Thing is, they don't need to sell consoles anymore. They're in the gamepass business now. This is why they're pushing gamepass on phones, PCs, Samsung TVs and Firesticks. They don't really care about selling you a box under the TV anymore since they're usually sold at or near a loss anyway. They just want you on the subscription wherever you can play it.

They currently have roughly 34 million subscribers (as of February, I'm guessing Activision Blizzard King is going to bump this number up further), let's assume an average of $12 a month. That's over $400 million coming in every month or 1.2 billion every quarter on the books. They don't have to rely on a big game to have a good month.

You're more valuable to them having the gamepass subscription and just playing on your phone over someone who buys a console and purchases 7 or 8 games a year. Articles like this fundamentally misunderstand the current gaming landscape and their business model. They're not losing the race, they're playing a different sport.

I'm in the same boat.

Elden Ring, Helldivers 2, many games I'd get on Sony PS Store that I just get on Steam because I want to "own" the full game not just the offline part of it.

There was a time where it was worth the money because it was far and away better than any free online offering. That time was probably up to about 2010. Now that servers are paid for with digital game sales, it would behoove them to drop the fee. Instead, I think they're just about to change the console market as we know it.

• I bought the newest console to play the most recent Halo. It truly sucked
• The first Bethesda exclusive game was Starfield. It truly sucked
• The recent focus has been towards online multiplayer and GAAS. Toxic games and toxic service models.
• The ads are insane. Sometimes I'll turn the console on to a full screen ad about Diablo or Game Pass I have to acknowledge before actually using the console. Beyond that there is designated space on the home menu for 3 different banner ads.

Just my opinions as someone that's enjoyed that xbox brand since the first one, and stuck with it out of convenience and from making friends on the network there. Next "console" is a proper gaming computer

I was a heavy Xbox user up until last year when they redesigned the Xbox home screen.

Instead of being able to pin multiple groups of custom apps/games wherever you want, you now only get one group pinned about halfway down the page past several rows of ads. There are generally at least 5 separate rows of ads on the homescreen at all times.

I have a series x (also had an original, 360, and one), and will 100% not be buying another console from Microsoft. The joy of using my expensive console was ruined by ads.

I need to finish Elden Ring, after which my Xbox will be used as a steaming device for videos from my PC or Kodi exclusively.

Edit - upon checking it looks like you can actually pin 2 custom groups. But there are also really 14 rows of ads, not 5, so....

Uggggghhhhh. Me, I’d just support DLSS-style upscaling and call it a day but realistically there will be some GenAI bullshit for sure.

The case I see is like this: Many publishers increasingly argue that they don't have a strong monetization plan for big epic singleplayer games unless they have a dozen forms of microtransactions. For Sony, the monetization plan for God of War is the PlayStation 5 - and all of the residual purchases that come after someone owns one. 80% of those purchases will be of games that are on both Xbox and Playstation - but went to the latter because God of War and Spiderman are awesome. With that in mind, the teams making those games can sorta just aim for awards, not perfect profitability.

I completely agree. Console exclusives are crap. Especially with how good PCs are.

Well once upon a time a console was a small fraction of the cost of a PC and the experience was put game in, turn console on, play game. Sure a console had a fraction of the computing power of a contemporary desktop but typically they had hardware specifically for graphics and sound and games were usually coded very efficiently for the specific hardware often directly in assembly.

That hasn't been the case for a good long while now. Consoles and their games receive updates just like PCs do. Yes the purchase price of a PC and its associated hardware is probably does still cost more than a console...until a few months of paying for those subscriptions go by. Console hardware is now very closely related to PC hardware. So the value proposition is for the price of a low-end gaming PC you get a lower-middle class gaming PC with a 90% less useful operating system, recurring costs and worsened versions of games.

Meanwhile Valve says "Yeah we made using a normal gaming PC on the living room TV work pretty well a WHILE ago. Also, you know the Nintendo Switch? Well we've built a full fat gaming laptop into a similar form factor of portable device. It's an x86 PC, it runs PC games natively. It runs Linux, you can get to a desktop, hook it up to a keyboard and mouse and you can do spreadsheets and run CAD on it for all we care." And it's been such a big success that several competing products have been hastily pushed out that run off-the-shelf Windows and none of them are as good.