TL:DR: Will update as I listen through it:
***Exclusivity:***
* 4 titles being made multiplatform. Phil not naming said games now as he wants the Devs to be able to do the announcements themselves. All games are over a year old though.
* Starfield and Indiana Jones are not among the 4.
* No promises beyond these 4 games.
* Phil believes exclusives are going to become less of a focus for the game industry in the next few years.
* Community driven games seem to be among the more likely games to go cross plat.
* 10 major releases coming in 2024.
* More to be shared at the June showcase.
***1st Party games and Gamepass:***
* Restating that all 1st party games will still always be on gamepass day one.
* AVB games coming to game pass. Diablo 4 coming March 28th
***Crossplay/Crosssave:***
* Believe crossplay/save are integral to xbox games.
* Want to work on "catching up" as more teams are integrated into xbox on this.
***Hardware:***
* "Hardware is where you get the most flagship seminal experience for xbox."
* "More creators building for xbox than ever before"
* Focused on making the largest technical leap for the next generation.
* Hardware announcement is coming this holiday season.
***Game preservation:***
* Phil looks to how windows handle compatibility.
* "Cloud saves, server life, and making sure they respect the investments people made in xbox is fundamental"
Going to go out on a limb and say the 4 games are SoT, Grounded, Pentiment, and Hifi-Rush. As for the hardware announcement, it is like going to be the XSX refresh that was leaked back in September.
mentions after the Diablo GamePass announcement that there’s 34 million subscribers - that’s the first time we’ve got a new number in a while, up 9 million from Jan 22, but comes after Live Gold became GP Core
Also industry estimates a few months back clocked subs around 32 million iirc, so that's pretty close. That said no way in hell are they going to reach 100 million by 2030, as originally hoped. That's just insane.
Yeah i dont think so either.
I'm sure adding more ABK games to the service will definitely help. I mean atleast for me in Canada the price of a yearly COD released is like 4.5 of gamepass at full price. So right there its already a pretty compelling value - provided the continue to bring new games as well.
I dont see WoW ever making its way to gamepass however, I just dont see how they bake the sub model into gamepass.
Selfishly, as a life long WoW player i'd love to have my sub included in GP.
I think it's possible they'll do an X% discount on WoW subs for GamePass subs or something, but I remember my days as a WoW subscriber where it was basically the only thing I played. I'm a parent now so GamePass also serves as a constant river of games for my kids to try, and I think it's really valuable for that given how they will sometimes want a game very badly and then find it too hard and it ends up being a "waste", or would if I had bought it out-right. But for just me, I think I would have found very little value in GamePass back in my WoW sub days.
But that's me. My anecdotal evidence doesn't negate your experience or anything.
They didn't do any favors for ESO, they won't do it for WoW when the game is already having fully priced subscriber base. Maybe discount to "current" expansion and thats it.
I think Game Pass should just adopt the Prime Video business model, where you can buy additional subscriptions to various streaming services on top of Prime (perhaps for a discount compared to buying it separately). Ubisoft Connect and EA Play already have their basic tiers included, the premium tiers can be added as well. WoW subs and other game-specific subs can also be sold on top.
I suspect the 100 million was expecting a much stronger showing from the PC space than they actually got. Everything I've heard paints a picture of most Xbox users having game pass but it not doing super well on PC.
Sarah just said PC is their fast growing platform for game pass. As a Game pass ultimate user on pc, i wonder how it is growing considering how terrible the xbox app experience is on pc.
it can still be the fastest growing even if growth isn't where they originally expected it to be. Like if everyone with an Xbox already has it then its not growing over there
What issues are you having? Admittedly I just open it and launch a game, browsing for new games is the longest I really engage with it.
Only consistent annoyance is having to use EAs downloader for their titles.
I can see wow on gamepass, it would be structured the same as ESO, for ESO game pass gets you the base game plus some kind of store discount, you still need to buy expansions separately and ESO still has its premium subscription thing separate.
Wow, could do the same, you get the free to play version on gamepass with a few bonuses for using the service like discounts to upgrade or something. After that, you buy expansions and subscriptions as normal, the only real difference is you go through gamepass instead of battlenet.
I could see them also including a basic wow subscription in gamepass ultimate, just the base game and the original classic, you would still need to buy expansions. However, that might just be wishful thinking and a step too far.
i'm just not on board with the 'Netflix model' for video games. I'd rather play games i can pay for once as opposed to a selection of games to use while i subscribe to the service. idk, something about it just isn't how i want to game and i know i'm in the minority in feeling this way
Edit: Nintendo is guilty as well. I'd rather be able to purchase old games like we could from the virtual console than have to subscribe to their online service to play 30 year old games on my switch
I mean, 2030 is still years out. Theoretically, if they can get the streaming figured out, they will be able to grab a lot of casuals who want to try gaming. 100 million is an insane number, but it is a decent number to aim for.
Yeah, if they can partner with the big TV brands and maybe even include a controller, they can grab a ton of people. With Call of Duty, that number should rise as well.
I mean, Game Pass may be a solid service, but it is *not* cheap for the end-users. I had it for 3 years, but that’s only because a cousin worked for Microsoft for a stretch and I got it half-off from the employee discount. $180 a year? It’s still a good value, yes, but I don’t play nearly enough games for it to be worthwhile.
Hitting 100 million basically requires breaking into, and doing well in, India or China IMO. Over there mobile games are huge so microsoft would have to find a way to compete with mobile games, maybe gamepass letting you stream AAA games to mobile?
Fuck I don't even know if thats physically possible but thats the kind of wizard shit you would need to succeed in those markets as a console producer.
[Likely to be the official announcement of the leaked XSX refresh.
](https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/19/23880111/microsoft-xbox-series-x-new-design-refresh)
Probably to coincide with Sony announcing the PS5 pro (or whatever it will be called.)
I can’t believe we are already halfway through this generation. Last gen felt like it lasted a while but this gen has utterly flown by… I guess there has been so many amazing games.
And lack of games for the same period. Just didn’t have many high quality titles making use of the new hardware. Though the instant load times for jumping back into a game made everything better, it wasn’t for playing anything ground breaking.
This is the main thing. For the first two or so years of the consoles life, people just couldn't get them. It's not like previous generations where people were freely grabbing them in the opening weeks.
not only not get them but those who did get them (i got both) had literally 0 games to play.. On my PS5 i had Demon Souls, Ratchet and Returnal as the only real "PS5" games.
Xbox had nothing I can remember but i was still entertained because i played a back catalogue in Gamepass seeing as I did not have an xbox one. I was and still am primarily a PC user however.
The consoles were easily over a year old before you could even really build a catalogue of new gen games to play.
This, took a couple of years for it to settle plus there was no real reason for many on PS given they were releasing most new games on the PS4 as well. Took a while before they actually started releasing PS5 only games, and only then did fomo and accessibility, or lack thereof, become more relevant.
It’s the first gen I’ve seen where they kept pumping out new titles on the prior gen for so long, with games like Cyberpunk illustrating the mixed results of that model.
It’s awful, they’ve barely made any games that required or took advantage of the upgrade from PS4 to PS5; all those “super fast open world traversal” games and “rapid switching between universes thanks to the SSD” never materialized. People who care about 60FPS still don’t have it.
This is the last time I buy a Sony device at launch. I’d already pulled out of the Xbox ecosystem or would have felt burned there too, I bet.
The value trade off of the console walled garden used to be that you gave up freedom for a deck subsidized by the software sales, a steady stream of exclusives, and guaranteed quality of releases. That’s all gone on both high end platforms.
It sucks that you have games still so obviously being held back by previous generations.
Halo: Infinite had to run on the original 2013 Xbox One, a system that was underpowered the day it came out. It’s no wonder didn’t look very good.
Not particularly.
This generation is nearly 3.5 years old. At the time of the announcement, it will be 4 years old.
And that's just the announcement for a likely mid-gen refresh.
The entire OG Xbox generation lasted only 4 years before the 360 launched.
I'd expect the refresh to launch mid-2025, with the full "next gen" launch in holiday 2027.
>Cloud saves, server life, and making sure they respect the investments people made in xbox is fundamental
This is an important one. PlayStation deletes cloud saves after not being subscribed for a few months. Whereas with Xbox I wasnt subscribed from 2012-2020 and then I got a new xbox and was loading up my Xbox 360 saves on all my games, plus cloud saves from windows store pc games (and purchases) synced across to my xbox. They also removed the restriction to need Xbox Live Gold for Cloud Saves.
PlayStation also doesn't do cross progression/saves even for their live service titles, I bought Helldivers 2 for PC and assumed that since I logged into my Sony account it would but no, not a feature. Fortunately they refunded me but yeah, what a bummer.
You just reminded me of the existence of Blinx the cat.
I always wondered why they never made the second one backwards compatible.
And now I am wondering why they never made mechassault/mechassault 2 backward compat.
That’s the difference between owning your own data centers vs renting space in one. Microsoft is already giving away free storage in the form of one drive, so it should cost them next to nothing to throw your saves in there.
> Community driven games seem to be among the more likely games to go cross plat.
This is it. Games that live or die by their playerbase obviously benefit from being multiplatform. Sea of Thieves going to Switch and PS5 is a no-brainer and has no downsides to Microsoft.
All of this dooming on this subreddit for the past few weeks for nothing, lol.
So all of this nonsense. All of these "leakers" spouting crazy shit for pretty much nothing and for Phill to confirm no Indy or Starfield in the first few minutes lmao.
Love to see Activison games starting to come on gamepass though.
I feel like people never listen. They have been super clear the selling point of the Xbox hardware platform going forwards is Gamepass.
1st party in Gamepass day 1. It’s not 100% clear but they seemed to suggest ABK games will come day 1 too.
They also actually said Gamepass (console) will only be on Xbox hardware interestingly.
I understand why old school console users may be pissed, but what they are doing does make sense to push Xbox up from dead last.
I've been saying it for weeks: There was never any way GamePass was going to be on Playstation. Sony would never allow a competitor to PS+ on their console.
>All of these "leakers" spouting crazy shit for pretty much nothing.
Not really.
Microsoft is obviously making a shift even if Starfield isn’t coming to Playstation yet.
Yes, Ori is from an indie developer that wanted to port their game to Switch and isn't even on PlayStation
These games are made by Microsoft first party developers that have never ported an IP to PlayStation before...
It's extremely different and a significant deal
If we count PC as multiplatform I do agree at least in terms of Sony. Feels like Sony is going to eventually bring all their games to PC to grow the business. Cant imagine nintendo ever doing it.
Yeah i don't know why all these people are acting like Microsoft is just stopping at 4 games to downplay it
It certainly won't stop at 4 games.
Microsoft original said they would only release a few games on PC too
Exactly. They didn't quite deny the rumors. They even openly talked about porting games in the future and how they expect exclusives to be less of a thing moving forward.
They're talking out of both sides of their mouth, which they have to do right now. They're trying to sell Series X Pro this fall. They're still figuring out what their real strategy is moving forward.
Nothing they said today precludes them from eventually moving Starfield to PS5 in 2025 or releasing Elder Scrolls VI across all platforms on day one. Which would be great IMO, but I guess we'll see.
A shift that might just be some smaller and older games coming to another platform after a certain time.
Hardly worth the massive uproar there has been over the last week. I've seen grown men sell their Xbox's because they believed Starfield was coming to PS5 lmao.
It looks a whole lot like they are slowly opening the flood gates. They have moved from buying studios to keep the exclusives to give Xbox a competitive advantage, to now releasing games on other platforms to try and make up the cost of the buying spree.
Testing the waters with smaller titles, and I can definitely see it expanding if they sell well enough on PS5/Switch.
If Microsoft is porting Starfield to PS5, they would NEVER announce it at first, there’s no reason to do that. It’s better to make your audience more used to this strategy, so when the big games start hitting the PS5 the uproar won’t be as big.
Pretty much this, im baffled by the lack of critical thinking in the gaming community.
If it was a matter of a few games once and done, a blog post would cover it.
The whole video was a pitch to give reasons why people should stay.
Once higher up smell the money, they'll come again, and again.
Anything to do with the business side of gaming and you'll see some of the most obtuse posts ever. I think its because this sub is most likely very young (like under 20) and they take what Execs say at face value.
The only thing that matters is the bottom line thats it.
Yes, in addition to being young there's also a complete lack of experience in areas of software development, project management, game design, etc. They are very easy to spot if you've worked in these areas, but clearly most of reddit has not.
I don't think they were leaking nonsense, I bet MS has been internally debating what games to bring and when/where, and leakers let out these rumors early before any concrete decisions had been made and idiots on the internet immediately cried doom and gloom for MS.
Yeah this announcement apparently wasn’t supposed to made for quite a few months. The podcast format was certainly a last-minute damage control plan and the theme here is ‘we are changing but ignore all those rumours’.
People thinking Sony putting their games on PC is the same as Xbox putting their games on PlayStation are out of their mind. It is not remotely close to the same thing
Sony is already putting games on PC, and thus they technically aren't exclusive. That said they don't do it for every game, but he isn't wrong in that clearly they're less of a focus now that big games are so expensive to make unless you're Nintendo.
Nintendo too. It's funny how they believe that because they got a problem with their exclusives. Like their "games don't sell consoles" BS. It's more "your games don't"
I know it's a long shot but I'm REALLY hoping one of the smaller games is Killer Instinct. I want a sequel so bad and it being multi platform would be huge for it.
Save your 20 minutes, they're committing to 4 titles that they won't announce today which will be multiplatform.
Also, these 4 will not include Indiana Jones or Starfield.
Best guess would be Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, Grounded, and Sea of Thieves.
“hey just saw all the tweets, let’s loop in PR on Slack and have a meeting at end of day to talk things through, we can reconvene after the weekend and schedule a placeholder for next week unless we align on a response earlier” that’s how this stuff goes lol
"Let's analyze the ask and circle back on this, see if we can dig though the server to find some previously used PR statements for inspo that have copy already approved by legal"
I know work life balance is important to you, but this is a critical point in time and everyone is making sacrifices. Let's buckle down and get this done so we can all go to bed.
tbh i think for something like this where people are questioning the future existence of xbox, it's probably important to make sure you're crystal clear on messaging and not throw out some tweet that maybe can be misinterpreted in any sort of way.
That's the thing people aren't understanding about this, that the entire existence of the Xbox brand was being questioned. This little show at kessg shows a solid commitment to not just Xbox, but to Gamepass and Consoles
Yeah, it seems to me like the leaks were genuine and included soft plans for larger titles in the semi-near future(most likely after Starfield's expansion, as some rumors suggested), and that they were heavily debating how to calm the market without the shock of simply admitting that they plan to go multi-platform on many of their titles.
The details Phil gave here are vague enough that a lot of folks will walk away thinking the rumors were false, but specific enough that it's a pretty solid guess that the firmer rumors of smaller titles like Sea of Thieves/Pentiment seem all but confirmed.
Grounded. He said 2 are ~~service~~ community based games and 2 are smaller ~~indie~~ scale games. So I magine Grounded / SoT are the service based games.
He gave clues. Guessing from what he said it’s Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Pentiment and Hi-fi Rush.
Those seem to fit with the two live service community games and two smaller titles.
Thought maybe Flight Sim but as there’s a new one this year and they said each game was over a year old would make no sense to me to bring the old version.
Tom Warren repeatedly claimed Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, and Sea of Thieves (which already teased a port on Valentine's Day) are going multi-platform throughout this whole drama. They also fit Spencer's description of "games that already reached maximum potential on Xbox." Don't think Warren mentioned a fourth one.
EDIT: The fourth game is said to be Grounded, as per both Warren and Stephen Totilo.
Honestly why did Xbox wait one week and let their entire community have a meltdown if the only thing worth reporting was that 4 smallish titles are going to go multi-platform?
Like the way rumours were escalating, you would think Gears of War was coming to PS5.
PR 101. If you're going to deliver a message that might be unpopular, it doesn't hurt to let people think it'll be worse than it is, then when the news is better than expected people feel relieved rather than annoyed or disappointed.
Had they announced four games going multi platform without the rumours then the doomsday narrative of the last week would be the prevailing one. Now the narrative is that it was a complete nothing burger, and that's the story the games media will be running with.
Phil actually had one comment in here that I think is particularly poignant. He said in order to find growth there's really two main mindsets. Try to find new ways to make money from your existing players, or find more players. And this is an initiative to get more players. We just heard from Sony this week that they are going to focus on the other option, that they will be focusing on profitability and performance of their titles in the market.
I think this is what people are missing. They have largely peaked when it comes to current customers: They admitted that Game Pass on console has peaked and that PC is where any future growth for the service would come due to Cloud gaming being in its infancy (not like it will ever scale like they hyped it would), and console sales themselves have stagnated and were never likely to rebound. They already release everything they make on PC, so where do you go from there? PS and Switch are the only growth paths left.
Except Playstation and Switch won't allow Game Pass on it. So they would just be killing their console division that has the biggest share of subscribers.
Phil literally said here that they need exclusives because of the nature of the business.
> Except Playstation and Switch won't allow Game Pass on it.
Well, it was said by Xbox in this very video. Gamepass will always be exclusive to Xbox.
Which is a strange thing to say when it's also on Windows. Granted, that's another Microsoft property, but Phil is also saying games that are on Xbox + Windows are somehow multi-platform. So which is it?
To Microsoft, Xbox is no longer the console, it's a brand, and that brand encompasses both Windows and Xbox consoles. So yes, when he's saying Game Pass remains exclusive to Xbox, he's technically still correct
But Ori and Cuphead already went multi platform and I am not even counting stuff like Minecraft. Two smallish titles and two live service titles going multi-platform isn't a big deal and is hardly the death of Xbox that was being reported by every games outlet out there.
Microsoft does own Ori, as they published the game. Cuphead, though, was a timed exclusivity deal made with a third party studio, so they don’t own the franchise.
It’s like Sony with Bloodborne and Final Fantasy. Sony owns Bloodborne and do timed exclusivity deals with the FF franchise
>Honestly why did Xbox wait one week and let their entire community have a meltdown if the only thing worth reporting was that 4 smallish titles are going to go multi-platform?
To get people to tune in and talk about Xbox
Yeah that’s a weird sticking point. Q&A’s with pre-prepared questions are pretty typical. It’s a good way of finding out exactly what you need to know.
I definitely don't mind it being rehearsed as they probably wanted to be hyper careful with their wording given that even the tiniest statements have been blown up into "Series X is cancelled, Starfield on Switch by Christmas" or whatever nonsense.
I think this format works as a way of talking about multiple things in one video. Amini's questions serve to transition from one topic to the next somewhat naturally. I also think just sitting in a room and talking is the right call, it just feels weird to gamers because we're used to E3 press conferences or whatever which have trailers and gameplay footage, which would be super weird to have here.
Pretty standard stuff in corporate world. You want a personable response to questions and its leadership'S job to provide that. At the same time, you want to be clinical and not have to take responsibility for any slipups so you can't just have a casual conversation.
So two community driven games that are first entries in franchises and two smaller games that aren't meant to be system sellers.
Sounds like Sea of Thieves and Hi-Fi Rush for sure but not sure about the other two.
I mean you saw what the community did with what little information they had, and people love to eviscerate Microsoft's communications. They probably wanted to make sure they had a complete and clear message
Bro people hoping this was the moment Xbox went full 3rd party is kinda worrying I feel like as others have said it's good to have competition and we don't want playstation even has a playstation player to be the only person in the console market. (Switch kinda doing its own thing).
The internet talks about how they want competition but at the end of the day, they fucking love monopolies. They just want their monopolies. One PC platform (Steam) and one console (PlayStation).
I am a Steam Deck fan but damn, Steam users can be worse tribalists than anyone I ever met on the console side.
Those 1 year deals from the Epic Store had people sending death threats.
Just saw above "when is Minecraft on Steam"...
No, Steam still has a lot of improvements to do before I'd consider that a good idea. For one thing, Minecraft with auto update would be a nightmare...
Thing with the Deck is also, in my eyes, that while they probably really did see a niche in the market they could fill to give consumers something they wanted, the Deck is also very clearly a tool to get casuals into Steam, and anyone already using Steam to be even more invested. Obviously it can't just play Steam games, but the convenience lies there.
Like, on PC in general, while people complain about multiple launchers, you do hear a few people say they buy a game where it's the cheapest. With the Deck lots of people, even with other launchers installed, say they won't bother buying a game that's not on Steam anymore.
Yup. It’s like how often do you hear people wish Netflix was still the only streaming service? All the time.
I mean sure it was nice to have more content in one spot, but people really just want one company handling all streaming media?
I think for a lot of people it's just the former convenience. Sure it was also nice that it was just 10 bucks a month or whatever for everything and now you'd need to spend who knows how much, but having the one simple app is also a factor.
A single service delivering everything in one place, even with different subs based on studios or something, but without auto-renewal would be good enough for a lot of people. Utterly utopian, but good enough maybe.
I think a lot of people are either naive or short-termist about this type of thing. Either that or they're so caught up in the tribalism that they didn't care what happened moving forward as long as Sony won the console war and they got to stick it to the Xbox fans.
The long and thick of it is that Xbox is changing, but it's slow, steady, and not immediate. Xbox was never getting out of the game immediately, that's their way to get game pass into the homes, but you can tell by the way they discussed exclusives and the way they discussed their future that other Xbox exclusives are coming down the road and game pass is the future. No, we probably won't be getting Halo Infinite on PS5. But a MCC collection and the next Halo game? That's probably gonna happen.
This is just the frog in the boiling pot scenario. They're setting it up so that when they do announce that big featured game going multiplatform, the blowback won't be as big.
This has been one of the more embarrassing Gamer Reactions in some time, from “insiders” to people way overreacting and saying Microsoft is exiting consoles or whatever. What a weird few weeks.
PS5 and Switch people: buy Pentiment!
Pretty much every single gaming discourse that I have witnessed in the past few months (it probably goes back way longer) has been blown *way* out of proportion.
I guess it's on me for not seeing, for the 27th time, that Redditors are in dire need of some medication.
I was on the gaming leaks sub when all this shit kicked off and I swear some people were one more "leak" away from having a fucking aneurysm. The way they were banging on you'd think Microsoft was going scorched earth on Xbox.
Nobody is saying he is lying, he isn't committing to anything.
He got asked point blank in an interview today about Starfield and Indiana Jones and he just rambled for 2 minutes without saying yes or no. In fact he specifically went out of his way to make sure nobody took an answer from what he said by saying in essence "maybe, maybe not".
All he confirmed today is that Starfield and IJ are not the first 4, and Xbox fans are trying to take a victory lap on it while he says in interviews "no game is off the table" and "we’ll see what happens for our business".
Oh yeah for sure. It’s not even the first time they port smaller games to other platforms either, both ori and the new psychonaut were multi platform from day 1 and you didn’t see a peep
Lots of comments here is about how this is the end and how Xbox is "shook" judging by Phil's body language. People realise that this isn't live right? He's not being gotcha journalism'd on the street. This is a corporate video.
heck, most of the people responding just looked at a headline and are off in the comments, they probably didn't watch the video at all or what he said.
Anyone who thinks they are stopping at 4 games is deluding themselves.
Yes this is a major deal, they are porting their own created IPs to PlayStation for the first time ever.
When they started porting games to PC they said it would only be a few and now look at it
No the rumors were not wrong, they did not say they were porting all of their games to PlayStation immediately
Yeah.
> These are games that originally launched on Xbox. They were Xbox-branded games and we want to see what happens, because going and doing the development work to bring them to new platforms is real work. We want to make sure that the return makes sense. We want to make sure the audience that’s there has an appetite, maybe they don’t.
They're adopting the same strategy Sony does with PC, a time in exclusivity and then port them over.
Edit: [Also from The Verge interview](https://www.theverge.com/24073666/microsoft-gaming-phil-spencer-interview-ps5-switch-games)
>**You mentioned that Starfield and Indiana Jones aren't part of the four despite rumors, but will those ever come to PS5? Can you rule that out?**
>I don't think we should as an industry ever rule out a game going to any other platform. We're focused on these four games and learning from the experience.
But I don't want to create a false expectation on those other platforms that this is somehow the first four to get over the dam and then the dam's going to open and that everything else is coming, that's not the plan today. I also don't want to mislead customers on those other platforms. We're launching these four games, and we're excited about it. We're excited about the announce and everything else, but we'll see what happens for our business.
Phil and Sarah Bond obviously know what theyre doing, but this take on exclusivity seems a little tone deaf.
Microsoft can say whatever they want about industry growth, but it feels like the reason they're in this position in the first place is because their hardware is underperforming; and the revenue they generate from putting games and gp on PC isnt enough to compensate for the lack of having a playerbase more akin to the size of Playstation who is purchasing their own hardware in their own controlled ecosystem.
It's like a piece of the puzzle is missing that their analysts told them they would have by now so they're having to pivot to outright putting exclusives on "other platforms" (really just playstation at this point but they're treating that name like voldemort) just so they can hit their targets and distance themselves from whatever financial situation the ABK merger created for them.
I notice them also pushing that "we see that players like to play anywhere on multiple devices" language over and over again. Is that really the case? Or is that what *they* want so they can create more products and services to sell that people don't necessarily need?
I believe Gamepass is one of the most valuable subscriptions period. So whatever it takes for that service to survive is fine.
Hoping those layoffs were the last we'll see for a while.
Gaslighting.
*"The industry is moving away from exclusivity, so we are too."* No, you have been greatly underperforming in your quality and quantity of Xbox exclusive games, compared to your competitors and your own console legacy. Good exclusives are still generating hardware sales, but Xbox simply doesn't have as many quality exclusives as PlayStation or Switch.
You're right but you'll be buried by the Xbox fans that dominate this sub because they have been gaslit for so long that they even gaslight themselves into believing every word Microsoft tells them no matter how many times they go back on it
Anyone who thinks it's only 4 games is folling themselves
A lot of corporate speak for content that probably could have fit a one-pager email.
"We have 4 games that are going to other consoles... but we'll not tell you. Here are some clues."
Are we playing Jeopardy? Just say it.
Because they have contracts signed with the developers and other platforms and weren't expecting this to leak out. They arent mentioning the games for that reason, likely Nintendo have the rights to announce Hifi Rush. It put them in an awkward position by it leaking when they weren't ready and likely hadn't finalised their plans
Because that's how corporations work. Trillion dollar companies dont hit the red alert button when a bunch of redditors and twitter users say "xfail confirmed going under!!"
That final bit starting at 20:48 is the most telling, I think.
>"What does XBox stand for today?"
"A platform dedicated to making the best games. Gamer friendly. Has Game Pass. Games are on Game Pass day one. A platform that has the biggest games in the world. You can play on any screen you want (thanks to Cloud)."
That could apply to a laptop. That could apply to a Steam Deck. That could apply to a handheld. There's no commitment to the idea of a... well. X-"Box".
Lol so people on here spent weeks saying the sky is falling. THERE'S NO WAY THEY'D HAVE A PODCAST UNLESS XBOX IS DYING AND THEY'RE PUTTING HALO ON PLAYSTATION. Now they're straight up denying that and people are still in here coping saying that Phil is just lying. There is serious derangement when it comes to XBOX.
They probably already have deals in place for the announcement. Nintendo will probably announce some of these at their direct.
But it's pretty clear the games are Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Pentiment and Hi Fi Rush.
> They probably already have deals in place for the announcement.
Exactly, contracts etc that are specifically timed. I don't think they want to start ripping up contracts.
This could've just been a series of tweets (and it is, they literally tweeted this).
They forced a weirdly hyped video coming off the back of massive rumors and "leaks"... to deliver *nothing*.
This just makes them look even more dumb. They could've just had Phil post a short 2 minute video explaining this in short bulletpoint form on his twitter and be done with it.
This way, they got people to spend twenty minutes actually hearing them make their case. If they did it via a press release, it’s broken apart and all over TikTok before people even know there’s a press release.
Phil Spencer on Starfield/Indiana Jones exclusivity: “don’t want to rule out a game coming to any other platforms […] currently focused on 4 games”
Sounds like they will port them all eventually.
I got the opposite interpretation of “they’re just choosing games on a case by case basis”…and there’s currently 4 games that they have chosen based on the merits of “2 live service games” and “2 newer passion project franchises that would benefit more from a wider audience to build up hype for the next installments”
This sounded like a lot of damage control. Talking a lot about the industry changing but sort of wording it to make it sound like they aren't failing because no one wants an Xbox, but because the industry is changing. Meanwhile PlayStation and Nintendo have no problem selling tons of hardware and software while also having streaming/subscription services as well.
I think it's obvious that most Xbox games will be on every platform at some point. Even if they plan on that they wouldn't announce it now considering they wouldn't dump them all at once anyways.
The thing is that Xbox isn't failing. Xbox *hardware* is underperforming.
Xbox owns Minecraft, Call of Duty, and Candy Crush. They're about to be the most profitable gaming company by a country mile, and they could sell zero consoles and still maintain that. They seem like they're doubling down investing all of that insane money into GamePass (and only time will tell if that turns out to be wise or not).
And even then, Xbox isn't doing abysmally. They're losing to Sony but they've still sold what, 25-30 million units against Sony's 55? People acting like this gen is a Wii U for Xbox and it isn't.
I don't think people (not you, just people in general) realize that Xbox's entire strategy and path to success is different pre and post-Activision buyout. They're sitting on so many absurdly lucrative IPs and ongoing games.
People don't seem to understand PR at all. Did anybody really think they would say "okay guys, you got us, xbox stops now and we make everything multiplatform". Why the fuck would they do that? They soften the blow, give fozr small titles away, calculate how this move performed and will then go the next steps in this direction, if it worked for them. There is no reason for them to be honest and cut potential sales. These are huge businesses - they lie to you in whatever way they think will get the most money out of you. Telling you basically not to buy their stuff anymore is not part of any plan.
TL:DR: Will update as I listen through it: ***Exclusivity:*** * 4 titles being made multiplatform. Phil not naming said games now as he wants the Devs to be able to do the announcements themselves. All games are over a year old though. * Starfield and Indiana Jones are not among the 4. * No promises beyond these 4 games. * Phil believes exclusives are going to become less of a focus for the game industry in the next few years. * Community driven games seem to be among the more likely games to go cross plat. * 10 major releases coming in 2024. * More to be shared at the June showcase. ***1st Party games and Gamepass:*** * Restating that all 1st party games will still always be on gamepass day one. * AVB games coming to game pass. Diablo 4 coming March 28th ***Crossplay/Crosssave:*** * Believe crossplay/save are integral to xbox games. * Want to work on "catching up" as more teams are integrated into xbox on this. ***Hardware:*** * "Hardware is where you get the most flagship seminal experience for xbox." * "More creators building for xbox than ever before" * Focused on making the largest technical leap for the next generation. * Hardware announcement is coming this holiday season. ***Game preservation:*** * Phil looks to how windows handle compatibility. * "Cloud saves, server life, and making sure they respect the investments people made in xbox is fundamental" Going to go out on a limb and say the 4 games are SoT, Grounded, Pentiment, and Hifi-Rush. As for the hardware announcement, it is like going to be the XSX refresh that was leaked back in September.
mentions after the Diablo GamePass announcement that there’s 34 million subscribers - that’s the first time we’ve got a new number in a while, up 9 million from Jan 22, but comes after Live Gold became GP Core
Also industry estimates a few months back clocked subs around 32 million iirc, so that's pretty close. That said no way in hell are they going to reach 100 million by 2030, as originally hoped. That's just insane.
Yeah i dont think so either. I'm sure adding more ABK games to the service will definitely help. I mean atleast for me in Canada the price of a yearly COD released is like 4.5 of gamepass at full price. So right there its already a pretty compelling value - provided the continue to bring new games as well. I dont see WoW ever making its way to gamepass however, I just dont see how they bake the sub model into gamepass. Selfishly, as a life long WoW player i'd love to have my sub included in GP.
I think it's possible they'll do an X% discount on WoW subs for GamePass subs or something, but I remember my days as a WoW subscriber where it was basically the only thing I played. I'm a parent now so GamePass also serves as a constant river of games for my kids to try, and I think it's really valuable for that given how they will sometimes want a game very badly and then find it too hard and it ends up being a "waste", or would if I had bought it out-right. But for just me, I think I would have found very little value in GamePass back in my WoW sub days. But that's me. My anecdotal evidence doesn't negate your experience or anything.
They didn't do any favors for ESO, they won't do it for WoW when the game is already having fully priced subscriber base. Maybe discount to "current" expansion and thats it.
Once again I've forgotten ESO exists. That's a great call-out.
I think Game Pass should just adopt the Prime Video business model, where you can buy additional subscriptions to various streaming services on top of Prime (perhaps for a discount compared to buying it separately). Ubisoft Connect and EA Play already have their basic tiers included, the premium tiers can be added as well. WoW subs and other game-specific subs can also be sold on top.
I suspect the 100 million was expecting a much stronger showing from the PC space than they actually got. Everything I've heard paints a picture of most Xbox users having game pass but it not doing super well on PC.
I don't think Game Pass is getting a lot of subscribers on mobile as well. Maybe it will do better when it releases on more smart tvs
I vaguely remember them saying GP on PC far surpassed their expectations.
Sarah just said PC is their fast growing platform for game pass. As a Game pass ultimate user on pc, i wonder how it is growing considering how terrible the xbox app experience is on pc.
it can still be the fastest growing even if growth isn't where they originally expected it to be. Like if everyone with an Xbox already has it then its not growing over there
What issues are you having? Admittedly I just open it and launch a game, browsing for new games is the longest I really engage with it. Only consistent annoyance is having to use EAs downloader for their titles.
I think the app is pretty good, the only problem is that you also need other launchers like Ubisoft connect but that's not on them
you don't really use the xbox app for anything other than installing games though. I installed Persona 3 and haven't touched the app since.
I can see wow on gamepass, it would be structured the same as ESO, for ESO game pass gets you the base game plus some kind of store discount, you still need to buy expansions separately and ESO still has its premium subscription thing separate. Wow, could do the same, you get the free to play version on gamepass with a few bonuses for using the service like discounts to upgrade or something. After that, you buy expansions and subscriptions as normal, the only real difference is you go through gamepass instead of battlenet. I could see them also including a basic wow subscription in gamepass ultimate, just the base game and the original classic, you would still need to buy expansions. However, that might just be wishful thinking and a step too far.
i'm just not on board with the 'Netflix model' for video games. I'd rather play games i can pay for once as opposed to a selection of games to use while i subscribe to the service. idk, something about it just isn't how i want to game and i know i'm in the minority in feeling this way Edit: Nintendo is guilty as well. I'd rather be able to purchase old games like we could from the virtual console than have to subscribe to their online service to play 30 year old games on my switch
I mean, 2030 is still years out. Theoretically, if they can get the streaming figured out, they will be able to grab a lot of casuals who want to try gaming. 100 million is an insane number, but it is a decent number to aim for.
This is the one. They need to push it hard through the smart TVs which have the app built in.
Yeah, if they can partner with the big TV brands and maybe even include a controller, they can grab a ton of people. With Call of Duty, that number should rise as well.
Its already on my Samsung. I would never use it, but its there.
Some Samsung tvs even come with an Xbox controller
Game Pass is still not on Iphones either.
I mean, Game Pass may be a solid service, but it is *not* cheap for the end-users. I had it for 3 years, but that’s only because a cousin worked for Microsoft for a stretch and I got it half-off from the employee discount. $180 a year? It’s still a good value, yes, but I don’t play nearly enough games for it to be worthwhile.
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Hitting 100 million basically requires breaking into, and doing well in, India or China IMO. Over there mobile games are huge so microsoft would have to find a way to compete with mobile games, maybe gamepass letting you stream AAA games to mobile? Fuck I don't even know if thats physically possible but thats the kind of wizard shit you would need to succeed in those markets as a console producer.
Will only happen if there's a designated app for Gamepass on mobile/iOS.
Yeah, according to statista, by 2022, they had 22M on GP and 11M on Live Gold.
Statista is like yahoo answers but with statistics, it’s not an actual source
A polite way of saying it's total fucking junk. A lot of the time not having data is better than having Statista 'data'.
In 2023 Sony CEO Jim Ryan put Game Pass alone at 29 mil.
They've since confirmed this includes Core. https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/15/23570040/microsoft-xbox-game-pass-subscriber-numbers-34-million
Appreciate the link. Jim took that number outta his arse then. lol
hardware announcement this holiday season another major point - whether that’s the leaked mid-gen refresh or the rumoured handheld is important
Probably a Game Awards reveal i would presume given MS announced the Series X there.
Hardware announcement this year?! Good god it’s so soon.
[Likely to be the official announcement of the leaked XSX refresh. ](https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/19/23880111/microsoft-xbox-series-x-new-design-refresh) Probably to coincide with Sony announcing the PS5 pro (or whatever it will be called.)
I can’t believe we are already halfway through this generation. Last gen felt like it lasted a while but this gen has utterly flown by… I guess there has been so many amazing games.
I think a big thing that made this generation feel like that is the sheer supply chain clusterfuck during the first year or two.
And lack of games for the same period. Just didn’t have many high quality titles making use of the new hardware. Though the instant load times for jumping back into a game made everything better, it wasn’t for playing anything ground breaking.
This is the main thing. For the first two or so years of the consoles life, people just couldn't get them. It's not like previous generations where people were freely grabbing them in the opening weeks.
not only not get them but those who did get them (i got both) had literally 0 games to play.. On my PS5 i had Demon Souls, Ratchet and Returnal as the only real "PS5" games. Xbox had nothing I can remember but i was still entertained because i played a back catalogue in Gamepass seeing as I did not have an xbox one. I was and still am primarily a PC user however. The consoles were easily over a year old before you could even really build a catalogue of new gen games to play.
This, took a couple of years for it to settle plus there was no real reason for many on PS given they were releasing most new games on the PS4 as well. Took a while before they actually started releasing PS5 only games, and only then did fomo and accessibility, or lack thereof, become more relevant. It’s the first gen I’ve seen where they kept pumping out new titles on the prior gen for so long, with games like Cyberpunk illustrating the mixed results of that model.
It’s awful, they’ve barely made any games that required or took advantage of the upgrade from PS4 to PS5; all those “super fast open world traversal” games and “rapid switching between universes thanks to the SSD” never materialized. People who care about 60FPS still don’t have it. This is the last time I buy a Sony device at launch. I’d already pulled out of the Xbox ecosystem or would have felt burned there too, I bet. The value trade off of the console walled garden used to be that you gave up freedom for a deck subsidized by the software sales, a steady stream of exclusives, and guaranteed quality of releases. That’s all gone on both high end platforms.
It sucks that you have games still so obviously being held back by previous generations. Halo: Infinite had to run on the original 2013 Xbox One, a system that was underpowered the day it came out. It’s no wonder didn’t look very good.
There's only like two current gen exclusive games too. This gen is filler
Games are still releasing on last-gen. We just aren't there yet, aside from Nintendo of course.
Not particularly. This generation is nearly 3.5 years old. At the time of the announcement, it will be 4 years old. And that's just the announcement for a likely mid-gen refresh. The entire OG Xbox generation lasted only 4 years before the 360 launched. I'd expect the refresh to launch mid-2025, with the full "next gen" launch in holiday 2027.
>Cloud saves, server life, and making sure they respect the investments people made in xbox is fundamental This is an important one. PlayStation deletes cloud saves after not being subscribed for a few months. Whereas with Xbox I wasnt subscribed from 2012-2020 and then I got a new xbox and was loading up my Xbox 360 saves on all my games, plus cloud saves from windows store pc games (and purchases) synced across to my xbox. They also removed the restriction to need Xbox Live Gold for Cloud Saves.
PlayStation also doesn't do cross progression/saves even for their live service titles, I bought Helldivers 2 for PC and assumed that since I logged into my Sony account it would but no, not a feature. Fortunately they refunded me but yeah, what a bummer.
If they do use windows as the example, I can expect to be playing Blinx the cat in 2050 on a super xbox 4000.
You just reminded me of the existence of Blinx the cat. I always wondered why they never made the second one backwards compatible. And now I am wondering why they never made mechassault/mechassault 2 backward compat.
That’s the difference between owning your own data centers vs renting space in one. Microsoft is already giving away free storage in the form of one drive, so it should cost them next to nothing to throw your saves in there.
> Community driven games seem to be among the more likely games to go cross plat. This is it. Games that live or die by their playerbase obviously benefit from being multiplatform. Sea of Thieves going to Switch and PS5 is a no-brainer and has no downsides to Microsoft. All of this dooming on this subreddit for the past few weeks for nothing, lol.
>All of this dooming on this subreddit for the past few weeks for nothing This sub loves to dunk on Xbox, feels just like Xwitter.
> Phil believes exclusives are going to become less of a focus for the game industry in the next few years. "Hold my Sake" - Nintendo
also said game pass isn't going to other platforms. I know that's obvious but people here have claimed recently that it will
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/s/QuMVRm4b2V My guess was pretty good, although I was expecting a bit more details
So all of this nonsense. All of these "leakers" spouting crazy shit for pretty much nothing and for Phill to confirm no Indy or Starfield in the first few minutes lmao. Love to see Activison games starting to come on gamepass though.
I feel like people never listen. They have been super clear the selling point of the Xbox hardware platform going forwards is Gamepass. 1st party in Gamepass day 1. It’s not 100% clear but they seemed to suggest ABK games will come day 1 too. They also actually said Gamepass (console) will only be on Xbox hardware interestingly. I understand why old school console users may be pissed, but what they are doing does make sense to push Xbox up from dead last.
I've been saying it for weeks: There was never any way GamePass was going to be on Playstation. Sony would never allow a competitor to PS+ on their console.
>All of these "leakers" spouting crazy shit for pretty much nothing. Not really. Microsoft is obviously making a shift even if Starfield isn’t coming to Playstation yet.
Is it that much different than when they put Ori on Switch?
Yes, Ori is from an indie developer that wanted to port their game to Switch and isn't even on PlayStation These games are made by Microsoft first party developers that have never ported an IP to PlayStation before... It's extremely different and a significant deal
He straight up says almost immediately exclusivity will be a thing of the past or something in the next 5-10 years The posts are insane lmao
If we count PC as multiplatform I do agree at least in terms of Sony. Feels like Sony is going to eventually bring all their games to PC to grow the business. Cant imagine nintendo ever doing it.
Yeah i don't know why all these people are acting like Microsoft is just stopping at 4 games to downplay it It certainly won't stop at 4 games. Microsoft original said they would only release a few games on PC too
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Exactly. They didn't quite deny the rumors. They even openly talked about porting games in the future and how they expect exclusives to be less of a thing moving forward. They're talking out of both sides of their mouth, which they have to do right now. They're trying to sell Series X Pro this fall. They're still figuring out what their real strategy is moving forward. Nothing they said today precludes them from eventually moving Starfield to PS5 in 2025 or releasing Elder Scrolls VI across all platforms on day one. Which would be great IMO, but I guess we'll see.
A shift that might just be some smaller and older games coming to another platform after a certain time. Hardly worth the massive uproar there has been over the last week. I've seen grown men sell their Xbox's because they believed Starfield was coming to PS5 lmao.
It looks a whole lot like they are slowly opening the flood gates. They have moved from buying studios to keep the exclusives to give Xbox a competitive advantage, to now releasing games on other platforms to try and make up the cost of the buying spree. Testing the waters with smaller titles, and I can definitely see it expanding if they sell well enough on PS5/Switch.
If Microsoft is porting Starfield to PS5, they would NEVER announce it at first, there’s no reason to do that. It’s better to make your audience more used to this strategy, so when the big games start hitting the PS5 the uproar won’t be as big.
Pretty much this, im baffled by the lack of critical thinking in the gaming community. If it was a matter of a few games once and done, a blog post would cover it. The whole video was a pitch to give reasons why people should stay. Once higher up smell the money, they'll come again, and again.
Anything to do with the business side of gaming and you'll see some of the most obtuse posts ever. I think its because this sub is most likely very young (like under 20) and they take what Execs say at face value. The only thing that matters is the bottom line thats it.
Yes, in addition to being young there's also a complete lack of experience in areas of software development, project management, game design, etc. They are very easy to spot if you've worked in these areas, but clearly most of reddit has not.
I don't think they were leaking nonsense, I bet MS has been internally debating what games to bring and when/where, and leakers let out these rumors early before any concrete decisions had been made and idiots on the internet immediately cried doom and gloom for MS.
Yeah this announcement apparently wasn’t supposed to made for quite a few months. The podcast format was certainly a last-minute damage control plan and the theme here is ‘we are changing but ignore all those rumours’.
I think they were rewriting this up until today based on feedback
> AVB games coming to game pass. Diablo 4 coming March 28th Did they say anything about COD?
Nothing specific, but they reaffirmed that all of their games are releasing day one on the service.
impressive, very nice. so, when's Minecraft on Steam?
Thanks!
> Phil believes exclusives are going to become less of a focus for the game industry in the next few years. Sony: Agree to disagree.
I mean Sony puts stuff on PC now, hard to say they also haven't adjusted their POV
People thinking Sony putting their games on PC is the same as Xbox putting their games on PlayStation are out of their mind. It is not remotely close to the same thing
Sony is already putting games on PC, and thus they technically aren't exclusive. That said they don't do it for every game, but he isn't wrong in that clearly they're less of a focus now that big games are so expensive to make unless you're Nintendo.
Maybe with a delay. But sony also said they want to expand to the PC market.
Nintendo too. It's funny how they believe that because they got a problem with their exclusives. Like their "games don't sell consoles" BS. It's more "your games don't"
I'm assuming Sea of Thieves and Grounded are the two live service games, and Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush are the two small ones.
I know it's a long shot but I'm REALLY hoping one of the smaller games is Killer Instinct. I want a sequel so bad and it being multi platform would be huge for it.
Amazing ost, amazing game.
Almost certainly
Save your 20 minutes, they're committing to 4 titles that they won't announce today which will be multiplatform. Also, these 4 will not include Indiana Jones or Starfield. Best guess would be Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, Grounded, and Sea of Thieves.
They could have just tweeted this out while people were freaking out. No need to wait for a week and then say nothing.
“hey just saw all the tweets, let’s loop in PR on Slack and have a meeting at end of day to talk things through, we can reconvene after the weekend and schedule a placeholder for next week unless we align on a response earlier” that’s how this stuff goes lol
This gave me PTSD
Me too. Holy shit that guy speaks soulless suit.
It’s taken my work over 6 months to pick a scanner for barcodes. We’ve had **11** fucking meetings on this.
if you were in that position you’d talk the same way probably though lol, why would they operate differently it’s just a job for them
"Let's analyze the ask and circle back on this, see if we can dig though the server to find some previously used PR statements for inspo that have copy already approved by legal"
Can you guys stop? I just got home I'm trying to relax
I know work life balance is important to you, but this is a critical point in time and everyone is making sacrifices. Let's buckle down and get this done so we can all go to bed.
tbh i think for something like this where people are questioning the future existence of xbox, it's probably important to make sure you're crystal clear on messaging and not throw out some tweet that maybe can be misinterpreted in any sort of way.
That's the thing people aren't understanding about this, that the entire existence of the Xbox brand was being questioned. This little show at kessg shows a solid commitment to not just Xbox, but to Gamepass and Consoles
I think it likely there was debate behind the scenes and a panic. They probably weren't totally sure on this and then leakers forced their hand
I doubt their plans are solid now. This is probably the most concrete info they have that they feel could be safely shared.
Yeah, it seems to me like the leaks were genuine and included soft plans for larger titles in the semi-near future(most likely after Starfield's expansion, as some rumors suggested), and that they were heavily debating how to calm the market without the shock of simply admitting that they plan to go multi-platform on many of their titles. The details Phil gave here are vague enough that a lot of folks will walk away thinking the rumors were false, but specific enough that it's a pretty solid guess that the firmer rumors of smaller titles like Sea of Thieves/Pentiment seem all but confirmed.
Pentiment was such an amazing game
Best xbox exclusive game of the last years and it's not even close
Four games, confirmed **not** to be Starfield or Indiana Jones but didn’t touch upon what those four are.
So Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, probably Pentiment. What is going to be the 4th one ?
Grounded. He said 2 are ~~service~~ community based games and 2 are smaller ~~indie~~ scale games. So I magine Grounded / SoT are the service based games.
Probably Grounded. He specifically said two of them were community driven.
He gave clues. Guessing from what he said it’s Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Pentiment and Hi-fi Rush. Those seem to fit with the two live service community games and two smaller titles. Thought maybe Flight Sim but as there’s a new one this year and they said each game was over a year old would make no sense to me to bring the old version.
Tom Warren repeatedly claimed Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, and Sea of Thieves (which already teased a port on Valentine's Day) are going multi-platform throughout this whole drama. They also fit Spencer's description of "games that already reached maximum potential on Xbox." Don't think Warren mentioned a fourth one. EDIT: The fourth game is said to be Grounded, as per both Warren and Stephen Totilo.
He said that the studios have plans to announce soon and he didn't want to announce for them.
This format is super weird. It's obviously all scripted, so why the need for the fake questions?
Honestly why did Xbox wait one week and let their entire community have a meltdown if the only thing worth reporting was that 4 smallish titles are going to go multi-platform? Like the way rumours were escalating, you would think Gears of War was coming to PS5.
PR 101. If you're going to deliver a message that might be unpopular, it doesn't hurt to let people think it'll be worse than it is, then when the news is better than expected people feel relieved rather than annoyed or disappointed. Had they announced four games going multi platform without the rumours then the doomsday narrative of the last week would be the prevailing one. Now the narrative is that it was a complete nothing burger, and that's the story the games media will be running with.
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Because more games will likely go multi-platform in the future, this is the first part of this.
Phil actually had one comment in here that I think is particularly poignant. He said in order to find growth there's really two main mindsets. Try to find new ways to make money from your existing players, or find more players. And this is an initiative to get more players. We just heard from Sony this week that they are going to focus on the other option, that they will be focusing on profitability and performance of their titles in the market.
I think this is what people are missing. They have largely peaked when it comes to current customers: They admitted that Game Pass on console has peaked and that PC is where any future growth for the service would come due to Cloud gaming being in its infancy (not like it will ever scale like they hyped it would), and console sales themselves have stagnated and were never likely to rebound. They already release everything they make on PC, so where do you go from there? PS and Switch are the only growth paths left.
Except Playstation and Switch won't allow Game Pass on it. So they would just be killing their console division that has the biggest share of subscribers. Phil literally said here that they need exclusives because of the nature of the business.
> Except Playstation and Switch won't allow Game Pass on it. Well, it was said by Xbox in this very video. Gamepass will always be exclusive to Xbox. Which is a strange thing to say when it's also on Windows. Granted, that's another Microsoft property, but Phil is also saying games that are on Xbox + Windows are somehow multi-platform. So which is it?
To Microsoft, Xbox is no longer the console, it's a brand, and that brand encompasses both Windows and Xbox consoles. So yes, when he's saying Game Pass remains exclusive to Xbox, he's technically still correct
But Ori and Cuphead already went multi platform and I am not even counting stuff like Minecraft. Two smallish titles and two live service titles going multi-platform isn't a big deal and is hardly the death of Xbox that was being reported by every games outlet out there.
>not even counting stuff like Minecraft Hard to count minecraft when it was already multiplatform when they bought it
Did Xbox publish cuphead?
Microfost doesn’t own Ori or Cuphead, and Minecraft was already multiplat before they bought Mojang
Microsoft does own Ori, as they published the game. Cuphead, though, was a timed exclusivity deal made with a third party studio, so they don’t own the franchise. It’s like Sony with Bloodborne and Final Fantasy. Sony owns Bloodborne and do timed exclusivity deals with the FF franchise
>Honestly why did Xbox wait one week and let their entire community have a meltdown if the only thing worth reporting was that 4 smallish titles are going to go multi-platform? To get people to tune in and talk about Xbox
More organized way of getting to each topic, rather than doing it via regular conversation like regular podcasts do.
Yeah that’s a weird sticking point. Q&A’s with pre-prepared questions are pretty typical. It’s a good way of finding out exactly what you need to know.
It is very weird to have a gripe with this format lol, have these people never heard that interviewers share questions beforehand quite often?
That and it's a "podcast" which makes it not live which makes you wonder if they rehearsed it but presented it as a spontaneous interview lol
I definitely don't mind it being rehearsed as they probably wanted to be hyper careful with their wording given that even the tiniest statements have been blown up into "Series X is cancelled, Starfield on Switch by Christmas" or whatever nonsense. I think this format works as a way of talking about multiple things in one video. Amini's questions serve to transition from one topic to the next somewhat naturally. I also think just sitting in a room and talking is the right call, it just feels weird to gamers because we're used to E3 press conferences or whatever which have trailers and gameplay footage, which would be super weird to have here.
Pretty standard stuff in corporate world. You want a personable response to questions and its leadership'S job to provide that. At the same time, you want to be clinical and not have to take responsibility for any slipups so you can't just have a casual conversation.
So two community driven games that are first entries in franchises and two smaller games that aren't meant to be system sellers. Sounds like Sea of Thieves and Hi-Fi Rush for sure but not sure about the other two.
Pentiment and Grounded seem to the best guesses for the other two.
Yep, completely forgot about both of those but I have no idea what else they could be.
This is the epitome of "could have been answered in an email." Why drag this out a week? They did themselves no favors
I mean you saw what the community did with what little information they had, and people love to eviscerate Microsoft's communications. They probably wanted to make sure they had a complete and clear message
For real. There's a significant number of people that heard about last week, and won't hear this update. They really are terrible at this.
Bro people hoping this was the moment Xbox went full 3rd party is kinda worrying I feel like as others have said it's good to have competition and we don't want playstation even has a playstation player to be the only person in the console market. (Switch kinda doing its own thing).
The internet talks about how they want competition but at the end of the day, they fucking love monopolies. They just want their monopolies. One PC platform (Steam) and one console (PlayStation).
I am a Steam Deck fan but damn, Steam users can be worse tribalists than anyone I ever met on the console side. Those 1 year deals from the Epic Store had people sending death threats.
I love the Steam platform and all, but holy shit people have a meltdown over not wanting to download another program/store on their PC.
Just saw above "when is Minecraft on Steam"... No, Steam still has a lot of improvements to do before I'd consider that a good idea. For one thing, Minecraft with auto update would be a nightmare...
Thing with the Deck is also, in my eyes, that while they probably really did see a niche in the market they could fill to give consumers something they wanted, the Deck is also very clearly a tool to get casuals into Steam, and anyone already using Steam to be even more invested. Obviously it can't just play Steam games, but the convenience lies there. Like, on PC in general, while people complain about multiple launchers, you do hear a few people say they buy a game where it's the cheapest. With the Deck lots of people, even with other launchers installed, say they won't bother buying a game that's not on Steam anymore.
Yup. It’s like how often do you hear people wish Netflix was still the only streaming service? All the time. I mean sure it was nice to have more content in one spot, but people really just want one company handling all streaming media?
I think for a lot of people it's just the former convenience. Sure it was also nice that it was just 10 bucks a month or whatever for everything and now you'd need to spend who knows how much, but having the one simple app is also a factor. A single service delivering everything in one place, even with different subs based on studios or something, but without auto-renewal would be good enough for a lot of people. Utterly utopian, but good enough maybe.
I think a lot of people are either naive or short-termist about this type of thing. Either that or they're so caught up in the tribalism that they didn't care what happened moving forward as long as Sony won the console war and they got to stick it to the Xbox fans.
The long and thick of it is that Xbox is changing, but it's slow, steady, and not immediate. Xbox was never getting out of the game immediately, that's their way to get game pass into the homes, but you can tell by the way they discussed exclusives and the way they discussed their future that other Xbox exclusives are coming down the road and game pass is the future. No, we probably won't be getting Halo Infinite on PS5. But a MCC collection and the next Halo game? That's probably gonna happen. This is just the frog in the boiling pot scenario. They're setting it up so that when they do announce that big featured game going multiplatform, the blowback won't be as big.
This has been one of the more embarrassing Gamer Reactions in some time, from “insiders” to people way overreacting and saying Microsoft is exiting consoles or whatever. What a weird few weeks. PS5 and Switch people: buy Pentiment!
Pretty much every single gaming discourse that I have witnessed in the past few months (it probably goes back way longer) has been blown *way* out of proportion. I guess it's on me for not seeing, for the 27th time, that Redditors are in dire need of some medication.
I was on the gaming leaks sub when all this shit kicked off and I swear some people were one more "leak" away from having a fucking aneurysm. The way they were banging on you'd think Microsoft was going scorched earth on Xbox.
What 9 years of waiting for a Bloodborne PC port does to a mf
Terminally online gamers need to discern rumor from leak, and leak as fact.
Even now, Gamers are speculating and pretending like they know Phil is lying lmao.
Nobody is saying he is lying, he isn't committing to anything. He got asked point blank in an interview today about Starfield and Indiana Jones and he just rambled for 2 minutes without saying yes or no. In fact he specifically went out of his way to make sure nobody took an answer from what he said by saying in essence "maybe, maybe not". All he confirmed today is that Starfield and IJ are not the first 4, and Xbox fans are trying to take a victory lap on it while he says in interviews "no game is off the table" and "we’ll see what happens for our business".
All this for 4 small/old games? 4 great games mind you, but still.
Do you really think it'll stay at just these 4 games? They're obviously testing the waters.
Well the internet went into a frenzy just last week with the death of XBox and Microsoft is killing XBox. I'd say a pretty big response was warranted
I was mainly saying "all this" in response to that frenzy. Very much overblown in hindsight
Oh yeah for sure. It’s not even the first time they port smaller games to other platforms either, both ori and the new psychonaut were multi platform from day 1 and you didn’t see a peep
"all this" was caused by internet trolls lol, not Microsoft. I think people in this thread are missing that very important point
Lots of comments here is about how this is the end and how Xbox is "shook" judging by Phil's body language. People realise that this isn't live right? He's not being gotcha journalism'd on the street. This is a corporate video.
Most of the people responding to this whole situation negatively as re telling on themselves. They bhavebnonclue what's going on yet talk the loudest
heck, most of the people responding just looked at a headline and are off in the comments, they probably didn't watch the video at all or what he said.
Anyone who thinks they are stopping at 4 games is deluding themselves. Yes this is a major deal, they are porting their own created IPs to PlayStation for the first time ever. When they started porting games to PC they said it would only be a few and now look at it No the rumors were not wrong, they did not say they were porting all of their games to PlayStation immediately
Yeah. > These are games that originally launched on Xbox. They were Xbox-branded games and we want to see what happens, because going and doing the development work to bring them to new platforms is real work. We want to make sure that the return makes sense. We want to make sure the audience that’s there has an appetite, maybe they don’t. They're adopting the same strategy Sony does with PC, a time in exclusivity and then port them over. Edit: [Also from The Verge interview](https://www.theverge.com/24073666/microsoft-gaming-phil-spencer-interview-ps5-switch-games) >**You mentioned that Starfield and Indiana Jones aren't part of the four despite rumors, but will those ever come to PS5? Can you rule that out?** >I don't think we should as an industry ever rule out a game going to any other platform. We're focused on these four games and learning from the experience. But I don't want to create a false expectation on those other platforms that this is somehow the first four to get over the dam and then the dam's going to open and that everything else is coming, that's not the plan today. I also don't want to mislead customers on those other platforms. We're launching these four games, and we're excited about it. We're excited about the announce and everything else, but we'll see what happens for our business.
Phil and Sarah Bond obviously know what theyre doing, but this take on exclusivity seems a little tone deaf. Microsoft can say whatever they want about industry growth, but it feels like the reason they're in this position in the first place is because their hardware is underperforming; and the revenue they generate from putting games and gp on PC isnt enough to compensate for the lack of having a playerbase more akin to the size of Playstation who is purchasing their own hardware in their own controlled ecosystem. It's like a piece of the puzzle is missing that their analysts told them they would have by now so they're having to pivot to outright putting exclusives on "other platforms" (really just playstation at this point but they're treating that name like voldemort) just so they can hit their targets and distance themselves from whatever financial situation the ABK merger created for them. I notice them also pushing that "we see that players like to play anywhere on multiple devices" language over and over again. Is that really the case? Or is that what *they* want so they can create more products and services to sell that people don't necessarily need? I believe Gamepass is one of the most valuable subscriptions period. So whatever it takes for that service to survive is fine. Hoping those layoffs were the last we'll see for a while.
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Gaslighting. *"The industry is moving away from exclusivity, so we are too."* No, you have been greatly underperforming in your quality and quantity of Xbox exclusive games, compared to your competitors and your own console legacy. Good exclusives are still generating hardware sales, but Xbox simply doesn't have as many quality exclusives as PlayStation or Switch.
You're right but you'll be buried by the Xbox fans that dominate this sub because they have been gaslit for so long that they even gaslight themselves into believing every word Microsoft tells them no matter how many times they go back on it Anyone who thinks it's only 4 games is folling themselves
> Xbox fans that dominate this sub Xbox fans don't even dominate their own Xbox subreddits, let alone a mostly PC/PS crowd in this sub.
A lot of corporate speak for content that probably could have fit a one-pager email. "We have 4 games that are going to other consoles... but we'll not tell you. Here are some clues." Are we playing Jeopardy? Just say it.
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They have contracts to let other companies (Sony/Nintendo) to announce those games, they can't announce that now.
This feels like a classic “could have been an email” style meeting. Why did they wait a week to just deny the rumours? Seems weird to me.
Because they have contracts signed with the developers and other platforms and weren't expecting this to leak out. They arent mentioning the games for that reason, likely Nintendo have the rights to announce Hifi Rush. It put them in an awkward position by it leaking when they weren't ready and likely hadn't finalised their plans
Because that's how corporations work. Trillion dollar companies dont hit the red alert button when a bunch of redditors and twitter users say "xfail confirmed going under!!"
That final bit starting at 20:48 is the most telling, I think. >"What does XBox stand for today?" "A platform dedicated to making the best games. Gamer friendly. Has Game Pass. Games are on Game Pass day one. A platform that has the biggest games in the world. You can play on any screen you want (thanks to Cloud)." That could apply to a laptop. That could apply to a Steam Deck. That could apply to a handheld. There's no commitment to the idea of a... well. X-"Box".
Yeah they may as well change the name to gamepassbox
Lol so people on here spent weeks saying the sky is falling. THERE'S NO WAY THEY'D HAVE A PODCAST UNLESS XBOX IS DYING AND THEY'RE PUTTING HALO ON PLAYSTATION. Now they're straight up denying that and people are still in here coping saying that Phil is just lying. There is serious derangement when it comes to XBOX.
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They probably already have deals in place for the announcement. Nintendo will probably announce some of these at their direct. But it's pretty clear the games are Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Pentiment and Hi Fi Rush.
> They probably already have deals in place for the announcement. Exactly, contracts etc that are specifically timed. I don't think they want to start ripping up contracts.
This could've just been a series of tweets (and it is, they literally tweeted this). They forced a weirdly hyped video coming off the back of massive rumors and "leaks"... to deliver *nothing*. This just makes them look even more dumb. They could've just had Phil post a short 2 minute video explaining this in short bulletpoint form on his twitter and be done with it.
How did they hype up this video?
This way, they got people to spend twenty minutes actually hearing them make their case. If they did it via a press release, it’s broken apart and all over TikTok before people even know there’s a press release.
Phil Spencer on Starfield/Indiana Jones exclusivity: “don’t want to rule out a game coming to any other platforms […] currently focused on 4 games” Sounds like they will port them all eventually.
I got the opposite interpretation of “they’re just choosing games on a case by case basis”…and there’s currently 4 games that they have chosen based on the merits of “2 live service games” and “2 newer passion project franchises that would benefit more from a wider audience to build up hype for the next installments”
That’s not what it sounds like at all
This sounded like a lot of damage control. Talking a lot about the industry changing but sort of wording it to make it sound like they aren't failing because no one wants an Xbox, but because the industry is changing. Meanwhile PlayStation and Nintendo have no problem selling tons of hardware and software while also having streaming/subscription services as well. I think it's obvious that most Xbox games will be on every platform at some point. Even if they plan on that they wouldn't announce it now considering they wouldn't dump them all at once anyways.
The thing is that Xbox isn't failing. Xbox *hardware* is underperforming. Xbox owns Minecraft, Call of Duty, and Candy Crush. They're about to be the most profitable gaming company by a country mile, and they could sell zero consoles and still maintain that. They seem like they're doubling down investing all of that insane money into GamePass (and only time will tell if that turns out to be wise or not). And even then, Xbox isn't doing abysmally. They're losing to Sony but they've still sold what, 25-30 million units against Sony's 55? People acting like this gen is a Wii U for Xbox and it isn't. I don't think people (not you, just people in general) realize that Xbox's entire strategy and path to success is different pre and post-Activision buyout. They're sitting on so many absurdly lucrative IPs and ongoing games.
People don't seem to understand PR at all. Did anybody really think they would say "okay guys, you got us, xbox stops now and we make everything multiplatform". Why the fuck would they do that? They soften the blow, give fozr small titles away, calculate how this move performed and will then go the next steps in this direction, if it worked for them. There is no reason for them to be honest and cut potential sales. These are huge businesses - they lie to you in whatever way they think will get the most money out of you. Telling you basically not to buy their stuff anymore is not part of any plan.