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Comment on Xbox’s leadership shift proves it: the gamer era is over, AI runs the show now

It is. The party system, voice chat services, and the ability to join on or invite friends in a universal way regardless of the game without having to make an account for that game all requires expensive infrastructure and manpower to build and maintain.

Yeah sorry, what is this… Like the third time I’ve stated this? PC did all of the things you’re claiming without an extra subscription fee. Sure, maybe Xbox took some subscription fees and funded infrastructure, that’s not my point. My point is they didn’t need to, as evidenced by someone else who did the exact same thing without the subscription model.

Playstation and Xbox, as a publicly traded hardware and software company, are much more pressured to discover and capture extraneous revenue sources; and the vast majority of the subscription income went to investors.

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EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Yeah sorry, what is this… Like the third time I’ve stated this? PC did all of the things you’re claiming without an extra subscription fee.

It did not do all those things. Not until very recently, and only through Steam. You can say it as many times as you want, that doesn’t make it true lol.

My point is they didn’t need to, as evidenced by someone else who did the exact same thing without the subscription model.

Sony did it for awhile without the subscription model too. Thats not evidence that they didn’t need to. The cost of infrastructure needed to maintain this model has gone up in the last 25 years with more players, higher expectations, and added complexity contributing to more manpower and higher salary expectations.

A free service doesn’t scale very well when it gets exponentially more expensive to maintain as time goes on. Sony was able to subsidize that service at one point in time but very understandably they can’t do that in the big 26. They already sell the hardware at a loss, if they continued to provide that infrastructure for free, leaving them only with commission on PS store sales, but also we don’t want them to take that big a cut from game developers, and we want them to still provide disk drives so we can buy and share games outside their store, and also we don’t want them to buy studios and make games exclusive to their platform… like corporate greed is one thing but also god forbid we just pay a reasonable price for the things we use.

Valve on the other hand doesn’t have to worry about this because they were never in the hardware game to begin with, and now with the Steam Machine they’ve already confirmed they’re not subsidizing hardware.

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- Abundance114@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  and only through Steam
  
  Now you’re being a bit unfair by bundling together console hardware and software while keeping PC hardware and software separate.
  
  To be fair you would need to take into account every available piece of software to make the determination if those features were available for PC before, at the same time, or after consoles.
  
  If I had to guess I’d say that in 90% of cases the innovation occured on PC due to it being an open ecosystem with freely available development hardware and higher numbers of developers. Big successful companies generally don’t come up with big new good ideas, they steal them from other products that have already been proven.
  
  But let’s just looks at this differently. In 2004 the Microsoft video game division reported profits of 2.75 billion. The Xbox live service reported 750,000 subscribers each paying $50 a year, or $37,500,000. The absence of Xbox live would have reduced Microsoft game divisions profits from 2.75 billion to 2.71 billion. Basically a rounding error. Microsoft could have easily funded any of the developments absent the subscription just as Playstation did for years later; just as PC does until this day
  
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  - EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    To be fair you would need to take into account every available piece of software to make the determination if those features were available for PC before, at the same time, or after consoles
    
    Taking into every available piece of software, those features appeared on PC 15 years or so after consoles. And only really achieved similar feature parity with early consoles in 2018.
    
    Big successful companies generally don’t come up with big new good ideas, they steal them from other products that have already been proven.
    
    In this case the PC company Valve “stole” them from Xbox and Sony. That doesn’t really help your argument at all here, in the contrary it just goes to show much much easier valve has had it as all they’ve had to do is follow a blueprint.
    
    In 2004 the Microsoft video game division reported profits of 2.75 billion.
    
    In 2004 the Xbox division of Microsoft reported $0 in profits. Xbox division became profitable for the first time in 2008. Know what was the driving force to that sustained profitability? Yup, Xbox Live.
    
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    Abundance114@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Okay. Pick a gaming feature that you believe was created by console manufacturers from 2002-present.
    
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