Xbox Game Pass - PC And Ultimate - News, Stuff And Recommendations
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There’s going to be backlash. Think it’s inevitable. With Microsoft having half the install base of Sony, don’t be surprised to see some major publisher/major retailer/Sony partnerships. Sony would be damned fools for not jumping in and making deals while retailers and some publishers are concerned.
Major retailers will be putting pressure on publishers even if publishers aren’t concerned themself.
They do know not everyone will use the service? Or that hardware sales could increase because of this
No, you don't understand gaming forums. This means that MS is just making it a valuable looking proposition and getting some money out of it now before they sell the gaming business to Amazon and this becomes a premium version of prime. #trufact #GAF'd
I love how panicked people can get every time Microsoft tries to do something big. The more crazy responses I see, the more I realize that they are on to something with this.
Oh, nowhere do I envision them streaming Xbox games in the next 10 years. There is seriously no need, imo. I think that they will keep selling Xboxes for the foreseeable future. The S will be super-duper cheap very soon...like under $100 cheap. Bank on it. Notice that the hardware is no longer fixed, but two sets of targets... could even go portable... or to another manufacturer. It really doesn't matter as much as some think.
Oh, nowhere do I envision them streaming Xbox games in the next 10 years. There is seriously no need, imo. I think that they will keep selling Xboxes for the foreseeable future. The S will be super-duper cheap very soon...like under $100 cheap. Bank on it. Notice that the hardware is no longer fixed, but two sets of targets... could even go portable... or to another manufacturer. It really doesn't matter as much as some think.
There’s lots of anxiety and panic in the industry. It’s not Microsoft’s doing but their response rings the alarm bells and makes it clearer that retailers and publishers have to keep moving in different directions.
Physical sales are going down with all types of media. People forget that before Steam, there used to be a healthy supply of physical PC games at retailers.
Game Pass isn’t the problem but rather a solution to the problem. This trend will continue and then some people will look to blame solutions to the problem as the cause rather than the effect. Microsoft is a good scapegoat.
Today the impact of Game Pass will be nominal. If Xbox succeeds and in 5 years it’s mainstream, it will have an impact. It’s naive to think otherwise.
Nope. It’s not.
As we think about long term ramifications, I could see cost cutting to traditional advertisers as well. When gamers have Game Pass, it’s easier to market whatever the new games are. They will also be more likely to get influencers to stream games if those influencers don’t have to buy them.
I pull up Netflix and it’s natural to check on what’s new. Netflix doesn’t have to advertise new shows. When they are advertising new shows, they are actually advertising the service as a whole.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/amp/20...the-console-war#click=https://t.co/D3kx00wxkF
Microsoft's new weapon in the console war
Adding new games to Xbox Game Pass at launch is a bold move that says more about Microsoft's determination to keep hard on Sony's heels than its long-term strategy
Rob Fahey
Microsoft's announcement that its first-party games for Xbox One will be available on its subscription service at launch is unquestionably a dramatic move. It's a huge step closer to the "Netflix model", in the sense that like Netflix, Microsoft will now be developing major titles not with an eye to retail sales, but rather with an eye to access numbers and subscription renewals - an enormous step for the company, the repercussions of which will be felt around the industry.
The implications of a world where players (or at least a sizeable fraction of players) are paying for games through a single subscription fee are dramatic; it changes the business relationship in fundamental and not necessarily predictable ways. One obvious question is what this would mean for DLC or other post-purchase transactions like loot boxes or in-game currency; there's a strong argument that players who access a game via a platform subscription are vastly less likely to be willing to pay for extras in that game, perhaps to the extent of rendering those business models untenable.
"There has always been an element within Microsoft that has viewed Xbox hardware as a stepping stone to something greater"
Other major questions arise from this move; one very important one addressed by my colleague Christopher Dring earlier this week is the question of what this means for Microsoft's mid- to long-term vision for its games business, and whether that's a vision that continues to focus on dedicated Xbox hardware, or sees the Netflix-for-games element becoming central to the offering.
There's no doubt that there has always been an element within Microsoft - a software and services company to its very roots - that has viewed Xbox hardware as a stepping stone to something greater. From its origins as a bulwark against Sony's threat to the living room through to the vision for Xbox One that has emerged since its rocky launch, there's always been a degree to which Xbox was designed as an extension of the Windows ecosystem; the endpoint of that design would see it evolve into a services platform that's spread across a wide range of devices (possibly though not necessarily including actual Microsoft-manufactured Xbox consoles).
That was a fine vision, I think, back when the first Xbox and even the Xbox 360 were conceived. There was a sense at that time that Windows was the only game in town with regards to home computing, and its success was attributed in no small part to the openness of the PC platform and the mostly-openness of Windows itself. For Xbox to follow the same path, establishing itself as the software and services platform that supported and tied together disparate game and entertainment software and devices, seemed like a logical second act for Microsoft.
The world, however, has changed; it is now filled up with walled gardens of one form or another, all of them encroaching upon the Windows ecosystem and the open PC platform to some degree. Apple's iOS devices, PlayStation, Switch, the diverging flavours of Android offered by Amazon, Google and others... Consumers are now engaged on a whole host more devices running on a more disparate set of platforms than they have been at any other point in the personal computer era.
"An enormous part of the appeal of Netflix is its universality... Being able to access your Xbox games on a host of different devices in the same way is clearly more challenging"
Things are held together by standards for the web - for streaming video and so on - but the operating systems and hardware people use to access those things are for the most part closed-off enclaves in software terms. Such notions move beyond the hypothetical when you get spats between companies like the growing animosity between Amazon and Google, which recently saw YouTube access being removed from Amazon's FireTV platform.
That raises a big question about the fundamental idea of a "Netflix for Games". An enormous part of the appeal of Netflix is its universality; the service can be used on almost any device you own, including devices offered by companies who actually compete with Netflix to some degree. The same goes for music services like Spotify, which are offered on iOS devices despite the existence of Apple Music. However, there's no real precedent for this with games; and where a company may find it hard to justify not allowing you to stream music or video to their device (which you can accomplish in a browser if all else fails), the notion of being able to access your Xbox games on a host of different devices in the same way is clearly more challenging and less likely to happen. Lacking that, the Xbox hardware itself remains absolutely central to the success of the platform and its services; Xbox consoles and gaming PCs are the primary (and perhaps only) potential outlets for these services.
That said, I don't think this is a flaw in Microsoft's plan, because I'm not convinced it's actually Microsoft's plan at all. It's easy to understate the importance of Xbox One sales to Microsoft, not least because the company itself has spent considerable time and effort on reassuring everyone that it's incredibly relaxed about the sales gap between Xbox One and PS4. The further ahead Sony has drawn on its romp to circa 73 million sales, the more relaxed Microsoft has insisted itself to be.
"Adding new games to a rival Xbox subscription service at launch really throws the gauntlet down to Sony"
This claim is made a little easier to swallow by the actions Microsoft has been taking over on the PC side of things, where it's been working hard to extend Xbox's software and services to encompass the Windows platform more fully; Xbox exclusives are now available on PC as well as the console, driving home the idea of "Xbox" being an umbrella brand that spans both, and the console sales being less important than some conveniently nebulous measure of success for the wider platform.
However, I think the love Microsoft is showing for the PC and its work to extend Xbox to cover that platform is something of a red herring - not least because, honestly, it's really just the company catching up to what it ought to have been doing all along. Microsoft's treatment of PC gaming since the launch of the original Xbox has always been pretty baffling, to the extent that I remain convinced it was an oversight rather than a plan. The company, which had actually been a pretty solid publisher of PC games as well as caretaker of the platform overall, completely ceded ownership of the platform when Xbox arrived, creating a vacuum that Valve eventually filled with Steam. That Microsoft has returned to taking an active interest isn't necessarily meaningful for its Xbox console strategy so much as just being the belated righting of a decade-old strategic error.
Hence, if you step back for a moment and wave Occam's Razor around dangerously, the reality is that Microsoft's dramatic subscription move this week actually makes the most sense as a pretty straight-up piece of console war strategy. One of Sony's most powerful and often underestimated weapons is PlayStation Plus; the reaction from many consumers when told that Sony gives you "free" games every month for a subscription is still pretty dramatic, and while the workings of the system (needing to log in to add the games to your library each month) are a little annoying, they're actually great psychology, because players gradually build a bigger and bigger library of free games, thus making the "cost" of ending their subscription feel higher and higher as they go along.
Adding new games to a rival Xbox subscription service at launch is an enormous leapfrogging of that value proposition, and really throws the gauntlet down to Sony. Consumers do think about these things when choosing a console, and "the one that gives you free games every month" is naturally going to lose out to "the one that lets you play all its new games for free" (yes, I know, just imagine the little asterisked caveats around the word "free" in those sentences, please).
As a move that may give Xbox One powerful momentum in 2018, perhaps enough to overcome the still-rather-anaemic nature of its release schedule. It is both eye-catching and crowd-pleasing, and it makes perfect sense simply as an effort to sell more consoles, wider strategy notwithstanding. The broader implications for the industry are going to take months if not years to work through, but the short-term implications are simple; this is going to sell a lot of Xbox One consoles.
Microsoft's new weapon in the console war
Adding new games to Xbox Game Pass at launch is a bold move that says more about Microsoft's determination to keep hard on Sony's heels than its long-term strategy
Rob Fahey
Microsoft's announcement that its first-party games for Xbox One will be available on its subscription service at launch is unquestionably a dramatic move. It's a huge step closer to the "Netflix model", in the sense that like Netflix, Microsoft will now be developing major titles not with an eye to retail sales, but rather with an eye to access numbers and subscription renewals - an enormous step for the company, the repercussions of which will be felt around the industry.
The implications of a world where players (or at least a sizeable fraction of players) are paying for games through a single subscription fee are dramatic; it changes the business relationship in fundamental and not necessarily predictable ways. One obvious question is what this would mean for DLC or other post-purchase transactions like loot boxes or in-game currency; there's a strong argument that players who access a game via a platform subscription are vastly less likely to be willing to pay for extras in that game, perhaps to the extent of rendering those business models untenable.
"There has always been an element within Microsoft that has viewed Xbox hardware as a stepping stone to something greater"
Other major questions arise from this move; one very important one addressed by my colleague Christopher Dring earlier this week is the question of what this means for Microsoft's mid- to long-term vision for its games business, and whether that's a vision that continues to focus on dedicated Xbox hardware, or sees the Netflix-for-games element becoming central to the offering.
There's no doubt that there has always been an element within Microsoft - a software and services company to its very roots - that has viewed Xbox hardware as a stepping stone to something greater. From its origins as a bulwark against Sony's threat to the living room through to the vision for Xbox One that has emerged since its rocky launch, there's always been a degree to which Xbox was designed as an extension of the Windows ecosystem; the endpoint of that design would see it evolve into a services platform that's spread across a wide range of devices (possibly though not necessarily including actual Microsoft-manufactured Xbox consoles).
That was a fine vision, I think, back when the first Xbox and even the Xbox 360 were conceived. There was a sense at that time that Windows was the only game in town with regards to home computing, and its success was attributed in no small part to the openness of the PC platform and the mostly-openness of Windows itself. For Xbox to follow the same path, establishing itself as the software and services platform that supported and tied together disparate game and entertainment software and devices, seemed like a logical second act for Microsoft.
The world, however, has changed; it is now filled up with walled gardens of one form or another, all of them encroaching upon the Windows ecosystem and the open PC platform to some degree. Apple's iOS devices, PlayStation, Switch, the diverging flavours of Android offered by Amazon, Google and others... Consumers are now engaged on a whole host more devices running on a more disparate set of platforms than they have been at any other point in the personal computer era.
"An enormous part of the appeal of Netflix is its universality... Being able to access your Xbox games on a host of different devices in the same way is clearly more challenging"
Things are held together by standards for the web - for streaming video and so on - but the operating systems and hardware people use to access those things are for the most part closed-off enclaves in software terms. Such notions move beyond the hypothetical when you get spats between companies like the growing animosity between Amazon and Google, which recently saw YouTube access being removed from Amazon's FireTV platform.
That raises a big question about the fundamental idea of a "Netflix for Games". An enormous part of the appeal of Netflix is its universality; the service can be used on almost any device you own, including devices offered by companies who actually compete with Netflix to some degree. The same goes for music services like Spotify, which are offered on iOS devices despite the existence of Apple Music. However, there's no real precedent for this with games; and where a company may find it hard to justify not allowing you to stream music or video to their device (which you can accomplish in a browser if all else fails), the notion of being able to access your Xbox games on a host of different devices in the same way is clearly more challenging and less likely to happen. Lacking that, the Xbox hardware itself remains absolutely central to the success of the platform and its services; Xbox consoles and gaming PCs are the primary (and perhaps only) potential outlets for these services.
That said, I don't think this is a flaw in Microsoft's plan, because I'm not convinced it's actually Microsoft's plan at all. It's easy to understate the importance of Xbox One sales to Microsoft, not least because the company itself has spent considerable time and effort on reassuring everyone that it's incredibly relaxed about the sales gap between Xbox One and PS4. The further ahead Sony has drawn on its romp to circa 73 million sales, the more relaxed Microsoft has insisted itself to be.
"Adding new games to a rival Xbox subscription service at launch really throws the gauntlet down to Sony"
This claim is made a little easier to swallow by the actions Microsoft has been taking over on the PC side of things, where it's been working hard to extend Xbox's software and services to encompass the Windows platform more fully; Xbox exclusives are now available on PC as well as the console, driving home the idea of "Xbox" being an umbrella brand that spans both, and the console sales being less important than some conveniently nebulous measure of success for the wider platform.
However, I think the love Microsoft is showing for the PC and its work to extend Xbox to cover that platform is something of a red herring - not least because, honestly, it's really just the company catching up to what it ought to have been doing all along. Microsoft's treatment of PC gaming since the launch of the original Xbox has always been pretty baffling, to the extent that I remain convinced it was an oversight rather than a plan. The company, which had actually been a pretty solid publisher of PC games as well as caretaker of the platform overall, completely ceded ownership of the platform when Xbox arrived, creating a vacuum that Valve eventually filled with Steam. That Microsoft has returned to taking an active interest isn't necessarily meaningful for its Xbox console strategy so much as just being the belated righting of a decade-old strategic error.
Hence, if you step back for a moment and wave Occam's Razor around dangerously, the reality is that Microsoft's dramatic subscription move this week actually makes the most sense as a pretty straight-up piece of console war strategy. One of Sony's most powerful and often underestimated weapons is PlayStation Plus; the reaction from many consumers when told that Sony gives you "free" games every month for a subscription is still pretty dramatic, and while the workings of the system (needing to log in to add the games to your library each month) are a little annoying, they're actually great psychology, because players gradually build a bigger and bigger library of free games, thus making the "cost" of ending their subscription feel higher and higher as they go along.
Adding new games to a rival Xbox subscription service at launch is an enormous leapfrogging of that value proposition, and really throws the gauntlet down to Sony. Consumers do think about these things when choosing a console, and "the one that gives you free games every month" is naturally going to lose out to "the one that lets you play all its new games for free" (yes, I know, just imagine the little asterisked caveats around the word "free" in those sentences, please).
As a move that may give Xbox One powerful momentum in 2018, perhaps enough to overcome the still-rather-anaemic nature of its release schedule. It is both eye-catching and crowd-pleasing, and it makes perfect sense simply as an effort to sell more consoles, wider strategy notwithstanding. The broader implications for the industry are going to take months if not years to work through, but the short-term implications are simple; this is going to sell a lot of Xbox One consoles.
Phil said just recently that they will probably debut a game streaming service within 3 years. But the boxes will be around a bit longer, gotta stream from something.
End of the day windows + phone and tablet app >>>> console market.
Didn't they stop doing windows phones now? So just their apps on competing phones?
Probably. In an ideal world Microsoft would want a top selling phone, Apple wants to own the home computer OS market and Google ....probably wants something too. None of them ever will without buying the other out.
Tbh the IOS and Playstore users are too huge to ignore.
Game streaming over the internet that is acceptable to enthusiasts is probably a good ways off. Not only is the broadband speed for the end user not up to snuff but the backend likely needs to evolve quite a bit as well (as in, how to serve up at scale Nvidia 1060 (and beyond) level grfx to each player session at 1080p minimum....they ain't anywhere near that yet). This is why game download is 100% the way to go currently and having a subscription service for that is the perfect idea. A years subscription is the cost of 2 $60 games. It mitigates my risk of getting a game I don't like from MS, saves me $$ (planning on buying SoT, CD3, FH4, SoD2, and Halo? Ori? anyway so that is saving at least $120 by doing game pass all year....) and I get access to decent back catalog that I haven't played. If you're smart and savvy, you can even get it for free. Not seeing the downside and $10/mo is completely reasonable whether you subscribe all year or just when it suits you.
Yeah, like I was saying, the hardware is about to get real cheap. Something with the S spec and no physical drive could easily go for $85-$95 in 1 year. Why fake it with streaming? Imagine if they went back to the taking a loss on the hardware approach again, just to serve the new Game Pass model. Again, why fake it with streaming? Just download what you want and play it on actual hardware. The hardware will be so cheap soon enough that they could practically give it away with a paid year's subscription plan. Anyone think this is crazy? Why not do it, though?
They could just do the hardware refresh for the core gamer every four years or so, keeping the pattern they just set going. They honestly don't need streaming when they have forward/backward compatibility for the foreseeable future.
OfficialSono
XBL/PSN/Nintendo - OfficialSono.
$120 a year for the new games is a deal in itself, that's cheaper than buying 2 games if you include tax. I am going to sign up and with the other titles available it's perfect for the kids.
XBL - $40.
PS Plus - $40.
EA Access - £28.
XB GP - $120.
That would cost me $220 a year for a ton of games.
XBL - $40.
PS Plus - $40.
EA Access - £28.
XB GP - $120.
That would cost me $220 a year for a ton of games.
The S wont drop below $100 with any degree of permanence (maybe a 2 day black friday deal) because of the hard drive .
Streaming is a much wider market.
A billion phones.
Half a billion tablets.
300 million PCs with just the next version of windows
A billion smart tvs
Any dongle stick
And thats just todays count. Imagine in 10 - 15 years
10% of that many devices and growing is twice as large as the most successful console.
Life finds a way
Microsoft and Sony are both looking at it this way. Sony’s current streaming isn’t the end. It’s a means to the end. It’s an alpha test towards streaming consoles. Microsoft’s Game Pass is a different way to attack the same market. There’s no secret that Microsoft wants to be on your phones, tablets and smart TVs. Netflix started on PCs and then the 360.
Right now games are driving the technologies that will power the rest of their business. When Spencer says that Xbox Live is their biggest asset, not Halo or Minecraft, this is what he means. Microsoft is moving away from being a software company and being a services company.
You’re right that in 10 years, this market will look completely different. 55 year olds will be playing Halo on their iPhones. There are technologies in the works that will essentially encase th earth in Wi-Fi. It’s sci-fi stuff but it’s happening.
Gamers should hope streaming gaming and cloud compute works. Today it’s performance isn’t good enough. If we get to a world wireless latency is low, you are talking orders of magnitude power increases for games. You are talking about power increases that aren’t reliant on new expensive hardware consumers have to purchase. This will help developers too.
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I disagree. The S was going for $189 this BF, and I do know that Black Friday and standard retail prices will be different. I still see no reason that a disc-less redesign of the S spec could not easily be below $100 within a year or two.
They could also potentially just build the spec right into other devices, such as Surface Pad.
I guess I could sum up my reservations about streaming games with calling it a solution in search of a problem.
I mean, what exactly is the gain? It's bandwidth intensive, and for what again? As every device we use gets smarter and higher def, the processing power increases as well. It seems kind of silly to not use the resources you have right there locally. Therefore, I say that in the near future, any device smart enough to handle the stream and code should also be smart enough to do the processing of say, at least the lowest game spec. For Xbox One, they have now set up precedence for two specifications under the same gaming code. They have already made scaling easy with anything powerful enough for the minimum of "S" that also runs Windows 10. I guess that would be your limitation right there. Do they want to limit this to Windows 10?
Will IPhones and Android phones have enough power to play AAA games...scaled even, in a few years? What about storage?
I believe the #1 device used to watch Game of Thrones was phones.
Would Netflix have anywhere close to the same base if it required more advanced hardware to run or a dedicated device.
I prefer local hardware as well but that’s due to the current environment. If technology continues to advance the way that’s projected, bandwidth and latency issues won’t be issues when it comes to streaming gaming in a few years. At that point, it’s opens the market to an entirely new set of consumers.
I think that future is further out than many think, at least if you want gaming to be available to as big of an audience as it is now and in UHD. Many areas still don't have true high speed internet available or have data caps, those are going to be big hurdles to overcome. Consoles are now advertising 4K when they can't really do it on a regular basis with hardware and it'll be even harder to get a constant 4K gaming experience when streaming. The recommended speed for 4K streaming of a movie is 25Mbps while the average speed in US homes is just over 18Mbps and over half of the cities in the US have no ISP competition so there is no real need for investment to improve speeds or reason to lower prices where higher speeds are available. I'm sure gaming would require even more speed than a movie due to the interactive nature, it's not as big of a deal for older games because they aren't HD to begin with let alone UHD.
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