47
Looming Xbox layoffs threaten Microsoft's reputation | Opinion
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
47 points (94.3% liked)
Games
19961 readers
485 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
MS reputation when it comes to gaming ain’t that bad. They scored some wins over the last two years with lots of decent titles available day 1 on GamePass while Sony is stuck doing remaster after remaster. Nintendo isn’t doing all that hot either reputation-wise. So maybe not great but the bar is set low.
Honestly it’s freaking weird how bad XSX is doing compared to PS5 - both are about the same performance-wise unlike previous generation, games are cheaper thanks to GP and there’s such an overabundance of games that lack of exclusives doesn’t hurt that much. I guess that’s just inertia from previous gen but even then Xbox is a budget conscious pick so you’d imagine they’d sell better.
Sony isn't stuck doing remasters, they're choosing to do remasters
Outside of Lemmy and certain circles, it certainly feels that Nintendo is doing fine. I can't say for sure but anecdotally I've hardly seen ant criticism of Nintendo whereas Sony and Microsoft get quite a lot of it. I know that may not really count for much but it's hard to get a proper gauge of these things.
Nintendo gets plenty criticism and rightly so and what we traditionally consider to be gamers opt to use other systems. The thing about Nintendo is that their main customer base aren’t gamers but kids. For now I wouldn’t look too much into sales figures of Switch 2, it’s mostly a measure of huge stock available at launch.
I mean, it's a hard definition to specify though. I don't think anyone would argue that Smash players are not "gamers" and the majority of gamers don't seem to care about things like these if they are even aware of it.
Gamer seems to be a weird term because most don’t consider someone playing Candy Crush a gamer. Kids playing Nintendo games are a bit of a different breed too if we go by that measure. There’s also loads of older folk that grew with some sort of Nintendo system or started to appreciate what they’re doing later on of course. Among my group of older millennials in a country with very little Nintendo presence it seems like Switch is something you buy for your children primarily.
It's interesting to see the demographic and maybe because I'm in an Asian country but among my peers, old zoomers and young millenials, it seems like any console is more for people while kids usually play games on their phone.
They are constantly yo-yoing over making games or just providing cloud services, they’ve closed the only studio that made them a highly rated exclusive in recent years, released all decent exclusives to competitors, stopped the backwards compatibility program, increased GP pricing, stopped making physical games, haven’t done anything with any popular ip they’ve bought since early 2000s, pioneered paid multiplayer and ads on the dashboard, and I have a lot more complaints. And I’ve had both xbox one and series x, and they were fine as game systems, but I’m not getting the next thing they make.
Sony hasn’t been that much better, but at least they are actually making games, and these games are well made, even if we saw fewer releases this gen.
Steam Deck is the only sustainable option it seems, considering where the industry is these days.
That’s kind of unfair assessment for Microsoft. There’s been more well rated games than HiFi Rush (even if closing Tango is a travesty). We should be applauding that they no longer lock their games to a single platform (despite fanboys crying over it). GP pricing increased but it’s still great value for the money and the best deal around. Their main franchises get new entries consistently and there’s been new IP too in the meantime (Indiana Jones is a joy). I think they ran out of publishers that wanted to participate in backwards compatibility program but I’d be surprised if ActiBlizz catalogue won’t join it sooner or later.
Honestly, what are the titles that Sony released in the past 5 years that aren’t sequels or remakes? I’m super confused how Sony is getting away with this.
As to Valve. Why is Microsoft stopping physical sales bad but it’s ok when Valve does it? Valve killed physical sales for the entire platform.Once they got a monopoly sales with deep discounts ended. Can you really trust Valve with backwards compatibility and long term support over Microsoft? One has a history of abandoning stuff when they no longer find it profitable, the other is probably best in class still. When I moved from PS4 to XSX it was because I could sell my physical copies, something not possible on PC. End goal for Valve seems to be Android for games where they exert power over some Linux based platform with their app store - that’s no good for any of us. And that’s without addressing elephant in the room that Valve is no different if not worse than EA when it comes to gambling.
I don’t have favourites and use what I think is best for me at a given time. I’m deeply confused with what other gamers are choosing for themselves.
That’s true, but you were wondering why PS5 would be selling better, and it’s definitely one of the factors, because why would you buy Series X when for the same price you get PS5 that runs all of MS games and all of Sony games.
That depends on how often you play and how many games, and how many of those games are on GP. I have time for maybe one game a month and buying that one game on sale is usually cheaper.
Epic’s free games promotions are also a much better deal value wise. If you’ve been getting them since the beginning by now you would have the library of around the same size as game pass. And at least those games are not getting regularly deleted from your account, like what happens with GP when they phase out some games.
Mostly Forzas got new releases consistently, not the other ones, and there is tons of stuff they bought and never did anything with: no Banjo games, no Conker, no Mechwarriors for many years (until they finally licensed the rights), no Black and White, 16 years since Fable III…
Neither Sony nor Valve are doing that great with their own IPs either, but at least Nintendo shows that it could have been done much much better.
There are still some really disappointing omissions, like older Forza titles, Front Software games like Armored Core, all Tony Hawk games (I wonder if we should wait for them to be added with Activision at MS), and it was also upsetting that the enhancement program ended with just a few titles getting it and a lot of the rest are still 720p and/or 30fps
Astrobot is great, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon is pretty new as well, even if the first game is older than 5 years now. And they’ve tried with Days Gone and Returnal. And I guess Concord, but we don’t talk about that.
Valve just had a better store, they didn’t really push anyone out. I’ve also resisted getting steam for longest time (I remember buying Humble Bundles and giving away steam keys because I was against steam and the end of ownership it represented), but in the distopian future we live in there is no choice left. I had an xbox because I could still buy disks for it, but now they want to kill even that.
What are you talking about? We are in the middle of Summer Sale, I just bought like 10 games.
You can mod games that you buy from Steam, even if they are broken for new systems there is usually a way to run them with community patches, you can’t do that with Microsoft stuff, even on PC you can’t apply modifications to a Game Pass game. I can still play games that I’ve got before they were delisted, like Dirt 2, on my new PC or on Steam Deck, but there is no way to play, for example, Forza 4 on the new Xbox.
Is valve the first one? What did they abandon in this way though, besides dead multiplayer games?
Valve still releases their updates as open source, and Steam is available in other Linux distributions besides SteamOS. And even SteamOS has the full desktop mode that is not locked to only running apps from their own store. So far their goal seems to be to free games from Windows monopoly rather than establish dominance in OS world.
That’s an overstatement to say worse than EA, at least it’s only cosmetic items and largely contained within CS and Team Fortress
The biggest problem with MS is how confusing and inconsistent they are, they don’t know what they are doing so we don’t know what we are supporting with our money. Just look what XBOne went through in one generation: from TV box with Picture in Picture support and mandatory Kinect voice control and Mixer streaming platform to a bare minimum game console with a subscription that is basically Netflix for games. Focus on buying studios one day and closing them the next day. Pretty consistent bad treatment of the studios and ips that they buy in general, and even if in some years developers say MS was running their studios well, MS shifts focus to often, so even if they are good today there will always be a big chance that tomorrow they’ll switch to cloud/AI/GamePass-only or whatever will be the next crazy thing.