Maybe they’ll release one more, maybe, but I think that’s it after that. Gears of War on Playstation was already a strong indicator, but this seals it imo.
Maybe they’ll release one more, maybe, but I think that’s it after that. Gears of War on Playstation was already a strong indicator, but this seals it imo.
You’d think it’s an industry they’d love to be out of, with the whole “sell at a loss and hope to make it back on games” business story.
The appeal of console hardware used to be that you could offer a tightly optimized experience with fixed hardware. The SNES outgamed a nominally higher spec 286/VGA PC because devs could use every gimmick and know it would work. But now the Xbox product matrix looks like a Taco Bell menu and console games are sprouting PC-style settings menus and inconsistent behaviour.
To preserve some brand value, I could see selling some sort of software pack or licensing system to motherboard makers-- your next PC will have an “Xbox Gold” badge on it and maybe a desktop icon or hotkey to boot into some cut-down Xbox OS.
I remember when the PS3 and Xbox360 came out with HDDs (tiny and propietary) and you had to install your games I figured that’d mark the beginning of the end. Used to be one of the better things for consoles was you put the game in and then you play the game and you don’t have to futz around with knowing system specs or fucking with settings. You buy the game with the logo on it and that was a guarantee shit works out of the box.
The PS3 hard drive wasn’t propriatery. It was a normal 2.5" SATA drive; I took the old 120Gb SSD from a laptop and slid it in my 40Gb fat unit. Still noisy though.