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Comment by invalidusernam3 | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic, but I recently bought my first Xbox (series x) after owning every generation of PlayStation since launch. There were 3 reasons I opted for the Xbox: availability, aesthetics of the device itself (in my opinion the new PS5 is hideous), and most importantly Xbox Game Pass.

I am amazed at the number of high quality games on there for a relatively small monthly fee. Buying one new game at full price is the equivalent of around 6 months of game pass. So for the same price I can either have 2 new games a year, or have access to hundreds of games.

Subscription services like that make piracy completely redundant. Game pass is spotify for games, and I haven't bought or pirated music since I started using spotify

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With an active life it took me more than two years to reach 140 hours of gameplay in horizon zero dawn. I have enough games to play until I am dead and beyond.

Game pass is nice if you aren't picky about what games you play. But if you feel like playing a game that's not on game pass, you are paying for nothing.

The biggest benefit to Game Pass that is seldom acknowledged is having the same game library for everyone. My friend and I can play together with hundred of titles to choose from, without having to convince one another to spend money.

We like this so much we sent an older Xbox One to a third friend with the idea to get him to buy Game Pass so we can all play together.

I dread the end of this early growth period for Game Pass.

Microsoft is much better about backwards compatibility and preservation than Sony, too. I have a library of Xbox and Xbox 360 discs I can just put in my Xbox Series X and still play, often with improvements. I can even still buy many titles from those generations digitally and play them on my Series X.

Meanwhile, Sony's missing many landmark titles from two generations, and your only option for playing PS3 games on a PS5 is streaming.

Indeed... So many PS3 games I missed out on because of Sony's negligence. They used to be better. The PS2 included PS1 hardware inside it. Early versions of the PS3 included PS2 hardware.

Am still salty that the Sly Cooper HD trilogy for PS3 never made it to PS4.

Cramming a PS3 on the PS4 made no sense, unless you wanted a 599 dollars console vs a 399 dollars.

PS3 had a shaky launch precisely for that reason, it launched at 599. The PS4 launched at 399 (a hundred bucks cheaper than the Xbox One btw and one the reasons it got a massive lead since the beginning)

Then emulate it via software. There are open source PS3 emulators being developed right now. Why can't Sony use its billions of dollars to do it?

On the PS4 with those Jaguar cores it was simply not possible, maybe on the PS5?

A PS4 isn't fast enough to emulate a PS3.

That's a pure lie, look who ended their backward combability promise? your buddy Microsoft

https://geekculture.co/xbox-ends-backwards-compatibility/

"I have a library of Xbox and Xbox 360 discs I can just put in my Xbox Series X and still play, often with improvements."

Not to take away from Microsoft's achievement (and commitment) here, but of course much of that is dependent on remote servers to supply the necessary patches, or in some cases going so far as to just treat the original disc as a DRM dongle that enables an entirely image to be downloaded.

This is backcompat that allows you to play titles from the last twenty years right now, and that's still a huge improvement over anything Sony or Nintendo have done in the last generation or so [1], and reflects the degree to which Microsoft sees that as a killer feature of Steam. But it's not super likely that this will still work in another twenty years— the only archival-quality solution is keeping the old hardware working or hoping for the best with emulation.

[1]: But do note that a Wii U can natively play Wii games, and can be jailbroken to natively play Gamecube games, since all three systems are iterations of the same underlying platform. The launch versions of Nintendo's handhelds always supported at least one prior generation of game card/cartridge as well. And of course the initial "fat" SKUs of PS2 and PS3 could both play the generation of games immediately prior— and none of this required internet access.

It wouldn't be the first time Microsoft takes over the world by providing a decent offering and excellent backward compatibility.

AFAIK you cannot even use an Xbox for the 1st time without connecting it to the internet. PS on the contrary you can pop a game and it runs offline. But it seems they have been working on removing these constrains which are truly crucial for preservation in the future.

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