InnerworldXbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform
I love how nobody here is getting me actual picture. They’re not going to sell Xbox to people anymore. What’s going to happen is they’re going to turn to a subscriber model where you have to log into a data center that they control and use your browser to play video games. Paying a monthly subscription for the privilege of playing their exclusive games. In fact I will bet money that the first product that will be introduced with this feature is going to be the highly anticipated upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6.
Mark my words. Either at the time of release or shortly thereafter they’re going to introduce the ability to subscribe to play GTA 6 in your browser on a remote gaming system. And then they’re going to phase out physical Xbox systems over the next couple of years.
This has been tried before and never worked well. What makes you think its going to work any better now?
The only thing that makes me think it might work this time is that for some reason Microsoft has this magical ability to take a bad idea, make the shittiest possible iteration of it and have it mysteriously become the most widely-adopted standard against all logic.
Why the LLM-driven scarcity in computing parts of course, and a little bit of cartel behavior when Nintendo and Sony inevitably announce the same thing next year.
sp3ctr4lIt doesn’t need to work well.
It needs to sound like it will make more money for MSFT’s board.
Microsoft Board: But Google lost so much money on Stadia!
Voice on speaker: but Google didnt have me, Bing.AI!
Microsoft Board: DONE. MAKE US RICH!
Stadia was still a system you buy. What I’m talking about here is having a browser based gaming system where any computer could be used to play games, for subscription price of course.
There are in fact currently places on the web that offer such services for Minecraft.
And I’ll bet you anything they’ll make the subscription price really low at first. Borrowing from the Netflix model… Ben wants consoles and PCS have been outmoded and no one owns anything. They jack the price up.
Stadia worked on chrome browsers. I think you needed their controller though, but I got mine for free with a Chromecast purchase.
The old “we don’t want to put any effort into creating anything good, we just want to milk this for cash until we can’t anymore.”
To play games coded by a shitty AI, full of bugs and as many microtransactions as possible …
Is the game buggy? Worry not! Microsoft™ Copilot 365™ powered by Azure™ will analyze your gameplay in realtime, detect when a bug occurs, and redirect you to an AI generated troubleshooting page.
ZaemzMy cloud computing teacher says the future of personal computing is just monitors connected to the cloud. Why couldn’t I have been born in the 70s?
dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️When computers were just a teletype attached to a mainframe?
Well, I would’ve been a baby at that point, I’d grow up just in time for the exciting home computing scene.
Sure, but realize that the current level of personal computing is a smartphone, we’re not that far off from your home “PC” just being a display, KB, mouse, and maybe an interface for some external storage and peripherals. I wouldn’t be shocked it that happenes some time in the next 10 years.
That being said, I think there will still be a significant group of people who will own their own hardware.
It won’t be GTA6. It will be an exclusive title like a rebooted Halo or Gears of War. They can’t risk losing the money on GTA when people just go to PS5 and buy the game outright there.
starman2112The Elder Scrolls 6, only available on Xbox® Game Pass© Ultimate Plus™ Cloud Gaming™®©
I said GTA 6 will be the introduction. Not the closer.
Regrettable_incidentDrug dealers don’t do that. You don’t need to create a market for drugs, if you’ve got decent stuff to sell people will buy it.
This sounds… plausible actually. They have this big stake in GPU datacenters for AI, that are (and will be) burning incredible amounts of money and are not turning a profit anytime soon. That same crazy level of investement on AI is making hardware costs go up, especially gaming hardware.
But Microsoft, being the benefactors who have inherited the company from philantropist and kids-lover Bill Gates, have thought of us! They will share a bit of their shiny GPU datacenters’ plwer for gaming and all they will be asking for is a lot of your money. I can see that.
Tattorack
djdarrenI saw a thread the other day, something like “What low-level conspiracies do you genuinely believe”; to which someone replied that they believe that OpenAI is being speedrun to bankruptcy in order for Microsoft to buy their data centres for pennies on the dollar.
And yeah, it all kinda seems that could be a credible outcome, at which point MS will have a huge amount of equipment all ready to serve game streaming to people who can no longer afford to buy a home computer to do the same.
Is it going to happen? shrug
Could it? Absolutely.
Doesn’t remote gaming require everyone to have an unmetered and fast internet connection? There’s still a lot of places where not everyone is that lucky.