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The Era of the Gamecube, Xbox, and PS2 will forever be the best in terms of consumer value and choice and commitment to quality, followed by the Xbox360 Ps3 gen....Its been boiling the frog since end of PS4 and on, but I got out of the water by the PS5...xbox was boiled long ago and were the first to turn up the temp
We shouldn't ever forget the sweet spot of the Game Boy Advance SP (proudly exclaimed "plays all games" on its box, and that wasn't a lie) and the original model of the PS3 which had full BC for every previous generation.

It's such a shame how far things have fallen since. The Switch 2 is an amicable modern day effort, but still, the industry has gotten much pricklier for the average consumer. Not to mention prices that will irreparably damage the scene.

We had a pretty good run there from NES onwards. Today the state of the games industry is weird - It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
Can we not forget Dreamcast was also part of that era?
The best part is that the era isn't gone; you can buy those and the games, and it's not even an expensive hobby. And people also know how to / can repair them.
I really don't get what MS is doing here. They claim they care about Xbox, that they're going to turn the ship around, yet they cluelessly and carelessly laid off most of their best staff, all while raising prices multiple times and still not producing a coherent future roadmap.

Any consumer or customer would look at this behavior pattern and think they are far too unstable to put their trust into.

At this point it's time to call it for Xbox. I don't think they'll be around in six months time.

The new leadership that was installed clearly has no idea what they’re doing. I get the sense they’re just trying not to get fired. Asha had no games industry experience coming in.

They were also dealt a pretty bad hand with the humongous Activision acquisition and a pretty poor slate of games year over year basically since the start of Covid.

The deal was they took everything from you… but at least you could buy electronics for cheap!

Now they don’t even let you have that.

Yeah, they've been explaining away inflation for decades by averaging housing with electronics. Yes your rent has tripled, but your TV is also 3 times as big and your gamebox has 1000 times the CPU so really, things have only gotten 2% more expensive, says the CPI calculation.

Now the politicians don't even have that excuse. I suppose they'll have to add AI tokens to CPI. Used to cost $1000 each, now $0.000002 each, average inflation is 2%.

Except they don't even have that because the recent FOMC meeting pretty much admitted inflation is 4% and they don't feel like doing anything to reduce it, but they're definitely committed to reducing it, they swear.

It’s because of the idiocy of p&l tracking. The hardware, store, and games all need to be independently profitable.

Once they are, they all need to be more and more profitable.

Finally when it’s no longer profitable fire half the people and strip it for parts.

They’re already dead, they just don’t know it yet.

bizarrely self-destructive behavior from XBox. they've been shooting themselves in the foot for years; apparently they've decided to exchange the gun for a flamethrower in hopes of cauterizing the stump.
Xbox is in complete disarray and is imploding. I haven’t owned a PlayStation in decades. If my son’s Xbox Series X (the worst naming ever) suddenly dies, we’ll either switch to PlayStation or build a PC.
Xbox is in complete disarray because none of the people in charge seem like people who have played a single video game ever.
I don't think it's played; it's that idiots brought low-margin businesses into a high-margin enterprise b2b saas company (that exploits a monopoly too) and are shocked that gaming is not going to give you 30% or higher margins. Nintendo is super disciplined and a bad year for Microsoft margin-wise is one of Nintendo's best. If Nintendo can't regularly hit 30% margins, nobody can, and certainly (as you say) people who don't game and don't know a single thing about gaming except speedrunning a tutorial aren't going to do that.
And isn't that just so typical? Every industry right now is headed by money extraction experts, not experts in that industry.
PS5 prices went up 35% in the past 2 years, and PC RAM went 5x. This is a global problem
Isn't playstation going download only way in a year or so, with no physical disks at all?
The majority of gamers don't care. PC has been digital only for decades.
I think that’s the really important implied question right now. Mostly everyone already has some form of device to play games on. What happens when they start to die off?
Would you consider the Steam Machine?
With all the other Xbox layoffs, studio shutdowns, price increases, rumors of pulling titles from Steam, what do they still expect from this brand?
Nothing. That’s why they gave it to a young woman with no achievements whatsoever in gaming and no reputation to build off of. Her job is to kill it in a way Satya can save face on so they can finish their push to everything in the cloud.
'No Achievements'? even just on her Wikipedia she has a great run in her career. Also the population seems to like her.
Curious that you focus so much on her gender.
I get the impression from Xbox and Sony that they are oblivious to the fact that they are killing the console. You no longer own the games you purchase. Rather, it's a license for a game (or movie) that can be taken away at any moment, and they want you to be okay with that. Prices are increasing with the excuse of the RAMpocalypse, but the hardware upgrades between the generations are minimnal.

Okay. Vent over.

At this point, it’s the ExBox :(
I recently purchased an Xbox Series S for ~NZD$180 to re-play GTA4 (and Episodes) as I never got to finish it when it first came out, and to get through all the GTAs before GTA6 comes out.

512GB Series S consoles in NZ are now retailing for close to $1,000. Might have an appreciating asset on my hands!

($1 NZD ≈ $0.50 USD)
I'm sure it applies to Xbox too, but I priced out today's PS to the PS1 and it closely follows the inflation rate that M2 has undergone.

M2 expansion is the prime driver of prices, after supply & demand. Normalize SPX, gold/silver, etc, to M2 and see that they all run in fairly horizontal channels. You can even see nominal GDP normalized to M2 having been flat initially and then transitioning into a downward sloped curve for the last few decades.

By normalizing, I mean [in TradingView] doing SYMBOL*23.16*10^12/M2SL (conceptually SYMBOL*M2SL[0]/M2SL). Most important items track close to M2's roughly 6.5%-7% annualized force of interest inflation rate (the quotient of the natural log of the ratio of price now to historical price, over the elapsed time between the prices).

7% inflation (FoI) -> wealth halflife of cash ≈ 10 years.

Reading this made me question my own mental stability.
He's basically saying the increase in prices has matched the increase in the money supply. Implying that we need to hold politicians accountable for the massive expansion in the money supply. Which is logic that's hard to fault.

Also implying that inflation is under-measured, perhaps deliberately. Which definitely seems true for anyone who's experienced inflation.

CPI replaces steak with hamburger or chicken once steak becomes unaffordable. It understates inflation.
Sounds about right.

"Prices double every 10 years" is a fairly standard economics benchmark.

Also known as 7.2% inflation.
I don’t blame them because I don’t know all the variables involved. Neither does the media reporting and we don’t know what a company of their size is going through with prices going up and suppliers being unwilling to sell parts needed to manufacture these things.

I bought a used Xbox one a few years back. I’m not a heavy gamer anymore so I usually buy the previous generation or even two generations ago hardware, get the games I want from eBay and I’m good. And I was looking forward to getting a Series X, but at this point it looks unlikely unless the brand completely tanks and they’re selling them off to get rid of inventory. Otherwise, my Xbox one is going to be worth more in the future than what I paid, and I don’t want that situation for anyone.

When did the Xbox start looking like a Braun radio?
Valve’s gain.
Have you seen the prices of valve’s hardware?
Valve is truly walking into the perfect storm with their current roadmap.
sideshow_bob_rakes.gif
For my entire life, I've seen the same cycle.

Microsoft buys something great, optimizes all the good out of it, and then pulls the plug.

Skype, Nokia, GitHub...

Now it's happening to video games.

The thing everyone needs to realize is that Microsoft fundamentally doesn't make anything, they never have.

All they can do is buy low and sell high. Or buy high and sell higher.

They certainly can't lovingly craft games, the way gamers expect.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that executives hate artists. Go out of their way to fire them.

Look at what's happening to Blizzard & Bethesda under Microsoft. Arguably Blizzard was ruined the moment Activision sunk their claws in. Quality went down, creativity went down, and all so Bobby could buy a new yacht and sail to Epstein's Island.

"Do you guys not have phones?" That's something a manager who was totally out of touch with his audience would say. Not of an artist creating experiences for gamers.

Microsoft wedge micro-transactions into everything, changes game play to emulate games like Candy Crush where gamers have to pay every 30 seconds. Really more slot machines than video games, but to the ghouls running the show they can't tell the difference.

Players like to be amazed, entertained, and it's not a formulaic process. A gamer will never say, "Oh good, I love feeling pressure and being rushed and all I wanted to do was put in more money all along!"

Microsoft has killed support for all these games. Which kills community.

They add things that nobody wants, because they saw someone else doing it. And they keep adding more of these pay to win and collection "buy a new skin" type mechanics.

Anyway this is a straight up rant at this point, but Microsoft buying something is always a sign doom will follow. Just a matter of time. Xbox held out pretty well. But in the last year or three Microsoft has set its sights on ruining every game it has, so it's just a matter of time now before gamers abandon it. I have zero faith Microsoft will find a way to bring an audience back, because they have no idea how to connect with said audience. It's always just going to be, "How much ARR does that game produce? Wow what a great game!"

Same with Google, Oracle, and basically every big company. In gaming, Valve is a holdout for now - maybe they felt burned after getting prosecuted for shoving Steam full of micro transaction gambling and they're laying low for a while.
I think you're right and I think it's because Microsoft behaves a bit like PE.
Microsoft didn't buy Xbox, they built the entire ecosystem themselves...
> "Do you guys not have phones?"

My time to cruelly remind people that Diablo Immortal was insanely profitable for Activision.