Ugh, I really hoped MS might acquire them.

Getting real tired of waiting around for MS to announce more acquisitions while more and more studios I wanted to see them acquire get crossed off the list. They better have an XO21 and they better announce some acquisitions there, good ones too.

On the assumption that other games are working, here's what you've got to do. This might sound silly but if you know all your account details...

1) Change DNS manually to 8.8.8.8, and 8.8.4.4. Clear alternate MAC address and restart console when prompted. 

 2) Navigate to settings > system > console info and select the option to reset your console while keeping your games and apps. 

Nothing of substance will be deleted so long as you play connected to the internet. Redownload your account and then bam, should work fine. I had issues with games not loading or DLC not being available despite being downloaded. I think there's some kind of handshake for each game update with the xbox servers which certain DNS settings stop from happening properly, and you can prompt it to try again by resetting your console.

I'm really finding the constant lusting over more acquisition news rather tiring. MS has a really strong stable of studios now, and we haven't even seen the fruits of their labor for Xbox yet. We're gonna be getting a lot of kickass games over the next several years.

Obviously, MS has made no secret of being in the market for more studios, and it's cool to speculate sometimes, or get excited if/when something happens...but this desperation from some people to talk this shit into existence, or getting upset about the fact that more acquisitions haven't already happened is really off-putting tbh.

Maybe I want MS to catch up to Sony too quickly, but I'm a gamer on a budget who can't really afford to get 2 consoles early in a generation, so it should be understandable to people that I want all of the 3rd party games that interest me on the first console I buy each gen. And that is not happening with Xbox either last gen or this gen, which frustrates me greatly. I don't want to have to wait a year or two for late ports of timed hats, nor do I want to to ever need to buy a PS console in order to play anything that's not 1st or 2nd party Sony. MS must this gen act to ensure that the situation is better next gen, so that we don't get 3 generations in a row like this for Xbox.

I wasn't going to respond to this at first, because it's only an opinion and we are all welcome to them. But that last line had me feeling a bit attacked, so here goes a wall of text that nobody is going to even bother to read

Is it a strong enough studio lineup objectively, or only subjectively? The current studio line-up is subjectively great, for me at least, but both subjectively and objectively I see ways in which it could be significantly stronger than it currently is. It's that second category, objectivity, that sometimes has me thinking that we live a bit too much in a bubble in this thread, failing to take into account what the market thinks about things.

If Microsoft's current 1st party lineup was strong enough, you would think that the Xbox Series vs PS5 sales ratio would be substantially more in favor of Xbox than the Xbox One vs PS4 sales ratio last gen at the same point last generation generation. By the end of 2014, PS4 had outsold Xbox One by 1.73x, based on current weekly sales trends at least, by the end of 2021 PS5 will have outsold Xbox Series by about 1.61x. That is showing an improvement for Xbox, but not a very large one. And some might say "well that is only down to stock, there is enough demand to sell alot more Xbox Series units than are currently selling", and while it is accurate that Xbox Series demand is high enough they could sell alot more than they are selling so far if they had more stock, there is no doubt that PS5 demand is even higher than Xbox Series demand, we can tell this by the Series S units that are just sitting on shelves in some countries while PS5 sells out everywhere almost immediately, and by the higher PS5 scalper prices. In other words, were it not for this global semi-conductor shortage, PS5 would be even more in the lead than it currently is, the semi-conductor shortage is actually helping MS ironically. In other words, even though MS has 24 first party studios now, compared to 8 Xbox first party studios in 2014 (343, Black Tusk/The Coalition, Rare, Lionhead, Turn 10, Twisted Pixel, Press Play, and Team Dakota), the same year of that generation, the hardware sales situation for Xbox hasn't improved at all. 

But hardware is of course only one aspect of a console's success, there is also software sales. Though sadly we can't really compare much between last gen and this gen here due to the wrench/spanner in the works that Gamepass creates. However, the fact that Microsoft has stopped releasing Gamepass numbers suggests that Gamepass growth may have stalled, with Gamepass falling short of Microsoft's internal targets for Gamepass subscriber counts. If consumers thought the current 24 first party studios were strong enough, would Gamepass growth be stalling? Afterall, MS announced they acquired an entire freaking publisher (one that has a studio that has proven capable of 30m+ sales on Elder Scrolls) just 3 months after their last Gamepass subscriber count update, and yet here we are 6 months after that acquisition and we still have yet to get new Gamepass numbers. 

And while many of those 24 first party studios have yet to release their first Xbox games, which does mean that we haven't seen the full effect of the acquisitions Microsoft has already made, we have at least seen trailers for what many of those studios are working on, and some of those trailers didn't get very many views, which isn't a good sign. The situation is made even worse by the fact that some of the studios they have already acquired won't be able to release their 1st Xbox exclusive games until late 2023 or even 2024, too late to have much effect on the hardware sales situation this generation.  

And some might say, "Why does the hardware sales situation matter at all? Who cares about console sales as long as a platform has plenty of games that you personally want to play?". That opinion has some merit, but the simple fact of the matter is that hardware sales are proportional to 3rd party developer support. Because Xbox sales are so weak in Japan, many JP developers ignore Xbox by default, it would pretty much take Phil paying some of these JP devs and publishers to release on Xbox via day one Gamepass moneyhat deals to even get them to consider Xbox as a platform. Then there is the fact that PS has such a dominant lead that they can moneyhat timed exclusives much more easily and cheaply than they would be able to if the gap was much closer. PS would never have been able to timed hat 6 AAA 3rd party exclusives so far (one of which with 2 year exclusivity) if PS4 hadn't outsold Xbox One by more than 2:1. MS must make sure that the gap is way smaller at the end of this generation so that Sony doesn't go into the 10th generation with the same huge advantage in getting 3rd party ports and 3rd party hats.

The simple fact of the matter is that it has now been a year since the last Xbox acquisition was announced, Bethesda/Zenimax acquisition was announced September 21, 2020, it is now September 23, 2021. MS has gone a whole year without announcing a single acquisition, not so much as an indie/single A dev, in spite of multiple interviews during that year where they said they were actively seeking more acquisitions. Both Phil and the head of Xbox Asia have given interviews where they stated that they hope to acquire studios both in Japan and in the rest of Asia, some of those interviews dating back as far as 2 years, and yet so far their only acquisition in Asia was Tango, a studio that came as part of a package deal with the rest of Zenimax. Meanwhile the list of possible Japanese acquisitions continues to dwindle as Chinese publishers make big financial investments in Japanese studios who might otherwise have been willing to sell to MS for financial security purposes. Likewise the list of independent AAA studios continues to dwindle as other publishers acquire them or as they receive big financial investments that make them less likely to sell to MS for financial security purposes, leaving MS with less and less acquisition options in the AAA arena. It is frustrating to watch. 

Maybe I want MS to catch up to Sony too quickly, but I'm a gamer on a budget who can't really afford to get 2 consoles early in a generation, so it should be understandable to people that I want all of the 3rd party games that interest me on the first console I buy each gen. And that is not happening with Xbox either last gen or this gen, which frustrates me greatly. I don't want to have to wait a year or two for late ports of timed hats, nor do I want to to ever need to buy a PS console in order to play anything that's not 1st or 2nd party Sony. MS must this gen act to ensure that the situation is better next gen, so that we don't get 3 generations in a row like this for Xbox.

Lol. Which one was playing it here, the community manager or the developer? Either way, they definitely could use some practice xD

Yeah, the Xbox retail software situation in Japan is truly abysmal. Apparently there is a sales guy that pays for full Famitsu numbers who stated that Xbox Series has sold just 1,700 retail software units this year. Yes, just 1,700 copies combined for the 4 games that actually got a physical release on Xbox in Japan this year, Scarlet Nexus, Flight Simulator, Dirt 5, and Chivalry 2. That is laughably bad, 1,700 physical software sales on a console with 61,000 hardware sales so far. 

Hopefully the much stronger Xbox hardware sales in Japan relative to last gen will soon convince publishers to release more games physically on Xbox in Japan, and to do larger print runs of their games, and for more retailers to start stocking Xbox software. In the meantime, Xbox really needs to work to get more big JP games on Gamepass, including some big day one Gamepass JP releases, since it seems like many in Japan are buying Xbox Series S or X to use them as a Gamepass machine. Gamepass Japanese additions have slowed considerably in recent months, the last noteworthy, recent (released in the last few years) JP games added to Gamepass were in June I think, I think the only JP games added since then were the niche Katamari Damacy Reroll, and FF13 from 2009, lol.