That still doesnt explain how comparing a first party and 3rd party event makes any sense at all, and that idea should not be encouraged with upvotes

That still doesnt explain how comparing a first party and 3rd party event makes any sense at all, and that idea should not be encouraged with upvotes

Because the comparison is that were the first opportunity to show the games on the console and MS didn't impress, Sony did. And the thread is exactly about what MS have to do to beat Sony conference.

First impressions is the only comparison that should be made. One let people down and one impressed. No argument there from anybody. But it’s another point to say the Xbox May event was MSs equivalent (20 minutes with A-AA 3rd party games) to Sony’s E3 styled event with all the bells and whistles. 

How did you measure any off that? As far as I'm aware sot never breaks into the top 20 on twitch. And we have some ancient games in the top 20. Even valorant which is consifer a huge failure is there.

Sales? Never will know as ms only tells us players who probably at one point at least tried it. They dont even say active players or individual purchases.

Quality? By who's standard? I have never seen an outlet come out and praise how good sot is now. Granted I don't follow every outlet. But the is no buzz online of this game.

"Despite the Steam Summer Sale kicking off Sea of Thieves at FULL PRICE is still in the Top 5 best selling games globally on Steam. Crazy how successful this has been"

Despite the Steam Summer Sale kicking off Sea of Thievs at FULL PRICE is is still in the Top 5 best selling games globally on Steam. Crazy how successful this has been

Also Halo Master Chief Collection continues performing great at #4. 2 Microsoft first party games in the Top 5 pic.twitter.com/G5JhfY8Hn8

— Benji-Sales (@BenjiSales) June 26, 2020

Look at the steam monthly player stats for it.

https://steamcharts.com/app/1172620#1m

Hardly any increase in players and after the first week when it hit its peak it never got close again. The game being in the top 5 of a sale of old games does not mean anything. Thouse are games that where not even selling anymore. 

Like I said before, People are jumping to conclusions already. Give it more time before trying to own people with incomplete data. This game could see a new breath of life or it could be a fizzle. Just have to wait a bit to find out. 

I do agree with you that Sony's 1st party studios are ahead of MS currently from a AAA perspective. Sony has 7 AAA capable studios now (Naughty Dog, Sucker Punch, Guerrilla, Santa Monica, Bend, Polyphony, and Insomniac), and most of those studios have now released critical and/or commercially successful games. However, that success comes at a cost, most of Sony's AAA studios are rather on the slow side, Horizon took 5 years to make and the sequel may take 5 years as well (if it gets delayed to Q1 2022, which is possible), Polyphony's GT games take anywhere from 4-6 years, Ghost of Tsushima took 6 years to make, TLOU 2 took 6 years. The slow release schedules mean that many of Sony's AAA 1st party studios only get 1 or 2 games out per generation. So, if you only like a few of those 7 studios like me, that is not alot of AAA exclusives to look forward to each generation from 1st party. Another problem with Sony's 1st party is that there is not alot of genre variety, most of them follow the same formula; open world, story-driven, action-adventure, it all starts to feel a bit samey after awhile. 

As for 1st party A/AA development, I definitely think that MS has the edge here, on a personal level especially. MS now has many A/AA teams/studios, several of them with good track records. Rare's Everwild looks fantastic so far, Double Fine has multiple teams with a pretty good track record of releases (they've released at least 1 game per year since 2007, with several of them being critically and/or commercially successful). Compulsion's We Happy Few had alot of potential, but got compared against the AAA expectations people had for it, even though it was made by a AA team. State of Decay 2 was pretty good, though a bit of technical and graphical mess (being first party now means that Unreal masters like Coalition and Ninja Theory can assist them making the 3rd game look like a proper next-gen Unreal game). Ninja Theory's Project Mara has potential to be a great psychological horror game. World's Edge is shaping up to be a great PC/console RTS studio in the future. Obsidian's AA The Outer Worlds team is fantastic, and their single A Grounded has potential (played the demo the other day). By comparison, I'm not a big fan of Sony's A/AA 1st party offerings, never liked Little Big Planet, Pixelopus stuff isn't my cup of tea, Japan studio's Project Siren team puts out some good stuff, but the rest of their teams are kind of meh in my eyes. 

The game shouldn’t have spikes at all if your stance is to be believed. This game should have crashed and burned shortly after its launch over 2 years ago. People are playing it. It’s community is consistent. The developers are saying it’s a success. You don’t do continuous updates to a dead game (a big one just released this week). At this point I’d say you are low key trolling as SoT surpassed all our expectations one way or another. 

Fyi MCC being on there shouldn’t surprise you. Turns out there are a lot of Halo fans that just don’t game on Xbox anymore and people discovering it for the first time. Halo 2 is responsible for the current spike and it’s gonna spike again when Halo 3 drops next month. Which it all is just marketing Halo Infinite for PC players which makes me extra excited for Infinite’s PC performance.