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.
every platform is also a community. a network of players, like a neighborhood, or a bar. Your friends & acquaintances are there. The whole is more than the sum of it's parts. It's more than just hardware, or exclusives.
I switched from PS to Xbox a few years ago, because my family and friends were playing there.
There's also some nice technical benefits, but compared to my friends, who cares?
It'd be nice if companies were forced to allow interoperability, at least optionally, and had good standards for making that easier on developers no matter what platform or title. There are some valid reasons to segregate PC and console gamers (depending on the game), but that kind of social network lock-in is mainly an artificial constraint which is anti-competitive and ultimately anti-consumer. Those are the kinds of barriers the internet should be removing from our lives.
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.
tonymet · · focus · HN ↗
I switched from PS to Xbox a few years ago, because my family and friends were playing there.
There's also some nice technical benefits, but compared to my friends, who cares?
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
tonymet · · focus · HN ↗
An open platform becomes a slum and an exclusive one opens up. Friendster MySpace Facebook instagram and so on
If you allow everyone you lose the community by definition.