Topic: The everything Xbox thread

Yeah although with most internet outrages, it's a company reacting to outrage from people who aren't even going to buy the product anyway, but just have a obsessive need to insert themselves into anything they dislike. It's the most pointless waste of time imaginable.

Xbox one X bundles down to 400 @ gamestop! These things have been going on sale very frequently lately..

Also an Anthem S bundle getting released in a couple weeks. Gives a week early access to the game

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/consoles/xbox-one-s/anthe...

They're just trying to get rid of their Fallout 76 stock

@Octane well of course that, but it's easy enough to get Walmart or target to price match a similar bundle if one is so inclined

i Heard in Germany a shop has a “buy a controller and get fallout 76 free” promo.

@FragRed Yeah, I can only assume the problems with Crackdown 3 was that there was really no vision for the game itself to begin with, and exists only as a tech demo for the cloud server thing that was promised during the doomed XBone launch and still hasn't materialized into anything of value. It's happened before with engine demo games. If the game doesn't exist to fulfill a game design, but exists to fulfill a technical capability, the game will never be great, because nobody making it really knows what they're trying to make, they're just making sure the engineering meets the spec sheet.

@Dezzy I agree. @DarthNocturnal has it right, someone "overstepped their bounds", and PR cleans it up...but....this was a mass email with formal marketing copy. There's no way that went out without a dozen approvals. And the joke works for the game. If someone "overstepped", it was a calculated intent at the business level with a canned PR response ready if the blowback is higher than hoped. Or to "cover all their bases" - send the edgy copy, then immediately retract, so it's a non-incident but they still get their intended effect. Life in the tort age, where everyone's offended, and everyone works around society like 6 year old "nuh uh, I didn't do it, you can't prove it, no one was looking, it was an accident, I tripped 30 feet to the right and 5 feet in the air and knocked the vase out of the closed cabinet and it broke, honest."

I don't buy the "this is was a misguided intern/marketing person" bit from the same Ubisoft that came up with this gem for box art.....it was corporate, not an intern. Ubisoft uses controversy as guerilla marketing.

@NEStalgia In case you somehow missed this, in your examination of the entire Ubisoft marketing boo-boo, then you should know that ultimately, none of it matters. The old adage "there is no such thing as bad publicity" has already reared its ugly head, so they're in the lime light, whether they made excuses for the comment or not.

And those excuses aren't real, they're just another PR stunt, meant to appease the masses, but they've already achieved what they set out to do. The couple of hundred people that will now not buy this game because they've somehow been offended by the "joke", won't even make a dent in the total amount of sales that the renewed attention to this title will reach.

EDIT:
Tells NEStalgia that he missed what he himself actually missed NEStalgia already mentioning...
Oh, well... guess being the victim of being jostled around in public transport, and subsequently crashing your ribs and hands into some of the handle bars, all thanks to a bus driver who apparently thought he had to floor the brakes, isn't really conducive to being able to have a clear thought pattern...

@ThanosReXXX Ouch, rib injuries are not fun....hopefully it wasn't too hart a hit?

@NEStalgia Unfortunately, it was. And I myself am rather big, and slightly overweight for my length, so that wasn't really helping either. Both pinky fingers were bruised, the right one badly swollen, and far as I can tell, part of my right-side rib cage is severely bruised. I've broken ribs before, and this feels different. The pain sometimes intensifies, though, making concentrating on anything rather hard to do.

Sleeping is a chore as well, seeing as I'm a "roller", so regardless of whether I lay myself down on the non-injured (left) side, I still wake up on the injured side anyways...

Being a former martial arts practitioner, I've got a pretty high threshold for pain, but besides the swelling having gone down in my fingers, my ribs are slowly killing me, so I'm gonna give it another day or so, and then I'm going to go and have some X-rays taken, just to be sure what's up, and perhaps get some heavy duty pain killers.

@ThanosReXXX Ouch... That's no fun at all....yeah, I know what the rib pain is like.....I once had an unfortunate encounter with concrete blocks. That was two months of some pretty terrible sleeping and pain. And that was nothing broken, IFAIK.

@DarthNocturnal It feels like Sea of Thieves content is a Mixer bonus for every stream featuring Microsoft (Inside Xbox, E3, Game Awards, etc.).

@Grumblevolcano Well giving away things nobody actually wants is how advertising freebies usually work, right?

Maybe they'll give away codes for Fallout 76 at the end.

Apex Legends is pretty fun, did a lot better than I ever do in fortnite. Really plays well so far.

@NEStalgia "Maybe they'll give away codes for Fallout 76 at the end" Savage!

Back to the point about Crackdown 3 being a tech demo, I definitely get that feeling. The cloud engine was all the reveal was about from memory, and looking back - I'm not sure if it was PR bull or real poor understanding of what the "technology" could actually achieve. Perhaps a little of both.

But you're right, it's why tech demos rarely make decent games. They're about showcasing hardware. It's the same thing with launch games to a degree. Though there is more of a game to them, the first party exclusives are really designed to wow potential buyers of the new hardware.

@FragRed Yeah, given it was the Mattrick/Ballmer "we've just invented television" era that spawned it, I figure there was definitely a lack of understanding of what the new magic tech was capable of doing, and a corporate imperative to synergize MS burgeoning cloud technologies into their entertainment stranglehold (which little known to them, had, at that point, abut 40 minutes left to live ) Crackdown 3 is kind of part of their "Sony moment." Based on that one article posted here the other day it sounds like there was no real plans for a Crackdown 3 and it came about purely to explore the tech.

@NEStalgia The best way to describe the Xbox One during the Mattrick/Ballmer era was to sit it side by side with the Philips CD-i. Both looked like giant a VCR, both were meant to be entertainment machines that just so happened to play video games (or at least marketed that way), and both were underpowered compared to their main rival. The difference being that Microsoft never did get it's own Zelda or Mario game

Apparently there’s a shop in Germany selling the fallout 76 X bundle WITH an extra copy of fallout 76 on top.

It’s like they just want to get rid of them.

@FragRed LOL! That's....a depressingly good comparison. Also, Philips seemed to actually want to enter the video game industry while Microsoft seemed bent on getting away from it, while simultaneously leading it.

@Delibheel "Yo dawg, we heard you like Fallout.........."

Can't imagine why they want to get rid of them before it goes F2P.

@NEStalgia And both ended up involving Nintendo in some way. Philips initially partnered with them until Nintendo broke away while Microsoft ended up working with Nintendo with cross play, Minecraft and soon, whatever Xbox Live will be on the Switch.

I don't know why that's been repeated so often given that it's clearly not true. There are dozens of examples where something got a lot of negative publicity and it lead the product to fail (or underperform).
The 2 most recent examples in the games industry being Mass Effect Andromeda and Battlefield 5.
It really depends on what the negative publicity is actually for, whether it affects the product itself, and who the negative reaction is coming from (it's often a negative reaction from people who aren't even part of the target audience)