That’s my thought as well. It’s good that there are two console makers directly competing (Nintendo is off very successfully doing their own thing like they always do), but bad that they’re trying to bludgeon their way to superiority via exclusives.

Ditto Activision-Blizzard — and indeed, Microsoft agreed to keep Call of Duty multiplatform, in part because they’re just not going to recoup those costs by going exclusive immediately. It would be leaving money on the table.

When Xbox Cloud Gaming was utterly unusable over the holidays I walked right into a Target and bought a 1TB Series S. They had a couple of Series X’s as well and they were the same price; it was tempting to get one of those instead but I didn’t need another one at home and the Series S is much better for travel.

That’s very similar to my use case. I bought my first Series X mostly because I wanted to be in a position to play the exclusives that were coming down the pike and I had and have absolutely no desire to do any gaming on PC except in very specific circumstances (mostly online play with friends for games like BG3 or…

I’m fine with the DualSense but I do prefer the feel of the Xbox controller. And that’s coming from someone whose first Xbox was a Series X.

It’s a loss leader, of sorts. The play was to lose out on the PlayStation sales in order to get people locked into their gaming ecosystem, whether it was on an Xbox console or a PC.

Yeah, that was pure, bog standard corporate shittiness. 

Jeez, couldn’t he have just had his father pay a doctor to say he had bone spurs like a normal person?

Definitely. The input lag was the surprising part; I figured that the whole point of the queue was to ensure that the available instances worked properly or even well, but that didn’t seem to happen.

My experience with it had been very good up until I tried to use it around the holidays last year. Queue times were 60-120 minutes and when I did get connected, input lag was insane. And it wasn’t my local internet connection because I used PS Remote Play with zero issues; considering that it was running through my…

Agreed. That’s why my concern is more that it gets bifurcated such that the only option for people in those vast swaths of the US is to buy a PC since that would be the only way to install games locally under that model.

Hmm. I’m genuinely not sure. I have GPU but I very, very rarely play on PC. I can definitely believe it, though.

ETA: There’s a bit of a delta, I looked at the current lineup and there are 477 titles available on Xbox and 444 on PC. I haven’t looked through the list but I wonder if it’s mostly or all BC titles like you…

I’d definitely be interested in that. I use a NUC for PC couch gaming now and it’s fine, but that’s mostly because I only play a very small subset of games on it. Something that’s purpose-built for that use case would be great.

MS doesn’t need games to get people to use Windows.

If Xbox wants to get out of the physical console business and get back into their more natural lane as a software company it’s fine by me if games (at least the big boppers) will be multiplatform as rumored. That means not just on PC, other consoles, something that always seems to get glossed over - “oh, it’s not…

I mean, they’re already screwing console owners compared to PC owners with GamePass.

I’m wondering if Microsoft/Xbox is now considering stopping making hardware consoles at this point and probably going forward with just like a streaming box for their gamepass subscriptions.

Microsoft releasing games simultaneously on PC makes a lot more sense for them given that the overwhelming majority of those PCs run Windows. It’s another incentive to get and keep people in their ecosystem, and that’s not a factor for Sony.

I mentioned the Podcast Cringe videos in another comment and yours reminded me of why I had a generally positive impression of him from them. They were discussing how he defended people with Down Syndrome and was visibly upset and took Andrew Schultz to task on his show for demeaning them. The video, at least that I…