All purpose Sales and Sales Rumours and Anecdotes [2022 Edition]

[Silent_Buddha]

It's a shame that both consoles's sale potential has been held back by global production issues. Consoles have always been budget boxes with a host of technical compromises but in terms of the the kind of performance the vast majority are pleased with, I don't think many would disagree that these machines represent the least number of compromises and potentially appealing to some who felt they had to go the PC route.

Compare this to the astronomical price of GPUs the past few years and I know a lot of people who have never gamed on console (PC gamers) before that have switched or are wanting to switch to gaming on consoles.

The value proposition of consoles has never been better (except maybe for the 99 USD PS2s) when compared to PCs. Combine that with consoles in most games looking not far off the high resolution PC version at high settings and it's getting really hard to justify gaming on PC unless you need KBM (me) or graphics configurability to either have a higher framerate, remove settings that cause eyestrain (like DoF and Motion Blur) for some, change the FOV (so you don't get nauseated) for some, etc.

Regards,
SB

 

[Johnny Awesome]

XSS is well positioned given what's happened. It's almost impossible for MS to catch Sony with just the XSX, but the XSS might make it possible.

 

[PSman1700]

The value proposition of consoles has never been better (except maybe

Its worse than last gen i think, if we look at performance (including reconstruction/rt) using msrp.

I know a lot of people who have never gamed on console (PC gamers) before that have switched or are wanting to switch to gaming on consoles.

I have been seeing the other way around, console users (mostly ps4) switching to pc gaming this generation due to underwhelming leap, cross-gen, increased prices for the hw and games, the lack of meaningfull rt perf (PR has done alot too), amongst many other reasons.

It's a shame that both consoles's sale potential has been held back by global production issues. Consoles have always been budget boxes with a host of technical compromises but in terms of the the kind of performance the vast majority are pleased with, I don't think many would disagree that these machines represent the least number of compromises and potentially appealing to some who felt they had to go the PC route.

PC hw has been held back by that and mining too.

 

[eastmen]

Its worse than last gen i think, if we look at performance (including reconstruction/rt) using msrp.



I have been seeing the other way around, console users (mostly ps4) switching to pc gaming this generation due to underwhelming leap, cross-gen, increased prices for the hw and games, the lack of meaningfull rt perf (PR has done alot too), amongst many other reasons.






PC hw has been held back by that and mining too.

Pretty sure last gen was worse. 2013 you'd be rocking an intel core i7 4xx0 and a gtx 780ti and an ssd
2014 would bump you up to a gtx 980

 

[chris1515]

Its worse than last gen i think, if we look at performance (including reconstruction/rt) using msrp.



I have been seeing the other way around, console users (mostly ps4) switching to pc gaming this generation due to underwhelming leap, cross-gen, increased prices for the hw and games, the lack of meaningfull rt perf (PR has done alot too), amongst many other reasons.






PC hw has been held back by that and mining too.

It can't be worse than last gen with a 2008 CPU with the Jaguar inside consoles. This time CPU and storage are good and GPU decent. The problem is the production issue.

 

[PSman1700]

It can't be worse than last gen with a 2008 CPU with the Jaguar inside consoles. This time CPU and storage are good and GPU decent. The problem is the production issue.

The CPU's where a downgrade compared to the 7th gen PS3 and 360 consoles, thus stagnating things. Now it is RT and ML reconstruction the consoles missed the boat on. The CPU's are cutdown/low clocked 2019 3700x cpu's, mid/low end gpu's and a 2x ram increase (16gb). They are further behind this time at launch than the PS4/Ones was.

 

[chris1515]

The CPU's where a downgrade compared to the 7th gen PS3 and 360 consoles, thus stagnating things. Now it is RT and ML reconstruction the consoles missed the boat on. The CPU's are cutdown/low clocked 2019 3700x cpu's, mid/low end gpu's and a 2x ram increase (16gb). They are further behind this time at launch than the PS4/Ones was.

CPU are fast enough when game are CPU limited at 30 fps PC can't do 60 fps like the Matrix demo or in the case of Battlefield 2042 at 60 fps on consoles this is impossible to double the performance.

ML reconstruction is not used for the moment, it doesn't mean we won't see it in the future. Read a little GDC presentation, this is pretty clear most of the games are created for old gen. The generation did not really begin...

RAM size and storage speed are linked, 16 GB is enough if game rendering engine evolution is to have virtualized textures and geometry this will be great.

EDIT: Jaguar CPU are weak because this was the only things AMD could propose to Microsoft and Sony. They were not competitive on CPU side at the time.

 

[see colon]

EDIT: Jaguar CPU are weak because this was the only things AMD could propose to Microsoft and Sony. They were not competitive on CPU side at the time.

I just want to point out that if they went Intel instead, we probably would have had a dual core i3 or perhaps a quad core at best. Sure, single threaded performance would have been better, but I think having 8 threads gave them more flexibility and potential for optimization. Also, if Sony and Microsoft were both shopping for a single vendor solution, Intel had nothing on the GPU front that was comparable to the Xbox One, much less PS4.

 

[PSman1700]

CPU are fast enough when game are CPU limited at 30 fps PC can't do 60 fps like the Matrix demo or in the case of Battlefield 2042 at 60 fps on consoles this is impossible to double the performance.

ML reconstruction is not used for the moment, it doesn't mean we won't see it in the future. Read a little GDC presentation, this is pretty clear most of the games are created for old gen. The generation did not really begin...

RAM size and storage speed are linked, 16 GB is enough if game rendering engine evolution is to have virtualized textures and geometry this will be great.

EDIT: Jaguar CPU are weak because this was the only things AMD could propose to Microsoft and Sony. They were not competitive on CPU side at the time.

Fast enough, it depends. If UE5 is anything to go by these CPU's are not fast enough. Digital Foundry mentioned that yesterday in their DF direct. PC will be able to maintain a more constant 30fps when considering a maxed UE5 engined game, since clock speeds/IPC seems to matter so much for that engine. The Zen2's while 'good enough' are still quite much behind when considering a high-end Zen3 CPU, we cant judge yet if the potentional of such cpus will be utilized or not. Teardown sure shows its possible, among some others.
Also i think 60fps will be a thing on pc for UE5 games, not so much for the consoles.

Maybe ML/AI reconstruction will be used on the consoles. Probably not though, nothing is indicating it will, and if it happens, there is no hardware acceleration for it, so performance wont be the same. They better hurry up, were closing in to 2023, its getting close to start design the PS6.

Yeah, the SSD's sure can (and do) help out, but they are painfully slow compared to GDDR6, latency and other factors aside. The PC does with 16GB for just the VRAM, along with just as fast if not faster nvme drives, besides main ram.

They were not competitive on CPU side at the time.

They had the core count at the time (vs the pc). Not so much this time around. According to devs the CPU's where quite capable when spreading the workloads over as many cores as possible.

 

[chris1515]

Fast enough, it depends. If UE5 is anything to go by these CPU's are not fast enough. Digital Foundry mentioned that yesterday in their DF direct. PC will be able to maintain a more constant 30fps when considering a maxed UE5 engined game, since clock speeds/IPC seems to matter so much for that engine. The Zen2's while 'good enough' are still quite much behind when considering a high-end Zen3 CPU, we cant judge yet if the potentional of such cpus will be utilized or not. Teardown sure shows its possible, among some others.
Also i think 60fps will be a thing on pc for UE5 games, not so much for the consoles.

Maybe ML/AI reconstruction will be used on the consoles. Probably not though, nothing is indicating it will, and if it happens, there is no hardware acceleration for it, so performance wont be the same. They better hurry up, were closing in to 2023, its getting close to start design the PS6.

Yeah, the SSD's sure can (and do) help out, but they are painfully slow compared to GDDR6, latency and other factors aside. The PC does with 16GB for just the VRAM, along with just as fast if not faster nvme drives, besides main ram.





They had the core count at the time (vs the pc). Not so much this time around. According to devs the CPU's where quite capable when spreading the workloads over as many cores as possible.

From sebbbi here a Jaguar on consoles were not able to compete with a modern quad core. For UE5 games I never said there will be no 60 fps game, the Coalition said they will do 60 fps UE5 game on Xbox consoles. And some game running at 30 fps on current gen console if they are GPU limited can run at 60 fps and more on PC but if the limit is the CPU it will be a problem. CPU or GPU limited old gens consoles could run at 60 fps or much more without problem on PC.

Not many PC card have 16Gb of VRAM an again using virtualization of texture or geometry or good streaming you don't need so much. If we suppose game will use 10GB of VRAM on Xbox and PS5 it means basically into the memory you can have using an average of compression of 2 to 1 for compressed content and devs will try to stay inside the 100 GB limit of BR disc. 1/20 of all unique asset of the game inside memory with fast SSD this is enough.

EDIT: Another things it will be a long generation because of the stock problem. There is more people wanting to buy a PS5 or an Xbox Series than people having one. And this time 2023 will be the real start of the gen with more non cross gen games.

https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/feature/NVMe-SSD-speeds-explained

At least in theory SSD latency is not a problem and a game should be able to load something from an NVME SSD each frame even at 60 fps or 120 fps. 225 microsesond is 0.225 miliseconds. And this is the reason Epic wanted an NVME SSD, from a bandwith point of view with Nanite and virtual texture a fast SATA SSD was enough in theory.

 

[eastmen]

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2022-q3/press-release-webcast

Business Highlights

Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes was $15.8 billion and increased 17%, with the following business highlights:

· Office Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 12% (up 14% CC) driven by Office 365 Commercial revenue growth of 17% (up 20% CC)

· Office Consumer products and cloud services revenue increased 11% (up 12% CC) and Microsoft 365 Consumer subscribers grew to 58.4 million

· LinkedIn revenue increased 34% (up 35% CC)

· Dynamics products and cloud services revenue increased 22% (up 25% CC) driven by Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 35% (up 38% CC)

Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $19.1 billion and increased 26%, with the following business highlights:

· Server products and cloud services revenue increased 29% (up 32% CC) driven by Azure and other cloud services revenue growth of 46% (up 49% CC)

Revenue in More Personal Computing was $14.5 billion and increased 11%, with the following business highlights:

· Windows OEM revenue increased 11%

· Windows Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 14% (up 19% CC)

· Xbox content and services revenue increased 4% (up 6% CC)

· Search and news advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs increased 23% (up 25% CC)

· Surface revenue increased 13% (up 18% CC)

Microsoft returned $12.4 billion to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends in the third quarter of fiscal year 2022, an increase of 25% compared to the third quarter of fiscal year 2021.

 

[PSman1700]

From sebbbi here a Jaguar on consoles were not able to compete with a modern quad core. For UE5 games I never said there will be no 60 fps game, the Coalition said they will do 60 fps UE5 game on Xbox consoles. And some game running at 30 fps on current gen console if they are GPU limited can run at 60 fps and more on PC but if the limit is the CPU it will be a problem. CPU or GPU limited old gens consoles could run at 60 fps or much more without problem on PC.

Not compete no, consoles generally never have anyway. I ment that the core count was one of its advantages the 8th generation had, which had some uses in parallel workloads. The last bit depends on if UE5 truly is going the ancient way of distributing workloads on the CPU, if then yes, UE5 games will be crippled. Doubt that will happen though. Otherwise, 12 and 16 core CPU's, at much higher clocks and even IPC, the difference is still large enough to distance the PC from the consoles when CPU limited (if engines arent badly optimized for multicore work). The hardware difference is there still cpu wise, its that what i talk about. Not a single engine scaling bad.

Not many PC card have 16Gb of VRAM an again using virtualization of texture or geometry or good streaming you don't need so much. If we suppose game will use 10GB of VRAM on Xbox and PS5 it means basically into the memory you can have using an average of compression of 2 to 1 for compressed content and devs will try to stay inside the 100 GB limit of BR disc. 1/20 of all unique asset of the game inside memory with fast SSD this is enough.

Not many? the first iteration AMD gpu's sport 16GB vram alongside ultra fast infinity cache (RX6800 and up). Didnt say it wouldnt be enough for the consoles, it probably is. What i am talking about is the relative specs against the (higher end) pc and the subsequent leap over the last generation of consoles. SSD's do not replace DDR ram, let alone fast GDDR vram. They complement and substitute somewhat, but not for every task, far from it, theres a reason theres still GDDR ram in there, otherwise 8gb would have been enough. Also, on pc there is nvme and compression tech too, the 16GB being 'enough' or not, the pc just has much more capacity in both ways.

EDIT: Another things it will be a long generation because of the stock problem. There is more people wanting to buy a PS5 or an Xbox Series than people having one. And this time 2023 will be the real start of the gen with more non cross gen games.

Thats about right for GPU's aswell, so yeah, this generation has been very underwhelming both hardware and software wise.

At least in theory SSD latency is not a problem and a game should be able to load something from an NVME SSD each frame even at 60 fps or 120 fps. 225 microsesond is 0.225 miliseconds. And this is the reason Epic wanted an NVME SSD, from a bandwith point of view with Nanite and virtual texture a fast SATA SSD was enough in theory.

In theory

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2022-q3/press-release-webcast

Business Highlights

Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes was $15.8 billion and increased 17%, with the following business highlights:

· Office Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 12% (up 14% CC) driven by Office 365 Commercial revenue growth of 17% (up 20% CC)

· Office Consumer products and cloud services revenue increased 11% (up 12% CC) and Microsoft 365 Consumer subscribers grew to 58.4 million

· LinkedIn revenue increased 34% (up 35% CC)

· Dynamics products and cloud services revenue increased 22% (up 25% CC) driven by Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 35% (up 38% CC)

Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $19.1 billion and increased 26%, with the following business highlights:

· Server products and cloud services revenue increased 29% (up 32% CC) driven by Azure and other cloud services revenue growth of 46% (up 49% CC)

Revenue in More Personal Computing was $14.5 billion and increased 11%, with the following business highlights:

· Windows OEM revenue increased 11%

· Windows Commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 14% (up 19% CC)

· Xbox content and services revenue increased 4% (up 6% CC)

· Search and news advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs increased 23% (up 25% CC)

· Surface revenue increased 13% (up 18% CC)

Microsoft returned $12.4 billion to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends in the third quarter of fiscal year 2022, an increase of 25% compared to the third quarter of fiscal year 2021.

Go MS!

 

[BRiT]

With our Xbox Series S and X consoles, we have taken share globally for two quarters in a row and were the market leader this quarter among next gen consoles in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Western Europe.

The Microsoft Conference call tweet thread @

https://twitter.com/x/status/1519061156953874432

https://twitter.com/x/status/1519070875366019072

https://twitter.com/x/status/1519071324081201153

 

[zed]

Yes I see in March NPD, xbox had the most dollars spent on it, Switch the most Units, PS5 was last.
Oddly Software was worse than march 2021, even though there were bigger titles in 2022, I assume this is prolly Due to Covid in 2021 & more time spent at home == less software bought.
#1 march 2021 was COD, yet COD in march 2022 only managed #9

I see in MS latest quarterly earnings the Xbox sector was the worst performing of the 13 divisions.
In fact revenue is actually down Y/Y if you take into consideration inflation. The previous 3 quarters it was 12th out of the 13 divisions
What could be causing this I wonder? <cough>gamepass<cough cough>
How many more quarters before the higher ups decide they need to do something?

 

[BRiT]

You're heading into FUD territory.

 

[AzBat]

LOL

Setting a revenue record for non-holiday quarter & they need to do something? Wow.

Microsoft said its Xbox Gaming segment revenue was up 6% YoY for the quarter ending March 31.

Hardware sales up 14% YoY, which is a positive sign for console availability.

Software and services up 4% YoY with growth from Game Pass.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1519045015057620993

Approx $3.75 billion for the quarter (Will get the full breakdown later).

That's the best non-holiday quarter ever for Xbox.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1519045888538255366

Some notes:

Total revenue: $3.74 billion (+6% YoY)
Content & Services = 81% of revenue
Hardware = 19% of revenue

- Best non-holiday quarter for Xbox
- Xbox Series X|S supply up from last year
- Content and Services crossed $3bn for the first time in a Q1 period.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1519050534807818243

Tommy McClain

 

[zed]

Yes I see in March NPD, xbox had the most dollars spent on it, Switch the most Units, PS5 was last.
Oddly Software was worse than march 2021, even though there were bigger titles in 2022

Seems I'm not the only one who noticed this
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-04-27-its-quiet-too-quiet-gi-market-report

Not so much the performance of the console hardware market, we all know what's going on there. But rather the software sales. NPD's figures show that US game sales dropped 13% compared with the same period the year before. And that's despite a healthier release schedule.

LOL
Setting a revenue record for non-holiday quarter & they need to do something? Wow.

No offence but do you not know anything who large IT companies typically do in their finances?
They typically have record Y/Y each quarter. As I have written about here multiple times this is logical because of 2 reasons.
eg heres me saying this here in 2013 https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1715749/
A/ markets expand( population growing in 1st world and ppl in poorer countries becoming richer)
B/ inflation.

The annual inflation rate for the United States is 8.5% for the 12 months ended March 2022

both these things compound.
sheesh mate This is just normal, have you never looked at IT financial statements, Its not everytime but nearly. In fact it should only be newsworthy if it actually went down Y/Y
eg
Another large IT company we all know about released its financial statement today
Google 23% increase in revenue (26% CC)
A lot of us heard about netflix recently super bad news, stock crashing blah blah.
How did their recent quarter revenue do, must be terrible right?
Yes it only increased 10%

Both of these results were not so good, i.e. 23% & 10% growth in revenue , And here you are claiming 4% growth in xbox revenue is good

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2022-q3/press-release-webcast
So 4% growth for Xbox content and services (6% CC)
4% means compared to inflation (~8%) they earnt less money in real terms Y/Y.

Yes the company as a whole Microsoft is doing great, I'm just stating the fact (not opinion) that the xbox division is the weakest link (that and surface)
FACT: In the last 4 quarters of the 13 or 14 divisions the xbox has either been the worse or the second worse performing division in microsoft

I'm not saying anything shocking, Ms also agree 4% was worse than they were expecting

Microsoft's chief financial officer Amy Hood mentioned during the company's earnings call that this growth was "below expectations."

Prediction: when sony and nintendo release their financial statements soon, they will both be record setting and both will be better than 4% revenue Y/Y

 

[PSman1700]

FACT: In the last 4 quarters of the 13 or 14 divisions the xbox has either been the worse or the second worse performing division in microsoft

That's not how things are considered a success or not. Those are not facts but personal fud.
Microsoft and its platforms, including Xbox, are doing very, very well. In special with the Xbox consoles platform its a huge difference to last generation's Xbox One launch and subsequent rate of success compared to its competitors. Now their very competitive, i'd say MS has the upper-hand looking into the future and where things are heading.

 

[BRiT]

Some Xbox Japan numbers

Earlier today Famitsu reported Xbox Series X|S sold 6,025 units last week in Japan. This is the first time XBS has sold over 6K outside of Week 1.

Excluding launch weeks the last time Xbox sold over 6,000 in a week was 2010.

Series X: 566 (95,856)
Series S: 5,459 (88,678)

https://twitter.com/x/status/1519781101950185472

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Interesting, I wonder if the XBS-X sold out in Japan leading to more people getting the XBS-S? The previous week had the XBS-X sell 3,027 units while the XBS-S sold 2,715 units.

Also, I'd kind of forgotten that Famitsu only reports physical game sales. That's due to the fact that they get their sale numbers (final number is an estimate) from certain retailers around the country.

Something else interesting WRT the Japanese market. The PS4 version of games generally sell MUCH better than the PS5 version of games. So, I'd expect most Japanese publishers and developers to continue to have PS4 versions of their games whenever possible until that changes.

Regards,
SB