Has Xbox lost the console wars? | Hacker News Reader

Has Xbox lost the console wars?

theverge.com

126 pointsmfiguiere471 comments

The console war argument is around such an outdated definition of the gaming industry. Self-identifying gamers have had their head in the sand for over a decade now.

Since 2010 mobile gaming has eclipsed revenue of both console and PC gaming _combined_.

Also since 2010, console revenue has stagnated while PC revenue has continued to grow.

This is the landscape to evaluate the different gaming brands. Xboxes are nothing more than a user-friendly gaming PC brand. The total addressable market for Microsoft is much larger than what Sony could hope for. Sony is in the worst bind long-term, trapped in consoles without any leg up in PC or mobile. They invested in VR instead which never became a strong category. In terms of revenue, VR is barely competing with Arcades.

If you had to stack rank gaming devices, iOS would be winning the console wars, followed by Android. In a distant third would be PlayStation, and then Microsoft and Nintendo neck in neck.

If you look at it by company, Tencent would be at the top, then Sony, then Microsoft and Nintendo.

Microsoft is definitely in -- at best -- third place no matter how you count it. The FTC trying to restrict the conversation to an era of console war that expired over 13 years ago shows they have no business trying to regulate this space.

The revenues in mobile gaming overwhelmingly come from predatory in-app item sales. They aren't in the business of selling games to people who like playing games, they're in the business of psychologically exploiting people who are vulnerable to compulsive behaviours. The industry isn't shy about this - they openly brag about their pursuit of "whales" and their use of psychological manipulation. Frankly, everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.

https://www.blog.udonis.co/mobile-marketing/mobile-games/mob...

Slightly tangential, but I've been watching Duolingo go down this road for the past few years since one of Zynga's product people became their head of product. Duolingo was never the best way to learn a language, but it's increasingly become essentially useless as an educational tool as they push for more and more revenue from their "whales". Every aspect of the experience is shaped towards manipulating people into "engaging" for longer and keeping them coming back, ostensibly to make learning more effective but in practice at the expense of learning.

This blog post by their head of product is a great example of the problems in the industry—he talks gleefully about all the manipulative techniques he pulled in from Zynga, and doesn't seem to have any clue that he's sacrificed the mission in pursuit of relentless growth.

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-us...

>The team consisted of an engineering manager, an engineer, a designer, an APM, and me.

I feel for that lone engineer with 4 people breathing down the back of his neck.

Anecdotal- but my daughter wanted to use duolingo to "learn a new language". I said, sure... but no in-app purchases of any kind. After a couple of weeks, she no longer uses it. It turns out that you need to pay for gems and stuff, in order to continue practicing. Once you're out of hearts and gems, you can't do anything until it refreshes.

It's kind of sad, that in the pursuit of cashing in on their "whales" that they've essentially neutered it as an educational app.

Mobile games are a pastiche.

The viewport is a small number of inches, the types of games are wholly different, the controls are awful.

These are not only different consumer segments, they're wholly different products. The FTC is making the right call.

If the category includes all mobile games, it should include video gambling machines as well.

Blurring the line between gambling and gaming.

Just because people make decisions that you wouldn't make yourself doesn't mean that they're stupid and emotionally manipulated.

I strongly disagree, mobile and console/PC gaming are not competing. It’s a completely different audience, different games and so on. I’d consider them mostly separate markets. The Switch tried to bridge the gap but really didn’t.

> The Switch tried to bridge the gap but really didn’t.

What would the Switch have needed to accomplish to bridge the gap to mobile? Sell 1 billion units?

I think the op is right.

Try to sell mobile games to "console/pc gamers", you just don't sell them, different market.

From a personal perspective, all my friends who play videogames avoid mobile like plague.

The Switch didn't really try to bridge the gap, the games are different. There are no Tears of the Kingdom or Mario Odyssey on phones.

They all compete with each other since they're all competing for your time, there's just specializations that make them more attractive in certain situations. If I'm at home poking at a gem game at my phone, that's still taking up time that could be spent on a console. If I'm out and about, it's time that could be spent on a Switch or Steam Deck, or possibly cloud streaming.

There's plenty of overlap between all of them. Hell, most mobile games are mostly adaptions of what are usually called casual or what used to be called "desktop" games on PC. Genshin Impact is an open world RPG, there's CoD Mobile and Mario Kart too.

There's a habit to separate various kinds of media in it's own little lockboxes and it's completely wrongheaded and old fashioned in an age where tech is consolidating so rapidly.

I think it’s important to note the revenue coming from mobile gamers (generally) isn’t the same revenue that Sony/MS are after here. Very different customer segments with very different demographics. You’re right though, it seems that the mobile sector is growing and the console one has stagnated.

I imagine contingent of people who spend big bucks on mobile games _probably_ wouldn’t be spending that money on AAA PS5 games otherwise.

I think it’s important to note the revenue coming from mobile gamers (generally) isn’t the same revenue that Sony/MS are after here.

Just curious if you are making that comment after reading the article, or is your general opinion? Because one of the big points of the article is that Phil Spencer said they tried to by Zynga, and the major reason they want Activision is for the mobile assets. This is Spencer’s testimony quoted in the article:

The deal, as we’ve talked about, expands our business to the mobile platform... the existing business that we run today as the third-place console business is a very difficult business to drive profit and margin. So the opportunity for us to expand in a meaningful way onto mobile, the world’s largest gaming platform, was really both a strategic and business opportunity behind this deal.

It can vary. Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail show that there certainly is a console-esque audience you can target, even with mobile style monetization. Their success does make me wonder why the West hasn't attempted something similar since the days of Infinity Blade.

At this point though the PC gaming market is indistinguishable from Xbox which is just a closed down Windows PC with DRM. AFAIK all Xbox games are supposed to be available on PC anyway?

This is like comparing bikes, cars and motorcycles, saying "the car has won, motorcycle sales have stagnated - get your head out the sand". You cannot just change "Console" to "Computing device that can run a game" because you think it is a better way to look at it. You also count Microsoft as PC + Xbox but not Sony as PlayStation + Phones + TVs etc. all of which has apps and games, making this an extremely arbitrary definition.

There's no doubt that a Console is far from the same experience most people have with a PC or a phone. Different, not better. Why do you think most that identify as a gamer own both a Console, a phone and a PC if it is basically the same experience? I own one of each for the exact same reason I own both a car a motorcycle and a bike: They are not at all the same or even related outside having wheels.

So how does one find high quality games on mobile? There's so much crap out there on the Play store, it's really hard to pick games. I don't care much about the genre or the price, I just want to play some high quality, low bullshit (no ads, spam, loot boxes, etc.) games.

Is there a website that curates games?

Edit: turned this into an Ask HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36468335

You buy a steam deck.

It's kinda a joke, but when I asked myself the question "can I play anything interesting on mobile", the answer I found was that one.

Check out some free software titles on F-Droid. Shattered Pixel Dungeon and Minetest are a couple examples. Anuto TD is also a decent low-budget-feeling tower defense game (don't set your expectations too high).

Apple Arcade?

Maybe Microsoft could compete by building something people would pay money for, rather than just buying their way to a dominant position?

I agree with this sentiment. As much as it lags the competition, it would be doing even worse had they not marketed the ever loving crap out of their flagship Halo. Remember I Love Bees?

I guess the underlying question is, are any of the consoles worth buying? I feel like they aren't.

"Self-identified gamers" and those extremely profitable mobile games have virtually nothing to do with each other, the commonality of 'games' is superficial. There's basically no overlap between the consumers of these markets.

You might as well compare console games to casino games.

> without any leg up in PC or mobile

Sony has a stable of desired exclusives (and even exclusive series). Microsoft Gaming doesn’t earn a dime on PC hardware sales. Hell, even the Windows group doesn’t earn more than a couple of bucks on a Windows sale.

It’s Microsoft Gaming that is in a bind here.

I'm evaluating them ultimately from their technical prospects and on a long timeline. Sony has a bright future as a content curator no doubt. It's their hardware business I think looks shaky.

Consider a future where TV sales dwindle, cannibalized by personal screens like tablets and headsets. Or imagine smart tv platforms clamping down on media that they don't get a cut of (anything over that 'obsolete' HDMI port).

Those trends are slowly underway, and part of the reason the console segment is not just stagnating, but shrinking. Sony has a big piece of a shrinking segment and no easy way to move to the other gaming segments. Microsoft on the other hand has 3 generations of games that run on Windows, which is still the dominant OS in a growing gaming segment.

If we could define the console wars as: who will escape the console segment before it disappears? That is the lens by which I say Sony has the worse hand. They're more likely to become an Atari or Sega at this point than Microsoft is.

I don't understand why smartphone games are relevant in determining whether or not the FTC is right to have concerns over competition in the console gaming industry.

Consoles games aren't the same products than smartphones games. Only xbox, playstation and the nintendo consoles are in the same market (edit: and PC)

I do agree console war is outdated and not relevant anymore but it doesn't mean the FTC is wrong. Of course they may be wrong for an entire different set of reasons.

Ypu are writing as if only the winners were making money. What is not true.

Consoles, handhelds and PCs can still make a ton of money even when studios are not centralized.

Unfortunately I think you are probably right. One thing I don't get though, why is either ms or Sony still in the console business. It's extremely risky, why bother when real money is mobile?

Edit: is pc gaming really growing? That surprises me, I used to really be in to pc games (late 90s). GPUs are ridiculously expensive, is it really big now? It was niche in my day

I don't consider most of mobile gaming 'the gaming industry' - superficially it's the gaming industry but it's some other thing. That's my own opinion and I guess I'm outdated but I never 'game' on mobile.

I don't think mobile games have anything to do with it. It would be more accurate to say mobile applications.

Epic vs. Apple reported that 70% of Apple's revenue on the App store came from mobile games: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/apple-vs-epic-70percent-of-a...

It really is that big a market.

> Xboxes are nothing more than a user-friendly gaming PC brand

Also, manufacturer- and publisher-friendly, given the heavy restrictions on the platform. It's bad for preservation that the Xbox One hasn't significantly been cracked yet.

Sony exclusives on the PS5 and a dearth of quality exclusives on Microsoft's side definitely have a lot to do with this but I wonder whether the Xbox Series S/X distinction contributed as well.

The current console generation came with a fairly large price hike and Microsoft responded by also releasing a more affordable but less powerful model.

The problem is that a non-technical consumer can go out and purchase a PS5 safe in the knowledge that they're getting the same gaming experience as anyone else that owns a PS5. Someone considering an Xbox now has to choose between the series S and X.

They now need to compare specifications, figure out which one is more powerful and worry whether the console will be able to deliver decent fidelity and performance in newer games.

On another note, it'd be nice to see exclusivity agreements die entirely. Microsoft has always been fairly good at making their titles available on PC and Sony is moving in that direction but still makes heavy use of timed exclusives.

Xbox ultimately made the same mistake as Nintendo with the Wii / Wii U.

Just give the console a number. And. Increment.

That's it. You can still have Pro / Slim / whatever models, but I have no idea why Nintendo and Microsoft both willingly threw away the easiest marketing strategy there is: your kid has the 4 and the 5 just came out. 5 is larger than 4 therefore the kid knows what to ask, regardless of age. The parent also knows what to buy because 5 is larger than 4.

Nothing convinces me that this isn't the reason why new Playstation models sell like crazy before any decent games are out. 4 was larger than 3 and 5 is larger than 4. That's it.

Nintendo got out of it by starting a new line of consoles with the Switch, but Microsoft's marketing just keeps giving this one away to Sony for free. It's unbelievable.

I don't think Xbox made the same mistake. Because while the naming is pretty bad, people do actually know it's the latest generation console.

The Wii U on the other hand completely flew under most people's radar. People were over the Wii and then Nintendo releases the Wii U. Most people thought it was an addon tablet because that's all they kept showing, just Wii remotes and the tablet.

I just had to look up the difference between the series X and S. It wasn't obvious to me. It's not even obvious which is the more powerful model, there's no mention anywhere of what X and S stand for. Is 'S' Small or Super? And I guess the 'X' is for eXperience.

Compare that to PlayStation 4/PlayStation 4 Pro/PlayStation 5 (and yeah, I'm not going to argue that 'pro' isn't a stupid designation for a slightly-more-powerful-than-before console), but it's at least obvious where they sit in the lineup.

AFAIK it’s X, S, Series X, Series S.

AFAIK, S is “no physical media”

AFAIK, “series” means “fancy”

I’ve only ever purchased XBox consoles and currently rock an XBox One.

Lemme fix your marketing, XBox: call the “no drive” ones “cloud” or “online” or “vapor” or whatever.

Call your next one 9006 so it is simultaneously “over 9000”, and puts you back in the semver race with PlayStation. /s

And not to be confused with the previous generation Xbox One X.

You didn't play your professional games on your PlayStation Pro? Office Simulator 2017, Mortgage Agreement 8, Car Repayments Xtreme?

I do not believe that you tried to figure out which was more powerful and it was not immediately obvious. MS even made a page comparing them and highlights the differences: one can do 12 teraflops the other 4. One does 4k the other only 1440p.

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/consoles/compare

Yes the names are not as easy to compare as PS5 vs PS4, but upon cursory investigation it's blatantly obvious that the X is more powerful than the S.

But people purchasing an xbox will see the price difference between the models and immediately understand what they should buy.

X > S

Seems pretty intuitive..

> Because while the naming is pretty bad, people do actually know it's the latest generation console.

Do they? I don't. At this moment, I couldn't tell you the name of Microsoft's newest console, because their naming convention is so convoluted. Meanwhile, I can tell from a glance that the PS5 is newer than the PS4.

Granted, I'm not a console gamer, but neither are (most) parents buying consoles for their children.

"Ehh, people will know what we're talking about" seems like a haphazard marketing strategy.

I work in the industry and mostly play on consoles (admittedly Sony’s) and even I’m not sure at first glance. I have to stop and think a bit every time.

I used to own Xbox consoles but the last few generations have only had Playstation (and PC). I would have absolutely no idea which of the last 3 (4?) released Xbox versions came before which. The naming is horrible. The X is top dog with S below? What was the last generation even called? Where there 1 or 2? I have no idea even though I have used it (them?) many times at a friend's house.

Edit: I googled it. Xbox X and the old one is Xbox One X? That is simply hilariously stupid.

It's not just stupid, it's demeaning to the audience. Be like Intel/BMW and give your models numbers that roughly correlate to the performance/size/features.

Sony/Apple/Samsung have this one solid - just release the next semver and market the hell out of it. Don't make me confused when I'm thinking about paying you money. Note: even the ones that aren't "on the version treadmill" do poorly: "iPhone mini" vs. "Samsung Fold" etc are niche products and exist to essentially sell the mainline item.

I honestly though the Wii U was an accessory until years after it was released, and at this moment now I couldn't tell you whether an Xbox X or S is better. Is S better because 'S-tier' is the top rating, or is X better because 'X'box? Either way could make sense, you can't intuitively divine this.

It wasn't very long ago that kids were struggling to get their parents to stop calling xbox and playstation "the nintendo". Young parents today are probably comfortable with the brands of xbox and playstation, having grown up with those brands, but expecting them to be up-to-date on the latest models isn't smart. There can be a considerable gap in understanding between those who are tuned into gaming matters and those who might be making the actual purchase. The value of simple branding should not be underestimated.

I am somehow interested to read the news about this ans I still dont know which Xbox is the latest.

If they want me to check on google, they failed.

Also it is funny that you attack people on.. hacker news for not understanding the versioning.

It just proves that microsoft does it in a bad way.

I have no idea which is more modern. I suspect most people who don't console game are in the same boat. This feels exactly like Wii/WiiU to me.

I mean... Xbox, Xbox S Series, Xbox 1, Xbox X, Xbox 360... it's totally obvious, isn't it?

Haha I genuinely have no idea how to sort that list, except that it starts with the Xbox.

This seems like it assumes the Xbox's target audience are kids, which doesn't automatically follow. It's like thinking rock music is greasy kids' stuff: Update your mental model. The MTV generation has grandkids now.

In short, Ford doesn't release the Ford 5 because it knows the Ford 4 is old news. (Also, get a horse, ya durn kids.)

Anyway, research:

https://www.windowscentral.com/heres-some-interesting-stats-...

> Most Xbox One gamers reside in the 25- to 34-year-old bracket, followed closely by the 35- to 44-year-old bracket.

> 56 percent of Xbox One owners live with a married spouse or partner, 10 percent live alone, and 23 percent live with their parents.

> Many Xbox One owners have an annual income of around $75,000.

I'd say I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac, but both of those references are outdated these days.

These statistics just prove the parent comments point.

No, they don't. They prove the exact opposite.

Isn't the parent the "owner" even if they never use it and it's for the kid?

Do you have evidence that's what's happening?

Sure they do, Ford released the 2022 Fords the year after the 2021s.

Is the Ford Focus newer than the Ford Escort?

Nintendo wants to communicate in their platform what they are targeting, so it will usually make sense. In comparison, Xbox tried, but always failed with clearly communicating their names.

I don't think non-numbers are a bad naming scheme, just the simplest. It means its easiest to keep up with and archive, but it can also mean it's hard to tell audiences what fancy new features you're marketing. If the Wii was the Nintendo 5 and the Switch was the Nintendo 7 I'm not sure if it would be quite as snappy in consumer minds.

The difference is that Microsoft released consoles with very similar purposes and names in the same generation.

Labelling the Switch as a new version of the Wii doesn't make much sense because it occupies a different niche, comparable to PlayStation/2/3/4/5 vs the PlayStation Portable.

PlayStation's addition of "Pro" in it's own naming scheme clearly distinguishes the more powerful console. Delaying the release of the pro model until later in the generation's lifecycle also helps reduce friction.

> 5 is larger than 4 therefore the kid knows what to ask, regardless of age.

I don't know a single kid that would not know which models are current gen and which are better or worse. Argument about non technical parents is valid but any kid today will know which Xbox to get and will tell their parents. Kids these days know much more stuff than you seem to think, they spent 1/3-1/4 of their lives on the internet. My 11-12yo nephews built PCs just following youtube guides, they do video montages of their Fortnite games to put on youtube and almost every single friend of theirs is similarly familiar with current tech.

Xbox having lower numbers is purely fault of PS dominating the market over last decade, people will continue buying it cause they trust Sony to deliver exclusives and they have existing game libraries. I converted two Sony fanboys to Xbox with Game Pass and they both love it. Noone these days buys a PS "because they are confused with Xbox naming", 5 minutes of googling answers any questions. The only people who might really have an issue with this are boomers+ who are not even going to buy a console for themselves cause "games are for kids and a waste of time".

The Xbox line goes: Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X.

The kids may know and understand this, but parents may not. If you go to a store today, you will only find the latter two, and you won’t have an issue picking the one your kid asked for (i.e. the X). But when both generations were on sale, the parent might end up buying "One X" instead of "Series X" because it’s cheaper, or buying "360" instead of "One" because it’s clearly bigger (by 359 no less).

15+ years ago when I worked at Target's electronic dept over the summer, it was hard enough for parents to track whether the PS2 or PS3 was the latest one much less where a "Wii" or "360" fit into that.

The Xbox line-up is just comical. I walk through any gaming department and see an "S", "X", or sometimes even both "S" and "X" on Xbox games. If it was just "Xbox 7" and "Xbox 8", you'd at least have some idea of what's going on.

It's like someone who knows nothing about cars trying to figure out SE vs LE vs CE vs XLE trimmings when looking at accessories.

> Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X.

Wtf, there are two different S's and two different X's? I thought 'Xbox One _' and 'Xbox Series _' referred to the same products.

This is coming from the company that in an attempt to count to 10 (and only ten) went "1, 2, 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, 11".

You have to go younger. My son is in first grade, he knows we have a PS bit he couldn't tell you what number. His friend is in kindergarten and loves his Xbox, and I'll wager a box of donuts he couldn't tell me what Xbox he has.

If he doesn't know, no way grandma and grandpa are going to be able to get him a birthday present.

Nintendo has always done this though.

NES -> SNES

GB -> GBC, GBA, GBA SP

DS -> DSi, 3DS, 2DS

I’m unfamiliar with Nintendo’s product line and this example proves the point. If I were buying a DS for a kid I’d have no idea which one is the best.

Every DS could play the same games at the same level of quality. So, unless a kid really wanted a specific console feature, it didn't really matter if you bought the wrong one.

Xbox is the opposite, if you get the cheaper console games will look worse and/or run at lower FPS. It only has one option for internal storage, leaving you with ~360gb after accounting for the OS, five or six modern games can fill that pretty easily. Official external storage costs about as much as the console itself.

For many people the trade-offs won't matter but it does make the PlayStation a much simpler choice if you're looking for a console for a kid that doesn't already favour one or the other.

> Just give the console a number. And. Increment.

Microsoft has never been able to do that.

If Xbox is dying, Game Pass killed it, not the (admittedly stupid) naming conventions.

Everyone subscribes to Game Pass, but nobody buys many games.

That would be a good thing for Microsoft. I don't think the data supports this. A quick google search showed that there are 25 million Game Pass subscribers and 125 million people in the Xbox ecosystem. There are also still plenty of games that aren't included in Game Pass.

Good for Microsoft. Bad for developers. And a console is nothing without the games.

In this context it sounds like the war is either not lost, or, maybe, there is no war and both ecosystems are thriving in different ways.

Kind of like how Apple hasn't "lost" any "laptop war"

It doesn't help at all that Microsoft's usual brand insanity infected this product. So whereas Sony have made the Playstation, the Playstation 2, the Playstation 3, the Playstation 4 and now the Playstation 5 - Microsoft names products based on picking a handful of "hot" words with no specific meaning, and so like a modern CPU you need to go read a detailed specification document to even figure out what you're actually buying.

Do we need Windows Azure .NET Live? No idea, maybe it's similar to Microsoft Active Core X except targetted at a different market? Here's a blurb telling us it's "For the smart professional", presumably as opposed to products which are only for dumb amateurs ?

Microsoft couldn't follow the 1,2,3... naming convention because the first Xbox came out when the PS2 was out. They'd always seem one behind if they released the Xbox 2 when the PS3 released.

Windows 9 would like a word.

Windows XP and Windows ME have joined your party. They corroborate your story, but seem to be carrying a text only version that claims to be Windows 1.0, who asks in a wheeze where 2 is. Windows 2.1 hides their face and pretends not to notice as they walk away, but they awkwardly trip over Office 365 in the process.

The funny thing is even as a consumer that understands all the confusing branding and power differences, I would still buy the cheaper system if it had compelling games to play compared to the PS5…it just doesn’t, and when it comes to first party titles everything Microsoft puts out is mid at best (Halo), or downright awful (Redfall). I also own a Nintendo Switch and I think I own more games on that than any other console I’ve owned in my entire life so raw power is t an issue for me. I want to want to buy an Xbox but the most important thing (games) just is t there. I may still buy one when Starfield comes out because it would be more expensive to build a gaming PC to play it (mac user), but I’m waiting to find out from reviews if it lives up to the (admittedly impressive from what they’ve shown) stuff they’ve shown off recently.

You remind me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k which is a couple of decades old now.

Funny thing is, that video was made within Microsoft. It's fascinating that everyone can be aware of the problem, but they still can't steer the behemoth.

I'm surprised that with all the money that MSFT has that they can't just put 1 or 2 Bm into a few few AAA titles / or just create them to drive the experience.

On the hardware note, I would not discount the impact that covid chip shortage had on the ability for MSFT to pivot on this problem.

Microsoft put over 200 mil in Halo 5, only to promptly abandon it. Needless to say, Microsoft has not been a great steward for first party games. Ninja Theory has been making Hellblade for god knows how many years, Redfall, Sea of Thieves... All massive investments with very little return.

Yeah I think the problem is MSFT being directly involved in the game. I think the better model for them would be if they just sprinkled money on studio's with ambition. It's like the movie business, there'll be misses, but there'll be big wins.

IIRC they weren't directly involved in Redfall's development. They may have pushed for it to release when it did though.

HiFi Rush is exactly what you describe. Published by Bethesda but developed by a smaller studio. Very well received without requiring a huge investment.

Do non-technical consumers care though? The Series S is an amazing little machine, and it's the cheapest. I think that's all most non-technical or casual gamers really want.

I'm pretty technical but I'm definitely a casual gamer, the Series S serves me perfectly.

I don't think the Series S is selling that particularly well. Back when the consoles were in very short supply in 2021-2022, the Series S and the Switch were the only consoles advertised in electronics stores print ads – the PS5 and Xbox Series X would be long sold out before the print ads would even get to circulation.

Seems to me it's more like Xbox has been redefined into something much bigger, now it's an umbrella of many big name game companies across all three platforms. They've also gained a lot more relevance on PC side of things, and their GamePass is very popular. They've finally embraced their Windows moat, and built a lot on top of it in the last few years.

Xbox as we know it (the console) became irrelevant, but that'd be assumed by everyone incl. Microsoft the moment they promised to bring Xbox exclusives to PC. IMO that was the first visible point of them committing to change course for Xbox. If anything, nowadays Sony seems to be pigeonholed to their own world, while Microsoft seems to be thriving.

From reading the article it also seems like Microsoft is well aware that the console isn't necessarily the point, the games are. Sure, they are in the number three spot for consoles, but doing fairly well for the Xbox division as a whole.

This might also be a case of Xbox having a different user segment, as compared to the PlayStation, and certainly compared to Nintendos offerings. I might be completely wrong, but PlayStation seems very much like the console for people who want large worlds, larger than life scenaries and single player games. Xbox is for when you want to play with friends, either in person of online.

"Xbox is for when you want to play with friends, either in person of online."

What new games can you actually play in person, like splitscreen? Seems most don't allow it, or at best it's 2 player.

The social console is the Switch. You can have split screen. Or local wifi where one console is the host. I used to play D3 with workmates this way. You also get 2 controllers with the base console.

Yeah, my friends play switch when we get together. Pretty much just Mario kart and smash. Any other suggestions?

On Xbox we play Castle Crashers.

FIFA 23 supports it I believe, so by extension, most of EAs sports-ball-games, but that's still only two player, but more wouldn't make sense anyway.

Might as well drop the console then or at least drop the console business model. However I have a feeling they won’t.

Consoles make money via licensing - each game sold they get a cut. Is MS willing to give that up? If no then they are still in the console business - and Windows is an internal competitor; MS earns nothing when someone buys a game for Windows.

Eh then you’re just running a PC business?

I don’t know the statistics but I feel like that misses a huge market segment. Lots and lots of people just have laptops for school / work that won’t run AAA games. Moreover, lots of people want to game in their living room and, while I know they exist, I’ve never met anyone that hooks their PC up to their TV to do that. Doing so might not even cross the mind of less tech savvy people.

I really tried the whole Steam with big picture mode a few years ago. I had a 2080Ti and mostly ended up with micro stuttering in AAA titles, it took months of swapping out parts to finally get it halfway stable, then I discovered the power from that electrical socket was dirty. It was a nightmare. My PS5 just works, no fuss, no muss. Which I a real PC gamer would just tell me to “git gud” but I’m getting too old for this shit. I just want to relax and play games not tweak settings for hours before I play.

That’s me. Have built computers since I was a kid but have no interest in (or time to devote to) building a gaming rig. Whatever I paid for the xbox ($300 maybe?) was a bargain and well worth being able to play with friends on a Friday night and let my kids check out new games without needing to worry about specs. I’d just not be in the ecosystem otherwise.

They’re also attempting game streaming via Game Pass. I’ve got people who use that functionality frequently.

>MS earns nothing when someone buys a game for Windows.

They earn money from each Windows license though and gaming helps to keep Windows relevant against Linux and macOS, especially for younger people.

They’re trying the opposite, bringing the console model to PC. The consoles themselves are still necessary, since they’re the default hardware non-enthusiasts buy.

It always seems like the kind of gamers who are attracted to the XBox are better off with a PC. Like, if you are a dedicated gamer, maybe you have a gaming PC, a Switch, and a PS5, and that gives you pretty broad coverage / FOMO avoidance. What incremental gain is there from XBox? It seems like it would be better positioned as a PC that you can use on your big TV with less dicking around than attaching a full PC to a regular TV.

But in general I think Valve has beaten Microsoft to the console-ization of PC gaming with the Windows-less Steam Deck. Maybe the Steam Machine is ready for a comeback.

I switched from being a hardcore PC gamer to Xbox and haven't turned on my gaming PC in the 2 years since I got it.

The gain I get is how much easier it is to use. I'm fairly tech savvy, but Windows has been a curse and there've been too many times I've spent my intended gaming time troubleshooting Windows, or a game's display settings, or drivers etc.

Steam as software never felt great to me. I don't have the greatest eyes and I find it difficult to use. Xbox UI is just stupidly simple and intuitive.

I like that the Xbox gamepass experience is so streamlined I can sit down on a couch, turn on my controller, and that will turn the console and TV on and I can be playing a game in 10 seconds. On PC it just ain't even close.

I've had more bugs on the Xbox side than with Steam. Stuff like quick resume server issues where you have to launch the game, then backout to the dashboard, then quit the game, then launch again. I've also seen games get stuck in matchmaking without actually searching and with no way to back out.

The XBox is basically a mid range gaming pc with a better gaming oriented os.

No idea if PS5 has this, but XBox’s ability to suspend games and instantly start back in the game is indispensable for someone with a minimum of gaming time available!

Every gaming console has that functionality, though depending on the game it's better to exit and restart often. Memory leaks and all that, aside from bugs caused by long runtime.

I have a gaming PC, bought it beginning of the pandemic. I turn it on and things start trying to update and eight different game storefronts pop up and windows will reboot to install updates when I step away to go to the bathroom, whole thing is just a nightmare.

I vastly prefer my Xbox. I sit on the couch, power up near instantly, pick a game. Play my games. Everything’s works. The UX is just sooo much better.

I have had both PlayStation and Xbox consoles every generation since the inception of both and every generation I just find Xbox more inviting. Maybe it’s some form of dyslexia but I also have never internalized the PlayStations button labels. Every time it tells me to hit a shape I need to look at the controller.

Microsoft isn't in the business of selling you a box, they want you in their ecosystem. They'll be happy if you play on PC as long as you buy their games to play on it.

Only if one likes to mess with hardware configurations.

The main reasons why game studios love consoles, and the gamers as well, is the development and user experience of using them.

With nearly all of the Xbox games I’m interested in being on Windows too and PlayStation having both better exclusives and better genre variety, I have no idea why I’d want an Xbox.

The last time Xboxes were remotely interesting to me was with the 360. Every generation since has been dominated by unremarkable competitive FPS games.

I have a PS5 and Xbox Series S and Series X - the PS5 is just gathering dust, started up only now and then to play one of the few exclusives(last one being God of War.....like 6 months ago?) or Genshin Impact as it doesn't exist on Xbox. It's a brilliant system but the ability to pick up any Gampass Game and have the saves instantly synchronized with my gaming PC is just incredible. I can play something like Forza or Yakuza 0 on my gaming PC upstairs then go to the living room, pick up the controller and continue the same game on the Xbox - that's a complete gamechanger and what makes this console more useful(for me) than PS5.

I do similar with the upstairs/downstairs, except in the living room it’s another PC instead of an Xbox. It does Steam, GoG, etc in addition to Gamepass for a much wider variety of games. It was more expensive than an Xbox sure, but the greater game variety and flexibility is worth it.

My PS5 also hasn’t gotten a ton of usage playing PS5 games, but there are finally some interesting ones brewing now. It’s been nice as a “PS4 Ultimate” with backwards compatibility though.

The exclusives come to PC after a long time so if you are prepared to wait there is no need for Playstation.

I like gaming on the couch. All my friends are on either Xbox or PC and, seeing as I don’t want to game on a PC, Xbox is perfect. Quick resume, SSD, and enhanced backwards compatibility make the Series X the best console I’ve ever had. This definitely reads like an ad lol but figure I’d give you some insight into why people still buy Xbox.

Haha this is funny as it reads exactly like the checklist of why I bought a PS5 after playing PC games for the longest. Which like, we’re adults here and I don’t care what console you have, more power to you. I think we’re both comparing to PC more than anything here.

The first game I played after getting my PS5 was… Bloodborne. I’d tried it on PS4 then sold the PS4 as it offended my eyes how ugly the game was back in December 2020. Two years later when the PS5 finally became available where I could just walk into my local store and buy it, it looked very pretty on the new PS5 hardware once the market calmed down. Such a delightfully weird and creepy game.

I've never bought or owned an Xbox, but my friend has a One, bought new at roughly the same time I bought my PS4 new (2014). my PS4 sounds like a helicopter taking off and his One is almost silent. I remember roughly similar experiences for my PS3 and others' 360s. it seems that perhaps Microsoft is (or was) less expectant of you buying their Slim/XS/mini/etc model in 3 years time. no idea how true this still is though

> Every generation since has been dominated by unremarkable competitive FPS games.

PvE games are for unskilled gamers. PlayStation and Switch are the preferred platforms for unskilled gamers. PC is the preferred platform for skilled gamers who can afford a good PC. Xbox is the preferred platform for skilled gamers who are poor (Xbox controllers are better for shooters than PlayStation controllers).

By the time you’re 28 it’ll be impossible to be a ”skilled” gamer as your reaction times will start to slow down due to being a “senior gamer”. No amount of expensive gaming peripherals on PC or XBox can stop this.

Biology catches up fast, and it doesn’t matter what gaming hardware you’re using. I’d suggest chasing fun or develop competency in a longer term skill instead of working on your “skilled” gaming clout.

But what do I know, maybe I just need to git gud.

Oh man, don't let yourself be triggered by a Verge article.

For what it's worth though, the really skilled FPS players have always been on the PC side.

> skilled

Nerds. The word you’re looking for is nerds.

Most competitive shooter players, or rather, any genre, are absolute trash at the game.

I think so. Nobody I know has an Xbox, even though we all had Xbox 360s back in the day. But they all have PS5s because Sony has great exclusive games. I don't see why Microsoft shouldn't be able to buy Activision, exclusives would be very helpful for them becoming competitive. But I don't play many (any?) Activision games so it wouldn't really move the needle much for me.

It is interesting the US is trying to block the last place player in the market from growing, which is also the only US company in the market.

> I don't see why Microsoft shouldn't be able to buy Activision, exclusives would be very helpful for them becoming competitive.

Because acquisitions make markets less competitive, not more. There are a zillion US companies making games, and if the platform gatekeepers become an issue, then the US can force them to open up their platforms and quit their rent-seeking.

> Because acquisitions make markets less competitive, not more.

This is just simply not true as a blanket rule.

Also, I don't understand what you're saying. Activision is not in the console market, only Microsoft is. Buying Activision makes the console market more competitive because it makes Microsoft's console more compelling in that market, a market where they are floundering.

You could also look at the game market, which as you say has a zillion US companies making games, and Activision under Microsoft would have to continue to compete in that market.

How does this reduce competition, and in what market?

> This is just simply not true as a blanket rule.

It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.

> Buying Activision makes the console market more competitive

Why should the FTC care about the console market specifically rather than the gaming market in general?

> How does this reduce competition, and in what market?

The very notion of "console exclusives" reduces competition because it removes incentives to compete on hardware cost or quality and instead compete only on whatever IPs a company happens to own.

> It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.

It isn't, which is why the FTC often approves mergers.

> Why should the FTC care about the console market specifically rather than the gaming market in general?

They should consider both.

> The very notion of "console exclusives" reduces competition because it removes incentives to compete on hardware cost or quality and instead compete only on whatever IPs a company happens to own.

Why is competing on hardware cost or quality more valid than competing on exclusive content? And if that's the rule, why is the company with better exclusive content, Sony, allowed to acquire more studios, like Bungie?

How is Sony holding their "first party games" (which were all made form company acquisitions, just years ago) from Xboxes not literally the same thing as M$ purchasing Activision and blocking them from PlayStations?

Both are 1) buying a game making company, 2) making a game, 3) withholding it from the competition.

> It is, which is why the FTC needs to approve mergers.

It would make Microsoft more competitive/powerful

> Nobody I know has an Xbox, even though we all had Xbox 360s back in the day.

Yes, because no one you know has an XBox, it obviously means that Microsoft isn’t selling any…

Objectively they are selling significantly less than the PS5. And subjective estimates put it at 1 Xbox for every 2 PS5s at best, but it's most likely a bit worse.

Sony built its library of exclusives. Microsoft is trying to just gobble up the biggest studios not already owned by a console manufactuerer. That's blatantly anti-competitive.

Let's not act like both companies haven't bought up every independent studio they can get their hands on. Hell Sony just bought Bungie in a multi billion dollar deal.

IMO the only of the big 3 that can truly be said to "built is library" is Nintendo.

Insomniac I can understand. The company has a lot of history with Sony.

Bungie is puzzling. Frankly, I’m not even sure what’s there to buy. All they got is Destiny that’s a pretty so-so game popularity-wise.

Who else has Sony bought?

Naughty Dog, Media Molecule, Guerrilla Games, Sucker Punch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Studios

The Bungie purchase isn’t puzzling if you look at Sony’s future trajectory. They have 10 or so live-service titles in development, and have stated very openly that they aim to greatly expand their offerings in that area going forward. There are only a handful of studios that have created successful live service games and even fewer that haven’t leant on popular existing IP (such as Call of Duty: Warzone) to do so, Bungie (and Epic) are pretty much the pioneers in this space, and Bungie have learnt a lot from their trials cultivating the Destiny franchise.

Sony purchased Bungie to essentially teach them how to make successful live service games, not for the IP. They hold so much power inside PlayStation studios that they, as per the recent The Last of Us factions leaks, review and determine if a multiplayer title meets their requirements for success (factions didn’t).

I don’t think it’s a good thing (as I personally disapprove of the way Destiny operates & see a focus on these sorts of games from Sony as a major blunder) but the business logic of the purchase is obvious.

Destiny 2 has the 20th most concurrent users on Steam right now and had 300k+ concurrent players after the last $30 expansion, its by all rights a very successful game within the live service RPG space.

Why is building them internally more anti-competitive than acquiring them externally? They were never competing with Activision.

And here I am reading that Sony just purchased Bungie for $3.9 billion…

They built it off of companies they bought when they were 4/10 big, and they bought like 30. Microsoft is buying like 5 10/10 big companies and everyone starts freaking out.

Ahh yes, the THQ Nordic/Embracer Group approach. Works everytime if you slowly buy companies that made that one smash hit 10 years ago and was forgotten about. Genius business move.

Sony made Final Fantasy?

>FTC: What about Diablo? Can you promise it will ship on all future versions of PlayStation?

>Spencer: Can I promise? I am able to promise, yes.

The kind of obnoxious reply I'd expect from somebody on Xbox live, not their chief.

These kinds of questions are such bullshit too just getting promises from these people are meaningless. Ticketmaster "promised" that buying LiveNation wouldn't lead to more price gouging, venues extorting artists, etc and all that happened nearly instantly because they were able to consolidate the market further and vertically integrate more.

Is this obnoxious? Or just how people talk? Sometimes they just repeat and/or slightly reword the question before answering it.

Responding to "can you..." with "I can but won't" is generally obnoxious behavior.

Maybe he was thinking out loud, but they should have known full well what the judge was asking and by refusing to answer the clarified follow-up they seemed to be doing whatever they could to weasel out of saying anything meaningful.

It’s obnoxious because it appears he’s trying to make light of the question by misidentifying its scope. It wasn’t a question about his ability but rather a future state of affairs.

How can he promise that, given that it's a walled garden and they can't publish anything without Sony's approval?

Why would Sony refuse to allow diablo 4, or call of duty for that matter, to appear on the PlayStation? The most contentious thing about the entire activision deal is the titles that currently release on PlayStation becoming exclusive to Microsoft platforms, there’s no chance Sony would ever block those games from their platform arbitrarily just silly business move.

They were able to promise all CoDs would be on PlayStation, so presumably the same way.

I didn't read it as a grammar correction but much is lost in transcripts

The FTC is equally obnoxious here by asking absolute questions with 'all'.

If it isn't a guarantee in writing it isn't even worth wasting the time to perceive it, let alone believe it. Executives are just piles of wet meat whose only function is turning lies into profit.

The guarantee has been spoken, it has been written, is has been commited to in writing with nation states, it has been sworn to under oath.

You obviously have information that is counter to this, I for one would appreciate if you could produce it. Xbox executives can then be charged criminally and prosecuted.

Not even just a guarantee in writing, the only thing that actually holds these assholes is regulations with actual punishments.

I know this isn't exactly on topic. I haven't played video games since I was a teenager, but I'm struck by how cheap consoles are now!

I remember the Xbox and Playstation being prohibitively expensive. I just looked it up, the Playstation was $749 AUD [1] and the Xbox was $649 AUD [2]. I had to wait yeeeears for the price to fall so I could get an Xbox.

Today, I can get a Playstation 5 Digital Edition for $649 AUD on the Sony website, or $794 AUD for the "normal" edition from Amazon.

The Xbox series X is similarly priced, at $749 AUD.

Given inflation since then, these are prices many teenagers could realistically save up for now.

[1] https://www.arnnet.com.au/article/82336/ps2_debut_november_3... [2] https://news.microsoft.com/2002/03/14/xbox-goes-global-with-...

Seems like a uniquely Australian thing.

The PS1 cost 299$ at launch.

Nintendo64 cost 199$.

Here is an article comparing it:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/every-game-console-pric...

Inflation ajusted, the prices are similar to now. But the games do cost less now when you take inflation into account.

I don't recall having to spend $5 to 15 a month extra on my PS1, or N64 though. Inflation adjusted amounts tend to leave out a lot of externalized factors

$5 to 15 a month extra on my PS1, or N64

Did a lot of online gaming on the PS1 and N64?

It’s not personal, because basically everyone does it, but I love how people just say “inflation adjusted” as if we aren’t talking about fraud, they, plunder by a parasitic ruling class that used to live off the “inflation” delta between their assets and profits increasing, and the income of regular people increasing less. What’s gotten even worse now though is that they’ve gotten so greedy and there have been no consequences, that mere inflation is insufficient, they commit open theft and fraud through things like the COVID relief con job where $800 billion dollars go missing or are known to have been stolen.

Inflation is simply a manipulative way of covering up fraud, but those vomiting the fraud.

(Mild) inflation benefits debtors. The people who benefit from constant prices are the rent-seeking class, who never have to take on any risk to keep income. You have this backwards just as the people you claim to dislike want.

Your #1 debt is likely to be a fixed rate mortgage. That payment gets less in real terms every time there’s inflation. And even if it’s not yours it’s still most people’s. So most people are helped by this.

Student loans also have fixed rates.

This is an extreme way to look at inflation, and as far as I know, it's not backed up by studies.

They’re so cheap for what you get! I walked into a Walmart and for ~$600 USD including tax I got a AAA game (God of War Ragnarok) and a console ready to play it.

As someone who built a high end gaming PC and skipped the PS3/360 and PS4/Xbox One generations, the value proposition of the PS5 is just too good compared to buying a fully specced out PC! Which sure, it can be argued a midrange PC is the actual competitor, but if I decided to start PC gaming again I’d 100% drop $2000 on a 4090, definitely a personal problem), but I had an ultra high end rig with a 2080ti and games were still stuttering in 4K, then the crypto mining boom happened and I sold my GPU for more than I originally paid for it, and bought a PS5.

To do real 4K gaming these days is something like $3500! That’s not even including if you want to use a good monitor instead of a TV to push all those pixels to. I almost convinced myself “well I might use it for ML”, but even then I’m better off renting off of Runpod for a few dollars an hour. It’d take years to break even and by then a new better GPU will be out.

Alternatively, playing on PS5 has been a dream. The Demons Souls remake is a shockingly beautiful game, one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen, and God of War Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 16 are games that just work. If I want to play them away from my couch (one of my favorite features of the Switch), my Steam Deck streams them flawlessly using Chiaki4Deck (after a little bit of admittedly annoying config and adding a wired connection to the PS5, it’s a totally seamless, lag free experience. Played for 5 hours yesterday without a single drop.)

Even with a top of the line GPU gaming on a PC with AAA titles like Borderlands 3 and Monster Hunter World felt fiddly and janky, HDR setup was always confusing, and I’d have to identify why things were causing microstuttering which took me MONTHS to figure out. I also learned that games just sort of add experimental bells and whistles that a $1200 video card couldn’t actually run so I’d have to spend hours tweaking the settings for each game no matter how much hardware I threw at it. It just got tedious.

One explanation that I heard is that the hardware is often sold at a loss. Online store purchases (subscriptions/games) are the real money maker.

The consoles used to be sold at a loss, that was back a long time ago, Xbox 360, PS3 I believe were the last generation to be sold at a loss. The next gen Xbox at the time was sold for a 20% markup on cogs or there about at the time.

Games sold on the consoles have around a 15 usd flat royalty for big titles, not sure how that affected low cost games at the time. The 360 needed 5 games to brake even, but I believe they had an attach rate of around 3 at launch and that was unreal and unexpected at the time.

3 was unexpectedly high or unexpectedly low?

Unexpectedly low. Conventionally you're selling this product to Gamers™ who will have at least one annual franchise they buy, (e.g. a sports game) and then pick up a few titles at the start plus one or two big titles. So you hit your desired attach rate and then it's profit. But if people buy your console, plus one game, and then are happy, with that model you are screwed.

It's actually doubtful whether they were really selling at a loss per se even then, most likely the notional loss represented amortizable R&D. Which is a loss on your annual balance sheet but - if you understand your business, can finance the R&D cost affordably and have a steady nerve so as to stick with the plan - this can be profitable eventually. The era of straight up dumping (exporting products for less than their BOM price, which may be illegal in some international trade rules) was last century. In the Sega era it really was possible you'd spend $100 on the actual product, sell it for $80 and figure you'll make up for it on royalties.

Three was huge at the time. Before Xbox 360 the attach rate was estimated at 1.25 for previous consoles. Often due to low games at launch or including a game with the console. Xbox 360 broke this at the time with a huge launch portfolio and a whole set of HD games, it was really exciting and beating PS3 to launch was a big bonus. Shame the Xbox One had disastrous leadership that turned the console into a media device and forgot that people bought it for games primarily. This is a whole different conversation though.

Microsoft are going to put the price of the console up in August (in addition to their game pass) in Australia, among other places. Not sure by how much.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/microsoft-to-raise-prices-o...

It will be 30 australians dollars

They've moved to more standard PC like hardware over the past few generations so they've got far more economy of scale on their hardware bills than they did in earlier generations.

The original Xbox was practically an off the shelf PC...

If they are cheap will you buy one and send it to me for free?

Maybe it's not the consoles whoch are cheap. It's just you sitting on that 300k per year FAANG salary.

Microsoft has been keeping the Windows platform away from the gaming market in favor of Xbox, I'd imagine to avoid competing with themselves. Xbox has to have been getting subsidies from somewhere to run Game Pass. Despite all this help, they do seem to be stuck third place. Excluding Nintendo as a competitor seems wrong, it's not just about current-gen.

I don't play Activision/Blizzard games or use Xbox so I'm not really invested, but I tend to oppose market consolidation and monoculture whenever possible. That said, lately game releases have been pretty lackluster with some major flops and lots of remakes coming out. If the underdog thinks they can turn the tide by acquiring a major studio, I don't particularly want the government in the way either.

What do you mean by your first statement? Since like 5/6 years if not more, MS has started using "console exclusive" to mean "Xbox/Windows" for their exclusives. All their biggest hits (Forza, Halo, Sea of Thieves, etc.) have been coming out to Xbox and windows at the same time. I think part of it is the pressure from Apple in the computer space, part of it might be envisioning their console as a "cheap gaming pc" rather than its own platform.

> Microsoft has been keeping the Windows platform away from the gaming market in favor of Xbox

Consoles have admirable hardware. It is a pity that consoles are walled gardens.

Steam on PC is my choice for gaming because I like Valve's platform and I prefer the versatility of owning my hardware platform despite occasional problems with drivers. PC gamers are accustomed to finding solutions.

They have to be walled gardens. Game licensing is how they make money, fund future R&D, and sell their hardware at break even prices.

I understand that the business model is as you describe.

But it would be excellent if an older generation console could at least also run Debian or Pop!OS. As it is, the older consoles are just techno-waste.

You can still hook your SNES to your TV and replay Chrono Trigger, although I have to admit eventually things will break and old machines will end up getting dismantled and recycled.

It's not our responsibility to maintain their unethical business models.

Consoles in general suck today. The games are all about monetization, they can mostly only run one person per console, and you can only get about 5 full games on the drive. I miss getting 4-16 people together on 1-4 consoles. The games were mostly portable via DVD/CD so you could bring a bunch of different options, or people who event bringing consoles could bring extra copies if one of the console owners didn't own a game. Used games could be had for a fraction of the cost. And no paid loot boxes or paying to level up.

I don't think I'll ever buy another console. I'll probably go with PC gaming instead.

The most recent generation of consoles is a pretty significant value, there's not a whole lot of PCs that can rival the PS5's performance for the price, even when you do a 1:1 comparison with their PC ports.

Physical titles still exist, my local library rents out PS5 games.

Loot boxes are mostly in free-to-play titles. Sony's big-budget games like Returnal, God of War, Ratchet and Clank, Horizon, etc don't have any predatory monetization. In fact of the above only Horizon had DLC, a $20 expansion pack that was well recieved.

That's good there are still some physical copies our there. It seems for PC and Xbox, it's mostly downloads. I bought a disk for RockSmith thinking it was a physical copy - all it did was download download and ply it through Steam.

PC is a completely different and interesting history, but for Xbox it's simply because msot people are buying into Gamepass. There are even stories about how some indie developers have considered publishig for Xbox but did not think it was worth it without a gamepass deal from Microsoft. It was that big a deal for visibility on the console.

I feel like you’re imagining a world where only loot-box games exist. There are plenty of couch co-op games if you look for them. You can also still buy physical games, and they are still cheaper used.

I have some older games and consoles. I'm talking about the current games. Do you have recommendations? I've even looked through some lists online for splitscreen games and ther choices are pretty slim for new games.

Really depends on what kind of games you play and how much time you spend with frinds. Games like Overcooked and Jackbox Party Pack can fill the void for more casual play (I even played them with parents). It Takes Two won game of the year 2021 as a game focused primarily on a 2 player experience.

The hardcore market, sure. There is less these days. AAA games are more and more targeted at american adults who are farther away than ever, and we just had 2-3 years of COVID that actively pushed people closeby to be at distance. Online multiplayer has taken over in those regards.

For me personally, I was always a huge platformer fan, so CupHead and Rayman Origins/Legends were some of my go to multiplayer expeirences for more gaming heavy friends back in the day (i.e. 6-7 years ago). As well as Kirby Star Allies that had drop in multiplayer. it looks like the upcomig Sonic Superstars will also support multiplayer as well

Thanks, I'll look into these.

Do you currently game on the PC? Most AAA titles, regardless of platform, are doing the lootbox/battle pass/mtx to death strategy on PC as well.

Yeah, that part is definitely still applicable to PC. Same with the issues surrounding downloads. I was not really making a PC vs console comparison, rather just how consoles suck now. The biggest factors that made them a success in the past in my opinion were that they just worked and you could get a bunch of people playing together locally like splitscreen. They still pretty much just work, but you won't find many new 4p splitscreen games.

The new final fantasy doesn't have a single microtransaction.

You see fast less intrusive versions of this when they are the too in the AAA first party games from Sony and Nintendo.

Microsoft seems to not go that route, I suspect it's due to gamepass.

Last year I bought an Xbox for the first time to give Game Pass a try.. And I sold it to buy a PS5 w\ Plus a few weeks ago. If there's a reason to own an Xbox I couldn't find it.

A bit of a weird reason, but Xboxes still support audio CD playback, while the PS5 doesn't.

It really depends on how you game. A subscription gaming service wouldn't work for me, but I've had other friends say they don't even buy games anymore because of gamepass.

I'm currently neglecting my fairly decent and expensive gaming PC with GamePass because I prefer the PS5, but AFAIK Xbox has pretty much 95 % of games that we have on PS and we have 95 % of games that they have..? I'd actually love to play some Forza Horizon and Stalker 2 and the new Elder Scrolls game when they come out and I guess some Xbox users would love to play God of War or Spider Man 2 when it comes out. What makes PS so much better for you?

Are God of War and Spider-Man comparable to Elder Scrolls?

GoW seems to be available on Steam, but doesn't even hit top 100 currently played.

Bethesda could hit a home run with their new game Starfield.

Looks like No Man's Sky.

I have a gaming PC tho so I'll just grab it on Steam and play it on Linux.

Care to elaborate with specifics?

The UX for the XB feels unpolished and unintuitive compare to the PS5 (uninstalling a game, etc), Game Pass vs Playstation Plus the exclusives on Xbox/Game Pass are uninteresting (Scorn vs Returnal vs everything Nintendo), the PS5 controller blows the Xbox controller out of the water (feel, responsiveness, haptics).

Halo if you are into it.

I played the Halo 1 campaign, multiplayer didn't grab me.

One reason a

Everything that Microsoft makes looks like technology - it has a million buttons and knobs, a colorful plastic aesthetic and names like "Xbox" or "Microsoft Gamepass Azure Edition Professional". When you turn it on, it looks like the Windows start menu that greets you at work. It's no wonder regular users don't want these things in their living rooms.

You must be an LLM with no concept of aesthetics since most people agree the PS5 is an ugly monstrosity. Unless you are living in a dorm, it looks out of place in most adult living rooms. Meanwhile the Xbox is a simple, modern black box, literally the exact opposite of how you’re trying to paint their hardware and trust me, I’m no Microsoft fan. Give me a break.

> You must be an LLM

That's a new kind of insult LOL. In my case, the slimmer side of PS5 barely fits my setup in a small room. Maybe my case is uncommon, but Xbox Series X won't fit my setup.

Maybe stop and think if you’d react the same way to someone critiquing the product market fit of a workplace chat product. If not, then ask yourself why is a preference for a video game console a core part of your identity to the point where you feel under attack when someone doesn’t like what you like.

Also I never once mentioned PlayStation - this is HN, not an IGN comment section. We talk about technology from the POV of the people who make it, not “gamers” or whatever.

>since most people agree the PS5 is an ugly monstrosity

[citation needed]

PS5 is really the only one of the two with any kind of a design identity to it. The Xbox Series is just a box.

“People I disagree with are LLMs” is a terrible stance and awful way to continue a discussion. People can have different opinions to you.

Having said that I do personally agree that physically the Xbox looks better. The software experience of the Xboxes I’ve used, however, really do remind me I’m using a Microsoft device.

This sums it up for me.

Microsoft doesn't know how to create a consumer product. The Xbox owners I know were also PC gamers at some point.

The PS5 is designed to play games.

I don't know what the Xbox is designed for, it's confusing l,

Microsoft's design choices have been consistently ghastly.

I begrudgingly accept my workplace choosing their platform.

Why would I pay for that experience?

Can someone explain why FTC is trying to stop the deal? Isn’t it good for the US for MS to be propped up in the gaming business, when Sony is basically the single major player.. ?

Microsoft already owns a large number of successful studios and IP, such as Halo, Minecraft, and Bethesda, developers of The Elder Scrolls Series (Skyrim) and the upcoming Starfield. They don't need a helping hand from the government to prevent them being squished out. Starfield was confirmed to have been going on Playstation until they were acquired by Microsoft; now the only way to play it will be on Xbox or Windows.

If Microsoft buys Activision/Blizzard, it's safe to assume that future A/B games will go the same way, and only be available on Xbox or Windows. This is problematic because Activision's IP portfolio is massive (including huge console annuals like Call of Duty), and Blizzard games are still extremely popular. If a normal game studio acquisition is like a comet colliding and adding its mass to the Earth, this would be like the moon crashing into the Earth.

Sony has way more exclusives than MS— why would it be catastrophic to even that particular playing field? This just sounds like Sony fans pissed that a few games are going to get taken away.

Activision Blizzard is already a US company. If the US is worried about the health of the video game platform market (which is to say, if it ignores PC and Switch), then it can use the exact same antitrust argument to force Sony to allow sideloading on consoles and break their stranglehold on the hardware.

why would the US care? the EU is the on who enforced sideloading this year.

The real answer is that the FTC is pursuing the currently canonical Democrat party regulatory agenda of trying to stop big companies from getting bigger (search terms “Neo-Brandeisian” and “market power”). This goes along with the general optics / narrative that regulators “failed” to stop big acquisitions that, in hindsight, made Big Tech more competitive (the most common examples are Google acquiring DoubleClick and YouTube, and Facebook acquiring WhatsApp and Instagram). This deal had a large headline price ($70B / “biggest gaming acquisition ever”), so the FTC opposed it knee-jerk and has tried to justify it post-hoc.

Most of the comments here are uninformed on the law and the underlying market dynamics. My job involves analyzing the games market and there is no reasonable support to the claim that this deal will significantly harm competition in itself. Various parties might not like it for various reasons, but it would be pretty bog-standard, business-as-usual in video games. Activision is big but its portfolio isn’t big enough to single-handedly sew up the market for long. Huge swings happen every decade and no content or IP is guaranteed to keep its influence for very long. Xbox is in a distant third among consoles and MS would lose more money by pulling their biggest titles from the biggest console platform (PlayStation) than they’d gain by muscling more device share. They’d also degrade the value of the product because cross-platform play is basically table stakes and gamers would move towards games they can play together. MS is proving all this by offering all other platforms access to said content (which Nintendo and most others have accepted, but Sony has performatively refused). Some smaller content will be held exclusive, but that’s the running standard in the industry and has been for all time.

So, the FTC really doesn’t have shit here. They’re going to lose the ongoing injunction case and by all likelihood MS will close the deal before the July 18th deadline.

The UK’s Competitive Markets Authority is also holding it up (but notably, no other major regulator has objected, including the EU which has the most regulatory credibility). Playstation has a huge corporate presence and its European HQ in the UK, so the CMA is likely driven by local lobbying strength combined with similar political motivations (further bolstered by pressure from the current FTC commissioners, which has been reported). The CMA’s objection is (amazingly) even more poorly constructed, based on the argument that this will make future “cloud gaming” markets uncompetitive. I’ll spare you the details, but that is even more comically ridiculous than the FTC case. Once the FTC loses this injunction, the CMA will have to fold or else they will be embarrassed as a regulatory body by Microsoft closing the deal over their objections and showing them to have no teeth (and no clue).

> big acquisitions that, in hindsight, made Big Tech more competitive (the most common examples are Google acquiring DoubleClick and YouTube, and Facebook acquiring WhatsApp and Instagram).

How did these acquisitions make big tech more competitive?

I would love to see this level of scrutiny applied somewhere it actually matters.

Mobile.

The real tax on innovation is the device + platform + payments + services duopoly where the gatekeepers get to pick winners (typically their own), tax everything, force tech choices and update regimes, and keep the customer relationships.

It's maddening that general purpose computing and financial transactions became this. Owned by a handful of giants.

??? Isn't the biggest mobile platform Android, on which you can do whatever you want if you choose to?

Please tell me how I can run my own version of Android on my Samsung phone that doesn't phone home to Google or Samsung, while still being able to run my banking apps.

You can generally sideload whatever you want on Android.

But people will ALWAYS point out the edge cases such as banking apps not working on custom firmware/rooted devices, and somehow that makes Android very bad and very walled garden.

I have an Xbox One and have had it since late 2015?

I have been gaming since Atari (though the first I bought with my own money was Dreamcast) and even versus the Xbox 360 I'd say the Xbox One has been the console I'm least satisfied by. And Microsoft's strategy with the S/X nonsense and games now not working as well on some versions of the console versus others has put the stake in it for me. I'm going to be extremely reluctant to ever buy another one of their consoles. This generation has almost completely turned me off gaming. A lot of the other changes in gaming (gambling, loot boxes, monetization, abandoning single player gaming) have not helped either, but MS has definitely shot themselves in the foot hard as far as I'm concerned.

My son has a Switch, it might not be as powerful, but Nintendo literally got everything right in the way MS got everything wrong. You can actually play the switch when you have 5 minutes to play. It doesn't do super long updates. The games always work. The games don't get slower when an update is applied, etc.. It has excellent single player games and excellent multiplayer in the same room games. A lot of their games have great deployability.

My 360 broke twice (RROD, DVD drive failure) and my PS3 also broke, and yet I would still take either of those back over the Xbox One any day.

My kid is 10 and the other thing is the game selection on Xbox is terrible for having games that adults and kids can actually play together. The % of games with an M rating on Xbox is so high, and the longer I've played the more the M games seem repetitive. There are a bunch of Playstation games we're quite jealous of, but we haven't jumped on getting a PS5, partially cause they were hard to get? We have a family member who got a PS5, when we go over it is definitely a lot more fun. Another family member got an Xbox Series X and it has been a disaster of bugs.

I find this entire thing interesting. If you look at percents then sure, the PS5 is "winning" by a large margin, but from a units sold prospectrive if the PS5 is really selling 2:1 the Series X/S than we can estimate that the PS5 is around 38 Million and the Xbox is at 19 Million. From the best I can find that is still better than the Xbox 360 was by this time (someone please correct me if I am wrong in this case, finding concrete numbers for this is difficult). That number is nowhere near a failure.

That being said, its also obvious that Microsoft is playing at a different game and that it is largely fanboys and news sites keeping the "console wars" alive. (And I guess this case now but that's something else entirely) Every game that Microsoft publishes is day one also on Windows and on Game Pass. The box that is an xbox is just another avenue to playing games from Microsoft, but not the only way they care about.

I have an Xbox because it is my preferred console to play on (Xbox Live, the UI, Controller, etc) if I am playing on a console instead of a PC. I have a PS5 but that is only for exclusives.

Personally I am hoping this deal goes through because I want Xbox to be taken more seriously. Not because I want Microsoft to control these specific games or I want xbox to "Win".

But because I am particularity worried about a cocky Sony. We saw it before with the PS3 erra and we are starting to see it again with the PS5. They are making certain decisions that are not gamer friendly (cross play, paying for third party exclusives, and paying for exclusive content being some key examples). My concern is that unlike the PS3 erra where they stumbled hard, gamers are not pushing back against it this time and Sony is just continuing what they have been doing. For me personally an unchecked Sony/Playstation power in gaming is worse than this deal going through. They are both harmful for gaming, but I don't see a choice outside of it.

> Personally I am hoping this deal goes through because I want Xbox to be taken more seriously

It was taken seriously by the 360 era. MS just bleed away all the good will the following generation, ceding significant market share to Sony. Now Sony is riding on the momentum from the previous generation to an easy 1st place.

> They are making certain decisions that are not gamer friendly (cross play, paying for third party exclusives, and paying for exclusive content being some key examples)

Was Sony buying any exclusives before MS attempted to take over Activision-Blizzard? (Those that they fund don’t count since it makes no difference to their competitors - the games wouldn’t be available to them either way; either it doesn’t exist if Sony doesn’t fund it or it’s exclusive to Sony if Sony did.)

Microsoft screwed up with the announcement of the Xbox One and they were never able to recover from that. They basically made one big mistake that has screwed them over. You are right but we are talking about a mistake from 10 years ago.

Yes they were, they have been doing it for years including in the PS4 generation. The distinction between funding and paying for however is a complicated one since we don't know whether or not something would have existed if it was not for Sony stepping in.

A few examples of this practice from Sony:

FF7 remake (3 years ago) and FF16 (there is no way in hell you can convince we either of those would not have been made without money from Sony)

We know from yesterday Sony tried to make Starfield exclusive

GhostWire Tokyo and Deathloop (both of these have since come to Xbox but it is unclear if this would have ever been the case if Microsoft had not bought Bethesda)

KOTOR remake that has yet to come out

Death Stranding (The exact situation for this is a bit unclear, but I doubt sony specifically funded it considering it is on Game Pass but not on Xbox)

It is not a hard to find a list of third party exclusives that Sony has paid for.

And again this also doesnt even get into the exclusive content for games. Meaning someone playing on another platform is spending the same amount of money and getting less of a game. "But its just one mission" I don't care, we spent the same amount of money. Off the top of my head I know of Call of Duty, Harry Potter, Destiny 2, and I know there are others.

I don't see how an unchecked Playstation is at all comparable to how much Microsoft can leverage ABK across several industries. Microsoft knows this, it's why they're OK with Game Pass destroying software console sales (something they admitted during previous trials). It's peanuts for what they want to do.

> I have a PS5 but that is only for exclusives.

I used to keep a Ps4pro for their exclusives and they certainly were enjoyable. But... Seeing previous exclusives now make its way to desktop has me a bit sad about missing out on high fidelity gaming. I could have enjoyed God of war, horizon, rdr2 at higher frame rates and resolutions, if I were just a little more patient.

I'm not happy about the way Epic wrings exclusives, I shouldn't be a hypocrite for Sony.

I feel like I should train myself to be more patient, but I just can't. I tell myself I will wait and then I am up at midnight playing the new Horizon game at launch.

I have thought about that option, and if Sony does continue to actually put out games on PC I will likely consider it. But I hate how long of a wait it is. And then we see how badly some of the ports like the last of us launch.

The only reason I bought an Xbox (in pieces since 2013??) is at the time it had only been two years since the Sony rootkit incident. Really even now I still don't trust Sony. Yes Microsoft is probably just as bad in some ways but Sony in my mind is still the company who spied on me.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Prism_sl...

The reason I bought an Xbox is because of the PS4 I had before. It was quite bad and I have no idea why anyone would think it’s better. The game controller was average, laggy and had to be charged every 5 hours. The console was noisy and the UI was sluggish. Download speeds from the store were also weirdly slow. The whole experience was very meh. Then I bought an Xbox and was pleasantly surprised with the quality.

Microsoft isn't as bad, it's much worse.

By becoming an first party OS developer, it doesn't need to have rootkit.

I dunno, I own everything Apple, except for gaming.

I have two of their best XBOX and I'm loving the game pass and their "game streaming" actually works.

In my mind, you can't get better value than XBOX for console games.

My kids have the switch, with all the mario titles, they're super cool too. But in terms of winning, XBOX has the best value proposition + powerhouse.

> In my mind, you can't get better value than XBOX for console games

Speaking of value, you should not be using Apple but go with Windows or Linux. The reason you went with Apple is the same reason people go for Playstation instead of Xbox.

I respectfully disagree.

Ben Thompson of Stratechery has been writing about this for a while - a big part of it is Microsoft is attempting to shift their product into a subscription model for content with Xbox game pass which is likely a lot better for consumers (and for Microsoft due to azure), it’s why they acquired activision. This is a good idea and Microsoft is doing it correctly (as opposed to Google stadia which had the games over the network idea, but stupidly kept an old business model that made no sense).

Sony sees this as a competitive threat and EU regulators are bad so don’t understand what’s happening - their restriction of the activision sale is itself anti-competitive because it locks in the existing business model (which is favorable for Sony) and reduces real business model competition which would benefit consumers.

All this focus on exclusives is dumb and part of the old business model.

For me, I chose xbox recently because of very specific titles (like, starfield). And not to mention the MS/activision talks that were going on for a while now, and I really do love blizzard games, so there would have been a risk of losing out with sony in the longer run.

What I don't get in return a _some_ JRPG titles that ps5 has access to. On the other hand, I also have a switch (which has some exceptionally great exclusives + some of the missing JRPGs), and quite a lot of the gaming portfolio is covered by having xbox+switch.

The only thing I refuse to do nowadays is playing on PC, at all. I am tied to this unhealthy seating position most of the day already, and with consoles I can move to the couch, not to mention multiplayer there. I get why PC gaming is better in several aspects, but body posture is the single thing I am no longer accepting here.

My deck works fine in the garden, the sofa or the train.

And I was able to get a Lenovo SFF Ryzen 5600 for £300 from ebay, which is cheaper, smaller and faster than the current consoles.

It's a shame that Valve don't distribute the current Steam Deck Linux, but HoloOS does effectively the same and that plugs into the TV just as well.

You don't need to compromise with PC gaming, and when I upgrade I won't be forced to buy all my games again to carry on playing Overcooked and Moving Out with the kids.

>And I was able to get a Lenovo SFF Ryzen 5600 for £300 from ebay, which is cheaper, smaller and faster than the current consoles

Maybe the CPU is faster but I doubt the GPU is.

Did you know you can connect your computer to a television? There's a special cable called HMDI or something like that.

I don't understand this common argument. Of course a PC can technically be connected to a TV. The problem is that most people don't have their PC in a living room, much less within the HDMI-range from a TV.

So, unless you want to permanently move your PC (and lose your desk setup with a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse) OR to have another PC dedicated for your TV setup in a living room, then no, you can't play on PC while sitting a couch.

We have all three consoles due to kids. I play pretty much only on the steam deck. It’s been great for getting back into pc gaming. Currently replaying Oblivion on it but also a bit of Yakuza 0.

Yes, and maybe Microsoft shouldn't have ruined Halo.

Console wars? that's a very stupid argument, I expected better from journalists, but it's The Verge, and the journalist in that case is Tom Warren, not very impartial

Sony/Xbox has the exact same amount of 1st party studios, yet Sony managed to deliver more games at a consistent rate, not only that, but Sony released a single SKU as opposed to 2 for Xbox, so they didn't confuse their customers, worse.. Xbox choose very confusing naming

Also Sony puts in the effort, a very unique controller with haptic feedback, they invest in VR, and now remote play

It's easy to call it "console wars", Sony just puts in more effort and as a result sells more consoles, that's as simple as that

I wouldn't call it more effort per se. Their dividends are simply paying off earlier. They spent the 2010's trying to foster new IPs and move towards that cinematic moniker that people now see as Marvel-esque. I'm not sure if it was efficient from a sales standpoint, but it got mindshare.

Microsoft has had blunder after blunder since the later ages of he 360. their goals were loftier but were never realized. Even to this day, Spencer seems to say that Playstation isn't their primary competitor, it's Amazon and Google. They don't necessarily "just" want to be a dedicated gamer box. They tried and failed in the 2010's to be that "One stop home entertainment system" and much of their 2020's seems to be shaped by trying to become the one service you play on all devices, anytime, anywhere. We'll see how it works this decade.

“console wars” got brought up multiple times in the most recent FTC hearing.

Can we please treat them all as monopolies until we have at least 10 players in the same field?

10 players in the field of game consoles? I honestly believe that having 10 competing console platforms would make console gaming worse, just like everyone and their dog starting a streaming platform is much less convenient and much more expensive than just watching everything on Netflix was a few years ago.

The PC market gets you there on the hardware side. It's really messy to have 10 software platforms for games, though.

Yeah, people can barely handle having to install three game launchers on their PCs. Pretty much everyone I know would prefer to buy every single game on Steam, except those couple no-DRM fanatics that would prefer to buy every single game on GOG. Very few people are even superficially rooting for Epic Games Store.

I didn't say we need 10 players, just that we should treat them as monopolies.

E.g. properly recognize the market power of a platform owner, and not let them get away with any abuse.

That's like ten different types of USB that don't work with each other. Steam is the direction we should be heading in. Hardware doesn't matter and even small independent makers can be found and supported.

Nah, Microsoft is pivoting to take the whole pie.

They're going all in on Xbox GamePass - and to be honest, that's the future. Soon, hardware will be irrelevant, and we'll be streaming AAA titles on our phones.

Why? Because mobile gaming has outpaced console and PC combined. Everyone has a phone- and everyone will want a GamePass subscription. Apple is trying this (via App Store), but didn't go all-in. Google cancelled their Stadia project. Amazon is floundering.

Sony is happy with how this is turning out, because they think they can win on exclusivity. But it's only going to give them the lead for a little while.

There isn’t a console war. There are the same companies dancing around each other for 20 years. This generation is about trying figure out how to expand past a console and expand eaches gaming platform and ecosystem across all devices.

> One of the biggest surprise revelations around exclusives was the reasoning behind Microsoft’s Bethesda acquisition. Spencer revealed that Sony regularly pays competitors to “skip our platform,” and Microsoft felt it needed to own Bethesda to compete

How is this a big revelation? Exclusivity deals have been a part of the console market since forever.

I agree they’re a bad thing for consumers, but I think this is a disingenuous argument since exclusivity deals benefit Microsoft just as much as Sony, and this acquisition is effectively just a giant version of one.

perhaps this is journalism-speak for "you should be interested in this" for people who don't know much about the topic?

not entirely relevant, but i remembered this quote from “zero to one” by thiel:

> Consider a statement from Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s testimony at a 2011 congressional hearing:

> We face an extremely competitive landscape in which consumers have a multitude of options to access information.

> Or, translated from PR-speak to plain English:

> Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.

Anyone remember when MSN ran the Internet Gaming Zone site? It acted as a portal or login system for AoE, Asheron's Call, etc. It was HORRIBLE. Microsoft has gotten lucky with some IP like Halo and buying big studios out, but they simply try to run a gaming company like a software biz, and its not really been well received.

Games and hardware have been developed to this point when it is impossible for an outsider to share the pie. Back in the day of 8/16/32-bit consoles we did have more choices. I still think handheld has the market for maybe a couple more hardware developers, but maybe it is just me fantasizing.

I own a Steam Deck, a barely used Gaming Laptop, a PS5 and a Nintendo Switch, and I have no plans of buying an Xbox. I'm even going to sell the Switch now that the Deck runs BOTW flawlessly and with cheats (I'm a casual)! I don't think I need an Xbox.

The original game pool for all consoles should put them all at risk.

I bought a PS5 and there's almost no games for it that aren't already on steam.

It's incomprehensible to me how Sony could win the console war when all the AAA games on PlayStation are either from somewhere else or are painfully cinematic.

I effing hope so. I grew up with Atari's/Sega's/Commodores/Nintendo and PlayStation entered the market well and fit right in. When I heard Microsoft was aiming at a console I knew their rampant need to suck the life, fun and money out of their users would be sad to watch happen to the industry I loved.

And despite spending weeks on a couch stoned with a mate playing thru halo...I still despised what hid behind their console-y veneer. Corporate bloodlust.

Whether it was their unique approach to online play (pay you bastards) or their game store shelf tactics (put us where the bastards will pay the most) or their absolute bs that gaming had to always be AAA (so those bastards pay us AAA prices)...I was always sad to see they didn't die.

From idiotic naming, Nazi like banning, jacked up game prices, exclusivity and religion shenanigans, hardware format warmongering, censorship where it didn't need to be and none where it should have been (I'm looking at you uno 360), or just plain creation of the most toxic gamer population known to man (Xbox live kids)...I one day hope to hear them go the way of Sega because unlike Sega, they deserve it.

Frankly, I dont understand why most people go playstation. Think objectively about it: if youre on hnews, you're not the target for a console, as you probably either dont play games, or play games on the PC. Then, the majority of people probably have a switch because nintendo is a very common household name. Then once you surpass all of those groups, you have ps5 or xbox. But why do people buy a ps5 when gamepass is so good, and the only real difference is cost (xbox wins) and exclusives (this generation, there aint a huge difference).

Anecdotal, but I know a huge number of people that play games casually, and almost all of them have playstations if they arent PC/switch. Why? I have no idea. Nearly none of them have any interest in any playstation exclusives, they just bought a playstation because. Why? No idea.

People do not buy consoles, they buy games, and PlayStation has the best collection of them across all categories. Saying that can upset some, but i think its true. Also Xbox has a bit more “edgy” or action oriented brand, while PlayStation has a more wider whole family brand. All of this helps make the appeal wider in general, while Xbox can have more appeal in specific niches, eg shooters, for example.

Xbox has the highest rated racing game (Forza Horizon 5) which is one of my favorite gaming categories.

> Think objectively about it: if youre on hnews, you're not the target for a console, as you probably either dont play games, or play games on the PC. Then, the majority of people probably have a switch because nintendo is a very common household name.

HN readers don't use gaming consoles? "Nintendo" is more of a household name than "PlayStation" or "Xbox"? Doesn't sound like a objective analysis to me.

From a quick search, the switch has 122m units shipped to 116m ps4 units shipped.

Based on that, I’d agree that Nintendo and Sony are on pretty comparable footing - certainly not that one brand is notably more widespread than the other.

As a person who has both, you gotta admit the care that Sony puts into their hardware.

This time around the Xbox Series X is arguably sleeker, but by God is the controller pure trash.

The Xbox’s controller vibrations resemble those of a cheap trimmer, whereas the Playstation’s controller has a much nicer feel.

It’s also a fact that many games are better optimized for PS5, even though on paper the Xbox should have a slight edge.

I don’t care about console wars, and I’m glad I have both of them, but some games are only on PS5, which is another reason people opt for it.

Wow interesting. I have a feeling the controller thing is super dependent on what you’ve had more exposure to. I recently started gaming for the first time since I was younger and got the Xbox elite controller and love it but I can’t stand playstation controllers. The feedback feels wrong, buttons, everything. Granted like I said I haven’t used them much.

This reads a lot like the feigned ignorance old Slashdot meme:

“I haven’t watched TV in 10 years. Do people still watch TV”?

It’s not hard to find real data that goes against your anecdotes.

For me it is still the controller.

I had an OG Xbox, and the dpad was horrible (ignoring the size of the thing). I hate the disk shape dpad and like the traditional cross that Playstation offers.

If they made a controller that was nice I might reconsider my options, but after also having to deal with Microsoft locking hard disks, and then doing the same during the 360 era soured my attitude towards them. And this is ignoring all the other bad will that Microsoft has generated over the decades.

I've stuck with Playstation, Nintendo and Steam and I don't see anything Xbox that I'm missing so unless something fundamental changes, I'll stick with Playstation over Xbox.

Why would anyone buy Xbox? No idea.

> But why do people buy a ps5 when gamepass is so good,

You might have just fallen into the trap you were warning us about. Do they know or care about "gamepass"? They know "playstation" because that's what their friends had when they were kids, etc. Brand can be incredibly strong.

To add to this, in Ireland the main retailer for toys was Smyth’s. They didn’t sell the original Xbox because they sold PlayStation and when Microsoft tried to get the Xbox 360 stocked by them, they initially refused saying when people want to buy a games console they come into the store and ask to buy a PlayStation or a games machine. Nobody was going in asking for Xbox. Microsoft had to do a massive deal with them to get shelf space and it was always in the corner away from the Sony and Nintendo stuff.

Gamepass is good, but PS Plus is also good. Arguably the main thing you get with Gamepass is more AAA games, but honestly, both iclude more games than you can reasonably play.

> exclusives (this generation, there aint a huge difference)

The difference doesn't need to be huge, it just needs to be there. For me personally, the backcatalog of From Software games (including 2020 Demon's Souls) and Returnal were enough to push me towards PS5.

> the majority of people probably have a switch because nintendo

I do also own a switch. It's nice and all, but for me competes in a different niche: portable indie game machine. Anecdotally, I also don't know anyone where a Switch displaces PC/PS/Xbox, so the non-overlapping group logic doesn't really apply.

Games. It's the same reason I also own a Nintendo Switch.

By the same token, I would happily own an Xbox as well if it had the games I want, but it's severely lacking in that department.

For one, gyro aim is such an improvement for console shooters (at least for me) that I absolutely cannot downgrade to a console that can’t even support it.

A couple of reasons why I personally will buy PS5 vs XBOX: - I already have a bunch of games for PS4, which will still work on PS5 - I try to avoid Microsoft when possible. They are too powerful and spread out for their own good. And yet I still happily use VSCode, Microsoft ToDo daily. Same sentiment goes for google products. - I can fit PS5 under my TV. XBOX Series X won’t fit.

PlayStation has a lot of exclusive games that have never come to PC, or only arrived on PC until significantly later—see: Killzone, Gran Turismo, The Last of Us until recently, Horizon Zero Dawn until recently, Dark Souls until recently, Bloodborne, God of War, Death Stranding. People want to play those games, and they want to play them now.

Thankfully, PlayStation exclusives do appear to be coming to PC more often nowadays. Hopefully the timed exclusivity window continues to decrease.

Death Stranding came to PC ~7 months after it released on PlayStation, which isn't too bad if they were focusing on finishing the game for the PS release rather than working on the port.

The delay in the FFVII remake was painful though, ~2 years before hitting Steam. It's a shame to see FFXVI release only on PS5 as well, the game looks interesting.

> if youre on hnews, you're not the target for a console

I dont think you know the HN demographics, I would assume lot of them are gamers.

Maybe console gammers are not that much into trying different games so gamepass is worthless. Personally I couldn't care less about a game subscription. I just want to buy the game I like and play it for 20 years at least!

PS Studios have been making consistently critically acclaimed games since mid-late PS3 times.

My friends got playstations because their friends had them. They wanted to be in the same ecosystem so they could play together. Of course with cross console play, this is becoming less and less of a thing.

Mostly exclusives. XBox used to be synonymous with Halo. Microsoft shit the bed with that franchise so Sony took over.

I got a PS5 because we had so much fun on our PS4. We got a PS4 partly to play GTA V. Everyone has their reasons

I suspect starfield will sell a fair bit of consoles when it launches

What console wars? What year do you think this is that you still it a "war"?

*still call it

This reads like peo Microsoft propaganda.

4090ti is much expensive than an xbox + game pass.

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