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Soundwave on 05 August 2023
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Slownenberg said:
Soundwave said:

I mean XBox doesn't sell past 60 million mainly because they have to fight the Playstation for the exact same consumer tooth and nail. If there was no Playstation, the XBox is selling what? 100 million? 150 million? 

What an XBox branded take on the Steam Deck would do is just what you alluded to there ... it would not be a niche product. It would get stocked at every retailer and a global release and you would see TV ads and the works for it, so it wouldn't be like a fringe type of product. Like the Playstation sells more than the XBox but no way does anyone think of the XBox as some fringe/niche brand, it's a mainstream brand for sure. 

Frankly with the amount they've spent on Bethesda and Acti-Blizzard there really is no more going back for them anyway, they are all in on gaming now, there's no like "well, we're just sorta doing this as a hobby". Not when you put down $70 billion dollars for one acquisition. If they believe that much in the Game Pass model then probably at some point a portable XBox makes some sense, to drive Game Pass adoption because there is zero chance Nintendo will ever allow that on the Switch. 

With the PSP and Vita it was a different story because it had to be a totally distinct hardware and software ecosystem that required tons of R&D and dev resources to support and those systems, but in this case like ... there is a version of every game they make already playable on a PC architecture, they don't even have to do anything. 

It's not even like the hardware R&D would be pricey either ... AMD is already making the APUs for these kinds of devices, I'm sure Microsoft could get something similar or better from AMD. It's not some exotic "made only for ASUS or Valve!" chip. 

Yeah absolutely Xbox sells less because Xbox and Playstation have basically been twin systems for three generations now and Xbox is just the much less popular brand. But doing a handheld or hybrid I don't think would get them anywhere. Of the people who do buy Xbox, I think most of them want the latest graphics action games mostly. That's like most of the audience. If Xbox made a handheld who would buy it? You wouldn't be getting ANY of those latest high-end graphics games because handhelds are well, handhelds. Just like Switch doesn't get the big AAA high-end third party games, Xbox portable wouldn't either. Sure now they have a bunch of developers they've bought so they could try to pump out games for it, but again, who's gonna buy it? Not the Xbox fans who want the latest AAA graphics. And they aren't buying up developers of console AAA games to have them not make console AAA games, not handheld-level games which are essentially graphically a generation behind. That's not their audience. And they won't be able to match Nintendo's first party output and "games for everyone" market. I think all they would get is an Xbox handheld that sells like a quarter of what their consoles sell. They'd probably do WiiU type numbers with an Xbox handheld.

Xbox knows their market. High end (by which I just mean games with realistic art style) AAA action games and the like. They are buying up studios to provide more of those. Handheld would just be a shift away from their market to a market that is fully occupied by Switch and for which Microsoft has little to offer. The path Microsoft is going on is to be the subscription console to differentiate themselves from Playstation. That's their niche. They aren't going to go after the niche dominated by Nintendo. That would be a huge blunder for Microsoft and the Xbox brand. They are buying up big developers in order to get huge AAA console games on their subscription service so that they can get a steady monthly income from like 50 million people. And people tend to keep subscriptions, so its a good model to have when moving from one generation to another. That's the Xbox path, definitely not trying to compete with Nintendo in the portable market.

I think you're misinformed about Steam Deck type hardware ... the whole point is they CAN run AAA modern games. Pretty much all of MS' games work on a Steam Deck already. 

The whole "well if you make a portable, you can't have AAA games on it" is outdated thinking. Here is Halo Infinite on the Steam Deck, this is not a special ported version or anything, it's just the PC version of the game:

Here is a PS5/XBS only game, Jedi Survivor, and look the settings are scaled down but the game is playable on the Steam Deck and this is a game that is notorious for poor optimization:

And really you have to consider the chip inside the Steam Deck is by now a little old, Microsoft if they went to AMD would likely get a better chip that performs better than this (probably something at 3nm which means it has a performance bump + battery life improvement over Steam Deck). 

Would such a product sell 100 million units? Probably not, but I think MS could move a decent number of these, it would also be able to do things outside of just gaming, like run Windows. It could add several million Game Pass users to the total. I don't game as much at this point in my life because there just isn't time, but if I was younger and in my 20s would I consider buying something like that? Probably yes.