Nintendo has the worst hardware, but consistently delivers a small number of really great games you can't play anywhere else. Any game you can play on a Xbox you could also play on a real PC and have a vastly better experience and far more utility. Xbox is just a shitty, ad infested, crippled gaming PC. Playstation is heading in that direction as they lose more exclusives, but at least their hardware is better than Microsoft's so the games look/play better.
Microsoft might as well give up and just sell a bunch of low-mid range gaming PCs in console shaped cases, running windows, ship them with controllers and just brand them as Xboxes. At least for now. Eventually Microsoft wants games as a service, where you buy a dumb terminal/cheap thin client and they stream games you pay excessively high prices for but never actually own to your screen.
bought an xbox series x + gamepass at the start of covid lockdowns. been playing since. before that i hadn't played video games in like a decade. maybe there aren't a lot of people in my category but to me gamepass + xbox is the closest thing to netflix for games. series x brought some nice things like quick resume which is fantastic for someone who only can dedicate a little time per day on gaming. for people who are not hardcore gamers it really ticks a lot of boxes.
I can only see gamepass being a good thing for the most casual gamers. It hurts developers and gamers alike. It's basically the ultimate DRM for games. You never own your games. You have to beg a company for their permission to play them (revocable at any time, for any reason). The games can be censored or modified without notice. Games can be removed and made unplayable at any time without notice. Prices to access whatever games they do allow you to access can increase at any time. It gives them yet another way to force ads on you. They have an endless number of ways to enshittify the service to pressure you to subscribe to higher tiers at higher prices. I certainly don't want to think about how I'm running up a meter while I play or have to worry if I have enough "gaming minutes" left this month or if I'll get cut off. That's just the issues with gamepass. Console gaming in general involves a growing list of compromises.
Most of those same arguments can be made for Netflix, but it's a lot less expensive to buy a DVD or Bluray to get around that restriction for the shows that matter to you. I think most people who are serious about movies have some kind of collection of physical media.
I know that leveraging that kind of control over what games people are allowed to play and keeping their hands in players wallet at all times pulling out cash at regular intervals forever is where Microsoft wants things to go for everyone, but it'll feel like a massive loss as someone who loves games and enjoys the fact that when the mood strikes me I can pull out my PS1 and replay Symphony of the Night or even my old Atari 2600 and play a game of Night Driver or Riddle of the Sphinx. As long as the hardware holds up I can enjoy my old games or loan them out to friends and family (props to old hardware by the way, most of my old consoles including both the Atari and the PS1 are still working fine while I'm already on my third PS5 controller).
I'm with you on the quick resume feature though. The PS5 actually had that when I got it, and it was handy, but they removed it in an update for some reason. I'm guessing it was either breaking saves or it took more effort to keep working with new titles than they wanted to expend.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
Nintendo has the worst hardware, but consistently delivers a small number of really great games you can't play anywhere else. Any game you can play on a Xbox you could also play on a real PC and have a vastly better experience and far more utility. Xbox is just a shitty, ad infested, crippled gaming PC. Playstation is heading in that direction as they lose more exclusives, but at least their hardware is better than Microsoft's so the games look/play better.
Microsoft might as well give up and just sell a bunch of low-mid range gaming PCs in console shaped cases, running windows, ship them with controllers and just brand them as Xboxes. At least for now. Eventually Microsoft wants games as a service, where you buy a dumb terminal/cheap thin client and they stream games you pay excessively high prices for but never actually own to your screen.
kyriakos · · focus · HN ↗
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
Most of those same arguments can be made for Netflix, but it's a lot less expensive to buy a DVD or Bluray to get around that restriction for the shows that matter to you. I think most people who are serious about movies have some kind of collection of physical media.
I know that leveraging that kind of control over what games people are allowed to play and keeping their hands in players wallet at all times pulling out cash at regular intervals forever is where Microsoft wants things to go for everyone, but it'll feel like a massive loss as someone who loves games and enjoys the fact that when the mood strikes me I can pull out my PS1 and replay Symphony of the Night or even my old Atari 2600 and play a game of Night Driver or Riddle of the Sphinx. As long as the hardware holds up I can enjoy my old games or loan them out to friends and family (props to old hardware by the way, most of my old consoles including both the Atari and the PS1 are still working fine while I'm already on my third PS5 controller).
I'm with you on the quick resume feature though. The PS5 actually had that when I got it, and it was handy, but they removed it in an update for some reason. I'm guessing it was either breaking saves or it took more effort to keep working with new titles than they wanted to expend.