These guys I swear.
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So was it just a playful meme or were they upset about the speculation?
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Maybe both.
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Do you think Xbox shouldnât raise prices on anything (Games, GP, or consoles/hw)? Like, at all, in this generation?
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For no good reason? You are aware that inflation has been sky high over the last year, right? This is what happens when inflation is high - prices get raised. Everything is becoming more expensive for Microsoft and all other game devs.
The difference between MS and Sony here is that Sony raised prices well before inflation hit - while MS waited until after.
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Yeah, within the current economical situation, and game development getting more and more complicated, a price increase was expected. Not necessarily what we want, but still expected nonetheless.
A few months after Microsoft announced plans to acquire the video game maker Activision Blizzard, the tech giant said it would remain neutral if Activision workers sought to unionize once the deal went through. Now, a major union is testing Microsoftâs appetite for organizing at a company it already owns.
A group of more than 300 employees at ZeniMax Media, a Maryland-based video game maker owned by Microsoft, has begun voting on whether to form the companyâs only union in the United States.
The vote, among quality assurance employees at ZeniMax, which includes prominent studios like Bethesda Game Studios, is taking place under an informal agreement in which Microsoft is staying neutral. Workers can sign a union authorization card, as some began doing last month, or weigh in anonymously for or against unionization on an electronic platform that opened on Friday.
The process will conclude at the end of the month and is more efficient than a typical union election, which is overseen by the National Labor Relations Board and can involve legal wrangling over the terms of the election.
A Microsoft spokeswoman said that the organizing campaign was âan example of our labor principles in actionâ and that the company remained âcommitted to providing employees with an opportunity to freely and fairly make choices about their workplace representation.â
The union campaign at Microsoft would affect Q.A. workers at several gaming studios that are a part of ZeniMax Media, including Bethesda, which makes hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Microsoft, which makes the Xbox series of consoles, acquired ZeniMax for $7.5 billion, a splashy pandemic purchase that helped it compete against rival Sony and its PlayStation consoles, as well as broaden the appeal of Xbox Game Pass, its video game subscription service. The deal closed last year. The first new major, exclusive-to-Xbox game stemming from that purchase, Starfield, is expected to be released next year by Bethesda. Some of the workers who test it may do so as union members.
Three ZeniMax employees said that while helping to make video games was a job they had once dreamed of, their Q.A. roles had taken a toll.
Victoria Banos, who has worked at one of the companyâs studios in Maryland for over four years, said many of her co-workers endured a ritual known as âcrunchâ a few times each year. It involves working shifts longer than 10 hours during the week and several hours on Saturday, sometimes for weeks in a row, to ensure that a game works properly before the company releases it.
âYouâre expected to drop whatever you have going on in your life and work whenever they need you to,â said Ms. Banos, who works on The Elder Scrolls Online. She added that ZeniMax had recently made these overtime hours voluntary, but that many employees still felt pressure to work them.
She estimated that her hourly wage of $25.50 left her tens of thousands of dollars below what she would earn annually if she performed a similar job at a different kind of software company â like one that makes financial or security software.
Other gaming industry Q.A. testers have echoed these points, citing crunch as a continuing problem and arguing that the industry gets away with paying them less because of the allure of its products and the idea that they should be happy to earn an income playing games. Workers say the mind-numbing process of repeatedly testing specific actions for glitches is far different from playing a game for fun.
Some ZeniMax workers also said they preferred more liberal policies on working from home, and they complained that the companyâs method of allocating training opportunities, additional responsibility and promotions was often arbitrary or opaque. They said they hoped a union would help create more transparent policies.
AndrĂ©s VĂĄzquez, who has been based at a ZeniMax studio in the Dallas area for more than seven years, said he had yet to be promoted to the next job level, senior Q.A. tester, even though some co-workers who joined the company around the same time had been promoted beyond that level. Whenever he has raised the issue with managers or human resources officials, he said, âI get corporate lip service.â
The Microsoft spokeswoman said the company was talking to employees to ensure that they were not taking on too much work, but she did not comment on the other concerns.
Still, the workers praised Microsoft for following through on its promise of neutrality. Unlike workers at Starbucks and Amazon, they say, they have not been summoned to meetings in which supervisors seek to dissuade them from unionizing, and they do not feel that the company has retaliated against them for trying to form a union. (Starbucks and Amazon have denied accusations of retaliation.)
âItâs been an incredible weight lifted off our shoulders,â said Autumn Mitchell, another Q.A. employee based in Maryland, who has worked on Starfield, the forthcoming game.
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When I first read âroyalties to the witchâ, I immediately thought Sony. lol. But then I realized who you were talking about. You could always buy a used copy or something which avoids that issue for you. For me, im not a Harry Potter fan at all. Never read a book or watched any movie and will never do either but the game looks freaking great. Iâm day one and ready to jump into that world and kinda want a âmagicâ game to play and I do believe that Hogwarts Legacy will be better than Forspoken.
Iâm day one for REmake4. REmake2 was $10 a week or so ago. You should really play it. In my opinion, itâs as of now, the standard in which all remakes should be judged.
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I believe that raising their games to $70 was the one decision that has an alternative - Game Pass. Console wise, Microsoft is doing good but still, raising prices would be bad for one simple reason - it would decrease sales and be harder to get people into Xbox who arenât already. I do believe that the consoles will stay as is though.
Game Pass wise, I can see Ultimate going to $20 but I donât think the $10 tier gets increased until next generation.
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Not able to the read full article. But this sounds great and I hope they push through. If this acquisition unintentionally brings about better industry employment then thatâs a big win.
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Agree. The $70 was the lesser of the three evils. Console price increase is gonna look very bad. Game Pass increase is also not gonna look good, but they could do that indirectly by introducing a new tier or as you said Ultimate for $20 but it should also have some more benefits as a result.
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i added the text
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With the games being higher and higher in terms of quantity and a lot of AAA 1st party games incoming from 2023 onwards of course it makes sense to raise the Game Pass price. I donât see how after 2 years a price raise in games and hardware makes sense though.
So what youâre saying is that MS doesnât make money at 70 euros and they have to raise the price to 80, if this is the case why could I bought a next-gen only, two months old release like Deathloop 10 days ago at 24 euros? instead of charging 10 euros more they could keep their prices at a certain level without dropping prices at 60 or 70% off after 6-8 months or 2 months in the case of Deathloop. Wouldnât that be a better alternative for them if they wanted to make more money?
Sky high inflation hits the corporations and us, guess who am I going to predict could easily take the loss.
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Does dead space have xbox marketing? it looks like they were playing it on an xbox based on button prompts or maybe a pc with an xbox controller.
Hardware price raise is gonna be bad, no question. But I think youâre the first Iâve seen think itâs better to raise Game Pass than Game prices.
All the footage so far is from the PC version (they said so in the vidocs IIRC) so this is probably why you see Xbox controller prompts.
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Havenât opened my copy yet. It sounds like I was right to hold off playing a bit longer.
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Majority of game sales occur in the first few weeks of release, so they capture the enthusiastic audience thatâs willing to play full price for day one and while the game is new. After that sales will plummet and so they do those deep discounts later on
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I think it makes more sense yeah, is it weird to say that instead of paying 13 euros for access to 350 games a month you will pay 15-16e makes more sense than raising 10 euros more for every 1st party game? do you really think that having 5-6 1st party AAA games in the future in addition to all the 3rd party stuff wonât raise the prices of the service?
But this is why the sales occur in the first few weeks of release, because most people expect to buy the games at 20 euros instead of 70 after a few months. Forza Horizon games are a good example of the opposite though, they never reach bomba levels of discounts but they still sell really really well and have great legs. All this price raise does is fuck over the enthusiasts which will most likely result in more people waiting for a sale so I donât see how thatâs good for the retail/digital market in the long term.
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GP is what differentiates themselves from everyone else, itâs also one of their main focuses
It makes far more sense to raise game prices so that they are in line with what everyone else is doing than raise the price of what is essentially their killer app
Doing it this way means they are only charging what everyone else is while also makes their subscription service look more appealing, itâs not a good thing they are raising those prices but people arenât going to bat an eye now that itâs become the norm
I guarantee if they raised their GP prices but kept game prices the same youâd have a shit load more people pissed about this decision online than vice versa
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