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ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

Indeed, the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, with its Xbox Full Screen Experience, is essentially what the next Xbox will look like. It’s not dissimilar to the SteamOS interface and Big Picture Mode, which allows you to exit out into full Linux at will.

A big difference here, and something that it sounds like the FSE did not nail, is that SteamOS doesn’t just boot into Big Picture Mode; it intercepts how popups and game windows are drawn to the screen so that you never lose focus of the game window. It doesn’t force you to get out a keyboard or use the touch screen to enter a login password or PIN. It’s got those important considerations for the ways a game machine differs from any other personal computer. Microsoft, with all its wealth and the code base of Windows in its control, can make those same changes, but maybe they didn’t plan for it in their code base that now surely goes back almost 30 years at this point. Best of luck to those engineers.

New technology Microsoft is developing, alongside the “fixed” nature of the hardware, should eliminate a lot of the inconveniences that sometimes come with PC gaming. Things like compiling shaders, etc, shouldn’t be an issue on the new Xbox, for example.

I don’t know if it’s actually new technology, but what Valve does for the Steam Deck is to either handle this server side or to have people with a Steam Deck essentially upload their completed shaders back to the server to be distributed to everyone else’s Steam Deck, sort of like BitTorrent. This is what I expect Microsoft will do.

Right now, I’m told the current plan is for the next Xbox specifically to have no paywall for multiplayer.

It’s insane that they’ve kept that paywall for so long when it would be the easiest way to make their console more enticing than PlayStation, before they did this pivot of theirs. If the goal was Game Pass anyway, make online free and make that library on Game Pass attractive. The reason online is free on PC is because your store purchases are supporting the infrastructure that someone like Valve provides, and we crossed the threshold on consoles where digital purchases are the majority some time ago.

Where the Xbox Ally is disadvantaged, at least for Xbox console users, is the lack of the Xbox console library. There are more Xbox Play Anywhere (dual-license PC and console Xbox games) than ever, but most AAA publishers aren’t on board with this ecosystem just yet. Increasingly, though, it’ll become the default ecosystem for publishers, particularly if they want to support a PC gaming universe where they get 88% of the revenue rather than 70%.

This is a delusional paragraph in the wake of the Epic Games Store.

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