Yeah late reply but it also cost a leg:

The controller set will be released on November 3rd and is available to pre-order now on the Controller Gear website, available at a price of $169.99. Your love for Gears of War doesn't come cheap, you know!

$170? Just buy an elite Controller lol

No, definitely not this. Because it's a money waste. It's not really gonna help them that much. Paying hundreds of millions just to get a single game on gamepass day one (let's say Cyberpunk) is pointless. Because it doesn't guarantee that those who subscribe will not cancel the subscription after they finished with cyberpunk. I would even assume that the majority will cancel. And getting loads of first party games day one there is so expensive that it doesn't make any financial sense. Also, I would argue about third party exclusives vs third parties launching on game pass approach. Because I believe that even if it comes to increasing gamepass subscriber numbers, the first approach will also work better. Because in the first scenario, you will be increasing the potential userbase for the console, which in result will increase a potential number of subscribers. In the second scenario, you don't really do that much to increase. console userbase, you only spending hundreds of millions to increase the gamepass subcriber attach ratio among those who already bought the console. And there is a certain ceiling that you can't go above here. This gen has shown that gamepass doesn't really sell that many consoles and it mostly acts as a nice addition for those who are already in Xbox ecosystem. So, I would say that the approach to expand Xbox userbase and then market the gamepass to them would be better approach than to just buffing up gamepass in hope that existing userbase will be more likely to subscribe to it.

Rod, is that you? :D

/jk, but that's too much for a controller that's not Elite.

It is too much.  And just out of curiosity, you're not the gamer with the 200,000 gamer score are you?  My wife and kids will be so green with envy that I'm replying to a post of yours, if it is you.  My wife makes me now remove my Jesus Painting and replace it with your Avy when I make love to her. But I still have to put the Jesus Painting back up when her mom comes to visit. Wow!

Gamepass is bigger than console hardware marketshare.  You are still looking at things where hardware is the center of everything but MS has moved on from that viewpoint and now content is the center of everything.  Think about it this way, if you are going into a store today and you can get the Series X for 35 a month with game pass.  Not only do you get all of MS first and 2nd party games on day one, MS also include some big hitter 3rd party game also on day one.  The entry to gamepass and MS hardware is made much cheaper and the value looks pretty strong even if you are going to purchase a PS5.  MS could waste that money to get a year exclusive for a game but it would not grow gamepass subs which MS is more invested in.  With their cloud platform now you can play your games on the go from anywhere for that same sub price.  As a purely investment standpoint, growing gamepass and its content is a far stronger and longer term investement then gaining an exclusive 3rd party game for a limited time which probably not going to make some one leave another platform.  If Tomb Raider was an indication then it probably is the reason MS has abandon this route.

Any word on any event for Xbox next week, or before launch?

@shikamaru317 In case you still want more confirmation.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-this-is-how-xbox-series-s-back-compat-really-works

...bringing titles that ran at native 720p up to 1440p. While this doesn't match the max 4K we saw on Xbox One X, there is the potential for improved performance elsewhere thanks to the much faster Zen 2 CPU architecture. In scenarios where Xbox One X was limited by its Jaguar CPU cores, Series S has much more headroom.

It's already been confirmed that the ways in which Series S and Series X handle Xbox One titles varies. Only the Series X will benefit from Xbox One X enhancements to existing games - which typically boils down to resolution boosts, higher quality textures and other graphics-driven effects. Xbox Series S brings its additional horsepower to bear in improving the experience of Xbox One S titles instead. This is more limiting in some respects (a game hard-coded to run at 900p will not run any higher on Series S, for example) but the new console benefits from increased resolutions in games that use dynamic resolution scaling, as well as improvements to texture filtering quality. Obviously, running games from solid state storage reduces loading times significantly, while the Auto HDR feature we've seen running on Series X also features on Series S - all games should present nicely on HDR screens, whether they natively support high dynamic range or not.

"We designed the Series S to enhance the Xbox One S games in a way that the Xbox One X can't do," system architect Andrew Goossen tells us. "We made it easy for existing Xbox One S games to be updated to run with double the frame-rate when played on Series S as well. When games are updated, existing games can query to determine whether they're running on the new console. And in terms of the performance, the Series S provides well over double the effective CPU and GPU performance over the Xbox One, making it pretty straightforward for the games to do this. And in fact, the Series S GPU runs the Xbox One S games with better performance than the Xbox One X."

...We had one triple-A title where doubling the frame-rate really worked perfectly, except that the crowd animation was twice as fast as normal. And so, those sorts of fixes are typically very, very easy for developers to go fix. We're working with game developers and publishers to update [their titles]. It'll basically be select games that run at a doubled frame-rate on the Series S."

So, as we understand it, existing Xbox titles can be enhanced for both Series S and Series X in different ways - the compatibility team can step in with its own specific type of magic, opening the door to running 30fps games at 60fps and 60fps titles at 120fps. Alternatively, developers now have the tools to see where their existing Xbox One games are running - and if it's a Series S or Series X machine, aspects like doubling the frame-rate become possible (and perhaps other features could be enabled too) - all without having to 'port' their games to the next-gen platform...

Doesn't seem like there'll be much attempt if any to reach 4K gaming on Series S. But that's on brand with what they're selling. And given all the other benefits, I think it's a fairly good tradeoff.

BC on the Series S/X is simply unmatched. No other system ever released has been able to do what these new consoles will be able to do. I really appreciate the extra work the BC team has done.

DOA5 and 6 are way better than 4. Problem is Team Ninja turned the game into waifu simulator with hundreds of dollars worth of dlc. Nowadays they only care about their shitty gacha game.