yep, they’re absolutely trying to exit the generation game
So their strategy is: guarantee they have the ‘halo’ most powerful console, regardless of cost (the Series X model looks like it’ll be $600 or so), have an entry-level console that competes on price, have first-party exclusives that aren’t generation exclusives and are available on PC as well (this part follows the rest of Microsoft’s lead in becoming a software everywhere company but it’s unclear what effect it will have on their consoles yet).
Presumably Sony will be pushing their first-party exclusives as exclusively next-gen and the reason one needs a PS5.
For the first few years, to me, it seems hard to resist Sony’s pitch next to Microsoft’s.
Presumably Microsoft will try to develop branding and consumer-language that can indicate it? They probably think Apple gets by ok, but then Apple usually avoids naming schemes like Xbox, Xbox One, Xbox One Series X.
I think this is an extreme take, even as someone who doesn’t really enjoy much Microsoft makes aside from developer tools (and even those are flawed, largely due to the bad decisions they make about Windows as a software platform)
Having bad taste doesn’t mean you can’t make a successful product, it just means you’re making a product that will be successful with people who have bad taste
I know that I know nothing about hardware wars and suchlike any more but it is getting extremely difficult for me to discern why a person interested Microsoft’s gaming products wouldn’t just buy a PC
like, consoles cost roughly what mid end GPUs do at this point and are a lot more accessible to people, by all means get a console, but maybe don’t restrict what you play on it to Microsoft’s game pass, which so far seems designed to deliver endless mediocrity to spec and disincentivize looking further afield
this is my current reason for getting all agita about this, the shoddiness of that curation seems like an obvious retrenchment
it’s also easier to steal stuff on a PC but the indies that don’t make it into Microsoft’s maw are exactly the ones you really shouldn’t steal so
there are exceptions for sure! personally I spent a couple months this year during which the inundation of free or nearly free games really ramped up just getting frustrated that not only was there all this stuff in front of me that felt like a poor use of my time, people seemed to be talking about those games a little more as a result and crowding out others
Yeah, but that was $600 15 years ago, and Xbox sex will presumably play Xbox x games too. And you could buy a $300 video card for your pc then that now costs $500