Lack of disc drive on the S is my only reservation. Honestly I just don’t see any reason to buy an X or a PS5 over this if you’re not anxious for the exclusives (and lets face it, most people aren’t these days). Might just get one since I have gamepass already and use it as a media center.
I was reading rumblings of there being a digital upgrade programme for discs where you send off your disc to Microsoft and it gets converted to a digital license, but I can’t see how it will work in practice.
Does anyone remember how PSP’s UMD passport scheme worked, at least logistically?
If the new flight simulator gets ported to Series S I think I would get one. There are a few Xbox games I miss having access to after selling my One X - Natsuki Chronicles especially but the BC stuff is still playable on my 360.
I’m already on my second 4k monitor at this point, and have 2 other 4k displays around the house. The series X is definitely going to be bough, but I just don’t see it happening before sometime next year. The series S will be next in line to replace my one S digital sometime after that.
honestly it could be resolved with a pretty cheap peripheral if MS was so inclined.
Haha, exactly. It should support USB blu ray drives…
…but we know what’s really going to happen. At that price it has to be a loss leader for MS, and by not including a disc drive it’ll probably condition users into either sticking with the included game pass sub, or buying games from the Microsoft Store. If there really is a disc upgrade programme that helps them achieve that goal - encourage people to give up as much of their disc collection going into the new generation.
Not sure what catalog on Xbox One people are talking about? There’s nothing there. Exclusives were few and far between and most (all?) of them are on PC. You didn’t miss anything if you never bought an Xbox One.
It’s a nice platform to buy games on. I just bought Tony Hawk 1+2 there because it wasn’t on steam and I prefer the controller to PS4’s, as another example I got Ace Combat 7 there rather than PC because the steam release had denuvo.
Xbox One only had true exclusives early in the gen(like Forza Motorsport 5 and Halo 5) up to 2016(though it only had 1 exclusive in 2016), but since then all their Microsoft published games are also on PC. I also find Xbox One to be my least favorite Xbox console as well. Original Xbox and Xbox 360 seem to have more actual exclusives than Xbox One, lol. I’ll be surprised if Xbox Series X has any actual exclusives.
They did a good job explaining how developers will really just be targeting two GPU performance profiles, everything else remains, by and large, equal: https://youtu.be/fYtJWIxt3-M
Something I find fascinating is seeing how developers optimise for Switch’s portable and docked performance profiles, it’ll be the same with the Series S I think.
Exactly this. There is complete CPU parity in terms of cores and clock frequency. The GPU’s of both have complete feature parity as well. The main difference being the resolution target where the X variant on average will target 4x the pixel count. In terms of optimization it will not be much more effort then finetuning the resolution of the various render buffers (mostly shadow maps and lightmaps), and some LOD adjustment for ingame objects.
Surely you don’t actually believe this.
- Not everyone has a PC that can play modern games. Obviously. Most people don’t even have a desktop.
- Exclusives in general are less significant than they were outside of nintendo’s first party stuff. Basically all games now are multiplatform. Which means… there are tons of games that you might still be interested in playing that were on the XBO. Games you didn’t get to on the PS4 if you had one, or the PC if that’s where you’ve been playing.
Fanboy wankery on every forum, swear to god.
I 100% believe it. Exclusives are a huge reason people buy consoles.
You specifically exclude Nintendo in point 2 because you know the value of exclusives so you have to take them out of the equation to make a (false) point. Then you eliminate piles of other games “you didn’t get to on PS4 or the PC” because nearly every game in the last gen is on PS4, Nintendo systems, or PC, while Xbox One has about five actual console exclusives left in its library. Xbox One was a complete non-event.
Fanboy wankery indeed.
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Exclusives are the main reason I even get new consoles nowadays. I may get a multiplat on there occasionally for certain reasons but obviously most of my gaming is on PC.
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In the past I always bought PlayStation systems for the third party exclusives due to the developer relationships that Sony held especially in Japan, much like those relationships Microsoft held with shmup, visual novel, and other smaller developers in Japan with the 360.
In today’s fragmented multiplatform world where games are also easily portable between platforms things have changed, you simply miss out on a lot less now if you don’t buy a particular format but this has one particular difference - it’s the Switch and PlayStation, and PC that seem to get the bulk of the games the enthusiast is interested in, with Xbox being left out.
I think that’s changing with the pull of Game Pass, they’ve got Yakuza now, Disgaea 4 Complete launched on Game Pass this week, Nier Automata was probably ported for Game Pass licensing money.
But they still aren’t there yet. Since the PC swapped places with Xbox early this generation in publishers’ minds, the Xbox by and large struggled, and continues to struggle, to gain support from specific publishers and developers: Taito, Nippon Ichi Software, Spike Chunsoft, Acquire, Gust, Falcom, Kadokawa Games and Sega Japan to name a few have routinely passed on Xbox releases with their games.
-HOWEVER- when looking at the bigger picture of console sales success among the mainstream, rather than our own personal desires, I suspect none of the above may matter since Microsoft is keen on selling access to a service with a bundle of games.
If the Series S at $299 is still too dear then Xbox All Access will enable, say, a parent to walk out of the store having paid nothing upfront for a Series S or Series X, with two years of access to over a hundred games via Game Pass Ultimate - now including popular EA stuff like Fifa. That’s going to be compelling compared with shelling out $450-500(?) upfront for a PS5, and another $60-70 for a game.
The selection of titles on game pass are probably to tick the box for most people who aren’t already ‘into gaming’ as it were, and it pains me to write this since I can’t say I welcome any sort of traction video games as a subscription service has been getting for a number of reasons. At the same time I think Sony knows this was going to happen since they have apparently wrapped up a lot of big games in timed exclusives going into the new generation, but those big games (apparently FFXVI is one of them) were never going to land on Game Pass at launch anyway, the Game Pass subscription model doesn’t favour it.
The EA Play deal is not going to include current Madden, NHL, FIFA… it’s the one that lets you play last year’s games. Also, most of their releases take a year to get to EA Play unless you buy Premium.
Good point, it would be silly to expect such things from the EA Play bundle - the Game Pass business model doesn’t suit big new games that would earn a massive chunk of their revenue through standalone software sales after launch.
The question is whether less informed people will care though. Microsoft’s trying to sell the idea of bundling gaming as a service, with the hardware if you don’t have a PC and don’t care about streaming. I think the PS5 will get the hype among enthusiasts and Sony will very carefully control the social media messaging like they did with PS4 and its #PS4Share feature, but Microsoft probably doesn’t care either, since Game Pass licensing directly benefits from these games landing on other formats first, Game Pass later.
Personally I hope Game Pass doesn’t gain traction because I think the long term consequences won’t be good for the industry as a whole, we’re already seeing people devalue games by saying they’ll be playable for free on Game Pass, and if access to games via subscription services becomes the norm among younger generations there will be no turning back in a few decades’ time.
I’m not that concerned with it. I think rock bottom mobile experiences were a bigger threat to quality games than a subscription service. If anything, this gives developers just another way to secure financing for their games, and let’s them try new ideas.
Look at film. Before the pandemic, look at what was in theaters vs. what was on streaming services like Netflix and Prime. Theaters were dominated by a few franchises that were using recycled ideas, and all of the cool original movies were releasing on streaming services.
I see streaming services as a great avenue for independent artists.
Of course, the music industry had the opposite thing happen with Spotify and Apple music - it did devalue the medium a lot. But I don’t see how it’s really comparable to video games. Music tracks only take 2-5 minutes on average to enjoy, so the economics are all very different.
Now that I think about it more, Series S is starting to feel like a weird compromise that may not find as much success on the market that some of the gaming community are predicting.
Like, if I want a low-spec entry-price machine, the Switch is just a cooler option. While Series S will be a lot more powerful than Switch, sure, it represents this weird middle middle ground of lower specs without the portable sexiness factor. Don’t get me wrong - it’s still a tremendous value, especially with Gamepass. In fact, for the specs, it’s possibly even a better value than the Series X, dollar for dollar.
But I don’t know if the general public will truly be able to perceive that. PS5 has such an easy-to-understand message in comparison.
People are saying that the Series S will get by on value alone. But it kind of feels positioned a bit like the Gamecube - people perceived that as less powerful than the PS2 just because it had a lower price. And the value there was insane. But it just didn’t sell.
Then again, maybe this thing really will be like the Netflix of gaming and people just won’t care about the lower spec graphics. But for those people, Switch is another option. And it can still provide some dazzling visuals for the form factor.
So, I see the Series S as positioned against both the PS5 digital version AND the Switch - and that’s a really tough spot to be in.
I have no doubt, however, the the Series X will have its hardcore audience though, especially for the BC advantages it’s sure to provide.
I love the Switch, but there are a lot of people for whom it isn’t the right system – it just doesn’t have the games they want to play. If you want to play Call of Duty, the latest Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, NBA, a car game like Forza, play a non-compromised version of Fortnite, the Switch doesn’t really work.
This is going to come off as negative and console warish but I believe it (the series S) is more like the shackles of the next generation than anything else. It is the minimum specs that the majority of games will be designed around while also cutting off the low end of what you could really charge for a system. Sony will not have the lowest priced console because of it, and will not have the “most powerful” because of the Series X. The unique things that the PS5 bring that are what add cost to the system are things that multiplatform games cannot/will not be designed around. That pared with the fact that the overall design of the Series S is one that games can be made to scale well to more power, which the Series X has, is also a key point.
I also don’t think that any comparison to the switch, as a less powerful system in the same generation, is apt since I do not think it will be treated as a separate platform. Unless I’m mistaken I do not believe Microsoft is allowing “Series X exclusive” games.
Now I’m not getting either system at launch. The first time this has happened since I was buying my own systems in fact. Will see how the games have shaken out in like a year or so before going in this time.