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I certainly won’t be buying another X-Box console, that’s for sure. The last few years have been absolutely shocking and any kind of good will they may have received from being the underdog (if that is even a description you can give to a mutli-billion dollar company) has totally vanished after these last lot of layoffs (and, honestly, has been pretty bloody shaky since the close of Tango Gameworks et al).
For The Phantom: The Video Game MS has been fucking the poor dev team around since day dot. That version of the game still hasn’t come out, and all trouble seems to stem from MS themselves.
Art of Play submitted the game 10 days before any other platform, but the MS still failed to approve it. To soften the blow, the team offered free Steam keys and refunds.
Later, it turned out that MS has sent the team the wrong compiler, so they had to get a new dev kit to complete the game to MS’s standards.
They sent the new version of the game off to MS, then MS laid off 9000 people. Art of Play couldn’t get in touch with anyone for ages afterwards until the AoP team got “real cranky.”
That was on July 11, and the game still hasn’t hit the MS store. I wouldn’t be surprised if Art of Play just gave up on it, and I wouldn’t blame them.
How is this any way to treat a dev team, small or no? If MS are only giving large developers the time of day, that speaks volumes about their business/ operating standards.
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When a business is all about “the big picture” and completely messes up the day-to-day work. Shame, shame, shame on Microsoft!
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Good on Arkane for standing up to Microsoft and calling them out on being complicit in genocide:
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Microsoft Wraps Up Series X/S Era
Xbox is about fun and playing games. The console, the controller, the headset, all of the devices become a reflection of the people who make them, but more importantly, of the people who choose to purchase and use them. These products matter to people.
Emphasis is mine. If they know this, then why were they so quick to abandon them while lying to everyone about doing just that? It’s like their admitting that they couldn’t care less about the people who bought their products.
Oh, wait…
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There’s a chance they are trying to get ahead of Sony on the next generation, partially because they didn’t create mid-gen refresh like the PS5 Pro and because rumour has it the PS6 dev kit is almost ready to go and doesn’t boat a huge CPU/GPU upgrade over the PS5 Pro, instead leaning heavily on upscaling.
Also both Xbox and PlayStation are rumoured to be releasing next-gen handhelds, so Xbox might want to beat Sony to the punch with theirs to lock eager early adopters in.
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The similarities between Xbox and SEGA are scary.
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Naw, Xbox is run by a much worse company and set of c-suites. Sega made mistakes. Xbox is on another level. And really it’s partially thanks to decades of MS not trusting them and not actively helping them get a greater foothold.
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The superficial resemblances are there. I agree MS is a worse company, but on a surface level the similarities are fairly striking IMO.
I’d lost them…but too tired right now. 
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I just read every post in this thread and it started off looking pretty bad for xbox. Then as I got 50 posts down the thread I glanced at my xbox sign in my nerd room and thought…hmmm should I get rid of this?
MS is pretty terrible and keeps getting worse. Excel has always sucked, I refuse to use Copilot, Edge is awful, I can’t upgrade to Win11 despite updating my bios.
I’ve never been a big xbox person anyway. I prefer Sony and to a lesser degree Nintendo. Right now my overwhelming favorite is Valve. I use my Steam Deck almost daily and can browse the store for hours during sales or just to download a demo.
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I was 100% X-Box when the One was announced (after the went back on the always online malarkey). I’ve never been a Sony fan and wasn’t really taken with the Wii U.
Over the years though, MS has totally ruined all good will I had for them. I still think the Series X is a great piece of kit, but the company is just a toxic mess of greed. Like you I’ve been loving my Steam Deck and that’s going to be my main platform going forward, especially once MS sunsets the X.
How they expect any consumer to trust them at this point is beyond me.
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Cowards. Absolute cowards.
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More AI from Microsoft. Who is surprised?
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enable the next generation of AI capabilities, that will be transformative in how you actually experience your gameplay
I like how neither Microsoft nor any of the other major video game companies can actually explain what this means. So far, it’s just a bullshit bingo checkpoint — the next “big thing” that will fall as flat as the metaverse, NFTs, blockchain games, live services, and more.
AI-driven NPCs would have to be driven by large language models, but the amount of energy needed for that would outweigh the positives by far, not to mention how immersion-breaking it could be if the LLM started roleplaying in a weird way. What’s more, games would be connected to one specific model, meaning that if the model is retired, the game is too, or the model’s responses change significantly, as we are seeing right now with the difference between ChatGPT 4 and 5. The few games that have tried this approach in the past had to deactivate that part of their games very quickly.
If the AI remembers your actions in the game and reacts to or comments on them, we already have that in games such as Bastion and Darkest Dungeon, and it worked well enough without any AI. There’s only so much you can do in a game that requires commentary. Any more than that and there’s no guarantee that the whole thing won’t break, especially because gamers will exploit the system and try to get the weirdest responses.
It can replace spoken dialogue with AI voices, but that’s not something I want in my games. I wouldn’t buy a game like that.
Imagine a game that creates missions on the fly, tailored to your play style. If you play as a bad character, imagine how the AI could go wild with violence. Imagine how difficult it would be to age-rate a game with unpredictable content. Imagine the scandals if the missions feature Nazi-like language, as language models have already demonstrated they can. People on YouTube would try to break the games in the most awful ways. I can see lawsuits on the horizon.
AI could adjust the difficulty level to suit you, making it even more difficult for the ‘get good’ crowd to compare their achievements. I am torn: on the one hand, it could help me get through more games; on the other hand, the possibilities for breaking the games are endless, and there are already so many easy ways to improve accessibility. In Days Gone, for example, a simple autocomplete button for one difficult mission would have been enough for me to see the end credits. It’s a simple solution with no additional cost, or the developer could have avoided sudden difficulty spikes as a condition for progressing in the story and not created that problem. I wonder if AI will just be used to “fix” poor game design instead of giving developers the time and training to get it right in the first place.
Procedural content could improve, but no amount of procedural content can beat handmade maps, hand-placed loot and events, and so on. AI can only take what has already been made, not create new worlds and events. There is also AI “artwork”, which I don’t like.
AI companions… I don’t even want to go there, knowing where that is already headed.
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Much of this is still experimental — AI NPCs today can quickly break immersion.
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Studios might use ‘AI’ mostly for cost-cutting (fewer writers/artists, more AI-generated filler) rather than for genuine innovation.
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AI will be used in matchmaking, preferably to match players with bots and whales, making them feel the need to buy shop items with real money.
This won’t make game development cheaper because any savings in development costs will be offset by AI costs. It will be another factor that causes games to fail when the LLM is retired. Games will require an internet connection more often. AI will turn players into even more data producers, catering to those who pay the most, and the data will mostly be used to exploit us.
This will not change the gaming landscape in the next 20 years, yet it is presented to shareholders as if it will generate vast sums of money next year.
It’s stupid, but that’s exactly what CEOs like.
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“Ah, I see you have been stealing from those pathetic, hapless farmers. Want to really ruin their day? How about we go bugger some chickens.”
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Why am I not surprised. 
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Haha. The news everywhere I look today is doomsday AI headlines. Today’s headline from The Telegraph was about Zuckerburg freezing AI hiring at Meta going forward. There’s this article on The Register about AWS CEO AWS CEO says AI replacing junior staff is 'dumbest idea' • The Register
Wonder what flipped in the simulation that caused everyone to talk about the bubble these last couple of days.
Spending hundred of billions of dollars and not getting much of it back has a funny way of culling things.
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I am sooooooooooooooo ready for the A.I. bubble to burst. I just need it to burst in a way that the scam masters behind it all actually suffer consequences. (Nah, they’ll all just be bailed out, and then move on to the next big tech scam, whatever in the world that will be. Something even more pointless, though it’s sure tough to imagine.)
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Hopefully it takes the wankers behind it out as well.
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