beats with major titles they would have been doing far better but PS now has all the momentum and that’s hard to stop, Nintendo and PS are doing better than ever and people only have limited time/money
As for a permanent price drop, I mean that would be great and I’m sure it would help consoles sales but people need to remember that maybe Xbox don’t care about console sales as much as we think they do, they are already losing money on each console and a further 50/100 euro or whatever might be too much based on how much they think those EU users will bring in to the platform
They are also selling roughly the same amount of consoles as XB1 last gen and yet their revenue has only been going up every year and that’s before adding ABK
There won’t be a permanent price drop.
Good luck to those wanting a Fortnite cash cow haha.
Fr, can’t blame these companies for trying though