Sony bought that cloud gaming company years ago now, can’t remember their name, but they have been using its tech and working on cloud gaming for years.
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Xbox Series X (coming 10 Nov 2020)
- Thread starter gkarris
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Sony bought that cloud gaming company years ago now, can’t remember their name, but they have been using its tech and working on cloud gaming for years.
You mean the ambitions where they have to do an inhouse port of WINE because no one wants to use Apple's technologies to make games for the Mac?
...where they'll sit idle, not playing games.
What Mac games actually do 4k/60 with HDR?
IS the low end gaming pc THAT big a thing though? As opposed to PCs that are ALSO used for gaming. Realistically a low-end gaming (as in dedicated to gaming, not a computer-computer as well) PC is just a console that is less turnkey than a console.
That was largely an anomaly driven by pre-privacy-safeguards on device fingerprinting and tracking. I would suggest more studios are leaving mobile for PC & Console than the other way around, at least from what I hear from launch-partner Apple Arcade developers.
The WiiU was a stupid idea, the Xbox is a turnkey gaming PC that doesn't require the user to manage Windows or drivers. They're not comparable.
Growth has a natural limit. Apple had something like a 20% drop in Mac sales in the last year. The iPad and Apple Watch have been flatlining for years. Is Apple getting out of all of them?
Xbox will be the only console where it won't matter what platform or store you bought your game on, you'll be able to play it on Xbox - GOG, Steam, whatever.
If Starfield is bad, that just makes Gamepass better value - you get most of a year's Gamepass subscription for the equivalent price of buying one trashfire game you didn't like. Thats a huge dodged bullet. Gamepass is basically an insurance policy against buying bad games.
Phil's unlikely to be going out and making a grand strategy statement that would leave MS open to being sued for defrauding shareholders by not adequately disclosing strategic risks, the way Apple had to settle for half a billion last week to protect Tim Cook over his defrauding shareholders by hiding flatlining iPhone sales in China.
Certainly, Phil'd be better informed on the subject than people on internet forums.
Well I think it's a little bit desperate, with the news they have lost 47% console sales year in year in Europe, they are trying anything. Will Steam want to support a possible failing platform?
Lies of P. Dev's optimized this game to the fullest on MacOS. Especially on M3 Max.
Because it'll still cost them to support the platform, also it's not Windows like the desktop version, it's severely cut down. Will MS be asking for a 30% cut of any sales made in the Steam Store in Xbox?
I fully expect them to increase the hardware price and just use Windows 12, after all what better way of supporting 3rd party stores than by just having folks run PC Games.
Xbox is in an existential criss and is facing the following realities:
-60% of gaming happens on mobile devices.
-Triple AAA titles that cost $200-300m and 5-7 years to developing are becoming a laughing stock compared with mobile games. Monopoly launched a mobile game that generated $2billion in 10 months.
-Subsidising hardware for 2-3 years to recoup costs through game sales is no longer viable. Sony has said that over 6 million PS users spend 75% of their time playing COD. Then we have lots of others that spend most of their time playing Fortnite or Roblox.
-2nd gen switch is coming and if that can play competitive shooters then MS and Sony will be in trouble.
-Nvidia are busy and a partner that's high in demand. Commissioning new hardware with an AI software stack of upscaling and frame generation to match would cost a fortune. It is also risky because you then have to fund $200-300 AAA titles that exploit the hardware.
-Windows is just starting the journey of shifting to ARM. It's going to be messy.
MS missed the mobile revolution and are now facing a threat from steam in hardware. In 2-3 years, Steam decks and rivals will likely match Series S for quality. Some demanding titles like flight simulator are already playable on Steam Deck.
I think the solution is to partner with Asus to create an Xbox handheld from off shelf parts. It's a quick and less risky route to market than developing a custom built handheld. Cutting edge graphics are nice but not end all be all, especially in light of growing popularity of indie games like Stardew Valley and Balastro.
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-60% of gaming happens on mobile devices.
-Triple AAA titles that cost $200-300m and 5-7 years to developing are becoming a laughing stock compared with mobile games. Monopoly launched a mobile game that generated $2billion in 10 months.
-Subsidising hardware for 2-3 years to recoup costs through game sales is no longer viable. Sony has said that over 6 million PS users spend 75% of their time playing COD. Then we have lots of others that spend most of their time playing Fortnite or Roblox.
-2nd gen switch is coming and if that can play competitive shooters then MS and Sony will be in trouble.
-Nvidia are busy and a partner that's high in demand. Commissioning new hardware with an AI software stack of upscaling and frame generation to match would cost a fortune. It is also risky because you then have to fund $200-300 AAA titles that exploit the hardware.
-Windows is just starting the journey of shifting to ARM. It's going to be messy.
MS missed the mobile revolution and are now facing a threat from steam in hardware. In 2-3 years, Steam decks and rivals will likely match Series S for quality. Some demanding titles like flight simulator are already playable on Steam Deck.
I think the solution is to partner with Asus to create an Xbox handheld from off shelf parts. It's a quick and less risky route to market than developing a custom built handheld. Cutting edge graphics are nice but not end all be all, especially in light of growing popularity of indie games like Stardew Valley and Balastro.
So it runs 4k/60 HDR?
If it does, slow 80s clap for getting performance on a multi-thousand dollar PC, that a USD$400 console offers.
On the latest build on 4K, Max settings, the hotel interior hovers around high 50 fps. Outside the hotel its fluctuates.
Granited my Mac is an M3 Max 40-core GPU w/128GB RAM.
1440p w/HDR is ~100+fps [both docked to monitor as well as the main screen. Also keep in mind, i am using Metal upscaler at Quality. I actually have not tried native resolution without upscaler.
Xbox hardware were down -30% in Q1 2024. Satya had nothing bullish to counter with. Pair this with Xbox titles coming to PS, overall downturn in gaming sales and you have the catalyst for studios possible abandoning the Xbox platform.
Staff layoffs and cancellation of projects are wide spread. If you are studio developing a game for PS, PC and Xbox, abandoning the latter could cut 25-30% of your costs. On Xbox you also have to develop for both Series S and X. It’s not necessarily double the world but you still need to individually QA every nook and cranny of both version, including updates and DLC. Might it be better for studios to, instead of producing AAA titles for the Xbox, develop smaller titles that can run on the Switch 2?
www.eurogamer.net
Staff layoffs and cancellation of projects are wide spread. If you are studio developing a game for PS, PC and Xbox, abandoning the latter could cut 25-30% of your costs. On Xbox you also have to develop for both Series S and X. It’s not necessarily double the world but you still need to individually QA every nook and cranny of both version, including updates and DLC. Might it be better for studios to, instead of producing AAA titles for the Xbox, develop smaller titles that can run on the Switch 2?
Activision Blizzard boosts Microsoft earnings, but Xbox console sales plummet
Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has contributed to a boost in gaming revenue, but Xbox console sales hav…
They did make money (thanks to Activision/Blizzard) though.Xbox hardware were down -30% in Q1 2024. Satya had nothing bullish to counter with. Pair this with Xbox titles coming to PS, overall downturn in gaming sales and you have the catalyst for studios possible abandoning the Xbox platform.
Staff layoffs and cancellation of projects are wide spread. If you are studio developing a game for PS, PC and Xbox, abandoning the latter could cut 25-30% of your costs. On Xbox you also have to develop for both Series S and X. It’s not necessarily double the world but you still need to individually QA every nook and cranny of both version, including updates and DLC. Might it be better for studios to, instead of producing AAA titles for the Xbox, develop smaller titles that can run on the Switch 2?
Activision Blizzard boosts Microsoft earnings, but Xbox console sales plummet
Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has contributed to a boost in gaming revenue, but Xbox console sales hav…
iPhone down over 20% in China, formerly it's most important growth market, Apple Vision Pro reportedly having stalled / collapsed sales-wise.
So we assume Apple is going to get out of Phones, and cancel AVP?
Newsflash - mass staff layoffs are happening everywhere in the tech industry (even at Apple), and it has nothing to do with the success or failure of products, it's primarily a political flex by the managerial class in response to increasing labour organisation.
How many Playstations are there currently in the userbase, PS4, 5, 5 slim, Pro etc.
What, so they can be disappear in obscurity against Malibu Zelda with a New Hat?
If a game is successful on one platform it gets to other platforms. Wren and Tim - a two person team got Unpacking self-released on Windows / Xbox and Switch simultaneously, then the PS, then Mobile verson followed, in each case success on one provides a low risk continuance to the next platform.
Concentrating on a single platform is literally the dumbest thing you can do in gamedev. It denies you the long tail of (comparatively) easy money that comes with ports, since the majority of development is frontloaded on the first version(s).
Unpacking is a great game BTW, my kids love it. However it’s a small and linear indie game. The investment required to develop it for additional platform is smaller than developing an open world or multiplayer title to another platform.
117 million PS4 sold
50million PS5 sold as reported in Dec 2023
25million Series S and X sold as reported in Dec 2023.
Correct. It’s a challenging period for lots of sectors. Some public companies that have laid people off have seen a surge in stock price which benefit management that get heavily compensated in stock!
IIRC MS won't let a developer make a game for Xbox where it only runs on Series X. You have to release the game on both. As of right now Sony doesn't force a PS Dev to make a PS5 game run on the PS4. In the future (when the PS5 Pro ships) Sony will likely be like MS in that regard. You will not be able to make a game that only runs on the PS5 Pro (they did the same for the PS4 / PS4 Pro).
Right, but you were literally saying the solution was to make small games rather than AAA titles. MOST of the development resources go on the first version, because MOST of the development is in the game engine, not the platform it's deployed upon. Game engines are basically virtual machines - you don't develop for XBox or Playstation, you develop for Unreal or Unity.
Right, but from a developer's point of view, every Windows PC counts in the "Xbox" column, and developers are still releasing Xbox One titles.
Yup, so probably not worth deriving the future of game platforms from studio hirings / firings.
Even if you have already developed a title for one platform, porting it to another platform is not as easy as File-Save-Into-A-Different format. Adapting a game or software to another platform require adaptations and that needs to be resourced with a team that has specialist knowledge and experience for that platform. This is why even with phone apps, some developers start with just either iOS or Android or just intel Mac but not ARM mac as well. They can’t afford to maintain a team for a second code base.
CDPR spent $120m post-launch of CP2077 just on fixing all the bugs and fixing the game across far too many platforms. For big open world games hardware and software specific QA can account for half of the development time. Therefore, developing for a given platform must be weighed up against ROI as you are committing to several years of technical work during and after development.
No, it's not just tick a box, but it's less work than making a whole new second game, in order to get a whole additional platform's worth of revenue, which a studio wold have to do if they limited themselves to developing for a single platform
It's even profitable enough that a lot of studios can pay a specialist porting studio to do the work for them.
Right, but Cyberpunk was buggy on EVERY platform - it was an underdeveloped product, released when it wasn't finished. It would have been just as buggy on a single platform. That was a management failure, not a development failure.
GPD Win Max 2
GPD WIN Max 2 - Shenzhen GPD Technology Co., Ltd.
GPD WIN Max 2, Handheld game laptop, Video gam console
What a bummer for creatives and developers that MS are closing down some of the studios that they own.
Indie games could become another focus for MS. The advantages are many:
-Quicker and cheaper to develop.
-Lower expectations.
-Can run on 80-90% of gaming hardware including phones, switch, older consoles and pc's with older hardware.
However a focus on Indie titles, negate the need for cutting edge hardware. Going forward developing a gaming device is two sides, hardware and ai software stack. For both, the partner you really want to work with is not AMD but Nvidia. However that won't be cheap.
Thanks for upscaling there is scope for the next Xbox to be a PC like mini ITX box that can run games natively at 1440 but upscale to 4k using DLSS and FG.
www.theverge.com
Indie games could become another focus for MS. The advantages are many:
-Quicker and cheaper to develop.
-Lower expectations.
-Can run on 80-90% of gaming hardware including phones, switch, older consoles and pc's with older hardware.
However a focus on Indie titles, negate the need for cutting edge hardware. Going forward developing a gaming device is two sides, hardware and ai software stack. For both, the partner you really want to work with is not AMD but Nvidia. However that won't be cheap.
Thanks for upscaling there is scope for the next Xbox to be a PC like mini ITX box that can run games natively at 1440 but upscale to 4k using DLSS and FG.
Microsoft says it needs games like Hi-Fi Rush the day after killing its studio
There seems to be some confusion here.