The entire western gaming landscape is crumbling.
Ubisoft is a shell of its former self,EA is live service garbage with the ocasional singleplayer every couple years,TakeTwo is basically just GTA at this point,WB is mentally retarded throwing shit at wall hoping some live service no one wants might stick before they go bankrupt,Embracer is....lol,Activision was basically just COD before Xbox took over,and Sony's western division seems to do everything in its power to fuck up the legacy built over years and years of amazing games and new ips with by the numbers sequels and woke products like Spiderman 2 who seem more interested in sending a message than letting the player have fun.
Xbox is just following suit to all these companies because like the rest they have garbage ceos and board of directors who only care about money and greed and follow every stupid trend that thinks will bring them more money.
Problem with Xbox compared to Playstation is that they have put themselves in this shithole a loooong time ago and have done nothing to course correct,from lackluster games for years and years,to following fading trends,to not sticking with their vision at any one time to always lying in interviews and most importantly to having retarded fans that nod in approval at every stupid decision they make just because they are incapable of criticizing their beloved company...
Gaming has become mainstream and therefore it's no longer entertainment, it's a business through and through with money being the only thing that dictates ideas and we're heading head first into another crash because of the greed of these incompetent cunts at the helm of these once great companies who have no fucking idea what gamers actually want.
Seriously FUCK these ceos for what they did to gaming!Eat shit and fuck off you greedy incompetent imbeciles!
Good post. I generally avoid these threads but this one seems to have promise. There are a number of issues currently.
General problems in the whole space
Peak games: Xbox has their own problems, but they are also dealing with market problems too. The captive console audience appears to be at saturation or at 'peak' (or running very close to). That is to say, most of the market who are interested in consoles own one or more of the three main competitors already. This is also affecting Sony. Nintendo are a bit more bulletproof because they have strong cross generational appeal. PlayStation and Xbox don't (though Xbox are obviously in a worse place).
Live Service: Since the money is all dropping out of live service games, they have become the chase. You're always fighting for consumers money, but now you're also fighting for their time. A captive audience only has so many hours to play, and if you punish them by missing out on time gated incentives, battle passes, season rewards then they are likely to gravitate towards fewer titles where they can 'max' out their characters.
Gambles: Taking a gamble on a large single player, action narrative game carries so much risk. The big thing about live service games is that just getting one right can make ten failures seem like nothing. You can't do that with single player games in the AAA space.
Cost of games: I think this is the elephant in the room. Don't get me wrong, it's good to have those games like Uncharted and Plague Tale but these high film/story production values don't need to be chased in every behind the shoulder narrative action games. Celebrity VA's, hours and hours of high fidelity cut scenes, studio mocap time and investment, creative rewrites (remocap), shoehorning mechanics into games that don't need them (base building, RPGLite elements, XP systems, side quests, open world hybrid games). Studio layoffs are point scoring exercises for most online console warriors, but everywhere is scaling back (1st party and 3rd party).
That's the backdrop of the industry right now to me. Challenging and needing to change and get its priorities in order. Then if we look at Xbox specific stuff
Quality: Just there are so many tangential issues with everything Microsoft are doing right now. Take the new Halo show, it's probably above average after the last season. However, Paramount+ hosting it can't get the subtitles working on Android TV, which means there are just large blank spaces when arbiter and Makee are speaking. It's just very disjointed with no responsibility or love for the detail and IPs - and this is just a TV adaptation! This extends to games as well though. Forza Motorsport is ok, I don't mind it - but Horizon is just in another league. Forza needs to be a system rival to GT7 and there are too many missteps for the idea to take hold. Not that GT7 had a great start itself, but it has heritage and fans. I've swerved off FM now and play ACC (more sim than simcade) but I haven't even back to FM. Redfall was another disaster. There was a good game underneath that, with good art and sound but who is at the top of the tree and saying this is ready to ship and the mechanics/characters are all good. Halo Infinite - I didn't mind the campaign tbh, and multiplayer was solid but undercooked. Right now, Xbox are putting out games like Saints Row level. The last 10% of any job is where all the presentation and effort is spent. And I think this is where Microsoft are generally failing. They are kind of accepting the 90% and not doing the 10%.
They also fuck up everything good in their platform. Quick Resume is excellent, yet now doesn't work with a lot of titles - so disable it then, or give the option to your players to disable it for certain games. The dashboard rebrand what everyone wanted, is now limiting and worse. Pulling clips off you companion app - now stopped. LFG getting spammed so it's fucking useless. The list goes on.
Xbox One: I agree with Phil. This was the absolute worse generation to fuck up, and they did. I've owned every console except the Xbox One. The whole reveal was all TV but only USA TV and linking. The Kinect is a pile of shite and was very niche, it should not have been front and centre of any strategy. This is the generation when MS should have cemented their Xbox Live as the ecosystem to be in. Sony had played catchup and had a strong finish to the generation, whereas MS didn't really. This was the generation people chose their provider for their digital libraries. It's going to be hard to convert any players now to switch ecosystems and leave their libraries, friends and digital content behind. They made their box the worst place to play 3rd party exclusives and then within months illustrated how their core userbase of COD was being let down on graphics and tech.
Converting players: "It's going to be hard to convert any players now to switch ecosystems" caveated by the fact that you have reasons for them to stay in it. Right now, Xbox aren't giving a reason for players to stick with Xbox. Gamepass is good but you can't buoy your hardware sales by an optional subscription. There is lots of uncertainty about which games are going to end up where. Uncertainty about their tentpole IPs and uncertainty about where the brand is headed.
Studio's/New IPs: Goes back to quality too but their gaming studio's still seems to operate very separate. There are jokes about homogenisation of Sony's games and style of games but you can take a step back and clearly see the strategy and quality control and direction of travel. The perception I have is that this does not exist in reality for the Microsoft studio's (both old and new). There's no identity there, most seem like 3rd party developers just providing a second party title for Xbox. I don't feel there's a common thread running through the brand. There's no love and care, but no senior leadership who are saying 'This is one of our fucking top titles, and this is not up to scratch'. I dunno if it's wanting to be seen as the nice guy or whatever, but sometimes you have to be frank about the quality.
On the flip side it was always going to take a lot of time for new games or new IPs to surface, but I do feel from the initial buzz, we should have seen more. What we have seen has not lived up to the hype (broadly speaking), allowing games like Psychonauts 2 and Pentiment to become examples of their best games. Hellblade can be the first step on a road to recovery, but every game coming out now has the weight of extra scrutiny on it as well. Yuo need ot be consistent, and you need to be consistent to a very high level and Xbox are still all over the place imo.