I’m Glad I Sold My Xbox

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:James Lucas

Published Jul 12, 2024

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Summary

Xbox has struggled to keep up with Nintendo and Sony when it comes to system-selling exclusives.
Its one ace in the hole, Game Pass, is starting to fall apart as prices skyrocket and the day one promise inevitably fell apart.
With talent tossed aside and Microsoft throwing money at the problem instead of addressing the root cause, Xbox feels like it's on its last legs.

Last week, I finally bit the bullet and pawned my 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Series X. I had it for a couple of years, but it became nothiꩵng more than a glorified, expensive Blu-ray player. I wouldn’t normally bother announcing this to the world, but afterꦡ months of writing news headlines that are variations of ‘Microsoft craps the bed’, this growing apathy to Xbox is worth discussing.

Let’s look back to the very start of the year. After Microsoft’s record-breaking acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:it laid off 1,900 employees. Immediately, the cracks and unsustainabilit♌y of its strategy w🐷ere showing.

Xbox One was often ridiculed for its lack of games while Sony released hit after hit with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Horizon Zero Dawn, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Bloodborne, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War, and so many more. Microsoft tried to gain a leg up in two ways, Game Pass and enormous buyouts, hoping to tur🐟n other studios’ work into its own first-party exclusives.

The top of an Xbox Series X console as seen in its reveal trailer

While an affordable library that makes gaming a less expensive hobby is a promising idea, this method is backfiring… badly. Game Pass has always promised day one releases, something Sony would not match with the revamped PS Plus for good reason. As the service continues to prove unfeasible, even 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:negatively impacting sales,𒊎 this promise turns those expensive first-party exclusives into fodder for a subscr📖iption that Microsoft is already .

In today’s world, games cost a lot to make. Spider-Man 2 ran up a bill of $315 million. But with Game Pass taking away sales, those expensive games are suddenly making a lot less money. Ultimately, this makes an ordinary dud a catastrophic failure. Arkane Austin—a studio with incredible prestige for developing modern classics like Dishonored and Prey—was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:shut down after just one bad game, despite 168澳洲幸运5开奖网♒:Microsoft spending $7.5 billion on Bethesda in the first place.

The day one promise is another anchor on developers in a struggling industry already weighed down by countless influences, and Game Pass itself has warped the way so many players view games. It has exacerbated the ‘time equal♛s quality’ debate, turned gaming into disposable fast food, and stripped away ownership, something that is worsening as we move into an all-digital future. Even Microsoft is reckoning with what it has created.

Xbox Series X over a blurred green and black background

Starting in September, Game Pass will introduce a 🉐new ‘Standard’ tier for $14.99▨ per month, which won’t include day one releases. You’ll have to fork out $20 a month for the ‘Ultimate’ tier if you want to keep that perk. It’s an incredibly confusing system (there’s a ‘Core’ and ‘Standard’ version now) that is far less affordable than it once was,♋ but it makes sense.

Game Pass costs a lot to run𝕴. Microsoft has to make up for lost third-party sales with big payouts to keep developers invested to continue boosting Game Pass sales that have now started to stagnate. And it’s losing sales on its own games from launching them on Game Pass too. Short of gutting the entire service, the only way to put the toothpaste back in the bottle is to obfuscate it and slowly bury the day one promise.

Buyouts inevitably lead to layoffs, Game Pass is an unsustainable vacuum, and then we have the exclusives themselves. After the disastrous Xbox One generation, the Series X/S stepped onto the scene, and so far, there’s very little to write home about. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Halo Infinite, while a good shooter, wasn’t enough in today’s live-service world. Redfall, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hellblade 2, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starfield—the heavy hitters Microsoft 😼was counting on toꦯ bounce back—varied from awful to lukewarm and were swept aside as quickly as they came.

The gems of this generation are the smaller, more experimental titles, like Grounded, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pentiment, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sea of Thieves, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hi-Fi Rush. But the💎 studio behind Hi-Fi Rush, Tango Gameworks, was shuttered, and all these games were ported to rival platforms. Throwing money at the problem after the Xbox One has not worked, and I can’t imagine that this strategy will ever lead to anything good, especially when talent is being tossed as🧸ide so carelessly. We’re seeing disaster after disaster, as Microsoft desperately pushes forward into a ‘game anywhere’ mindset while everyone asks, ‘What games?’

I sold my Xbox because I can just play the exclusives on PC and PS5, and I doubt I’ll ever go back to Game Pass with its prices skyrocketing. It’s a dying console on its last legs that Microsoft is scrambling to make work, but after two incredibly messy generations, you have to wonder when it will finally admit defeat and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:go the way of Sega.

Game Pass might have put Xbox back on the map, but now it’s a shackle holding it back, and all of those studios it fought to acquire aren’t fixing the lack of games that it’s been trying to address for ten years. I don’t see a future with Xbox at this rate, so what’s🌊 the point in sti🐻cking around? I’m bowing out early.