DF Direct Weekly #221: Disastrous Xbox Cuts, AMD/Sony PS6 Hints, Helldivers 2 Coming To Xbox

Years of mediocre to just plain bad games have hurt MS gaming way more than any acquisition imo
I have no doubt that all of that is true, but my question is how did the higher ups at MS actually approve the acquisition?

What in their right minds convinced them to loan Spencer, Booty, Bond and Greenberg $67 billion?

"Nutella" isn't exactly showing to be good at this either.
 
I have no doubt that all of that is true, but my question is how did the higher ups at MS actually approve the acquisition?

What in their right minds convinced them to loan Spencer, Booty, Bond and Greenberg $67 billion?

"Nutella" isn't exactly showing to be good at this either.
They saw how much money King and Call of Duty made every year and wanted to see how fast they could kill them
 
Why they look like someone farted and they are trying to discover who was the culprit of the smell ?!

richard.png
 
A lot of things can happen over the course of 3 years to change ones mind
Yep, I allowed myself to be optimistic about the acquisition of Bethesda.

I had hoped that it might:
1. Lead to a remaster of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas - by putting smaller teams on those ports and give them development experience. That should have been commisioned DAY ONE.
2. Allow a smaller studio to work on a Fallout/ Elder Scrolls game that wasn't a mainline, but could have been released to coincide with the show. Make them safe games, they were fun. not something that needed to break the bank.
3. Do the same for a Quake game. Let a smaller studio make a safe Quake game.

There were SOOOO many opportunities for little easy wins for that acquisition...and they wasted it.

Instead...it gave us Starfield, Redfall and Doom the Dark Ages. Only one of those was legit good, but still a step back from the two preceding games. Starfield was OK, but was not anywhere close to the homerun it needed to be and Redfall was absolute trash.
 
They saw how much money King and Call of Duty made every year and wanted to see how fast they could kill them
How Gamepass wasn't immediately killed/retooled when they saw Call of Duty didn't result in a meaningful subscriber count is their biggest mistake. The net effect of that decision was that it...likely...killed all sales of Call of Duty on Xbox. Doom the Dark Ages is likely suffering that same fate.
 
How Gamepass wasn't immediately killed/retooled when they saw Call of Duty didn't result in a meaningful subscriber count is their biggest mistake. The net effect of that decision was that it...likely...killed all sales of Call of Duty on Xbox. Doom the Dark Ages is likely suffering that same fate.

The solution is to shut down id 🙄
 
Yep, I allowed myself to be optimistic about the acquisition of Bethesda.

I had hoped that it might:
1. Lead to a remaster of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas - by putting smaller teams on those ports and give them development experience. That should have been commisioned DAY ONE.
2. Allow a smaller studio to work on a Fallout/ Elder Scrolls game that wasn't a mainline, but could have been released to coincide with the show. Make them safe games, they were fun. not something that needed to break the bank.
3. Do the same for a Quake game. Let a smaller studio make a safe Quake game.

There were SOOOO many opportunities for little easy wins for that acquisition...and they wasted it.

Instead...it gave us Starfield, Redfall and Doom the Dark Ages. Only one of those was legit good, but still a step back from the two preceding games. Starfield was OK, but was not anywhere close to the homerun it needed to be and Redfall was absolute trash.
Pretty sure if MS put a few random Gaffers on MS management team, they would see better results, lol.

Because let's face it, it would be hard to do worse.

How MS still didn't get Bethesda/Obsidian to remaster Fallout 3 / NV is inconceivable!

inigo-montoia.gif
 
It made 0 sense to support the deal at the time it happened. Microsoft had just bought bethesda and now they were buying the biggest publisher in the industry. They were going on a massive spending spree and wanted to buy more and more until the CMA essentially played hardball with them and they realized that they should tone down the spending for awhile after buying activision/blizzard.
Yeah, the era of spending is over. The pressure to make money on every initiative is stronger than ever. Xbox can no longer be as decadent as they were before. We are already seeing layoffs. If the money doesn't start coming in soon, Xbox will diminish even more.
 
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"Is XBOX hardware dead?"

What a stupid topic. A console's existence without exclusives is COMPLETELY irrelevant.

Fukin larry curly and moe over here
 
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Team "I was against the ABK acquisition before being against the ABK acquisition was cool". Where's the rest of the crew? @GHG @DeepEnigma Bernardougf Bernardougf Bunch of others...
Truth is a lot of fanboys from all around wanted the fist pump dudebro moment without critical thinking... its the exact same thing with gamepass...more studios + "free" games. What could go wrong. And the frog gets cooked.

Thats why I will remain critic of Sony dogshit decisions this gen until I see a future... because right now.. things are fucked up
 
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One comment John made about Microsoft's behavior is that they are so hands off their studios, right up until they need the help, and then it's the chopping block. This is 100% true, they only have one speed and it's all or nothing.
 
Ignoring Xbox It not been a good year for Nvidia camp. 7900xtx/9070xt outperform the 5080 in performance. AMD basically the main company for Xbox/PS. Switch 2 Is a hot mess that can bearly beat a Series S. RTX 50 line up also a hot mess of melting cables & driver problems.

No wonder so many gaming forums has them needing to spam how their the best as If anyone cares. It fun being called a AMD fanboy when my past rig was a 1600x/1080ti/16GB then upgraded to 5900x/7900xtx/32GB as It was far cheaper than going 5900x/5080/32GB.
 
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Ignoring Xbox It not been a good year for Nvidia camp. 7900xtx/9070xt outperform the 5080 in performance. AMD basically the main company for Xbox/PS. Switch 2 Is a hot mess that can bearly beat a Series S. RTX 50 line up also a hot mess of melting cables & driver problems.

No wonder so many gaming forums has them needing to spam how their the best as If anyone cares. It fun being called a AMD fanboy when my past rig was a 1600x/1080ti/16GB then upgraded to 5900x/7900xtx/32GB as It was far cheaper than going 5900x/5080/32GB.
Microsoft and nvidia have a lot of parallels. Both are drunk off AI and have largely shit on gamers.

Nvidia on the other hand still delivers a viable product and I do have a legit choice.

Microsoft has shit products that get worse.
 
The activision/blizzard deal screwed them just as badly because now xbox isn't a blip on the radar for microsoft anymore. When you spend over 70 billion dollars then microsoft suddenly turned their eye to the xbox division and took much more control over it then they had before. For example satya nadella seemed to appear out of nowhere much more frequently after the deal happened and everything was finalized.




He took more control over the xbox division and now we're seeing all these cuts and canceled projects out of no where. We also saw xbox go third party right after that deal happened and i don't find that to be a coincidence. He's running the show now and he dosen't give a crap about brand loyalty, xbox consumers, exclusive games etc. He just cares about making a profit as well as A.I and damn everyone and everything else.
But but they dont make any profit on the Xbox division infact the Xbox division is bleeding money like you never seen before....go Phil 😁
 
Microsoft and nvidia have a lot of parallels. Both are drunk off AI and have largely shit on gamers.

Nvidia on the other hand still delivers a viable product and I do have a legit choice.

Microsoft has shit products that get worse.
If Nvidia gets blown apart by AMD's UDNA 1 high end they will be sent to the same corner that Intel crying in.
 
If Nvidia gets blown apart by AMD's UDNA 1 high end they will be sent to the same corner that Intel crying in.
nvidia is a long way from that happening. nvidia has surprised me, as I thought they were basically going to keep Blackwell as a paper launch producing just enough to say it exists, but supply for the 5070 and 5070 Ti has actually been decent. There haven't been many models of the 5070 Ti at MSRP, but there have been quite a few 5070s at MSRP.

Meanwhile, the 9070 and 9070XT have been nowhere near MSRP. The cheapest 9070 XT I have seen lately is $699, which you can argue is still a better deal than the 5070 Ti.
 
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