I feel you brother. It's bad. They are pushing AI features at the speed of light but forgetting that other things need attention too. Log a support ticket and it spews out AI shit that I have already tried or doesn't help.

didn't the new exec come from their AI division?

There are already a bunch of documented but umimplemented functions in a few Xbox related API, like GameInput.

So, everything?

They can’t even make money with their AI, they only survive off the windows OEM licenses, Office 365 subs that businesses are locked into and their backend server and sql stuff. That’s enough to make them a walking dead for a long time.

So, also AI?

This has been tried before and never worked well. What makes you think its going to work any better now?

I even have a free controller google gave me when they tried it.

I saw a thread the other day, something like "What low-level conspiracies do you genuinely believe"; to which someone replied that they believe that OpenAI is being speedrun to bankruptcy in order for Microsoft to buy their data centres for pennies on the dollar.

And yeah, it all kinda seems that could be a credible outcome, at which point MS will have a huge amount of equipment all ready to serve game streaming to people who can no longer afford to buy a home computer to do the same.

Is it going to happen? shrug

Could it? Absolutely.

It won’t be GTA6. It will be an exclusive title like a rebooted Halo or Gears of War. They can’t risk losing the money on GTA when people just go to PS5 and buy the game outright there.

The PS5 version of GTA6 is going to sell pretty well then

To play games coded by a shitty AI, full of bugs and as many microtransactions as possible ...

And how well do you think that's going to work? Sounds like a shitty service maybe five people will subscribe to, and then it dies a year later.

We've had subscription services like this already. I don't hear much of them anymore... Or at all... So I presume they're all dead.

The old "we don't want to put any effort into creating anything good, we just want to milk this for cash until we can't anymore."

This sounds... plausible actually. They have this big stake in GPU datacenters for AI, that are (and will be) burning incredible amounts of money and are not turning a profit anytime soon. That same crazy level of investement on AI is making hardware costs go up, especially gaming hardware.

But Microsoft, being the benefactors who have inherited the company from philantropist and kids-lover Bill Gates, have thought of us! They will share a bit of their shiny GPU datacenters' plwer for gaming and all they will be asking for is a lot of your money. I can see that.

That's what their actions felt like for decades yet somehow they've always kept chugging along.

I can only hope.

You mean Microsoft? I hope but I doubt it, they have a lot of companies locked in their products

Nah, shifting heavily toward being B2B.

Some victory. PC sales have been plummeting in favour of mobile and now component prices. Console space is now done with any semblance of competition - Sony is a monopoly and will soon start behaving as such. And xbox's portfolio of many many IPs will go straight to the bin.

You mean Tencent mobile games

No, the new player in the game, AI killed everything.

I'd like to see you try to build a PC right now for less than $1,500. The cornered the market on all of the parts necessary to make a computer that can run games well.

I was thinking the same thing. We've known about it for years.

The sunk cost fallacy is a bitch

The Xbone is what made me go PC full time.

Been a Xbox gamer since the original Xbox with Halo CE. LAN parties galore. Halo 2 and the beginning of Xbox Live was amazing. Bought a X360 at launch, got Gears and Crackdown for the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. Halo 3 was peak.

And then Xbone announced. Always online. Kinect required. "Sports" "Live TV". Yeah, not falling for that. "Can't just flip a switch".

Yeah I cancelled my Xbox Live sub and built a PC. 2500K with a 550ti. Haven't looked back since. All of my friends in our group did the same, but some bought a PS4 as well for the SP games.

Microsoft just doesn't care. They have enough money to not care. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time for Xbox and I'd be genuinely surprised if they release another console and I'd be even more surprised if anyone actually buys it. It's a dead ecosystem.

It’s been a sad thing to watch. I was the biggest Xbox fan in my circles in the 360 & One days. But by the time Series X came out, I was so disappointed in their games that I still don’t own it. Microsoft bought so many companies that I thought would bring games. Yet, most of them aren’t producing anything.

Enshittifying

Old Xbox actually did have a good number of people who just wanted to make cool video games.

... You gotta get rid of people with some semblance of duty and desire to achieve some kind of good in the world though.

That's how you maximize next quarter investor returns.

That makes sense. Microsoft didn't enter the console market for gamers or gaming- they entered it to beat sony. The PS2 had a linux distro you could load on it to try to sell it as a computer to circumvent luxury import taxes. If it WAS a computer, it would compete with Microsoft Windows. They were worried that a console could just sell software instead of games and be a competitor, so they threw a ton of money trying to run Sony out of business.

Microsoft never really wanted to win gaming. The war was against an enemy that wasn't really a threat. So not killing off a console wasn't really a "loss".