I really like what MS is doing with the Series S/X. I don't play video games all that much but when I do, I like turning on games that make me nostalgic for when I was a kid. So far I've bought a number of older games off the Xbox store and for games that aren't available I run the Xbox in dev mode and run a PS2 emulator.
I'm particularly impressed with XBSX2 and PCSX2, I have an OG PS2 (fat one) but I seldomly use it because when you plug it into a big screen TV the graphics are all out of whack because it was designed with older "fat" TV's in mind. The emulators though allow you to upscale graphics which makes them so much more playable on a large screen TV. Granted there are bugs and various issues you have to get over and setting up the entire system can be a little challenging and time consuming but it's hard to complain.
And overall I think the Series S is one of the best bangs for your buck in the game console space, at $299, it's much cheaper than even the PS5 digital edition that comes in at $450. Though I bought mine back during the "PS5 Crunch" where the only PS5's you could find online were all resellers that marked them up 1.5-2X the original price, so $299 versus $600-700 was a great deal.
> And overall I think the Series S is one of the best bangs for your buck in the game console space, at $299
It's funny that you think that because it's absolutely right of course, and it's a big part of what killed microsoft hopes and dreams to "forget the xone era and try and catch back to what we achieved in the 360 era".
Unlike Sony, MS didn't make both console equal beside optical drive, they made the S less performant and then made it so any game must have every features on both S and X. What this means, in effect, is that player buying the S don't lose out, that game can cut features on Xbox (rather than have it on X but not on S), that xbox dev is standardized on the S stopping the X from showing it's capacilities, and that microsoft can't react to the ps5 pro let alone use the occasion to solve that early mistake because according to their own numbers something like 70+% of their sales are S.
Coupled with the complete lack of worthy first party or dedicated IP beside Forza, this destroyed Xbox ambitions. Microsoft is going all in on gamepass, and it might very well work out in the end (I don't personally think so not until their fix their internal quality game developpement issues, and it's starting to show cracks), but they're not doing it after a nice analysis but because they realized they've so absolutely lost yet another console generation.
> that xbox dev is standardized on the S stopping the X from showing it's capacilities
I find it really hard to take this at face-value. The CPU power difference between the S and the X is negligible; it's the GPU cuts that are the biggest drawback. It makes sense to me that games on Series S get cut-back to enable playable performance, but I don't think the existence of a less-powerful GPU meaningfully limits the scalability of console titles on the bigger console.
> Coupled with the complete lack of worthy first party or dedicated IP beside Forza
That's just like, your opinion man. It's been nice watching Microsoft start publishing smaller titles in an age where the future of gaming is looking more-and-more bleak. Sony's IP library is starting to get milked dry, in comparison. The big exclusives are a Final Fantasy remake, a Demon's Souls remake, an upcoming Metal Gear Solid III remake... I've already played those games. The biggest reason I can muster to buy a PS5 is so I can play Bloodborne at a stable framerate. Sony used to have just as strong of a sell as Nintendo in this regard, but I think we're starting to see them fall from grace.
> It makes sense to me that games on Series S get cut-back to enable playable performance, but I don't think the existence of a less-powerful GPU meaningfully limits the scalability of console titles on the bigger console.
It's not so much the existence of a weaker Series S that meaningfully limits console titles, but rather Microsoft's decree that games must have full feature parity on the Series S and X; they had to make a special exception for Baldur's Gate 3 to cut features on the Series S version entirely (split-screen co-op) for it to ship on Xbox at all.
The Series S exists as a way to try and entice people into the Xbox ecosystem by drastically undercutting the PS5 in price, but it _absolutely_ hamstrings the Xbox Series X because 100% feature parity is required between the two. We have literal proof it's why some games aren't on Xbox (or wouldn't be without Microsoft bending the knee and making exceptions), pretending it's not a millstone around their neck this gen is absolutely foolish
Unfortunately it would seem that way. I don't want to point fingers, because ultimately the entire industry is going through it right now and it's really a tough time for everyone. That being said, it's a good way to frame the discussion around how successful these big-budget games can be, and whether it's even worth the risk. Digital Foundry had a great discussion on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvTQF00qtNY
In a AAA game, written in the past 15 years or so the CPU is used to handle I/O (controllers, network, "HDD" etc) and, sometimes, sound (the more modern GPUs have low latency cores to work with sound but a plain old PS4/Xbone has too much latency on the GPU to work with sound). On PC the CPU is affecting game performance because there are many layers of data transformation between the userland game and the data that GPU reads and all these are processed on the CPU, but on a console the game writes the native GPU command buffers and surfaces so there is no intermediate processing so CPU is pretty much irrelevant as long as it's fast enough to write couple megs of command buffers per frame and not skip interrupts from the I/O devices.
Sony never had an IP stable as strong as Nintendo, their exclusive have been selling like hot cakes this generation and lead their selling lists, and sales of respective consoles shows a clear preference from gamers.
At the end of the day, my point is not based on only my preferences but the actual numbers. Look up Xbox head he himself says as much : the last Gen was the worst Gen to lose, and they're terrible at making their own games.
I agree that using upscaled graphics in PCSX2 make them more playable on a modern large TV (Looking at you Gran Turismo 4 in 8k60fps) but I think - because the games _were_ designed to be played on old CRT TVs with scanlines - using an older TV makes the games feel much better. I'm planning making a retro corner with an old TV and older consoles instead of just playing on scaled up emulators.
>using an older TV makes the games feel much better
Outside a handful of enthusiasts, the vast majority of consumers are not gonna start buying CRT TVs back in their homes just to play a few vintage video games.
Especially that most CRT TVs are garbage by today's standards, and the ones that are indeed good are rare and sought after and command huge premiums on the used market.
Emulators are by far the more sensible solution for most even if they can't replicate the CRT "effect".
Insane FPS refresh rates. A different lighting technique that kind of blurred together the pixels in a vague antialias. Less tearing than their potentially cheap TV.
Microsoft's strategy is somewhere between the two, you can put an Xbox 360 disc into a newer Xbox system but what it actually does is download a recompiled version of the game and just uses the original disc as a DRM key to run it. Alternatively you can buy the game digitally and play the recompiled version without a disc, if you want.
Perhaps I'm speaking out of ignorance, but that just seems... excessive. The game's on the disc, why not just play it instead of downloading the whole damn thing?
Can someone explain why this option is preferable to just playing what's on the disc?
Edit: Three immediate, simultaneous, and helpful responses - thank you! :)
Xbox games are all VM images so im not it’s even sure it’s recompiled as much as emulated. All they are probably doing is ensuring compatibility . Dave Cutler said XBox is a variant of hyper-v.
Yep and each game comes with a weird windows os it runs the game with. XB360 was the power PC one so it has to do something to emulate it -- since hyperv doesn't emulate it may swap the OS or something
you'd have to emulate the 360 arch in software so just probably just easier to download a recompiled game than to solve all emulation challenges and edge cases
I believe that Microsoft actually does emulate the 360 [0] [1]. But compiling the game allows them to deal with some subtleties and also provide upscaled assets where possible.
I own every generation of Xbox. Multiples of most. I have gotten an incredible deal on each and every one. And the physical and digital games typically go cheap quickly. 20+ years. Not sure what their strategy is but I’ve benefited.
I don't understand how Microsoft handle's Xbox backwards compatibility on the Series S/X, but under the hood there are clearly stubs to trampoline original expected behaviors to unsupported dialog messages.
Some legacy games appear to not support split-screen anymore, as far as I can tell from the store pages of specific Xbox 360-era games.
All-in-all, it's a subpar experience that I think will only continue to be disappointing, and the only real solution is to find used hardware and play the games in the manner they were originally designed.
Anything off the digital stores will be subject to alteration, sometimes just because they can, it seems.
This does not seem an impossible problem for the likes of Microsoft. They own all of the Xbox APIs and backwards compatibility is in their DNA. Especially now that consoles are just regular computer hardware with a funny hat.
I think the business people calculated that keeping the full game library available for the initial investment of compatibility APIs is totally worth it. It becomes a huge differentiator if Sony cannot/does not follow the playbook.
APIs don't mean much here as the Xbox 360 ran a completely different architecture, that's tricky to emulate reliably on X86_AMD64. Which is why Sony gave up on the idea of emulating PS3 games.
I'm not sure how much of this applies to the X-Box X series SoC
Details on '360 compatibility.
"...certain aspects of the Xbox 360 hardware design are indeed built into the Xbox One processor - specifically, support for texture formats and audio..."[0]
I can't believe some people here are criticizing MS. I got a Series X and digital games I had bought almost 20 years ago on the very first iteration of the XBOX Digital Store simply worked with no extra fees. I don't know anyone else delivering this kind of backwards compatibility.
I had luck even with original Xbox discs that I could put into the console and start downloading the requisite files to play it. I'm not very fond of Windows, but I quite like what Microsoft does with Xbox to handle back-compat.
Games often use licensed third party assets like copyrighted music or various SW libraries for graphics or networking. That copyrighted content is licensed to them for a fixed number of years.
After that license period expires, they're no longer allowed to sell the game, unless they negociate again a new license agreement with whoever owns that IP now, which is often too much of a headache, and if they do renew it, it means a new release of the game for extra money to offset the new licensing costs.
Emulation works around that since it relies on users who already bought the content from when the license was still in effect, but again, it's and effort from Microsoft to provide the emulation environment which is something the likes of Nintendo and Sony abandoned, since it brings little revenue for the extra costs.
It's a lot more complex issue than just "all game devs = evil".
>Too bad, maybe they should've thought of that before signing those contracts.
Think about what exactly? Nobody's gonna afford to spend money to buy perpetual licenses for a games that will be on shelves only a few years. What exactly do you expect they do better?
>The subdiscussion isn't even about sales, but about not breaking existing copies.
It's contrary to what Sony and Nintendo did, where there was no backwards compatibility from the PS3 to the PS4 or from the Wii U to the Switch, and the games that were manually ported over were re-launched at full price with no discount for those who already bought the original. Microsoft are the only ones who made a significant effort to keep games working across generations with very different hardware architectures and didn't charge for the privilege of playing your existing library.
I think it's a reference to Nintendo periodically redoing their retro game technology/store and making you re-buy the same classic games library from scratch each time. Whereas you still own your rights to Xbox digital titles no matter how many console generations prior.
the team supports the subscription model of the future. until all potentially “saveable” games are saved, or at least those over a certain popularity threshold, there is customer value to be squeezed.
all the old content is valuable, because it doesn’t matter what you play, or if you play.
Honestly probably a while. Selling the same game over and over with minimal changes is quite profitable (see: call of duty, fifa, etc). Selling the same game over and over again with no changes... probably more so.
I'm particularly impressed with XBSX2 and PCSX2, I have an OG PS2 (fat one) but I seldomly use it because when you plug it into a big screen TV the graphics are all out of whack because it was designed with older "fat" TV's in mind. The emulators though allow you to upscale graphics which makes them so much more playable on a large screen TV. Granted there are bugs and various issues you have to get over and setting up the entire system can be a little challenging and time consuming but it's hard to complain.
And overall I think the Series S is one of the best bangs for your buck in the game console space, at $299, it's much cheaper than even the PS5 digital edition that comes in at $450. Though I bought mine back during the "PS5 Crunch" where the only PS5's you could find online were all resellers that marked them up 1.5-2X the original price, so $299 versus $600-700 was a great deal.