Topic: Official Push Square Xbox Thread

I just bought Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (the complete edition; DLC and all) for five dollars. I’ve heard great things about this game, and since it received a 60 FPS boost recently, I decided to try it out.

I'm at about 30+ hours of Indiana Jones now. I honestly don't know how it could take any less time than that, unless your following a guide and skipping cutscenes or quests. I'm not even doing a 100% run, and I'm not bothered about getting collectibles unless they just happen to be where I'm exploring at that moment, which is quite often the case anyway. So no game time is being wasted doing any purely collecting quests, it is all Adventures, Fieldwork and mysteries, which themselves all tie in to the main story of the game.

Superior game design. I'm guessing one or two more sessions and I'll have wrapped the story, depending on how big the mysteries and Fieldworks I've got left turn out to be.

If two thumbs up was a review score, it'd suffice 👍👍

@Ravix Yeah, if you play the game naturally, you can easily get 25-40 hours out of it. It really is a fantastic game, and I like how a lot of fieldwork and mysteries are stumbled upon naturally. Everything feels organic. With that said, near the tail end of the game I was using the fast travel system quite a bit, and I was also going balls to the wall melee against enemies since there aren’t any repercussions. There is a ton of backtracking and it’s not entirely respectful of your time, particularly in Egypt, but it’s still amazing experience.

With the rumours of more first-party Xbox games coming to PS5, it got me contemplating on how Microsoft got to this point. I feel like Phil Spencer/the Xbox team made two fatal mistakes. The first one being that they shouldn't have added first-party titles day one on Game Pass. Because of this, the games miss out on a lot of sales. Looking at the competition, such as Sony with PS+ and EA with EA Play, they wait at least a year before adding new releases to their service. Even other companies, such as Disney, let their movies be shown in cinema first before having them added to their service. This model seems more sensible. Microsoft can't really go back on this decision, which is why they decided to release their games on other platforms now.

The second mistake being that they bought Activision/Blizzard for a hefty sum, which has made the Xbox team seemingly lose their autonomy as decisions are no longer being made by them anymore. This is the impression I've gotten throughout the past year as Phil Spencer and the team have been very quiet since the acquisition went through. Instead, we're hearing more about Xbox from Satya Nadella. It's like because Microsoft invested a lot of money into acquiring ActiBlizz and Game Pass is not showing enough growth, the bigwigs want to take more control in order for this division to gain as much revenue as possible so that they can show that their investments were good. I honestly believe that Spencer and the rest of the Xbox team don't want to release first-party titles on other platforms but their hands are tied now after the ActiBlizz acquisition.

I think that both of these mistakes tie in with each other as well. If they didn't release their first-party titles day one on Game Pass, then maybe they wouldn't need to release their games on other platforms as they would've gained more revenue from the sales on their own platform before adding the games on Game Pass a year or so later. Not to mention that more people would've bought an Xbox and thus their brand would've grown.

The only reasons why you would buy an Xbox is because it's more affordable than a PC and it has Game Pass, which PS5 doesn't. So if you want to play games like Indiana Jones day one in the most affordable way, then Xbox is the way to go. But I don't think most people mind waiting some time for the games to come over to PS5 and have them go down in price instead of buying an Xbox. So really, there won't be much of a reason to buy an Xbox henceforth, which is a shame as I feel like Microsoft had something good going for them for a while there. Unless the next Xbox offers something different than the competition, I think I'm going to stick with Nintendo's and PlayStation's next consoles in the future.

@LtSarge I think their problem is always the same. They try to buy their way to success. Fail. And then try again.

If they had spent the years since their inception developing more varied titles than Halo, Forza, Gears (all which appeal to and thus share a very similar male American user base) then maybe they wouldn't have to keep trying to buy publishers to grow their catalogue.

Whatever people say about Sony, they don't really buy just buy a studio and simply keep ploughing on, they find talent early and develop it by working closely with them, when they have proven themselves they usually get acquired and/or trusted with massive projects which take risks that SIE can then publish

In the live service era, it's started a bit sketchy. But before then it has led to games and franchises that have supported SIE for years.

Xbox are not risk takers, they don't develop talent. They are simply number crunchers and service pushers. Which is what Sony should definitely avoid in the coming years, by the way.

I do think Xbox tried to change this, but then splashing the cash to buy publishers kind of sets that back again and leads to a slightly naff way of doing it. Like they have Obsidian under their control, which is one of those things that should pay off in the future and they could have put a big focus on their talent. But then right after they bought Zenimax 🤦‍♂️ it's just too much. And yes, Machine Games have hit gold from the Zenimax buyout, but then they have to release their game on PS5 anyway.

It's hard to get behind them when it's just spend so much and hope one pays off, rather than focus on a few and make sure the real talent gets the support it needs.

@Kraven Man I can not understand how so many have had time to beat Indiana Jones already.. Its like of the internet have it done by now. I got the impression that it is a quite big game. Yet it seem to have taken most people like less then a week or something to beat it..

@Ravix I wholeheartedly agree. Just looking at the past few years, they've delivered so many underwhelming experiences such as Redfall, Forza Motorsport, Starfield, Hellblade II and so on. Then they succeeded with one game: Indiana Jones. Microsoft definitely bit off more than they can chew.

At first I thought it was convenient that they bought so many studios as that would mean more games on Game Pass. But then they shut down Tango Gameworks, one of their most creative studios, and I lost all confidence in them. I seriously hope they stop acquiring more studios, because at this point I feel like either more studios are going to get shut down or the talent is just going to leave over time.

Microsoft should just focus on the studios they have now and nurture them so that at least we can get good games from them. I'm curious to see how Avowed is going to be received next month. Either it'll just be a Skyrim clone or something more original that'll help boost Obsidian's status.

@LtSarage May I ask if you are ”new” to Xbox? Or have you been on the platform for a long time? Hm I thought that you was mostly on playstation before:)

@oliverp I've been playing on Xbox since 2010 during the 360 days. I actually started playing on Xbox before PlayStation. You're right though that I mostly play on PlayStation nowadays.

@LtSarge if Fable doesn't come out this year and they move to having even more games come to PS (the ones I bought an Xbox thinking I'd eventually need it to play them) then it might be time to bin my series X already 😅

It went from "the future is bright" with the summer showcase to "the future is publishing on PS" a few months later 🙈

My xbox gaming has amounted to a grand total of Indiana Jones and half of Starfield. Anything else I've played on it just happened to be on game pass/Ea Play at the time.

Buying Bethesda/Zeni, a massive publisher arm, and then deciding to not publish those games much beyond Game Pass and cut the console sales reach of the games by well over half also seems like sheer lunacy. And it has hurt their smaller studios, who also weren't able to sell the games on PS at the time they were getting hype on Game Pass. I genuinely don't know how Phil managed to do it, and how they haven't thrown him under the bus yet. The suits clearly hate the gambles he made. And it hasn't really helped the average gamer, either.

And I've always said a dev like Bethesda need game sales as they can't just fund The Elder Scrolls 6 out of thin air. They need to actually budget for it, and they probably won't have as big an allowance now than they would have had if Starfield had launched on PS5 as well. Despite it not quite being the game people wanted, it would have still sold millions upon millions on PS 🤦‍♂️

@LtSarge iirc post-ps4/early 9th gen you went pretty much all in on Xbox/Gamepass too right?

@Ravix Sorry to hear that you bought an Xbox for that reason. I'm still keeping mine to use as a Game Pass machine (still nice to play day one releases for under €20) and to play older games. But yeah, it's really sucks that Microsoft went this route.

I mean, Microsoft could've just continued having those games release on other systems but with the key difference being that they would've also been added to Game Pass over time. They really didn't think that one through.

@colonelkilgore Yup, that's right. Back in 2020, I thought I'd do fine with just subscribing to Game Pass and playing next-gen games on my Xbox One through cloud streaming, which sounded fantastic on paper. Why buy the next console when you can just keep playing new games on the one you already own? But then I tried out cloud streaming on Xbox and it sucked. So I decided to get a Series X in 2022 I believe because it was cheaper than PS5 and I could play day one games on Game Pass. But I barely used my Series X for the remainder of the year lol. That was the year games like God of War: Ragnarok came out so I ended up playing more on my PS4 thanks to those titles being cross-gen. And that's when I realised that PlayStation was my preferred platform and I bought a PS5 back in 2023.

If I could go back now, I would've just bought a PS5 instead of a Series X. I bet on the wrong horse this generation.

@LtSarge to be fair, Microsoft’s Xbox/gamepass consumer-friendly sales pitch was a strong one (given their predicament)… and I’m surprised more people didn’t make the same bet that you did.

Ultimately though… Phil explained it himself during that kindafunny interview, that they lost heavily during the 8th gen when gamers were building their digital libraries and profiles and it was always gonna be an uphill task. And while people do generally have short memories, the constant mantra of wait til next e3/i’m more excited about what we didn’t show, which almost always went unfulfilled… eventually worked against Xbox by way of the boy who cried wolf.

They were in such a strong position early to mid 360… and then they just stopped delivering games. That stretch from 2010-2024 was a veritable drought and that is why the most important generation was lost as Phil put it. Shame too, as if they had the emphasis on games back then, that they seem to have now it all would’ve probably been very different.

@LtSarge I'm not really bothered about it, I just find it funny that when they finally convinced me after years that there would finally be enough Xbox games coming out I'd at least be interested in, that they changed their whole business so they'd most likely come to PS anyway 😂

I've still got great value out of it, but I do also kind of question the value compared to the health of the games industry, and I'd rather support developers, and only use subs as a supplement to games I'm buying.

But if they want to give out their games day one for peanuts, that's up to them. Hopefully PS sales are enough to keep their studios afloat. But it wasn't the case for Tango, unfortunately.

I have a theory about the next Xbox console with Microsoft say they are making. First lets add up what we know for sure:

1) They have said it'll be the biggest leap ever in tech terms
2) They are putting their games on PS5/Switch 2 as well
3) Sales for Xbox hardware has fallen off a cliff
4) Some 3rd parties (like Capcom) are starting to skip releasing Xbox versions of games because of the low sales numbers.
and
5) A rather long point, but important. Sony/Nintendo/Xbox sell their consoles at a loss or break even because they make the money back on game sales. This is the current business model and why consoles are cheap to buy considering the bill of materials to make them.

If Microsoft release yet another console, same sort of Spec as PS5 Pro/PS6 we know its going to bomb hard, and I'm sure Microsoft know this.

I really doubt a handheld device is really a viable business for Microsoft. If they can't get people to buy their home console, why would someone buy their handheld over a Switch 2 or Steamdeck? Also it's worth noting that even the Steamdeck has only sold around 5 million units.

So what market if left for Xbox to sell in?

I think if they are smart they will create a new market; a premium console market.
They could create a very high powered box and sell for around $1000-$1200.
Now clearly this is not a mass market device, but they have alread failed in that market so why try again?

No, I think the only viable business Xbox hardware can be in is a premium market. A high powered box, that gives users access to Gamepass, but also Steam.
Hopefully they could cut some sort of deal with Valve, to get an "Xbox certified" tag added to Steam games much in the same way you have "Steam Deck certified".

This way, they can make a profit on the hardware sold rather than on games, because lets face it, they are not making money on Xbox games.

@dodgykebaab I do want a premium console like this, but i'd rather Sony or Valve do it. Game Pass games, on the whole aren't the same quality as the first party Sony and Third Party multiplatform releases and therefore aren't as scalable.

It's games like KCD2 the next Witcher and Cyberpunk etc that will benefit from a PC style console as those are games made with high end PC as a priority.

It will be interesting to see what they do. At this point they will have to release a console with unimaginable potential but also ridiculously cheap to sell them to anyone, it feels like. And the longer it takes, the further third party will drift from Xbox with delayed releases and less effort for the platform.

@dodgykebaab https://www.vg247.com/xbox-phil-spencer-consoles-comment-mayb...

@graymamba Yeah because Phil has never gone back on things he said.

Oh no, wait he's done that a lot!:

https://www.pcgamesn.com/gears-of-war/phil-spencer-says-not-e...

@dodgykebaab okay… but he literally discussed his negative perspective on a $1000+ console a little over a month ago and the next Xbox was apparently greenlit around two weeks ago. Logic would dictate the information I provided would have a bearing on that 🤷‍♂️

@graymamba This is true.

To be honest, my post here is only a theory based upon what would actually generate profit for Microsoft; and they have a history of releasing hardware everyone else could see would bomb from miles away.

I just don't see what the business plan would be for making a normal console or even a handheld. I just can't see them making their market bigger.