Hacker News Reader

Comment by djhn | Hacker News Reader

How come? Any TL;DR? Not a gamer, so I’m not up to date on consoles.

Basically, PS5 sales recently reached 80 million. Xbox Series X/S is estimated about 30 million. They lost the generation where digital libraries were built and can't gain the market back.

There's been a lot of rumor lately that Xbox becomes a shell on top of Windows and just runs regular Windows games. The announcement of the Xbox ROG Ally using this same approach gives it a lot of weight.

It is crazy how they managed the bungle the Xbox One launch at just the right time to cause this cascade of issues over a decade later. It doesn't help that MS haven't had a huge AAA exclusive title in a very long time. Now that they have started cutting in hard on their game dev teams, they may end up more like the Microsoft Studios before Xbox was a thing.

Nothing of the sort has been leaked or said by Microsoft.

However, their strategy seems to be going all-in on Gamepass. And if you subscribe to Gamepass, Microsoft does not care if you play on your Steam Deck, iPad or Xbox.

This is also why they mentioned they might open up the Xbox to other stores (Steam), and why they have been releasing first party titles onto the PS5[0].

If you couple that info with them axing their own handheld and instead licensing out the Xbox name to Asus with the ROG Ally Xbox, it isn't a huge leap to assume they'll just license out the Xbox name to whichever OEM feels like making a console. The Xbox One and Series X / S already run the Windows Core kernel which would make going more wide on the hardware support quite easy, and the current hardware is semi off-the-shelf stuff from AMD anyway.

[0] this led to some memery: https://images3.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED187/67a6bce7291...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com