The console wars have ended. The PC is victorious.
Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform
Submitted 1 month ago by Innerworld@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://gamesbeat.com/what-an-xbox-founder-thinks-of-the-new-xbox-ceo-seamus-blackley-interview/
Comments
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 1 month ago
absquatulate@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Some victory. PC sales were plummeting in favour of mobile and now component prices. Console space is now done with any semblance of competition - Sony is now a monopoly and will start behaving as such. And xbox’s portfolio of many many IPs will go straight to the bin.
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 1 month ago
Ah fuck I forgot about mobile and I hate to consider it.
sakuraba@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
In what world is Sony a monopoly when Nintendo exists?
The Switch 2 is not a dedicated home console but it is a console
Don’t get me wrong, consoles are dying too, memory prices have gone up and Sony is already shifting from making money from consoles to making money from subscriptions
Nintendo is just doing their thing and becoming the Apple of the videogame industry
Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
No, many of them will go to PCs or Sony over giving up
BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 1 month ago
You mean Tencent mobile games
ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 1 month ago
Microsoft owns King. The candy crush franchise creator.
sturmblast@lemmy.world 1 month ago
No
ThePantser@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
No, the new player in the game, AI killed everything.
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 1 month ago
My PC will still boot when the people turn on the data centers in the next 6 months. Can AI say the same?
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’d like to see you try to build a PC right now for less than $1,500. The cornered the market on all of the parts necessary to make a computer that can run games well.
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 1 month ago
Bro I am playing Webfishing and Space Station 14 on a T460s running linux. Caves of Qud as well. You’ve been lied to. You can game without any of that shit if you’re not trend chasing battlefield.
justsomeguy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This is for the best. As someone who is forced to work with a lot of Microsoft infrastructure let me tell you things have never been this broken before. They keep doubling down on AI and it simply doesn’t work.
anarchyrabbit@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I feel you brother. It’s bad. They are pushing AI features at the speed of light but forgetting that other things need attention too. Log a support ticket and it spews out AI shit that I have already tried or doesn’t help.
justsomeguy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
My favorite last week was 2 dead support numbers and a third that let to AI which happily told me it has a solution that will fix the problem. The link it sent brought me to the bing search page.
I was so happy to finally talk to indian support a day later.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 month ago
didn’t the new exec come from their AI division?
ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 1 month ago
Is this how they put her out to pasture? “Your AI division has been such shit that we’ll put you in charge of a division we plan to close…”
sakuraba@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
depends on what you mean with ‘AI’, like builder.ai
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 1 month ago
There are already a bunch of documented but umimplemented functions in a few Xbox related API, like GameInput.
Greddan@feddit.org 1 month ago
It’s been steadily downward since the release of Server 2012 when they started shoehorning every damn feature into increasingly bad web-UIs. I Worked on Microsoft environments since Server 2003 and I fucking hate that companies still use their garbage.
JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 1 month ago
It’s insane how Microsoft is handling Xbox:
- They have their own console and Windows
- They bought everything they could and now own most of the biggest gaming franchises outside of Nintendo: Activision-Blizzard. Minecraft. Halo. Call of Duty. Warcraft. Starcraft. Diablo. Candy Crush. Elder Scrolls. Fallout. id software. Bethesda.
They have everything in place and are still getting slapped around by Valve and Sony and are now talking about shutting down everything?
sturmblast@lemmy.world 1 month ago
As a long time IT guy… this is how Microsoft does everything
Jeremyward@lemmy.world 1 month ago
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀.meme
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 1 month ago
They thoroughly shit the bed, it’s an astonishing display of incompetence.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
More than likely they’ll just sunset Xbox the platform and rent you the ability to play games on the cloud using your phone, smart TV or computer. And all those franchises will be rentable first, then maybe buyable some day later.
Among other things they have huge data centers that are going to be unused come AI collapse - they just need to figure out how to run games on those GPUs, as they’re very very different from gaming GPUs.
Broken@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Yes. Correct. Because they don’t know what they’re doing.
Just look at how they’ve positioned themselves in recent years: One, we always want to have the most powerful console to be the best. Two, we want people to be able to play anywhere with just a controller and no console required. Talk about a kingdom divided.
vane@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I think they are sunsetting whole company.
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
That’s what their actions felt like for decades yet somehow they’ve always kept chugging along.
CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I can only hope.
sakuraba@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
You mean Microsoft? I hope but I doubt it, they have a lot of companies locked in their products
sexy_peach@feddit.org 1 month ago
Wtf I just came up with the same comment without reading yours first.
So yeah, I agree. They must have done the calculation that it’s easiest to just not exist and lay everyone off.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Nah, shifting heavily toward being B2B.
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I love how nobody here is getting me actual picture. They’re not going to sell Xbox to people anymore. What’s going to happen is they’re going to turn to a subscriber model where you have to log into a data center that they control and use your browser to play video games. Paying a monthly subscription for the privilege of playing their exclusive games. In fact I will bet money that the first product that will be introduced with this feature is going to be the highly anticipated upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6.
Mark my words. Either at the time of release or shortly thereafter they’re going to introduce the ability to subscribe to play GTA 6 in your browser on a remote gaming system. And then they’re going to phase out physical Xbox systems over the next couple of years.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This has been tried before and never worked well. What makes you think its going to work any better now?
CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
The only thing that makes me think it might work this time is that for some reason Microsoft has this magical ability to take a bad idea, make the shittiest possible iteration of it and have it mysteriously become the most widely-adopted standard against all logic.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
It doesn’t need to work well.
It needs to sound like it will make more money for MSFT’s board.
Zink@programming.dev 1 month ago
Attitudes like that are not how we got a trillion dollars in spare data center infrastructure to find a use for!
Those consumers will be happy owning nothing THIS time!!
Wilson@lemmy.today 1 month ago
Oh man, those stadia controllers. Not the stupidest $99 I’ve ever spent, but still pretty dumb.
dr_robotBones@reddthat.com 1 month ago
Why the LLM-driven scarcity in computing parts of course, and a little bit of cartel behavior when Nintendo and Sony inevitably announce the same thing next year.
djdarren@piefed.social 1 month ago
I saw a thread the other day, something like “What low-level conspiracies do you genuinely believe”; to which someone replied that they believe that OpenAI is being speedrun to bankruptcy in order for Microsoft to buy their data centres for pennies on the dollar.
And yeah, it all kinda seems that could be a credible outcome, at which point MS will have a huge amount of equipment all ready to serve game streaming to people who can no longer afford to buy a home computer to do the same.
Is it going to happen? shrug
Could it? Absolutely.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Doesn’t remote gaming require everyone to have an unmetered and fast internet connection? There’s still a lot of places where not everyone is that lucky.
KaChilde@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
It won’t be GTA6. It will be an exclusive title like a rebooted Halo or Gears of War. They can’t risk losing the money on GTA when people just go to PS5 and buy the game outright there.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
The Elder Scrolls 6, only available on Xbox^® Game Pass^© Ultimate Plus™ Cloud Gaming™^®©
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I said GTA 6 will be the introduction. Not the closer.
tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
The PS5 version of GTA6 is going yo sell pretty well then
phx@lemmy.world 1 month ago
To play games coded by a shitty AI, full of bugs and as many microtransactions as possible …
entwine@programming.dev 1 month ago
Is the game buggy? Worry not! Microsoft™ Copilot 365™ powered by Azure™ will analyze your gameplay in realtime, detect when a bug occurs, and redirect you to an AI generated troubleshooting page.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And how well do you think that’s going to work? Sounds like a shitty service maybe five people will subscribe to, and then it dies a year later.
We’ve had subscription services like this already. I don’t hear much of them anymore… Or at all… So I presume they’re all dead.
greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
The old “we don’t want to put any effort into creating anything good, we just want to milk this for cash until we can’t anymore.”
andallthat@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This sounds… plausible actually. They have this big stake in GPU datacenters for AI, that are (and will be) burning incredible amounts of money and are not turning a profit anytime soon. That same crazy level of investement on AI is making hardware costs go up, especially gaming hardware.
But Microsoft, being the benefactors who have inherited the company from philantropist and kids-lover Bill Gates, have thought of us! They will share a bit of their shiny GPU datacenters’ plwer for gaming and all they will be asking for is a lot of your money. I can see that.
dr_robotBones@reddthat.com 1 month ago
My cloud computing teacher says the future of personal computing is just monitors connected to the cloud. Why couldn’t I have been born in the 70s?
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 month ago
When computers were just a teletype attached to a mainframe?
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Sure, but realize that the current level of personal computing is a smartphone, we’re not that far off from your home “PC” just being a display, KB, mouse, and maybe an interface for some external storage and peripherals. I wouldn’t be shocked it that happenes some time in the next 10 years.
That being said, I think there will still be a significant group of people who will own their own hardware.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I love how corporations work. “Hey, we completely fucked this up. We mishandled it, made decisions our customers hate, and now we’re scrapping it because we might lose money.” “Could we fix it? Sure. But that would mean changing the business model that made us money 20 years ago, and that’s terrifying. There’s a risk we might lose money.” “And sure, the board won’t lose a dime personally. But the stockholders, basically meerkats who scatter at the first loud noise might panic. And we can’t have that. We might lose money.”
umbraroze@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
My feeling on Xbox since Xbox One days has been pretty much “this is an awesome platform, you’re sitting on a gold mine Microsoft, what the fuck are you doing?”
The last bit of brilliance they did utilise properly was GamePass, and of course they cocked that up by getting greedy.
Last few years have been extremely rough. The only lucky thing about this is that instead of full Xbox exclusivity Microsoft was pushing Xbox/Windows cross functionality. …Yeah, I’ve been pivoting to PC, but Steam/GOG instead.
eli@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The Xbone is what made me go PC full time.
Been a Xbox gamer since the original Xbox with Halo CE. LAN parties galore. Halo 2 and the beginning of Xbox Live was amazing. Bought a X360 at launch, got Gears and Crackdown for the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. Halo 3 was peak.
And then Xbone announced. Always online. Kinect required. “Sports” “Live TV”. Yeah, not falling for that. “Can’t just flip a switch”.
Yeah I cancelled my Xbox Live sub and built a PC. 2500K with a 550ti. Haven’t looked back since. All of my friends in our group did the same, but some bought a PS4 as well for the SP games.
Microsoft just doesn’t care. They have enough money to not care. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time for Xbox and I’d be genuinely surprised if they release another console and I’d be even more surprised if anyone actually buys it. It’s a dead ecosystem.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 1 month ago
xbone was the beginning of the end. when the enshittification kicked in before we had a word for it.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
When you set an impossible goal (30% profit margin for the division), you know that you are killing off that division, just, slowly.
logicalmoody@lemmy.world 1 month ago
They’re sunsetting the platform alright, but nothing about it is quiet
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I hate that Xbox is a joke now and that it’s going to die out. I hate that there is going to be less competition in the console space. I hate that Microsoft have no idea what the fuck they’re doing.
the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 1 month ago
When xbox first hit the scene it was a breath of fresh air. Now its just a stale fart, its time for it to die.
DannyMac@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I guess they’re going to go all-in on AI despite only 3.3% of MS365 subscribers paying for Copilot. Stonks?
njm1314@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Ain’t that quiet.
tyrant@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This isn’t new. I heard them say years ago “yeah Sony won the console war but that doesn’t matter” implying cloud gaming
mrfriki@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s been for a few years now.
hOrni@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s not good for the consumer to have less competition on the market. But is there any legit reason to own an Xbox?
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Look some people may say Xbox has confusing naming scheme, but it’s very simple, number just goes up:
First one is Xbox one. Noone in Microsoft is dumb enough to call “one” console that isn’t first of the series. Then Xbox X (because X is Roman 10) then the Xbox 360.
Very easy
CubitOom@infosec.pub 1 month ago
That’s a 360
CaptainBasculin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
After letting go of Tango disregarding their massive success, that part is pretty obvious.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Its got to be deliberate. They’ve had so many chances and fucked it, and they’ve had so many successes that they’ve just cancelled or discontinued for seemingly no reason.
boaratio@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Quietly?
commander@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Xbox as a 3rd party publisher can succeed. As a console vendor, it’s too late to stop the multiplatform strategy this gen. They’re not Nintendo. At least on the Wii U, Nintendo was still releasing great games and the 3DS sold like 80 million units and Nintendo were also releasing great games there and all those studios would converge on the Switch. They can’t be serious launching a console without a great launch year lineup of exclusives marketed well to convince people that they won’t cut tail and run if a new console doesn’t take off.
The advice for the new Xbox CEO that I believe in is to rip the bandage off and embrace 3rd party publishing. Timings for a new console seem awful. Fable is supposed to release this year. Forza Horizon Japan this year. Obsidian has already released their two big games last year. Perfect Dark cancelled. Forza Motorsport studio seemingly on life support rather than working on a new entry. New Gears of War should release soon. Elder Scrolls VII I’m not betting on that before the 2030s. Also these unreleased announced games are marketed as multiplatform already. Is it going to be another attempt at a Halo as the launch title after a string of crowd goes mild Halo releases
64bithero@lemmy.world 1 month ago
He’s aged so much he looks like a prospector who has been struggling to find any gold at all …
LoafedBurrito@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I went to walmart to look for a new xbox controller for my xbox one x and they had maybe 12 games for the Xbox series X and NONE of them were anything i would ever want to purchase. Also the series X is a trash piece of equipment that has constant overheating issues, you cannot replace the hard drive if it dies, and it looks absolutely horrible design wise. They also had zero consoles in stock, while Best buy had about 12 open box Series X that people had returned for one reason or another at the outlet store.
So looks like even retailers are giving up on it.
The xbox one x was the last good console xbox made and even it has a ton of heat related issues with the HDMI circuit.
Xbox just cannot make a high quality gaming system, they just can’t. It’s been 2 decades and they still can’t get 90% of their consoles to last more than a year or 2.
darkmogool@feddit.org 1 month ago
good
Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
What can I say but… at least their hardware was on average a little more functional than Sony’s.
sexy_peach@feddit.org 1 month ago
Not surprising aren’t they sundowning their whole company?
aviationeast@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Microsoft is quietly sunsetting everything they cant make money on with AI.
snooggums@piefed.world 1 month ago
So, everything?
sundray@lemmus.org 1 month ago
It feels that way. Every ongoing product MS has feels decrepit and ready to collapse.
BillyClark@piefed.social 1 month ago
They’re still scamming the shit out of businesses with their corporate software. Oh and they have Azure which I’m guessing makes money.
Xorg_Broke_Again@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I’m so happy that in the recent years Linux made leaps and bounds in terms of usability so now we have an alternative that actually works well, especially since Microsoft just stopped caring about desktop Windows users.
mephiska@lemmy.world 1 month ago
They can’t even make money with their AI, they only survive off the windows OEM licenses, Office 365 subs that businesses are locked into and their backend server and sql stuff. That’s enough to make them a walking dead for a long time.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
And eventually companies will hopefully start cancelling those subscriptions to move to Open Office or Libre Office.
France is already starting that push by having government departments transition first, and are projected to save millions of euros in licensing fees each year. Once you get a critical mass of users on libre software, it’ll hopefully spread on its own
lemmy_get_my_coat@lemmy.world 1 month ago
So, also AI?