D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
Sure, but the performance - for some - had been bad since September. What changed between September and November?
Xbox leadership and the Xbox brand evaluation *spawn
- Thread starter BitByte
- Start date
To me it appears the only master plan was to appeal to Satya "the subscription" Nadella, talk with vague bullet points which resonated with his style in b2b environment, make ad hoc decisions and hope for the best. Executives convinced themselves they can somehow throw away foundations of what makes successful dedicated platform (console) to reach bigger audience and fanbase will not notice and here they are, sales of console are worse tha tarnished xbox one, loosing ground even in strongholds.
Pc efforts are mediocre too, particularly on store side it feels like everything regarding store is decided in other parts of company.
Promos ended and Gamepass has stalled on console and didn't light up up those imaginable infinite audiences (who wants specific things not bundles) growth potential on pc especially with inevitable price hike. I was the same story with subscription in music and tv, none of those services are that profitable or breaking even, and mostly promised infinite growth to executives. I fear for thousands of people in those two fat publishers they bought, sooner or later many position doubling Microsoft roles must be cut after integration. Looking at mw3 and starfield reception and performance, it remains to be seen if those pubs are such impeccable evergreens anymore, especially with even more politics and friction involved under Microsoft which so far lacked publishing focus.
It feels like clock is ticking to another pivot.
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I think someone should ask, why do people prefer Playstation more than XBOX and list the reasons
Sony hasn't risked at all this gen as they did last Gen that's for sure and that's been troubling me about it's future. Even though on the other hand, I m happy that I have less titles to worry about missing due to lack of time. I feel people prefer the console based on faith that it will continue delivering just like PS4 did.
MS hasn't been delivering much in the AAA blockbuster front but did bring some interesting smaller games in scope
The exclusive games MS released so far, beyond the typical exhausted ones like Forza and Halo, are mostly brought by big multiplatform companies MS bought like Zenimax and ABK. This isn't MS willingness to risk by bringing new projects. It's MS buying companies that were willing to create those titles in the first place. Starfield was either going to be a PS5 timed exclusive or an immediate multiplatfotm game for example.
Sony is doing something similar by investing on third and second party or timed exclusives instead of purchasing the studios themselves.
Sony started more strongly than MS did with AAA titles like Rachet and Clank, GoW, GT7 Forbidden West, Spider Man and Returnal. Surely they are sequels, but are highly sought ones and MS barely had much to compete against.
But they also complemented it with third party console exclusives or timed exclusives like Stray, FF16, Demon Souls, Sifu, Valkyrie Esysium, Rollerdrome, Ghostwire, Deathloop, etc plus a lot more highly sought franchises are coming exclusively to the console.
In general I m underwhelmed with current releases on both consoles.
Personally I prefer the PS5 more for these reasons:
1) Controller's unique features
2) Franchises I like
3) More interesting future releases or sequels I m interested in
4) I can carry on a huge list of PS4 exclusives that are still unavailable on XBOX
5) I have a list of PS4 games that are BC with PS5.
I would never want to miss out on the next Spiderman, Final Fantasy, GoW, Horizon and Death Stranding. And I am sure a critical amount of gamers wouldn't want to miss either. The PS5 seems to carry on, on the successes of PS4's industry shaking titles.
Halo's audience shrunk, Forza's audience is smaller than GT's, Flight Simulator is a niche, Gear's audience shrunk and there isn't a new announcement, other smaller titles are good but not shaking the industry.
MS's future relies mostly on new AAA projects or the success of existing blockbusters owned by the multiplatform studios they recently bought to cover the gap.
Sony hasn't risked at all this gen as they did last Gen that's for sure and that's been troubling me about it's future. Even though on the other hand, I m happy that I have less titles to worry about missing due to lack of time. I feel people prefer the console based on faith that it will continue delivering just like PS4 did.
MS hasn't been delivering much in the AAA blockbuster front but did bring some interesting smaller games in scope
The exclusive games MS released so far, beyond the typical exhausted ones like Forza and Halo, are mostly brought by big multiplatform companies MS bought like Zenimax and ABK. This isn't MS willingness to risk by bringing new projects. It's MS buying companies that were willing to create those titles in the first place. Starfield was either going to be a PS5 timed exclusive or an immediate multiplatfotm game for example.
Sony is doing something similar by investing on third and second party or timed exclusives instead of purchasing the studios themselves.
Sony started more strongly than MS did with AAA titles like Rachet and Clank, GoW, GT7 Forbidden West, Spider Man and Returnal. Surely they are sequels, but are highly sought ones and MS barely had much to compete against.
But they also complemented it with third party console exclusives or timed exclusives like Stray, FF16, Demon Souls, Sifu, Valkyrie Esysium, Rollerdrome, Ghostwire, Deathloop, etc plus a lot more highly sought franchises are coming exclusively to the console.
In general I m underwhelmed with current releases on both consoles.
Personally I prefer the PS5 more for these reasons:
1) Controller's unique features
2) Franchises I like
3) More interesting future releases or sequels I m interested in
4) I can carry on a huge list of PS4 exclusives that are still unavailable on XBOX
5) I have a list of PS4 games that are BC with PS5.
I would never want to miss out on the next Spiderman, Final Fantasy, GoW, Horizon and Death Stranding. And I am sure a critical amount of gamers wouldn't want to miss either. The PS5 seems to carry on, on the successes of PS4's industry shaking titles.
Halo's audience shrunk, Forza's audience is smaller than GT's, Flight Simulator is a niche, Gear's audience shrunk and there isn't a new announcement, other smaller titles are good but not shaking the industry.
MS's future relies mostly on new AAA projects or the success of existing blockbusters owned by the multiplatform studios they recently bought to cover the gap.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
As I mention the official DLSS patch was released.
Starfield's 1.8.86 Update Officially Adds DLSS Support and Finally Allows You to Eat Food on Sight - IGN
A big new Starfield update is here, officially rolling out DLSS support and a "consume" button, which will finally allow you to eat food on sight.
September they said they were working to add it and Nov. 20th they finally delivered a non-BETA patch with DLSS as well as numerous performance optimizations for NV hardware. Immediately after Nov. 20th we see positive review scores immediately increase massively relative to negative review scores.
The user review scores graph is a great way to see if the developer is responding to user dissatisfaction over time as scores are generally reflective of how well the developer supports the game. You'll see a positive review trend in the graph if the developer releases a good patch even if the overall score remains mixed or even negative. On the flip side it's also a way to see if the developer is not responding to user dissatisfaction or does something "bad" as scores will immediately show a negative trend even if the overall score remains positive.
The graph is also a great way to see if a game is suddenly under attack by a review bomb or if the effects of a review bomb are finally over even if the overall score will forever be affected by said review bomb.
I wish all sales stores had something similar, but so far Steam is the only storefront of any kind on the internet that shows that. Amazon in particular could really use it, IMO, as most "paid for" reviews happen when a product is first listed. Although to Amazon's credit, at least now they have 2 additional metrics, roughly how many units are puchased in a month and if a product suffers from excessive returns.
Regards,
SB
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
And yet you convieniently ignore the data in your own graphs where actually sequels that started development under Phil's watch or where the majority of the development were under Phil's watch increased not only their critic scores but their user scores as well.
Halo: Infinite better than Halo 5. The newest Flight Simulator significantly better than the previous.For your argument that Phil is bad, titles like Fable and Dead Rising are irrelevant they happened before Phil was in charge. You'll also take note that in order to prevent continuing erosion of the Fable IP, Phil actually cancelled in development Fable projects that would have failed if released.
Wait what? Moving the goal posts this much, just recently you were banging the war drums about Steam USER review scores for Starfield being bad and thus it was a horrible game despite fantastic CRITIC review scores. C'mon at least be consistent.
This whole thing started because you were banging the war drums about how Steam USER scores were far more relevant for Starfield than CRITIC review scores. And now you dare to try to say you don't give a rat's arse about user review scores because that's a "lazy argument" in your own words? Wait did you just call yourself lazy?
Regards,
SB
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
It's unfortunate that you aren't as grateful for what Phil has accomplished for Xbox. I'm certainly not naive about why he's doing it. You'd know that if you read my posts. That doesn't change the fact that I love the direction he is going.
I'd like to add that it's absolutely hilarious to me that GT7 is a great success at 87 and Forza is a failure at 85. Lol.
C'mon. Be serious people. Stop acting like Starfield is a failure because it only scored an 86 on PC and an 83 on Xbox.
I'm pretty happy about all these 85 scoring games I'm getting to play on GP for a 3rd of the cost.... wait for it ....
Thank you Phil!
PS: Because GT7 is $70 and Forza Motorsport was essentially $25, I'm willing to suffer with my 85 game instead of the 87 PS5 users get. TYP.
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D
Deleted member 11852
Guest
In a market where both PlayStation and Xbox are available and are marketed comparatively, this might be a useful question. Obviously you'll find folks who favour individual platform strategies/appeal over another, and some (like me) who own everything and some who are like me but cannot justify the cost of owning everything and need to chose. However, in markets where Xbox isn't pushed by Microsoft, it's barely a relevant question.
I don't want this to get weird, but that's what I said to begin with:
You looped around and tried to answer my question with the point of my actual question!
Let's try again. Why did Steam suer reviews scores crash in November? That is when the performance patch was available in beta (then fully). You suggested the beta patch was not relevant as people don't opt-in to betas. In which, the performance has been the same since launch in September. But scores were better in September than in November.
So back to my question. What changed in November that resulted in quite a drop to user scores?
Silent_Buddha
Legend
In a market where both PlayStation and Xbox are available and are marketed comparatively, this might be a useful question. Obviously you'll find folks who favour individual platform strategies/appeal over another, and some (like me) who own everything and some who are like me but cannot justify the cost of owning everything and need to chose. However, in markets where Xbox isn't pushed by Microsoft, it's barely a relevant question.
I don't want this to get weird, but that's what I said to begin with:
You looped around and tried to answer my question with the point of my actual question!
Let's try again. Why did Steam suer reviews scores crash in November? That is when the performance patch was available in beta (then fully). You suggested the beta patch was not relevant as people don't opt-in to betas. In which, the performance has been the same since launch in September. But scores were better in September than in November.
So back to my question. What changed in November that resulted in quite a drop to user scores?
Oh whoops, the increased total number of negative reviews. I think that's roughly when the Steam "Black Friday" sale started. I think it kicked off around the start of Thanksgiving week or maybe the week before. While I don't think Starfield itself went on sale on Steam (It did go on sale at GMG on the 23rd which I think coincided with the largest spike in positive reviews) more people buying games might have led to more people deciding to pull the trigger on Starfield while they were buying other games. That's just a guess though. That said, throughout Nov. there was a trend of increasing positive to negative review ratio.
Yeah, looking at the longer graph, the first half of Nov. saw the lowest number of both positive and negative reviews. Then around when the Black Friday sale kicked off (mid Nov.) we see a bump in positive reviews and a smaller bump in negative reviews. Then when the official DLSS patch released combined with the GMG sale, we see a massive increase in positive reviews and a smaller increase in negative reviews. Although the past few days I'm seeing increasing negative reviews, perhaps buyer's remorse from picking it up during the GMG sale and Starfield not being the game they wanted it to be (seeing negative user reviews talking about how it's not a Space Flight Simulator, for example).
Regards,
SB
Metal_Spirit
Regular
This is a very good question, and one that I asked my readers on my page.
We came up with a large number of reasons. I will list some of them:
- Expectancy - Specially after a very disapointing Xbox One that was very dry on exclusive games, people look at Playstation as the brand that delivers.
- Speech Coherency - Microsoft talks avery day. And contradicts hitself. Promisses and promisses, and low deliverance hurt the brand.
- Game quality - Sony games are awesome. Microsoft games tend to underdeliver, or be more of the same.
- Market Control - We are now seeing an attempt to make Microsoft games passing as better than they are, with games getting scores higher than deserved. Halo infinite had serious problems, was incomplete at lauch, and got abandoned by players after some months by lack of content. Yet, it managed to get 87% average reviews, and voted Peoples Choice Game of the year. Same with Starfield, now averaging 69% on Steam, and with less active players that Skyrim. On September, there were news that a quarter of the persons who played Starfield didn't even made it to space. And yet it got 87%.
- Lack of brand recognition - Xbox is becoming a second rate brand for all the reasons above and more. One point that cannot be neglected is the fact that the console has little to no market presence in Physical Stores do to a mass adoption of Digital Games by their users. And a brand that is not seen, it is forgotten!
- Lack of regional attention - All Sony games get some Kind of regional care, either with subtitles, but mostly with voices for all regions. Microsoft games neglect that a lot, and when they have it, it is limited. For instance, Forza Horizon games in Portugal have Brasilian Voices. And although it is the same language, it really is not the same.
- Lack of investment in publicity - Microsoft publicity on TVs advertising all over the word is near to zero. The Spiderman 2 release here in Portugal, made it to the news on TV dues to the expected sales of the game. MIcrosoft investment in that regard is inexistant.
- People fear Gamepass - Yes, I know this one is very polemic, but people fear Gamepass will make console games equal to Smartphone games, with lots of payments on DLCs, Microtransactions and others. Gaming is a passion, and people do not want to destroy the quality they are getting with a subscription service that they do not believe can sustain the industry as it is.
- And a lot conected with this topic: Phil Spencer. People see him as a used car salesman. It's image is awfull, and people claim that with him at the helm they will never buy a Xbox console again. He is in front of Xbox for 12 years (give or take), and all he got was money from Microsoft to sustain a console that otherwise would have been terminated. And even with that, even with Activision, Gamepass is seeing no growth, and console sales are colapsing.
Note that these are not my arguments, so I will not defend any of it. These are a compilation of some of the explanations I got on my webpage from my readers from Portugal and Brasil about why people prefer Playstation over Xbox, and a reply with the data I got from my readers on the Iberia (Spain+Portugal, normally incorrectly refered only as Spain) market, and Brasilian Market.
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A lot of games have less active players than Skyrim, though. Also, are you only looking at Steam numbers? Xbox doesn't publish raw numbers to my knowledge, but if you look here, they list the most played games in order of most played to least played. Starfield is currently #10, Skyrim is 27. I think there is a large amount of data missing if we are only looking at Steam numbers, because Starfield launched into Gamepass day 1, and we also know Gamepass subscriptions were higher than expected because of Starfield.
Also, according to Steam, less than 70% of Skyrim SE players gat the first achievement (Unbound). That's the achievement you get for getting past the tutorial. This isn't that uncommon of a ratio for a Bethesda game.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
That's not even uncommon for most games. If I look at my Steam achievements for games that I'm playing people that don't get out of the first area of a game (for games that have an achievement for it) vary anywhere from 20-90% with most being at 50%+ never getting past the first "area" achievement. Heck, looking at a random game in my Steam list that's from a popular IP, only 82.2% of players have killed 1 enemy. Basically, almost 18% of people that own the game haven't even played it.
And that's a game with "overwhelmingly positive" (97.19%) reviews.Regards,
SB
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Xbox Series S caro: "Seguramos até onde deu", diz Phil
O líder da marca conversou com o Flow Games sobre Xbox Series S e outros tópicos importantes ao Brasil
flowgames.gg
I will not be grateful for industry consolidation. Imagine a world where Microsoft owns the biggest publishers. Each one will not have a strong reason to excel games from other publishers. For example, if Microsoft buys EA Battlefield developers may not put big efforts to be better than Call of Duty.
Industry consolidation is not good at all.
Can you understand it? Or your only concern is saving money?
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Industry consolidation was happening well before MS bought ABK. Battlefield doesn’t needs to compete with call of duty. Games have an artistic component that is not relatable to consolidation in other industries.
Quite frankly the whole mil-sim genre could die and some other fps be king. We’ve seen all sorts of leadership swaps happen over and over again, people have different tastes and milsim while very popular with certain crowds, I have my doubts it will be as popular with the next generation of gamers who are growing up playing Roblox and Minecraft.
I can't see the connection here. Who here is gaming on the types of games they grew up with? Didn't we all follow gaming as it evolved to some extent? Racers were big in the noughties; now they're not. Point and click adventures died, though now they have a bit of a comeback. I don't think there'll be any correlation between people growing up on Roblox and Minecraft and the games they play later on. Heck, even among kids I know now, most moved on from Minecraft as they got older. Fortnite was a big craze that they walked away from, making the sudden resurgence of interest anomalous where many have returned for this season.
For me, the connection is how Modern Warfare came out nearly 20 years ago and it returns as a remake now. We have more remakes and remaster of titles now more than ever. And we saw this with movies as well. Everything popular in our childhood has suddenly made a return because we’re the ones with the disposable income now.
So I do believe that there is some connection between the games we grow up playing, and that franchise being important later in our lives. We are just itching to get a sequel, you know what I mean?
Half Life 3 for instance would be the second coming for a large group of older gamers, but be irrelevant to all the newest gamers. So if there ever is a Minecraft 2 or a Roblox 2, a world of Warcraft etc. some of these franchises have lasting power, but annually released milsim; I see boredom.
I got Trump vibes from his speech
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
As usual, the devils in the details. Consolidation's been pretty good for me as a gamer so far.
There's probably a limit to how many companies I'd like MS to acquire. Maybe just Sega would be nice now.
Could you elaborate which parts of it are great for you as a gamer?
