Xbox fans have been smarting recently. The universally beloved 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Astro Bot has been dominating social media, and thundered to the peak of the OpenCritic and Metacritic rankings to make itself front runner for Game of the Year. When accounts or influencers decorated with Xbox regalia point out that it's too short, that scores are inflated, that it's for kids, or that (as one particularly left field shout claimed) 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sea of Thieves didn't get this level of attention, it feels a little desperate. Astro Bot is unequivocally a win for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation. Now, there is a hole in PlayStation's foot of its own making thanks to the extortionate $700 price point of the PS5 Pro, and Xbox fans are taking this as a win. Why ღcan't they see that we've all lost here?
PS5s are already expensive. So expensive that gaming is a far less accessible hobby than it used to be. I don't need to hear the figures on inflation when they're so out of context with cost of living and wage stagnation. What I know is that everyone I grew up with could afford a game console, even if it meant their parents needed to save up for a while, and these days thܫat is no longer the case. Sony has decided to remedy thiౠs obvious problem by releasing a new console that's even more expensive.
Xbox Has Lost Its Identity And Direction
This is where the Xbox fans get to point and laugh. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Microsoft saw this coming, just as it saw consoles becoming an all-in-one entertainment system coming. Unfortunately, just as it did with the entertainment system pitch of the Xbox One, it saw it coming too soon. The Xb✱ox Series S is a much more affordable path into this generation, but the world isn't ready for such thinking. As a result, it has no games.
Xbox's strategy this gen seemed to be targeting the fact gaming was becoming financially inaccessible, and bridging that gap. The Xbox Series S, tied with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Game Pass, meant you could hop on the train to the latest gen for🐎 a lower price. 𓆉With Microsoft buying up various studios to go toe to toe with Sony on exclusives, it also gave you access to the biggest games. But that hasn't really worked out.
Redfall was a disaster, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starfield and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hellblade 2 were (at best) divisive, and the only unqualified win of this era, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hi-Fi Rush, saw 168澳洲幸运5♕开奖网:the studio shuttered just aꦇ few months later. Meanwhile, former exclusives - including Hi-Fi Rush - have 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:been brought to competing platforms, and many games are skipping Xbox altog🅰ether. Part of that is Sony still having the upper hand with exclusives, but another factor is the reduced power of t🦋he Series S being too much work for devs to bother catering to.
Last year's game of the year, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3, ended up arriving on Xbox months late because of this very issue. This year, none of the four front runners for Game of the Year (Astro Bot, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Helldivers 2, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Black Myth: Wukong) are available on Xbox. The low cost of entry doeꦓsn'ꦉt mean much when you're too short for any of the rides.
While Nintendo seems to offer a solution, it's also its own ecosystem and with claims the Switch 2 will be as power💙ful as a base PS4, it doesn't offer a route into modern gaming. A base PS4 ca🅷nnot run Baldur's Gate 3.
The PS5 Pro's Price Point Is A Major Own Goal
This isn’t just to trash Xbox. Astro Bot is a rare bright spark for Sony this gen, and comes from going against the grain. Bloated development cycles mean 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Naughty Dog may not produce a single PS5 game despite being Sony's flagship studio, and trying to make a cheap buck off the ✨live-service industry has proved to 𓆉be a money pit with Concord buried at the bottom of it. It is exceedingly good timing that the Pro follows Astro Bot out the door because this is the only week since the PS5 launched that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:it has seemed lik💦e a good idea to own one.
But 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:many people have and wi🌠ll continue to write about how the PS5 Pro is a misstep for Sony. They may well still sell out on day one, but that won't change the fact this 💞is a worrying path for gaming to walk down that, like the normalisation of each game taking𓃲 eight years to make, will have major consequences for the future of game development. I know that this is a silly price and part of a very bad system of constantly being charged over the odds for features we're told we need.
I also know, oh helpful commentator, that no one is forcing me to buy one. Don't worry, I won't be. We can still object to the direction 🔴gaming is heading in⛄ for reasons beyond a selfish desire to own a machine.
This is a mid-gen console refresh, and they've never been much of a big deal to me. I never had a PS4 Pro and were it not for certain Nintendo reviews requiring an OLED, I'd be fine with my launch Switch still. My niece and nephe🧔w have mine, and it works fine. Th꧃e scariest thing in that regard is that we're apparently halfway through this gen with very little to show for it. I get that we can take it or leave it.
But the thing is, we can't. Xbox's strategy has been to keep prices down, and as a result it has been forced into something of a fire sale while its subscription service at the cornerstone of thi𝔍s strategy fails to add the value it promised. But simply, as was the case with the last gen, Xbox doesn't have enough games to move the needle, and the restrictions of the Series S limit it further. Meanwhile, Sony's strategy of continuing to swing for the fences and charging more while it's at it has also resulted in a dearth of games, and feels like extremely short term thinking. Where do we go from here?
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Astro Bot Only Use💫s Its Best Idea Once
Astro Bot has muღltiple po🎀wers that only come up once, and that is part of its charm
