Topic: The everything Xbox thread

True but this is 2020 and not 2013. The "cheap" alternative will be xCloud (streaming) and not Scarlett. Lockhart rumours have faded.

Microsoft wouldn't need to be more expensive than Sony even if Scarlett was more powerful. The money is elsewhere, in games and services but people won't pay extra for an Xbox and Microsoft knows it. I think that many people don't know if they want a PS5 or an Scarlett yet.

They are not "leaks" in the slightest. Sony has talked more about PS5 than Microsoft about Scarlett so it's impossible to conclude that PS5 is more powerful because of the available information.

What we know for sure is that both will use AMD technology, specifically a next-gen RDNA-powered Navi GPU and 7nm Zen 2 CPU, a new technology commercially released as Ryzen 3000 this month. They will support ray tracing by dedicated hardware like new high-end Nvidia graphics cards and feature GDDR6 RAM and a solid-state drive that could be used as a secondary pool of memory. Sony gave a few more details like the number of cores and so while Microsoft is being less specific. We won't know the final specifications until E3 2020 and they are not set in stone yet. I'm thinking about CPU speed (which can't be compared to current generation anyway), GBs of RAM (that will be faster than GDDR5 anyway), etc. Looking at how well designed the Xbox One X is I think that Scarlett will be the better console somehow and not the other way around.

@BlueOcean I don't know that MS considers XCloud a "cheap alternative to console". The market that can use XCloud is going to be exceedingly limited. And ironically the group that's going to be most likely to be able to use it, is also the group that's going to be more willing to spend on a premium console.

For now I get the impression they're treating that as a groundwork for a future that isn't now, as well as a "blue ocean" (ha ha) to extend the "X" brand gaming reach, not as a replacement/alternative to their hardware products for now.

You're right in the money being elsewhere, but I'm not quite sure how much either company is willing to subsidize hardware just yet. Both were disinterested in doing that back in 2013, and left it behind them. Are they willing to go back to PS2/X-B era type heavy subsidies on hardware? MS can afford to eat the money more than Sony. But I still don't know what the corporate appetite is right now for subsidizing hardware. Sony started that strategy largely so they could push media formats (CD, DVD, BD) to mass market by making gamers pay for it. Could both companies be willing to do that to push subscriptions? Maybe. Regardless, if Sony sells a $600 system and MS sells a $500 system, MS wins, almost guaranteed. If Sony sells a $600 system and MS sells a $400 system, Sony should just start selling fixtures.

I don't have a doubt the MS hardware will be of superior design. With the exception of PS3 Phat vs. RRoD, MS hardware has been of quality design since 2000, and Sony hardware has been of shoddy design since 2000

Either way, if we're looking at a new gen of TWO $600-700 consoles....even $500-600, Gen 9 is going to be a SLOW moving generation with lots of speculation about the death of console gaming and lots of talk of the future of streaming even though 1/3 of players even have the capability of using it. And Nintendo's cheaper offerings start looking really attractive on a mass market scale - and PC starts looking better and better again.

@NEStalgia Of course I haven't been following any Sony news, obviously, since I couldn't care less about what they're doing. I'm just saying that from Microsoft's perspective, it would REALLY be stupid to give away their upper hand in regards to hardware. They ARE the only premium console hardware supplier right now, and for all intent and purposes, it's literally the ONLY aspect in which they were able to outdo the competition.

This coming generation, they must build upon that, and not only keep that advantage, but also expand in other areas, as I already detailed. I really don't think that Phil Spencer and his team are just going to lean back to allow Sony to win the next hardware race.

If Sony truly leaked so many specs, then chances are that Microsoft will react to that. They still have close to a year to make some minor adjustments, and more won't be necessary.

If Sony is going to release this all-powerful unicorn of a game console, then they're going to bleed billions of dollars, not just in manufacturing costs, but also in sales losses, because only a minority is going to buy it, much like we see now with the X1X. It'll never be a mainstream product. And they can market all they want about how that is their exact intent, but that isn't going to change anything. I just don't see it happening. And unless the price difference is going to be well over a $100, the power difference is also going to be marginal.

@NEStalgia "Cheap" xCloud because you can play on any tablet or PC and just requires to stream the game but obviously not a "replacement" of Microsoft's hardware products, not now that Surface and Xbox hardware is so successful. Cheaper than Google Stadia in any case because Google requires gamers to buy the games for streaming and you pay an extra for 4K streaming, too.

I do not think that PC gaming will eat the console market share next generation because PCs are relatively more expensive than consoles and at the same time consoles are more optimised for gaming in terms of architecture and interface. PC is already an alternative to Xbox One and PS4 and still many consoles are being sold. Gaming PCs won't be cheap either.

Nintendo! Now this is a different story. I don't know why people consider Nintendo to be cheaper now when Switch has proved that it's as much or even more expensive when you buy the console, the pro controller and a big-capacity SD card. Even some games are more expensive on Switch than on Xbox One and PS4. People save money in games, not in hardware! They buy a console once but buy many games. Anyway, Nintendo has changed since the Wii was released so much that they won't ever be the same. Wii was cheap and weak but had innovative motion controls and I loved it. Wii U was one generation late but I loved it. Switch is a portable Wii U without backwards compatibility so I can't love it as much. Switch is a successful "handheld" and easier to market than Wii U but still hasn't come close to 3DS numbers. Nintendo will probably release a Switch revision or successor but will be weak and cheap compared to Scarlett, PS5 and, very likely, Xbox One X and PS4 Pro.

@ThanosReXXX At a cursory glance, I agree. But. The tech arms race reminds me of the end of the Cold War. At want point do you just spend your competitor into a hole and win? I thought the same as you that MS needed the hardware advantage/premium status until the price factor entered the equation.

Sony has won, the generations, at E3, almost exclusively by undercutting the price of their competitor, not by hardware advantage. They did it to Sega twice in a row, before it killed Sega. They did it to Microsoft at X1 (in addition to MS's other shenanigans hurting X1) and won instantaneously. They priced OVER XBox at the start of PS3 and it hurt them considerably. (Sure they "outsold 360" eventually, or so they spin it, only by selling it longer than 360 was available and discounting a heavily stripped down model.)

If there's one and only one trend to take away from the history of the console war, and from Sony's history specifically: The lowest priced console ALWAYS wins (WiiU excluded). The most performant hardware ALWAYS loses unless it's also the lowest priced. For MS to win, they have to come in at a lower price. Any other result would be a significant deviation from history. Given what we know of PS5 spec, Sony may be creating a tremendous window for MS to do just that. The question is does MS take that history and the obvious opening arrogant Sony creates to undercut them possibly significantly and very likely win? Or do they stick to their hardware advantage and forfeit an obvious opening? Or do they eat their cake and have it too, keep the hardware advantage, eat tons of loss, undercut Sony, and get a paper victory that wins by numbers but is a net loss? That's what they did with X-B OG actually...it took most of the 360's success and into X1 to repay the losses they took on that. That strategy hurts and doesn't always pay off.

If they're just playing a hardware race they just just buy Alienware from Dell and be done with it. Consoles are about more than that.

I agree about Sony taking in losses (We saw it with PS3 until they corrected) - but that depends a lot on if they have a competitor that's willing to make them look like fools by undercutting them. If MS just plays the price/specs game with them, they BOTH lose. Sales on the new gen consoles will be dire for years.

The one thing I think we can be certain of is that the PS5 is not being targeted as a mainstream product, they've more or less directly said so with their "high margin" and "niche" comments. They're very specifically targeting that minority - I suppose presuming the majority keeps buying PS4 Pro. If MS is going to spec/price match them, then basically the 9th gen consoles, at large, aren't going to reach the mainstream, and are going to intersect a bit too heavily with the PC market. Still cheaper, but not meaningfully so for the faction that's spending that much to begin with.

Either that or they're both planning two SKUs and Sony dropping all these details is just them creating an imaginary unicorn that they can put next to the real product to make it look more appealing.

It's going to be a weird generation unless both companies are eating a lot of costs (which also doesn't sound smart.)

Of course those non-mainstream products would get a revision 3 years later and magically drop a few hundred $ and become mainstream.....if so that means the "real" launch for the masses wouldn't be until 2023...the first 3 years is just milking early adopters and rich kids dry.

Or put it this way: So far, even fans aren't expecting a sub $600 PS5 and are already rationalizing that $600 is way more viable now than it was when PS3 came out, and inflation kept rising etc. When PS fans are doing mental gymnastics rationalizing Sony pricing a year before reveal.....you know it's going to be bad.

Personally I don't think even a $500 console would be suitable for the market. If it were, X1X would be the hottest ticket ever.

@BlueOcean Did Google reveal pricing on that yet? I can't imagine any success if you're paying full retail plus 4k premium. Then again, despite Sony's irrational fear of Stadia, when's the last time any new Google product actually succeeded?

Priced right, streaming would easily obsolete consoles in a year or two the same way Netflix obsoleted DVD players. The problem is availability. Even worse than bufferable video too much of the US and the world doesn't have internet that would even be usable.

if Console pricing starts pushing into the $600, $700 price range it starts directly competing against "gaming" laptops at the $999 price range, and tower builds that can come in at less.

Nintendo: Well, $360 for console + pro controller. The SD card is only mandatory if you do digital and DLC ,and you don't need a big one for DLC. Yeah for digital it's pricy for what you get, but with 100GB games etc, I still had to buy pricy external HDDs for X1X too. Per GB Nintendo's format is more expensive, but for "mass market" purposes, it's probably best to not confuse matters with the whole "digital on a mobile device" issue, since it's actually sharing a common "problem" with phones on that one.

I think with the inevitable Switch Mini and Pokemon, Switch's numbers will start reaching 3DS parity more rapidly, and very likely surpass it since it doesn't have a split market with a home console like 3DS did. 3DS remember was sold across 6 different models (2 small, 2 large, 2 2DSes). Due to price point(s) alone, plus portability, I'd be shocked if Switch didn't beat PS4's sales numbers by the end of it's life.
Sony's plugging their ears pretending Nintendo's not a real competitor, meanwhile MS is smartly shoveling their content onto it

@NEStalgia I hope that this is the first and last time that I quote the The Sun but

"Google Stadia will charge full price for games AND make you pay to play them. You'll also have to shell out an £8.99 monthly fee to be able to play the games in the same quality you'll get from a PS4 Pro or Xbox One X".

The HD service is "free" but you still have to buy games full-priced for streaming. I agree that Sony is unnecessarily scared of Google.

Back to your comment, you are saying that Scarlett will fail if it's more expensive than PS5 but what I'm saying is that it will match PS5 price even if it is more powerful. My bet is that both will cost the same, €$500 like Xbox One X, and will have similar specifications with Scarlett being more optimised and customised and PS5 sounding like a Jumbo Jet taking off (the last part is a joke).

I have the hunch that next generation is going to be like 360/PS3 in terms of market share and yes, Nintendo will continue doing their thing but they won't reach DS or Wii's levels of craze again, not now with mobile gaming being available on smartphones and tablets, something that DS and 3DS didn't have to worry about.

@BlueOcean LOL, about The Sun! Also LOL about what Google wants to call a service. Streaming that's MORE expensive than consoles? I don't know how a company that's a virtual monopoly on all collected knowledge of the human race can so consistently not understand anything at all about the world around them.

Google has gone so strange. They wen't from the "everything is free (so you give us your info)" company to a company that nickles and dimes absolutely every service they have (Want Youtube ad-free? Buy the $10/mo music service and add $4/mo - up from buying it for $10 by itself.) TV service? Up another $25 for more stations you don't want. Commercial use like using Maps? Now the rates are up and everything is metered!) Google's probably the most expensive services company around now. And their products still suck.

This is just hilarious. I can't even figure out who that service is for. And given how bad YouTube is at streaming live-anything.....I can't imagine it works very well either.

Personally, I'm not sure how successful even $500 boxes would be for now. It sort of worked for X1X because it was a premium model of something you could get cheaper. But X1X still isn't the bulk of X1 sales by far. But 500 would still be more reasonable than what people are expecting PS5 to be priced at. I'm not going to be comfortable seeing either company reveal at $500. I think that gets Gen 9 off to a rocky start all around. But it's certainly more palatable than $600 and beyond. Will it be to the masses though or will they just buy X1 & PS4 for half that price as long as games are made for them?

Sure, Nintendo won't hit DS or Wii. No one will. That was a very unique time period without the competition of time and other tech that exists now. Back then you had a beige box PC and that was really all the tech in your life.

We'll see. I'm not gonna keep creating text walls with what-if's...
This is my view on things, and until we get the actual facts, I'm probably not going to think or feel otherwise.

I do want to add/clarify one last thing: how you interpreted my comment concerning Microsoft's current position as having the better hardware, wasn't quite what I meant. That is also why I didn't mention cost or anything.

It's really as simple as I literally put it: with the X1X, they now have the upper hand hardware-wise, and Phil Spencer would be an idiot to give that teeny-tiny advantage that they have (well, that and the superior services and backwards compatibility), because otherwise, they'll end up even more empty-handed than they have been this generation, because the biggest variety of games is still in the hands of Sony.

I don't think that this point is too hard too understand, and it seems to me that it's pretty damn logical as well. Microsoft doesn't have to charge it's userbase some kind of astronomical price for it's next premium console, and besides that, I also don't think that they'll have to eat all their own losses.

It is VERY clear to me that with Phil Spencer, and the team behind/around him, lessons have been learned, improvements have been made, and measures have been put in place to prevent a repeat of those mistakes. And Spencer is a smart guy, so he's not going to let Sony just roll on over to the first place position again, if there's anything he can do about it.

But either way, even with all those supposed leaks, which is basically just Sony marketing, we the public still don't know anything. A Formula One car can have the most expensive and/or best motor and gear box, that doesn't mean that they'll work together in the most optimal form. So, in that regard, we all seem to agree that the Xbox team has basically always been better at tuning their hardware. Or rather: fine tuning. Other than that, all we can do is guess, but nothing's set in stone yet.

But personally, I will most definitely be surprised if Sony is going to release a considerably more powerful machine than whatever Microsoft is putting together. I just don't think it is a smart move, and if anything, that would mean that Sony would stand to lose the most, by FAR on their initial investments.

But we'll see.

Hi, as some of you might know, I'm seriously considering finally getting a console other than Switch I'm pretty sure it'll be an XBox.... Please tell me all about it?

@BruceCM Well, what would you like to know?

Here are some general tips I can give you.
The first one, is to keep this site in your favorites:
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/gold
It is the official Xbox site, and as you scroll down a bit, you'll see three labels, called 'Overview', 'Games with Gold' and 'Deals with Gold'. Overview kind of speaks for itself, but Games with Gold is good to keep tabs on, because it'll show you which free games are on offer this month, if you're a subscriber to Xbox Live Gold.

On the official Xbox YouTube channel, you can also check out trailers of these free games every month, so you can decide whether you want to download them or not:
https://www.youtube.com/user/xbox
Here's this month's offerings:

Speaking of Xbox Live Gold, you might also want to put these two in your favorites:
https://www.cdkeys.com/xbox-live/memberships
https://www.allkeyshop.com/blog/buy-xbox-live-gold-membership...
Don't buy your subscriptions for Xbox Live straight from your local game shop or from Microsoft, because more often than not, you can get them for much lower prices. Only every so often, Microsoft itself comes with an interesting offer, but if you're subscribed, you'll be notified of that anyway through the newsletter.

Do take care to only buy subscriptions that either have a European label, or a Worldwide label, otherwise the code won't work on your console.

For all the latest news, about games, events and so on, visit this site:
https://majornelson.com/

Major Nelson is the gamertag of Larry Hryb, one of the people that created the Xbox, and who's still very much involved in several aspects, so it's an interesting site to keep an eye on.

Now, back to the official Xbox site: the third label, 'Deals with Gold' shows you all the games that you can buy for reduced prices, if you're an Xbox Live Gold member. And then there's also Game Pass, which, for all intent and purposes is the Xbox's equivalent of Netflix. As long as you're a member of Game Pass, which comes on top of the regular Xbox Live Gold, you'll have unlimited access to the entire Xbox library, spanning three generations of consoles and games, and you can play all the games they've included in that list.

It's not a streaming service, by the way: you actually download the games to your Xbox. Quite often, GamePass trial subscriptions are offered for a euro/a pound, so you could always try it out first, to see if you like it and/or if you'll make enough use of it to justify a full subscription.

Of course, you could always take subscriptions per month, and with GamePass that's actually quite ideal, because there's always months in which you won't play as much as others, due to holidays and what not, but Xbox Live is a different story, because of the free games. No subscription, no free games, obviously.

Important to know: from the free games on offer every month, ONLY the games originally belonging to the original Xbox and the Xbox 360 will actually become your property, once downloaded, even if your Xbox Live Gold subscription expires, but the free Xbox One games will only work with an active subscription, and are basically rentals. But, as described earlier, you can buy them for discounted prices through Deals with Gold, so if you download a free Xbox One game, and you find you like it enough to want to own it, you can always decide to buy it afterwards.

Well, that's about it for general tips and tricks. If you have any other questions, you'll have to be a bit more specific, so that we can help you with whatever you want to know.

But either way, this should at least be enough to get you started.

Thanks, @ThanosReXXX .... If I mostly play offline games, though, is the Live bit worth it? I couldn't just have the GamePass part?
It'll be a little while before I can afford the console & some games, BTW

Forza Horizon 4 is a game I didn't know I needed in my life, but thanks to £1 XBox Game Pass I've fallen in love with it.

Has anyone tried the LEGO expansion yet? Any thoughts?

@BruceCM gold also gives you free games twice a month, and the 360/og Xbox ones are yours to keep even if your sub ends.

The Xbox one games you do need to buy if you run out of gold, but they remain “redeemed”, so you can unlock them again by getting more time of gold.

@BruceCM Well, no Live, no free games. And even for those alone, it's worth it. I myself don't even play that much online either, but you get around 500 - 700 euros of free games each year with a Live Gold subscription, so for around 40 euros on average per year, I'd say it's well worth it either way.

And Game Pass is only a rental service. It's good for being able to try out the entire available catalog, but you'd still have to buy the games if you'd like them and want to own them, contrary to Games with Gold, where you'll at least get to keep the original Xbox and Xbox 360 games.

The discounts with Gold are also larger.

Oh right, gold always has discounts and they are often good

Well, I don't usually keep physical games for even 1 month, @ThanosReXXX Mostly, once I've finished playing them, I trade them in.... I'm not sure if I'd like most of the free Games with Gold, though?

Well, you don’t really need to keep a constant sub, it’s fine to have it for a while and let the sub die.

I personally only get it when to goes on sale.

Yeah, you'd be told about the upcoming Games with Gold in time to get it if you wanted....?