I’m sure everyone’s been seeing this everywhere else already, but major Xbox news just dropped.
Xbox Series X will be the console giveaway for Taco Bell this year. I’ve always held that whoever gets the coveted Taco Bell giveaway promotion will become the best seller of the holiday season, so I can’t help but think the PS5 may be dead in the water. The only way it can possibly survive at this point is if it manages to get a Subway giveaway promotion going to counteract the power of Taco Bell.
Other details mentioned in last night’s reports include a $25/month financing option for Series S, and a $35/month option for Series X, both of which Microsoft is apparently keen to offer worldwide.
theyve been doing this for a while with the xbox one and its great to have someone try to sell me a console like its a fucking honda civic. its just a big ugly piece of shit that plays videogames where u shoot dogs because people in america think thats great art. wow my xbox has 0% APR!! you can upgrade to the next xbox console after 18 months!!! barf
On the one hand the rent-to-own pitch feels sleazy and, man, Microsoft repo’ing your console sounds like an awful world to live in. On the other hand, being able to pay for it in $20-$30/mo. increments (esp when Game Pass Ultimate as it stands now is $15 a mo. and that’s presumably included in the new bundles like the old bundles?), this is maybe a good deal? Perhaps better than dropping it into the undifferentiated unsecured mass of debt on your 24.99% APR credit card? Might make having a currentish console more feasible for like families with lower but stable income and shit.
An 18-month life cycle for consoles seems insanely short, but that sure seems to be what they’re pitching. Seems real wasteful!
Is… Microsoft gonna absolutely murder themselves over muddying their brand? I’ve lost track of what their plan is with their new cycle to flag what may or may not be playable on which level of console. Or is each game gonna ship with PC game-like graphics settings locked to individual platforms? At what point does support for the lower-end first-gen Series S get deprecated for new titles and how will I know as a user? And if, as they seem to be signalling, they’re going to have a 1-to-3-year (at most) iPhone-like hardware upgrade cycle, this just seems like a clusterfuck of both marketing and possibly usability.
I kind of hate myself for liking the look of the new Series S, though. If it doubled as a dope bluetooth speaker as its form suggests, I’d be tempted to finally get an MS console tbh.
As a musou freak I was sort of expecting them to add a BotW expansion of sorts to the Switch release of the first HW…uh, more than 2 years ago now, time flies, but am happy to see them follow through.
I’ve never played a musou, and the champions story stuff was my least favourite part of BotW, but I do want to see that Hyrule before it got/as it gets wrecked.
Just went searching to find that even used physical copies of Hyrule Warriors Switch are above retail now. Nintendo and Covid make bitter bedfellows.
Oh well, if I’m being honest I’ve probably only got capacity for one of these games, and Super Mipha Sisters, er, BotW Musou is the one I want, so I’m glad I didn’t impulse by a copy of the original for $40.
Like, playing as the champions sounds awesome. And I’m somewhat into the idea that the story of this game is destined for despair.
i can’t believe nintendo keeps doing this perd hapley “you are listening to me talk about the game i am talking about” shit and it is still better than any other video game conference / press release crap
Microsoft wants to be the Netflix subscription of games and is downplaying console generations in favor of an iPhone/iPad-style developer-set experience. Like all Microsoft games plans, it’s a business model taken from other sources and interpreted to the hilt, but this time they’ve maintained their attention long enough that they’re starting to see it through.
I don’t think they’ll have much trouble downplaying console gaps because for the limited people that care they’ve got the best system for multiplatform games now and for the rest the experience should be seamless – we didn’t see major user complexity loads or confusion with the mid-cycle DSi, new 3DS, and less so PS4 Pro and Xbox Series X. And while Microsoft isn’t making a direct case for next gen, they can still draft off Sony’s message that a console generation matters by being prepared to meet and best them in a specs fight.
I think the bigger challenge Microsoft continues to have is lacking exclusive games after they gutted their internal teams late 360-era, and then let Sony lock down a lot of 3rd-party games from Japanese publishers (harder for Microsoft to justify because they have almost no Japanese market presence and their NA & EU audiences don’t buy those games in number, but real exclusivity is quite a cost on them).
