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Comment by costanzaDynasty | Hacker News Reader

I hate the fact that Xbox One killed Xbox's momentum so much that people are dismissing or not recognizing some of the things that Xbox has going for it right now with Xbox GamePass and cloud gaming. This is a transitional generation, but Xbox is positioned a lot better than most people seem to understand if they only travel in the areas where console wars is the religion of the day again.

I've been replaying Halo 1 & 2 again and just remembering the infancy of console online gaming and how fun it was as compared today were its either absolute silence or mute worthy trash.

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> recognizing some of the things that Xbox has going for it right now with Xbox GamePass and cloud gaming

Or they don't recognize them as inherently good things. Game pass has potentially cannibalized "real" game sales on the platform and primed its userbase to "just wait for it to come to gamepass"; with the gamepass honeymoon developer deals drying up, this has had dire implications for third party support going forward. Xcloud has been a mixed bag - you can find countless reports of it lagging behind PS cloud streaming and various PC cloud gaming vendors in performance (latency) and image quality (though I personally haven't seen much difference between most of them).

For a lot of us, the current generation Xbox platform has been doing everything just as bad or even worse than it was with the Xbox One - they've stopped iterating on backwards compatibility, they've pushed Gamepass above all, and they've spent unbelievable amounts of money on M&A instead of building up their own existing studios and releasing more new original exclusive games. The quality of some of their major trumpeted releases has also been incredibly suspect, despite repeated claims of high quality from their internal tastemakers before release.

The dumb social media console war stuff has unfortunately gotten in the way of some important self-review and introspection that the Xbox team should be doing. As a longtime Xbox fan, it has been tremendously disappointing to see.

The Xbox team have just had terrible leadership choices.

The One was a miss from the beginning , trying to be more than a gaming console and falling short on all fronts. The name didn’t help either.

Then they picked an even worse name for the Series X and and Series S. while implementing a necessity for parity. confusing the market and holding back devs.

The 360 was effectively a flash in the pan IMHO, helped by a significant misstep on Sony’s part with the PS3 design, and Nintendo moving to create their own market with the Wii that effectively made it a companion console rather than a competing one.

With the One they also made the mistake of trying to permanently tie discs to consoles in an attempt to destroy the used game market for the console, which got leaked pretty early on and led to Microsoft and the Xbox brand taking a massive reputation hit, even though they quickly backtracked. For that generation, a lot of people who would’ve otherwise bought Xboxes instead bought PS4s out of principle.

That E3 was crazy. Anyone remember the video that Sony posted on "how to share games with friends" while the Xbox debacle on locked discs and always online was in full force? (it was literally a guy giving a game disc to another guy)

This is why I am still against the MS acquisitions. Imagine that whole debacle happening but you're still forced to buy an anti consumer console, because God forbid you like to play CoD, Fallout, Starfield...

Now Sony just lock the entire disc drive behind online activation instead:

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps5-disc-... “Internet connection required to pair disc drive and PS5 console upon set up.”

Cue defenders “but it's only once and then it works offline!!” like that will make a difference in the far future once the activation system is dead and gone.

Bit disingenuous to compare the two because it’s also only if you’re upgrading from a disc-less model.

How does that make it okay? You're basically buying an external Blu-ray disc drive for the PS5. Why does it require Sony's permission to hook up and use if you've bought it? This is just another way modern companies are encroaching on our rights, it's literally online DRM for a peripheral. Imagine if you needed online activation to be able to use a new controller you buy. It'd be just as absurd as this.

a controller isn’t part of the security verification chain, and again, it’s disingenuous to compare the two because they happen at a significantly different frequency level.

The more salient comparison for “why” is look at PC games. Even if you buy a physical copy, most require you to authenticate them online.

Sony chose instead to do a one time drive authentication so you don’t need to authenticate every game online instead.

That's not true. PS5 Slims which are bundled with a disc drive still require online activation to use the disc drive. It's not just for those who bought a digital model and want to buy the disc drive later.

This puts them in the same boat as the retail Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles, which require an internet connection during first time setup.

And others of us are old enough to remember the Sony rootkit DRM on their CDs and refuse to go anywhere near Sony products.

Completely different product segment though. I don’t think that really had any outsized influence on PlayStation buyers at the time.

And to top it all off I heard MS just put Surface people in charge of designing the next one, to copy Switch success I guess?.

>The name didn’t help either.

It all goes back to Microsoft not naming the 360 "Xbox 3" with some lame excuse for why it did so. Yes, everyone would have laughed, but no one would remember or care today that the "Xbox 5" isn't actually the fifth Xbox.

The Xbox 360 was only the second xbox.

Though at the time we joked they just needed a triangle based word in the name for the follow up and they'll have all the main PS buttons covered in the title.

> The Xbox 360 was only the second xbox.

thatsthejoke.gif

And now they are playing a SEGA, turning XBox into a brand.

I don't believe that they still care about the console as much they say they do.

It's funny that you should note that they are doing positive things in a transitional era, only to finish off by noting that you are playing decades-old games on their hardware.

While I am a fan of GamePass, and I own two XBox One consoles, I have no desire to own a Series console or the forthcoming refresh. Everything I want to play I can play on the One or via Cloud; but more importantly: the difficulty of discovering compelling experiences in this era of XBox is too damn high.

There are too many straight-up _bad_ indie games swamping GamePass, and too many B and AAA quality games that are phoning it in.

Any game developer could have told them early on that Kinect was next-to-useless, despite the technology being interesting.

Even operating simple menus was problematic. You could point, but had no buttons to click. It was never going to work beyond a few niche cases (dance games and simple minigames).

> It was never going to work beyond a few niche cases (dance games and simple minigames).

It really is superior for dance games.

It's not that people are not recognizing the good things about it. There's this underlying theory that we had one chance at a digital game library. The PS3 and Xbox 360 were way too early for people to get attached to their digital purchases; after all, few large titles released digitally day and date with their disc versions. So people bought a few indie titles digitally, but they still had a big disc library.

But the PS4 generation was the digital generation. The majority of sales were digital then (probably not dollars-wise, but certainly units-wise). So the theory goes that people have this large lock-in with PS4, which leads to them directly going to the PS5 without looking at the distinguished competition's offerings.

I'm not sure I agree.

I’m sad for kids who don’t get to experience high-quality couch multiplayer.

Also making an account for every little stupid thing. No you don’t need account systems. At least make them opt-in.

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