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.
The Xbox has always been a vehicle for the DirectX API. That is where it gets its name. By making a console that use the API, they convinced game makers to support it exclusively boosting both the Xbox and Windows. But the time has come that DirectX is fully emulatable on other operating systems, and falling out of favor compared to other options like Vulkan. Microsoft to their credit saw the writing on the wall way back with the Xbox One, where they strongly pushed streaming and other media consumption (or they thought they could just sell DirectX licenses to the other consoles and step away from the console market quietly). It turns out for once in the company’s life it was thinking too far ahead. Streaming wasn’t ready, it kinda sucked to use, and it lost a lot of favor with gamers.
So now they tip their hats and they’re ready to walk away, hands completely empty.
Oh yeah except for all the money they got by juicing their stock price through purchasing indie companies and then firing everyone that worked there. It wouldn’t be Microsoft if they didn’t destroy the entire industry as they leave.
I can’t see Microsoft wasting a perfectly good order of GPU’s on the xbox division when they could be put to use heating up an uninhabited warehouse.
Well hold on, the $30B of Nvidia GPUs could be running an AI service paid for by a $40B company that Nvidia has a $30B investment in…
Wait, that’s too transparent, let’s split that up and add a few more steps before people can catch on.
They never managed to beat Sony in sales in a single generation. They had a lead briefly with the 360 in America, but by the end of the generation a PS3 was such a good value bluray player it caught back up.
Its not surprising is my point. I really hope Sony get back into the handheld market. Right now we’re looking at a duopoly in console manufacturing that doesn’t even need to directly compete with each other.
Where did I put my PS Vita I need to lovingly admire it
I really hope Sony get back into the handheld market.
We definitely don’t need any more locked down systems, just get one of the many PC handhelds.
I liked the Vita too, but having to buy those ridiculously expensive memory cards was some bullshit.
PC handhelds are way too large. I’d be hoping they stick to the small vita form factor, even though I know it’ll be tablet sized
Those PC handhelds felt like the final nail in the coffin for traditional handheld gaming. Big honking things playing full-fat console games is just how it is now
I dont mind the new handhelds being huge…but now that you are talking about it I would love a small pc handheld for indies like Spelunky, Vampire Survivors etc. Basically a cheap pure indie machine. That actually sounds like it could be cool . Wouldnt even need a lot of drive space on it since you arent going to run Call of Duty with it.
There’s an app called PortMaster that can be used to run ports of PC games on Linux handhelds. Weaker hardware like the cheapest Anbernic handhelds aren’t going to run everything, but there’s still a decent selection of games. https://portmaster.games/
This is what I want basically. A small device that gets ports of games that’ll run on lower end hardware.
There were rumors of the next Playstation being a hybrid console like the Switch, but the handheld part would probably be a huge slab. It does make me wonder how small you could make a console based on a x64 APU, thermals would probably be a major barrier.
xbox should make controllers for playstation
This is going to be a conspiracy ass thing to say, but I have to wonder how much fed money had to do with the success of the 360, considering the CIA got caught funding CoD.
The reason Nintendo struggled during Wii U generation is that the CIA would not fund Splatoon
Lmao mamma mia Mario is-a gonna do-a war crimes! Wahoo!
We’re still decades away from the Octo-Squid war being declassified.
You have a source for the CIA funding CoD? What I remember was that the DOD had to approve the script and how the US was portrayed in exchange for the devs getting access to US military assets.
It will never not be
to me that an older CoD has a writing credit to Olliver North.
Xbox? You mean like the game pass brand?
Back compat is underrated its such a solid way to play some older 360 titles while xenia flounders but the majority of
dont really give a shit about old games. I got one almost exclusively to play The DarknessThere was an opportunity to open up the app store to a lot more software which was the only thing that could have been unique. Maybe having more relaxed mod support but no.
It ended up being a gamepass machine basically which lost them money on sales anyway lol
The Darkness plays more or less perfectly on rpcs3. Nightdive mentioned that they were looking at a remaster two years ago but that seems to have stalled.
xenia flounders
Have you tried xenia-canary?
And as you have a 360 you might want to look at ABadAvatar for a near seamless softmod experience.
Canary is better, but only marginally. I wish Xbox emulation was better
An incredible masterclass in bed-shitting.
It’s Joever for console exclusives and consoles in general. Sony puts their games on PC for free too, what’s the point of having a Playstation?
bloodborne PC when tho
I see this argument a lot and it always strikes me as odd. After all, if we keep our discussion to just games and turn the question around, what’s the point in having a big beefy gaming PC? There are very few exclusives there either.
You can play all the Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo ”exclusives”. There are also plenty of games that are either exclusive to PC or just best played on PC.
Nah, the reason I said “very few” is because “all” in either case is not true. You can’t play Half Life Alyx on a console and you can’t play Astrobot on a PC, but these are exceptions to the rule.
Ultimately “best played” is wherever the player wants to play it. That’s the whole benefit of the console wars being over! We don’t need to fight over this silly stuff.
I forgot Astro Bot even existed, shows how much I pay attention to ”AAA” releases any more.
Emulators, piracy, mods, etc, etc, etc, etc,
Emulators can run fine on a phone or an old dented MacBook Air from the 2010s, you don’t need a gaming PC for that. Likewise the low-end indie games and so on. And piracy, well, you’d need to do quite a lot of piracy to break even after buying an nvidia graphics card. It almost seems hypocritical to spend so much on one thing only to avoid spending on another.
Mods, yes, they’re a bit less common or interesting than they were 15-20 years ago, and some games like Quake and Doom and so on have mods on their console versions now, but that’s largely still a PC only thing, yes.
The other unspoken reason for PC gaming is because it’s expensive. It’s the bougie high-end option where you can spend a stupid amount of money to get a higher resolution higher frame rate experience.
The unspoken secret of PC gaming is that you can spend around the same amount you’d spend on a console on a prebuilt and it’ll be good enough for most people. Some enthusiasts might snub you for using one, but they’re just fine. 1080p is the sweet spot tbh, you don’t need a higher resolution than that.
The new consoles are also ludicrously expensive, especially the PS5 Pro. I definitely can’t say they’re worth the money compared to a relatively budget PC, since on top of that you’re locked into that manufacturer’s peripherals, while on PC you can use any controller you want. 8bitdo will save you cash.
I don’t really see the logic in saying you need to do a lot of piracy to break even on a GPU. If publishers are going to be serious about asking $80-90 for a new game, then you’d just need to download 6 or 7 games assuming you’ve spent $500 on a GPU. Mods maybe aren’t what they used to be, but there’s still impressive stuff coming out for games like Assetto Corsa.
No that’s quite commonly spoken. But saying “you can buy a shitbox!” (like the ones I’ve typically built for myself over the years) is not a super great argument for why PCs rule and consoles drool. What is it that makes gaming on a PC special? Paying the same price as a base PS5 or Switch 2 for less well-optimized experience isn’t especially distinctive, but again that’s fine, people can go with what they prefer without worrying about what’s “better”. If you want to plug a big janky Windows PC into a television then that’s a choice you are perfectly able to make. It doesn’t need to be a contest.
Oh, third party controllers do exist for consoles, including some made by 8bitdo! I’ve got one that has a little button for switching between the different signal types for different devices.
The other things I like about PC gaming are openness and backwards compatibility. Only Xbox seems to take the latter at least somewhat seriously
Also I have an older budget AMD card I got off my local Craigslist equivalent, thank you very much. No, it doesn’t ray trace for shit
Openness is less true than it used to be, given the dominance of closed platforms like Steam and the aims of Microsoft. We’re all extremely lucky that Microsoft is as incompetent as it is and that Steam is not particularly user-hostile. The moment Gabe dies or decides to sell Valve to private equity will be a massive crisis point for PC gaming.
Something I’ve found with backwards compatibility on PC is that sometimes you’re better off running the console version under emulation than trying to get an old Windows .exe to behave itself. Good luck if it was made for windows 9x!
And yes, of course there’s still value in old PC parts, just like there’s still a lot of value in keeping an old dusty PS4 from 2013 that can inexplicably still run a lot of new releases in 2025. Keeping old shit working is great!
All the console companies are going to become software companies someday.
Smartphones and tablets have taken the place of consoles as the cheaper and easier alternative to PC, where do consoles fit in?
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.
But now the Xbox product matrix looks like a Taco Bell menu and console games are sprouting PC-style settings menus and inconsistent behaviour.
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.
Smartphones and tablets are kind of ass to play games on though. Kinda sucks if that’s where gaming is headed.
I miss having a Sony Ericsson. It had a built-in PSP with a sliding controller, so it was a handheld you could use as a smartphone. I had most of my old GBA titles on it and they played like they did on the original console.
Yeah, it’s depressing. The 3/DS is such a good device for new types of games. The Playdate looks kinda’ neat (if stupidly expensive). We If we’re going to pump out generationally obsolesced e-waste it should at least be innovative e-waste that expands the medium or solves different problems.
Segaisation
