HoloDust said:
curl-6 said:
Yeah in this economy I expect Helix will simply be too expensive to achieve mainstream success, even if by some miracle they can salvage the brand's tarnished image. With AAA budgets having ballooned as much as they have, they will have basically no choice but to sell on Sony and Nintendo. |
From my POV, it depends on whether MS is able to offer it at price that is significantly cheaper than equivalent PC (I'm thinking at least ~75%), which they should be able to offer. Given that they will be Steam-ready, I might not be inclined to replace all my PCs with it, but I'll be certainly interested to replace some of them with Helix. Not sure how many PC gamers are thinking this way, but I guess there's some amount of us that do, in addition to actual XBOX gamers who have not migrated to PS and find appeal of continuing their XBOX experience, in addition to getting access to PC gaming. |
Even if this plays out well, success from the PC market in this regard will probably not equate to much or at least not what we expect from the console space. Something like the steamdeck can be the talk of the town in the PC space but will struggle past 5m in 3 years of sales.
The PC market is huge in totality but its made up of many different configurations including school/work laptops, notebooks, workstations, more typical gaming rigs etc. No individual fixed piece of hardware is ever going to take a huge chunk of that pie, unlike with consoles.
Xbox is no longer a trojan horse, there is no grand plan to reach 100m gamepass users etc, all of those ambitions hit their ceiling. There's no realistic reward in going back to Xbox exclusives or XBox+PC exclusives. I think the Helix is just a low investment consolidation of their hardware niche, whilst the software will be everywhere else and the real continuation of the Xbox brand.