[Vyse]

There are a lot of talented developers working under the Xbox banner now, and according to Microsoft's gaming CEO, Phil Spencer, the aim for the tech giant from here on out is to provide an ongoing stream of "great" video game content.

Phil touched on this during the same Xbox Era podcast - noting how Microsoft hasn't quite reached that point yet, as there's no "big game" for this quarter. Here's exactly what he had to say:

"We do have a lot of great games in development...We want to get to this point where there's a steady flow of great games that are coming, that our customers can predict...we're going through right now, you know, [and] we don't have a big game this quarter - so Matt Booty and the teams, and the ZeniMax teams...want to get to that point where we really have a great on-ramp for our platform and games that people can get excited about on a regular basis."

Microsoft's Game Pass service for Xbox and PC is likely a key driving factor behind Xbox wanting to maintain a "steady flow of great games" in the future - with new games coming directly to this service on day one and encouraging players to stay subscribed as well as new sign-ups.

Xbox's acquisition of Bethesda's parent company (and Activision Blizzard in the near future) will further bolster Microsoft's offerings. Some of the first-party titles to be on the lookout for include Starfield and State of Decay 3, which Phil Spencer also talked about in his latest appearance.

While Phil may not necessarily feel his studios have built up a "steady flow" of game releases just yet, on the plus side, Microsoft was recently named by Metacritic as the best publisher of last year - with an overall score average of 87.4.

Xbox Wants To Provide A 'Steady Flow Of Great Games' Moving Forward

It's not quite there yet, according to Phil

www.purexbox.com

 

[Arkam]

Cool, ill go play those promises... oh wait I cant.

 

[Stilton Disco]

I mean he's been saying the exact same things, about the exact same problems, for almost a decade now, but I'm sure this time it's true, and that steady stream of bangers really is just around the corner, for real this time!

 

[gameragodzilla]

There's a reason Microsoft decided to just buy a bunch of formerly third party studios/publishers.

 

[brap]

Phil coping hardcore.

 

[Grinchy]

The Xbox brand had such a nice momentum building up from the OG and first half of 360 and then just fell off a cliff.

And now they're just going to buy up and ruin as much of the industry as they can.

 

[quickwhips]

i love gamepass. I don't give a shit as long as there are fun games to play. Infernax is amazing and i'm loving it on xbox. Halo was disappointing for multi but i haven't played story yet as no coop. Fuck no coop phil.

 

[Musky_Cheese]

Well you made a live service game with missing content at launch and no new content after launch. This was your biggest franchise.

And your first party has been lack luster overall for many years.

So keep trying I guess

 

[CAPTAIN RAINCOAT]

Well to be fair ..once they do turn on the hose it's going to make owning an xbox console pretty irresistible with gamepass

I've spent more time on my ps5 as of late

 

[HeresJohnny]

Spencer seems to be very good at talking shit and not so good at doing shit.

 

[HeresJohnny]

The Xbox brand had such a nice momentum building up from the OG and first half of 360 and then just fell off a cliff.

And now they're just going to buy up and ruin as much of the industry as they can.

This. The 360 was such a phenomenal system, up until Don Mattrick turned it into the silicon equivalent of a Goatse pic via Kinect. Usually I just forget about pieces of shit that have no place in this business like Don Mattrick, but that son of a bitch... I still wish him ill will.

 

[Stilton Disco]

Well to be fair ..once they do turn on the hose it's going to make owning an xbox console pretty irresistible with gamepass

Which is also something I've been hearing for far more years than most games take to make.

And we know from other media subscriptions, just how low the quality becomes when you make entertainment as mass subscriber bait, not to make a product that sells individually, on it's own merits. We already deride most MS 1st releases as gamepass fodder, and with the constant delays, games announced before any real work has started, broken and content missing releases like Halo Infinite and behind the scenes problems like with Perfect Dark, I fail to see what evidence people are using to justify putting their faith in Gamepass being soemthing worth investing in and encouraging.

And that's even before getting into the economics of all such subscriptions. They're always cheap to start with,but the more subscribers they get, and the closer to market saturation the services become, they always raise prices and lower quality. ALWAYS.

Subscriptions like Netflix, Disney Plus, Gamepass, NSO and all the rest are not created to give you the best value and service as a customer, they're designed to hook you in, then exploit you, as a lazy consumer that never remembers to cancel their subscription. A resource to be exploited as efficiently as possible, as you either lose interest and forget about it, or become a slugbrain that has been conditioned to the consumption of crap.

People defending Gamepass (and the rest really), or telling everyone how great it will be, always put me in mind of pigs, happily scampering into a slaughterhouse, telling each other how amazing life in the abattoir will be, because why else does no one ever come out again?

 

[HeresJohnny]

Which is also something I've been hearing for far more years than most games take to make.

And we know from other media subscriptions, just how low the quality becomes when you make entertainment as mass subscriber bait, not to make a product that sells individually, on it's own merits. We already deride most MS 1st releases as gamepass fodder, and with the constant delays, games announced before any real work has started, broken and content missing releases like Halo Infinite and behind the scenes problems like with Perfect Dark, I fail to see what evidence people are using to justify putting their faith in Gamepass being soemthing worth investing in and encouraging.

And that's even before getting into the economics of all such subscriptions. They're always cheap to start with,but the more subscribers they get, and the closer to market saturation the services become, they always raise prices and lower quality. ALWAYS.

Subscriptions like Netflix, Disney Plus, Gamepass, NSO and all the rest are not created to give you the best value and service as a customer, they're designed to hook you in, then exploit you, as a lazy consumer that never remembers to cancel their subscription. A resource to be exploited as efficiently as possible, as you either lose interest and forget about it, or become a slugbrain that has been conditioned to the consumption of crap.

People defending Gamepass (and the rest really), or telling everyone how great it will be, always put me in mind of pigs, happily scampering into a slaughterhouse, telling each other how amazing life in the abattoir will be, because why else does no one ever come out again?

You make an excellent point. I don't know that people understand how dangerous the "well it's free, so who cares if it's shyte" mindset that comes with Gamepass is to the health of the market. For the first time, games are now being excused for being released in shitty half-baked states and the excuse is that it isn't hurting you because you're just renting it essentially. Bullshit, I say, if you are releasing a game that you don't think should be sold for $60, then it shouldn't be released as paid for content on a service like Gamepass.

My biggest fear about GP is that it's going to shit up the industry. It's leaving me wondering if it's going to be essentially like government run healthcare, where you pay just a little and when people end up dying in a waiting room or on a list the response is "well it's free, it's better than paying the greedy insurance companies!"

Is it though? I think we are all adult enough to know that nothing is ever free. And most times you get what you pay for. And if subscription based becomes the model for the gaming business, we might all come to regret it.

 

[DonDonDonPata]

People defending Gamepass (and the rest really), or telling everyone how great it will be, always put me in mind of pigs, happily scampering into a slaughterhouse, telling each other how amazing life in the abattoir will be, because why else does no one ever come out again?

By the time GamePass began I had already cancelled Netflix and PS+. A subscription is always nicest at the beginning to build the brand and then -- by design and by necessity -- slowly squeezes out all the value. GamePass is even worse since you don't get to keep anything, it's just a rental for a few months. I don't like to consooome a game just for the sake of it. I don't need every game to be a 10/10 banger but it's not like there's a lack for decent games nowadays. Why waste my time on a game just because it's temporarily free ("don't wanna miss out before it leaves GP!!") or because I'm afraid of "wasting" my subscription if I don't "make full use of it"? It's not how I engage w the hobby. It's not how I engage w other media, to be truthful, not with books or movies or music, either. A good game is good a year later, even 5 years later.

 

[Explosive Zombie]

Honest question... what was their last "great" game?

 

[Stilton Disco]

Honest question... what was their last "great" game?

The Forza Horizon games are consistently great. MS Flight Simulator and Age of Empires should really count too, although they're definitely more Windows than Xbox games.

 

[HeresJohnny]

By the time GamePass began I had already cancelled Netflix and PS+. A subscription is always nicest at the beginning to build the brand and then -- by design and by necessity -- slowly squeezes out all the value. GamePass is even worse since you don't get to keep anything, it's just a rental for a few months. I don't like to consooome a game just for the sake of it. I don't need every game to be a 10/10 banger but it's not like there's a lack for decent games nowadays. Why waste my time on a game just because it's temporarily free ("don't wanna miss out before it leaves GP!!") or because I'm afraid of "wasting" my subscription if I don't "make full use of it"? It's not how I engage w the hobby. It's not how I engage w other media, to be truthful, not with books or movies or music, either. A good game is good a year later, even 5 years later.

Especially when you consider that on the new consoles, one comes with a 1 TB drive and the other only 825 gigs, and many of the games are 70-90 gigs. I haven't figured out how people who have GP are holding all these games on their drives.

 

[DonDonDonPata]

Especially when you consider that on the new consoles, one comes with a 1 TB drive and the other only 825 gigs, and many of the games are 70-90 gigs. I haven't figured out how people who have GP are holding all these games on their drives.

Big hard drives are for people with big gaming collections.

But as long as it's a fast hard drive and you rotate out games every few months, why is anything bigger than 1TB necessary? Just delete and download. That's 10-20 games (with 2 or 3 being your multiplayer daily drivers).

 

[HeresJohnny]

Big hard drives are for people with big gaming collections.

But as long as it's a fast hard drive and you rotate out games every few months, why is anything bigger than 1TB necessary? Just delete and download. That's 10-20 games (with 2 or 3 being your multiplayer daily drivers).

Doesn't work for me, I have games from the beginning of the generation I still go back and pop in. Being faced with a forced monthly choice of what games I have to delete would jack me all up, especially as the generation wore on and the collection of really good stuff grew. Also, sometimes I don't have the time to finish a bigger game in a month or even two. Returnal took me 6 weeks to beat and that was with me being pretty hooked on it and devoting a lot more of my free time to it than usual. Same with Tsushima. And I plan on going back to both.

EDIT: And it's not like installing and reinstalling on the Xbox is a painless process even if the games weren't removed from the service. I almost sold my Series X after it took like 6 hours to install Halo Infinite. It just seems like GP forces people like me to make choices, none of which are very good.

 

[lock2k]

By the time GamePass began I had already cancelled Netflix and PS+. A subscription is always nicest at the beginning to build the brand and then -- by design and by necessity -- slowly squeezes out all the value. GamePass is even worse since you don't get to keep anything, it's just a rental for a few months. I don't like to consooome a game just for the sake of it. I don't need every game to be a 10/10 banger but it's not like there's a lack for decent games nowadays. Why waste my time on a game just because it's temporarily free ("don't wanna miss out before it leaves GP!!") or because I'm afraid of "wasting" my subscription if I don't "make full use of it"? It's not how I engage w the hobby. It's not how I engage w other media, to be truthful, not with books or movies or music, either. A good game is good a year later, even 5 years later.

Just sample them with gamepass and pirate them later.

 

[DonDonDonPata]

Just sample them with gamepass and pirate them later.

Not disagreeing, but that's too much of an effort in a hobby where pick-up-and-play used to be something people cared about. I'm already good enough at sampling a game by watching some footage and deciding if I want to play it. I rarely pick a "bad" game (per my own personal tastes) so the risk of me "wasting" money on a bad buy is very low nowadays. I don't need a curated subscription to help me "discover" or "try out" a huge variety of games.

 

[HeresJohnny]

Not disagreeing, but that's too much of an effort in a hobby where pick-up-and-play used to be something people cared about. I'm already good enough at sampling a game by watching some footage and deciding if I want to play it. I rarely pick a "bad" game (per my own personal tastes) so the risk of me "wasting" money on a bad buy is very low nowadays. I don't need a curated subscription to help me "discover" or "try out" a huge variety of games.

Which is why I'll never get rid of my Switch. It's the only real "console" I own. Buy a game. Slap it in. I'm playing in less than a minute. It values my time, which is increasingly finite these days.

 

[Grinchy]

You make an excellent point. I don't know that people understand how dangerous the "well it's free, so who cares if it's shyte" mindset that comes with Gamepass is to the health of the market. For the first time, games are now being excused for being released in shitty half-baked states and the excuse is that it isn't hurting you because you're just renting it essentially. Bullshit, I say, if you are releasing a game that you don't think should be sold for $60, then it shouldn't be released as paid for content on a service like Gamepass.

My biggest fear about GP is that it's going to shit up the industry. It's leaving me wondering if it's going to be essentially like government run healthcare, where you pay just a little and when people end up dying in a waiting room or on a list the response is "well it's free, it's better than paying the greedy insurance companies!"

Is it though? I think we are all adult enough to know that nothing is ever free. And most times you get what you pay for. And if subscription based becomes the model for the gaming business, we might all come to regret it.

That's the most surprising thing to me is how fast people were persuaded into the "I don't care if it's not good as long as I'm only paying a small rental fee" mindset.

On other platforms, you look forward to the launch of a game because you think/hope it's going to be good. On Xbox/gamepass, you look forward to...paying less money when it inevitably turns out to be mediocre? That's an insane change to a consumer's expectations.

If Sony let me pay $1 to try out SonyPass and the next God of War fucking sucks, I'm not suddenly excited that I only paid $1. I'm pissed that they put out a turd in a great franchise. I don't know how they tricked their fanbase into being so happy with mediocrity.

 

[Stilton Disco]

That's the most surprising thing to me is how fast people were persuaded into the "I don't care if it's not good as long as I'm only paying a small rental fee" mindset.

On other platforms, you look forward to the launch of a game because you think/hope it's going to be good. On Xbox/gamepass, you look forward to...paying less money when it inevitably turns out to be mediocre? That's an insane change to a consumer's expectations.

If Sony let me pay $1 to try out SonyPass and the next God of War fucking sucks, I'm not suddenly excited that I only paid $1. I'm pissed that they put out a turd in a great franchise. I don't know how they tricked their fanbase into being so happy with mediocrity.

In fairness, they'd been putting out mediocrity at full price previously, so the same shite for cheaper is infact an improvement.

 

[lock2k]

That's the most surprising thing to me is how fast people were persuaded into the "I don't care if it's not good as long as I'm only paying a small rental fee" mindset.

On other platforms, you look forward to the launch of a game because you think/hope it's going to be good. On Xbox/gamepass, you look forward to...paying less money when it inevitably turns out to be mediocre? That's an insane change to a consumer's expectations.

If Sony let me pay $1 to try out SonyPass and the next God of War fucking sucks, I'm not suddenly excited that I only paid $1. I'm pissed that they put out a turd in a great franchise. I don't know how they tricked their fanbase into being so happy with mediocrity.

To me it's a different thing that has drawn me to Gamepass.

Games are too expensive in Brazil now due to the dollar value and also because prices went up to R$ 300 per game (an enormous amount for our standards) so I end up having Gamepass to have new shit to play without going broke. But if I had the choice I would buy more new games.

 

[Grinchy]

To me it's a different thing that has drawn me to Gamepass.

Games are too expensive in Brazil now due to the dollar value and also because prices went up to R$ 300 per game (an enormous amount for our standards) so I end up having Gamepass to have new shit to play without going broke. But if I had the choice I would buy more new games.

God if I had that Brazil situation happening, I'd probably just pirate fucking everything lol

I assume PC parts are also prohibitively expensive, but maybe it's an up-front investment I'd be willing to live with to just say fuck it to the overpriced situation that goes on there.

 

[lock2k]

God if I had that Brazil situation happening, I'd probably just pirate fucking everything lol

I assume PC parts are also prohibitively expensive, but maybe it's an up-front investment I'd be willing to live with to just say fuck it to the overpriced situation that goes on there.

Many go the PC route precisely for this. I do have a PC but it's not that powerful. I can play fighting games and emulators with it so I'm happy.

Parts are expensive but the investment is good in the end.

 

[Grinchy]

Many go the PC route precisely for this. I do have a PC but it's not that powerful. I can play fighting games and emulators with it so I'm happy.

Parts are expensive but the investment is good in the end.

So you've got gamepass and can play a library of stuff for $10/month. I can see how that is helpful for your situation for the most part.

But I take it you are not playing Elden Ring at the moment? Another thing I hate about subscriptions is feeling like I'm not getting my money's worth. I'd hate to be spending $10-15/month on it and then something like ER comes out, I buy it for $60, and now I'm paying a sub that I'm not even going to use for the next month or more.

My brother in law has had an active PC gamepass subscription for over a year and a half and he played literally 2 hours of that Jedi game and didn't like it. That's it lol. Fucking $180+ down the drain because he's too much of a sloth to cancel when he's not using it. And that's the future they're dying for. And he'll tell you what a great value it is

 

[Explosive Zombie]

The Forza Horizon games are consistently great. MS Flight Simulator and Age of Empires should really count too, although they're definitely more Windows than Xbox games.

Personally I'd only be interested in giving age of empires a try. I understand all three have pretty big fan bases but I don't think of them as system sellers or in this case the sort of thing that sells people on game pass.

 

[Snes nes]

the real question is what did microsoft actually innovate on besides bad practices from the get go?

 

[lock2k]

the real question is what did microsoft actually innovate on besides bad practices from the get go?

Xbox Live brought mainstream online gaming to consoles (and all the bad shit that comes with it) lol

 

[Arkam]

the real question is what did microsoft actually innovate on besides bad practices from the get go?

Xbox Live. It created the Gold Standard (pun intended) for a console based online service. They standardized so many features into a package so tight that Sony had to copy. I can hate on MS/XBOX all day for their stupidity, but gotta give them credit where it was earned.

 

[Snes nes]

Xbox Live brought mainstream online gaming to consoles (and all the bad shit that comes with it) lol

Xbox Live. It created the Gold Standard (pun intended) for a console based online service. They standardized so many features into a package so tight that Sony had to copy. I can hate on MS/XBOX all day for their stupidity, but gotta give them credit where it was earned.

thats still a bunch of nothing though.

 

[lock2k]

thats still a bunch of nothing though.

PSN and Nintendo Switch Online existing is nothing? Whether you like it or not they changed the landscape. I like some of it, I hate some of it, but they changed the game.

 

[Nikana]

the real question is what did microsoft actually innovate on besides bad practices from the get go?

The changed the entire development process of games using their tools on the OG Xbox.

 

[Nikana]

Personally I'd only be interested in giving age of empires a try. I understand all three have pretty big fan bases but I don't think of them as system sellers or in this case the sort of thing that sells people on game pass.

I guess that would depend on your definition of system seller? Microsoft's weakest generation still sold 50 million units based on their pillar franchises. People certainly weren't buying Xbox One's for Quantum Break Sunset Overdrive. They bought them for Forza, Halo and Gears.

Edited for grammar.

 

[Snes nes]

The changed the entire development process of games using their tools on the OG Xbox.

what exactly was the tools they made?

 

[Nikana]

what exactly was the tools they made?

Direct X.

 

[Dreamlord]

A lot of hate for what is actually great value if used right. Nothing stops you from getting a one month sub, especially on a dry month with no new releases you are interested in, playing or even just sampling a bunch of games, all for a tenner. I mean, come on.

GamePass has a number of flaws, but value is not one of them.

 

[Stilton Disco]

A lot of hate for what is actually great value if used right. Nothing stops you from getting a one month sub, especially on a dry month with no new releases you are interested in, playing or even just sampling a bunch of games, all for a tenner. I mean, come on.

GamePass has a number of flaws, but value is not one of them.

Oh, it's great value now. That's how all subscription services start out.

But the cavalcade of shit, with ever rising prices and worsening quality that Netflix etc. have turned into, that is also what is going to happen with it eventually, if it continues to be a success.

Races to the bottom always start out on a high.