We should be applauding that they no longer lock their games to a single platform (despite fanboys crying over it).

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.

GP pricing increased but it’s still great value for the money and the best deal around.

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.

Their main franchises get new entries consistently and there’s been new IP too in the meantime (Indiana Jones is a joy).

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.

I think they ran out of publishers that wanted to participate in backwards compatibility program but I’d be surprised if ActiBlizz cat join it sooner or later.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once they got a monopoly sales with deep discounts ended.

What are you talking about? We are in the middle of Summer Sale, I just bought like 10 games.

Can you really trust Valve with backwards compatibility and long term support over Microsoft?

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.

One has a history of abandoning stuff when they no longer find it profitable, the other is probably best in class still.

Is valve the first one? What did they abandon in this way though, besides dead multiplayer games?

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.

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.

And that’s without addressing elephant in the room that Valve is no different if not worse than EA when it comes to gambling.

That’s an overstatement to say worse than EA, at least it’s only cosmetic items and largely contained within CS and Team Fortress

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.

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.