| firebush03 said: Imagine if Spyro the Dragon got a new game. Imagine if Skylanders got a new game. Imagine if Crash 5 wasn’t cancelled. Imagine if Banjo Kazooie wasn’t completely MIA. Imagine if Nintendo bought Microsoft. Imagine the Nintendo PC, Switch Phone, Nintendo Xbox, and Star Fox Adventure 2. Imagine if Ryuu96 had to confess that the Nintendo Xbox Series Alpha/Sigma is good. Imagine… btw what are y’all’s thoughts on the current state of affairs with Microsoft? You upset? Happy? Neutral? I personally do want to see Xbox on top again, though it’s looking like a sinking ship at the moment, down 30-50% YoY. |
On the plus side, their 1st party has never been in a better shape, they have a massive number of studios now to feed 1st party content into Gamepass, and those studios have some great games incoming that I'm hyped to play. Gamepass is by far the best value in gaming still, especially since you can keep it active with rewards points.
However, on the negative side of things: There are alot of aspects of their current sales strategy that I'm just not a fan of, charging more for Gamepass on console than on PC, the recent Gamepass price increase feels like dirty pool when they claimed in 2023 that the Activision-Blizzard acquisition wouldn't raise Gamepass prices, low console stock production, low marketing budget overall and near non-existent marketing outside of the US. Sometimes it feels like they are trying to drive people from Xbox consoles on purpose and get them to move to PC and/or competitor consoles. On top of that, the effects of DEI and ESG at Microsoft have been pretty clear to me and many other gamers, and I'm not a fan of it at all. Things like Joanna Dark being less sexy than in the past, the very plain looking Fable main character, Cortana made less sexy in Halo 5 and Infinite compared to earlier games, etc. We also learned that Sweet Baby Inc. got brought in for consultation on 2 upcoming Xbox games, South of Midnight and Contraband, and it is rumored that Sweet Baby made pretty big changes to South of Midnight in particular, with a source claiming that Sweet Baby involvement got the game almost entirely redesigned from what it was originally planned to be under the game's first creative director. However, we did at least learn recently that Microsoft is laying off one of their DEI teams, so maybe things will start to get better in that regard soon.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 21 July 2024
