NerdPropellant

Nobody wants to say it, but we need AI in the game loops (AI npc's, etc) to make games more reactive, more interactive, more dynamic if we want the medium to compete more favorably for growth here. It has to be done tastefully and boost immersion for core audiences + attract mainstream.

Matthew Ball's report suggests interactive media formats outside gaming have eaten into gaming's growth vector pretty significantly post-COVID. Gaming has not rly evolved wrt interactivity since 360 gen.

Ha!

The avg internet speeds are above xCloud recommended specs in like, 75% of countries worldwide (and they would never be in all of those right away anyhow).

Sorry, did you say Fable Anniversary?! o.0

Think of the children Roger! :p

Bro killed Pluto! Don't give him a platform! :p

They aren't subsidizing it, btw.

Seems Valve did that on their own. Valve gave Xbox a huge hand up by having everyone comparing the two approaches 1:1 and when we get full details of both, that comparison won't be pretty.

It's a console that plays your PC games. Don't expect to have full file/desktop access but there will be apps you can hop into for the other storefronts (just as Epic said here).

Keep in mind *every console* is little more than custom OS + PC hw + closed store.

Xbox sales have nothing to do with any lack of demand. They stopped shipping at scale in summer 2022 when new post-ABK margins targets hit and they needed to erase $100-$200 per unit losses from balance sheet to hit said profit targets. They had outsold PS5 for 6 months leading into that change.

They aren't subsidizing the console. And they don't need to make $ on 3P store transactions to still make more $ on their own store than presently.

They've told us this formally in half a dozen diff ways. From Brad Smith (MS President), Satya, Phil, Jason Ronald, Sarah Bond, Lisa Su. I literally dunno how many more ways they can tell ppl what their plans are before ppl understand it.

LOVE the way they have you creating the masses. So natural you can do it on accident but not in a bad way.

Any estimate you can share wrt % of younger gamers buying new consoles? I think last year at one point the trailing 12 months to that it was like 3% of new consoles sold were to younger consumers. Curious if that is shifting/stable.

If anything those ppl should frame it to themselves as simply having 'more refined tastes than the masses', or something. But nope, they wrap their identity in validation from a market of consumers that are strangers to them (in multiple ways).

Holy shit....you're right. Jesus...

He didn't even drop his phone or stop recording....he barely made contact and other footage shows he leaned on the car for some reason, not the car moving into him.

This is a remarkable job. His phone was in his left hand and it clearly shows here in his own footage that the phone (and thus his left hand, thus his entire body) must be to the right of the vehicle. It also is clear as day she was turning to her right, away from him.

Like, a designer gets a spurt of inspiration and spends lots of their extra hrs at work on a new mechanic...great, but now do they pass that off to programmers/artists/playtesters/QA/etc after the mechanic's design has a pass or two? Those ppl might not want to set deadlines aside for it.

I've heard devs talk about this saying team leads often try to tamp down on this bc it can lead to pushing more work up to others that didn't sign up for it and interferes with their own priorities.

Curious what % of hw sales thus far in 2025 are from younger gamers.

I take it you don't work much with AI?

You can train AI to find things like misaligned geometry or jumps that are awkwardly too far/high, etc. Tons of QA involves just brute forcing super tedious actions to see where the code breaks and cataloging that. QA also doesn't generally handle what is fun or not btw. That's for play testers.

All good stuff here.

Xbox made the decision to dial back console sales bc of profit margins targets. When they made that call, they were outselling PS5 for 6 months prior.

The narrative you are trying to reinforce just is not reality.

You think internal emails are designed to sugarcoat whatever you think is really happening? Do you hear yourself right now? That makes absolutely zero sense.

Console sales were down since Xbox announced they were buying ABK. In 2022.

Are you going to also claim internal emails are 'PR' next?

I've no idea what I said you imagine to be PR jargon. We literally have internal emails where Phil Spencer talks about them constraining console supply to hit profit margins targets placed on them by Amy Hood. He notes they did it multiple times even.

Since Series consoles sell at a steep loss ($100-$200 depending on the model, as of when they decided to stop shipping at scale), erasing those sales (losses) from your books is a huge win for the margins target progress. That's why their console sales fell off a cliff. Not due to demand.