I appreciate you sharing the last two bits of news. If I had the hard drive space I’d check these out.
It makes me think that the Xbox dashboard should have a news section as you scroll down. I’m alerted to game sales on it, which is nice, but stuff like this would be great to know.
It’s possible that it’s already there and I’m just ignoring it 
The Xbox app on Amazon Fire Stick works awesome. Basically a console experience.
Sidenote… how long will people still call it xcloud, isn’t it just the Xbox app officially?
Sand Land!
This will get me to start gaming this week again, because I didn’t buy the game, since the backlog was growing and growing. Now I can try it long enough to see if this is a buy or not.
How about…
I think Microsoft registered(pattend)the Xcloud name, so even though it’s technically unofficial that’s the name of the service.
Oh I didn’t mean it as in buying Sand Land right after the free weekend, just overall.
Before I get to Cyberpunk, I still have Blood and Wine to continue with. And poor Starfield too. Lately gaming is at an all time low for me. It will get back.
Officially it’s Xbox Cloud Gaming.
But people in the “gamer bubble” will probably keep calling it xCloud forever, because it’s much shorter and distinctive.
Quite frankly, MS should’ve kept that name, imo. But I guess they want the Xbox branding in there. On the other hand they switched to “PC Game Pass.” So… just the usual MS naming sillyness.
I get Jez here. Here I thought these would be in the stores too, but here we are, they aren’t. If it’s all solely for social media engagement then…come on now.
And folks really do want to buy these, the reactions have been great.
I was checking daily if STALKER 2 was open for pre-order on the Xbox store. End of July with no preorder was not a good sign.
I replayed the 3 STALKER games back to back with the rereleases and I’m so ready, but november is not a big delay. It will space out the releases schedule a bit. September was overkill.
Jez didn’t write the piece, he just tweeted it out. Licensed products like this when they become for sale then cost/split money. For an advertisement like this it costs Xbox nothing, Marvel pays for it to promote their product. It’s not as easy as "turn around and mass produce this thing someone else paid to make a handful of.
I get all the reasons but it’s still a shame. At least make a few ones, have it be a limited thing and you can bet they will sell. But I guess it’s just like some of those custom consoles, you think it will be for sale and then it’s not. I find it very unfortunate.
It’s kinda dumb to compare it to Sony, when the Spiderman stuff actually had a… big game to go with it. This is a movie tie in that has absolutely nothing to do with Xbox otherwise.
Also think it’s silly to label it as a problem with marketing when the marketing has done a pretty good job despite no actual product existing. Social engagement is a (major) part of marketing.
Why can’t they just have 2 formats? Maybe have it so that when people join it cycles between them at random.
too much to balance
The developer deepdive is really worth reading if you are interested in developer decision-making or Overwatch. Sad tho predictable that dexerto are dramatically misrepresenting and oversimplifying.
ETA: To oversimplify and misrepresent myself, 6v6 presents huge issues in game pacing, queue times, etc. 5v5 has its own flaws too, but that’s why they’re testing.
Director’s Take: Opening up the conversation on 5v5 and 6v6 - News - Overwatch (blizzard.com)
https://x.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1816596813782171857
And undoubtedly many more games. Oh man I hope this gets sorted. The strikes in the movie industry pushed many promising movies far away, don’t want this to happen to games.
Imagine, GTA6 gets pushed far enough and becomes a next gen Xbox launch title, basically making it the best version around!