Now, when it comes to peripherals, they've already closed shop. They also fired large numbers of people from the physical distribution team. Those two things are true, but here's the yet unconfirmed rumor (but rather highly corroborated with recent leaks). The rumor is they're going multiplatform, porting all their exclusives from Gears of War to Sea of Thieves to PS5. They've already been porting their games to PC, and not just in their own exclusive Microsoft Store but on Steam as well. Not all of their XBox One/Series exclusives are there yet, but they're getting closer year by year. Combine that with recent leaks about the Switch 2 that say that MS has dev kits for the next Nintendo system, there's a good possibility they intend to do the same there too. They've already ported a handful of their former exclusives to the Switch 1.
If they go this route... well it would mean that MS has been buying up all these companies to become a games development house bigger than EA. It would also mean that what I currently have sitting on my shelf is a relic. I mean, MOST of my consoles are relics yes, but this would be a relic like the Dreamcast, the last hurrah.
Interesting to think about. There's positives and negatives to this of course, namely that Sony gets just THAT much more control over the console market, but what it could ALSO mean is that MS is going to make hardware more like the "Steambox", just a PC in a box that runs a normal version of Windows and just... plays whatever PC game you want to stick on it.
It would be absolutely horrible if MS actually quits the hardware market because surrendering the whole top-end hardware market to the worst company in the industry, Sony, would be just about the worst possible outcome... I hope that even if MS makes the not very good decision to release some multiplatform games they keep making their own consoles.
If they make somewhat consolized PCs that'd be interesting, though.
From the looks of things that really is where we're going, and in terms of corporate consolidation that would leave the market entirely to Sony and Nintendo. I wouldn't say Sony are the "worst in the industry", at least not appreciably so though. I mean... how much competition is there? The OUYA? As I've discussed before, the days when any decently sized toy or computer hardware company could just spit out a console are behind us. Steam, NVidia, and the like are instead going the route of "Consolized" PCs, mainly aping the Switch's base design.
While I can easily see MS going that route too, either as a Switch style machine or a fixed spec "consolized" PC (complete with branding we might see on games indicating full compatibility with that particular consolized PC (and of course PCs in general), I really do think the era of bespoke locked-down consoles is dwindling bit by bit. Sony's also releasing their games on PC these days, though differently than MS are. They unfortunately don't do same-day releases instead spacing them out a year or so after the console version, but they DO sell them on more stores than Steam by bringing their games to DRM-less stores like GOG.
I am also very eager to cut down the number of yearly online services I'm paying for. On PC, I don't have a pay a dime to play MS's games online, and that's the expecation driven by, again, Steam.
I think at this point the decision has already been made though, one way or the other. Keep in mind that MS has already sacked significant chunks of their hardware production departments and already ceded their PC accessory division entirely (though they did at least decide to license out the designs for some of their more popular products so third parties can reproduce them).
I'm no fan of consolidation, but let's face facts here, MS will be a VERY powerful 3rd party developer, dwarfing EA with only Embracer Group as a real peer. They have always been primarily about software, and with their dominance of the main OS almost everyone uses on their PCs, your PC was practically already a "Microsoft console". They have nothing to lose at this point by making this decision.
Sony however will be in a prime position to do what Microsoft threatened to do before the release of the XBox One, and that's worrying. MS only cancelled that decision to force disc based games to require an always-online connection because of how thoroughly Sony put them in their place by NOT embracing that strategy. They "won" that E3 in a single devastating moment when they explained how to "loan a game to a friend" by just handing a disc from one employee to the other. But, I'm under no illusion that makes Sony "good". They're giant corporations. They're both greed incarnate, and Sony is likely even now considering doing the very thing they mocked MS for trying the moment MS can't counter their move. But... Nintendo still can, at least. And Nintendo is going to Nintendo. They'll do whatever the heck they feel like regardless of what MS and Sony are doing, after all.
It's at this point I do want to stress that while the inside sources have been fairly reliable, this is still, as of yet, rumors. What's more known is the push for MS to start porting their exclusives to PS5, what isn't known for sure is extrapolating from that.
I point this out because MS "fanboys" (a thing I foolishly thought no longer existed) are losing their collective minds over this. Apparently, it was very important to them, for some reason, not just to have good games, but to be the only ones that got to play those games. Now you have people rending their shirts, gnashing their teeth, and breaking into soulful mourning music. Though, whether this turns out to be the real direction MS is going or not, I will certainly appreciate the responses of those now saying "I realized that Microsoft doesn't actually care about us and only care about money". That is a good growing moment. "Microsoft" isn't a person, it's a corporation, and corporations are systems, not people. Systems don't "care" about anything. I hope they've learned that putting any effort at all into "defending" or "sticking up" for a giant corporation is a waste of one's precious life on this Earth.
The date for whatever it is has been announced: it's a podcast Thursday. Yeah. Either they don't have much to say or something, I don't know... curious.
Sony meanwhile have their announcement. They sold twice as many consoles as Microsoft, and yet:
https://kotaku.com/ps5-playstation-5-lif...1851257227
They don't consider that a success. Granted, the Switch outsold all of it, but this article does point out that this generation has been... weird. No one could really even GET the things because of how hard it was for manufacturing during the chip shortage to come even close to meeting demand. While I do manage to have both myself, I couldn't actually recommend someone put in the effort hunting either one down back before 2023.
So, the "slow down" is notable. Of course, also notable is just how much money Sony basically burned in making "Spidersmin 2: Actually it's the Third one, but black sequels don't count". All the same, ending the generation a little over 3 years into the cycle (remember that both XBox Series and PS5 came out at the tail end of 2020) does seem rather hasty since by typical metrics, they're winning. Unless...
Well, unless the whole concept of "consoles" is about to make a seismic shift. Hey remember last year when rumors abounded from both MS and Sony sides that we'd be getting "Pro" versions of those consoles? I'm sure that it was something both of them were considering, but the vast majority of people who couldn't even find the original models did NOT want to deal with that mid-gen upgrade situation again. Heck even Nintendo bowed out of that sort of thing after making that "New 3DS" last handheld generation, with the "Switch Pro" not touching the specs and focusing on different user-facing features like battery life and the screen, so it was more of a "Switch SP". Sony, too, are running an x86 based console and the OS is a Unix based system (Linux itself forked from Unix's BSD release), so Sony could turn their console into a PC-in-a-box if they so wished to go that route, though the OS would need a lot more work than XBox's OS would to be fully compatible with, say, WINE. (Linux may have forked from UNIX, but it's added and changed so much over the years that things like WINE make specific system calls that don't exist on BSD UNIX.)
I'm speculating heavily at this point, admittedly, but it's a curious situation so forgive me that speculation for now. One last thing though. The chip shortage is still happening. It's been a rather long shortage and is projected to still take a bit to fully resolve.
Well from MS's current announcement, it seems that their multiplatform plans are a lot more limited than the leaks had originally indicated. Now it COULD be that they are reacting to the ridiculous fallout among their diehard fanbase, but more likely the details weren't set in stone and the leakers didn't have a full picture.
They've also made it clear they're still going to make more hardware. Now, this is good only in the sense it keeps Sony from just dominating the console market, but it's bad in the sense that we're stuck in the era of having 5 different versions of games locked to specific hardware for at least another generation, and I was kind of starting to get really excited at the prospect of "consoles" going away entirely.
Consoles do not "go away entirely" if the entire high-end console market is ceded to Sony. That's not how it works at all. That would just be a situation with a monopoly where one company controls the whole market and leeches off of all sales made there because of unlike the PC console marketplaces all pay the platform owner. Monopolies never ever goes well. Of course, I really dislike Sony as a videogame company, but monopolies are almost always bad.
So yeah, it's fantastic that Microsoft is not abandoning hardware. Releasing their games on the other platforms while Sony and Nintendo do not release games on Xbox isn't great though, that's giving them the advantage for sure. I know that MS said that they'd like to see Sony and MS games on Xbox but don't expect it, but yeah, I definitely don't expect it... but if it ever did happen Sony games on Xbox is certainly much more likely than Nintendo games anywhere not on a Nintendo platform, that's for sure. Nintendo does not do that.
Alright don't misunderstand, I was only saying that it's a step towards that conclusion, not a forgone one.
Here's something weird. Nintendo cancelled their "direct" at the last moment. Still not really sure what's going on behind the scenes.
On that second point, the new rumor is that the Switch 2 or whatever it's going to be has been delayed from late this year into early next year. I've never believed any of the "Switch Pro" or "Switch 2" rumors because there are too many of them and they are too obviously always wrong, but that's what is being said.
Personally, I think the Switch is just fine... yeah, it can't do high-end visuals and if a new console releases I'll get it, but the kinds of games that I play on Switch look great and wouldn't be much improved by higher resolutions, I think. It's not the '90s anymore, you don't need a new machine every couple of years. Tech is at the point where platforms stay perfectly acceptable for much longer and I do think the Switch is at that level. It will need a refresh eventually, but I've never understood the people getting so upset at Nintendo for years now because there isn't a more powerful version of the console out... like, seriously, most games run just fine on it!
(16th February 2024, 10:52 PM)A Black Falcon Wrote: [ -> ]On that second point, the new rumor is that the Switch 2 or whatever it's going to be has been delayed from late this year into early next year. I've never believed any of the "Switch Pro" or "Switch 2" rumors because there are too many of them and they are too obviously always wrong, but that's what is being said.
Personally, I think the Switch is just fine... yeah, it can't do high-end visuals and if a new console releases I'll get it, but the kinds of games that I play on Switch look great and wouldn't be much improved by higher resolutions, I think. It's not the '90s anymore, you don't need a new machine every couple of years. Tech is at the point where platforms stay perfectly acceptable for much longer and I do think the Switch is at that level. It will need a refresh eventually, but I've never understood the people getting so upset at Nintendo for years now because there isn't a more powerful version of the console out... like, seriously, most games run just fine on it!
Frankly I agree with this as a general rule. There's rumors of a PS5 Pro coming along and all I can think is... why? Why even bother with that? Not only is it hard to tell the difference between the PS4 and PS5 versions, just about all the big hits on PS5 are also PS4 games anyway. The key thing there is as far as gameplay is concerned, consoles can do anything a developer can imagine. They are not held back by hardware unless they LET themselves be by obsessing over the latest, greatest, most details visuals.
But then there's the Switch, which has long suffered low frame rate issues from even modest (though impressive) ports. There's good reason, I think, to go ahead and release new hardware in that particular case, bringing the console up to a portable PS4 perhaps. Get the internal storage up to NVME speeds (which is possible using newer SD Express speed cards) and that's pretty much all we'll need for the foreseeable future.