Xbox could easily surpass PlayStation if Microsoft actually bothered to leverage the intellectual properties they’ve developed and acquired to start pumping out exclusives. If they shat out a slew of console exclusives like new Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, StarCraft, Elder Scrolls, Doom, Pillars of Eternity, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Jet Force Gemini, Conker, Gears, Halo, etc games, and actually ensured they were competently made, Sony wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.
making good games is difficult. They've tried to ensure their recent games were competently made, and failed. You don't just get good games by thowing money at it.
In addition, they need to actually make money at some point, they could make all those games but they would lose money on every single one, because Xbox doesn't get game sales anymore thanks to Game Pass.
So Microsoft needs to make just enough that is cheap enough to make Game Pass make them profit.
We're at the part of infinite growth. Can't make the numbers look bad compared to pandemic numbers so fire people until they balance out. Otherwise a shareholder might not make as much money as normal this year
Marketing hasn't been a viable way of gaining sales for years. No one watches ads, no one watches sponsored content, it doesn't translate into sales. If you have a mega budget to put your ads on the side of the road, maybe, not for most.
Also remember there are more platforms than steam, I know you want to hope that steam won't do something bad but you should remember steam does not exist in a vacuum and that steam does bad things for profit too.
1, most platforms don't have refunds
2. Youtube clicks that immediately result in not watching the video negatively affect the algorithm. So, the comparison is even more valid.
But ultimately, the game doesn't have to be good. It has to be good enough. And the actual point I'm making that I want you to understand is that games will need to be made for thr algorithm first, and for the player second. Refunds, which are not available on most platforms, are not solving anything there.
I'm sure glad uber "disrupted" the industry from what it was to a marketplace of bidding for a taxi. The system we had previously where you said "I want a taxi" and then a taxi came, and then you paid for it and the driver was paid appropriately was obviously unworkable after working for a hundred years.
In an algorithm world, the only games you would see on your steam homepage are games that are made to suit the algorithm. The only games that Steam would recommend to you are games that suit what the algorithm wants first.
I don't know how to explain this better to you. In an algorithm world, you have to make something for the algorithm first and the consumer second. If you want an example, I've given a lot with youtube, which is the prime example today.
I don't know what part of this you aren't getting, but this is all it is. Refunds and reviews don't matter because you have to make things for the algorithm for anyone to even get to that point.
The point is that refunds and reviews don't matter if no one sees your thing. To go back to the youtube analogy, creators on YouTube still have to make something that viewers find acceptable because otherwise, watch hours would be down, and they wouldn't make revenue. But they have to please the algorithm first.
You have to make something the algorithm wants before anyone gets to the point of being able to refund or review your thing.
the biggest concern for me is that game stores are going to become increasingly algorithmic to deal with this problem. Then game development becomes more about pleasing the algorithm than it does about pleasing the customer, or about making something good.
you can see this play out pretty much anywhere algorithms decide what people can see, YouTube is a good example, many channels had to just change to adapt to what the algorithm wants rather than what their audience wanted.
And of course this leads to situations where you can make something brilliant but no one will ever know, because algorithm.
Steam deck os is good, but it's important to remember that it's highly designed around the specific steam deck hardware. Using it with other kinds of hardware doesn't work so well right now. The standby mode in particular.
Because you can talk to it and it's programmed to make you think it knows a lot and is capable of doing so much more.
People expect it to do more because chatgpt was trained to make people expect it to do more.
It's all lies, of course. Chargpt fails at more than the simplest of tasks and can't use any new information because the internet is full of ai generated text now, which is poison to training models. But it's good at pretending.
usually means they’re behaving in a narrow minded, arrogant way
nope not saying that, that's something you made up. I said pc master race weirdness, where everything not pc is described as being inferior to the goal, which is pc only.
this kind of thing kills communities, and breeds the hivemindness you see on reddit. I don't' care about the downvotes because literally they mean nothing on lemmy. I care that this community has drastic shifted to the hivemind circlejerk you find on reddit in the past few weeks/months. And that this is a good example of it playing out.
I know you won't like this and we'll get right back on pressing the angry no button immediately, that's a thing. But I'm hoping the people here can sit back and try to understand that the weirdo reddit stuff, i don't know, do we have to spread it here? it just sucks to see.
yes they have banned accounts, they haven't banned accounts for uploading videos? steam has banned accounts too is that bad? what's the bad thing here.
literally sony has never done this, no one has done this aside from microsoft, I thought this community was better than this crap but i guess you can't stop the reddit from infesting everything
it's worth remembering that this is just an xbox thing, the pc master race weirdness isn't needed
edit, just to ask you to be better lemmy community, we've totally lost everything that was good about this place and now it's just become a mirror of modern reddit.
i know this falls on deaf ears, and just causes more people to press the angry down button immediately, but all I ask is that you try to be better and foster a better community.
This is a good jumping off point to talk about observer biases. Because statistics don't back up what you are describing at all, but you obviously feel this way.
There's a lot of observer biases, but in this case, it's likely that because it's in the news, you are noticing things more. Your brain is looking out for things. I've seen security guards come and go from shops many many times over the past few decades, at times of plenty and times of less. But because the government is out here trying to distract you, your brain is focused on that.
Reminder that CDProjekt is a public company, so this basically doesn't mean anything. There's a number where they can't say no (because the board would force it), and no one has offered that number (yet? microsoft is looking pretty desperate after their buyouts thus far haven't exactly set the world on fire)
Just go outside, op.