The next generation of consoles is expecting to give the gaming industry a much-needed boost, but the recent announcements appear to be predicting the downfall of many of the aspects of gaming that gamers currently take for granted.
In 2013, if your company or product is receiving negative attention across the internet, you have to act quickly with an open and honest response or face the wrath of your customers.
Cryptic or vague statements just don’t cut it anymore in this Information Age, and you would think that Microsoft of all companies would embrace this change in culture. Yet after neglecting to react to the always on-line debacle it appears that although the shiny new console is the future, certain attitudes belong firmly in the past.
Games such as Mad Max, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Batman: Arkham Knight desperately deserve a modern-day revisit.
"Hammerwatch II's journey to Xbox has been long and perilous. After first launching on Steam in the fall of 2023, the game finally turned up on PlayStation 5 last December. Since then, Xbox gamers who enjoyed the original Hammerwatch and the sublime Heroes of Hammerwatch have been anxiously awaiting their turn at the long-promised sequel. At last, the wait is nearly over because Hammerwatch II will hit Xbox and PlayStation 4 on April 23," says Co-Optimus.
Joe 'Three Sheets' Neate (Executive Producer): "As I’m sure you can imagine, when it comes to Sea of Thieves my days are full of numbers. Development costs, active servers, days until the next update… Sometimes, though, a truly extraordinary number stands out – a number like 40 million, which I’m incredibly pleased to say is the number of pirates who’ve now set sail in Sea of Thieves!"
Garrr... more people to walk the plank and send to Davey Jones locker.
would have been funny to release this on talk like a pirate day.
40 million have set sail...that's great. How many are sailing now? Monthly active users....when it actually matters. How many people purchased the game is another important number.
You don't get numbers like that from MS mouth pieces, they just like to say stuff like "this game was looked at 129 million time, the biggest amount of people browsing a game of this genre on xbox gamepass ever in the last 3 weeks compared to before gamepass was out (small print only 2 million bothered playing longer than 20 seconds and only 100 people are playing it concurrently)
It's all smoke and mirrors
There are usually around 10,000 concurrent users on Steam not counting Xbox or PS but really it doesn't matter as long as there are enough people on the servers to play which there always were and will be for a long time now with the PS players coming on board. Same goes for how many people bought it and how many are on GP, we aren't the accountants of these console companies so why would we care?
Reporting on MAU stats is very misleading. Other companies publish units sold, MS cannot or will not due to Game Pass. We all know that their prior startegies have not panned out so now they have to actually sell games on other consoles. In any case, SoT is doing impressive preorders on PS5 and will very likely motivate Satya to release more games other than the four indicated games on their competitor's consoles. Take note Phil is radio silent....
40 Mil across Stream, Windows 10, and Xbox. Healthy numbers for sure, but when PC is the biggest platform, I expected more. It’ll be interesting to see how it does on PlayStation. Very well could be double that player count in 6 months with PS too. It’s crazy for developers to skip the most popular platform, not sure why they’d want to, but they must have had their rea$ons.
We have all seen those videos edited on You Tube saying "TV....TV...TV"
This is also a massive misjudgement and blunder because they don't seem to know that their own customers do not actually watch TV anymore.
There really wasn't any way that they could market the Xbone and be taken seriously.
Unfortunately for them 6 months is way too shrt to rethink a strategy that they have been preparing for months now.
Lets see what they got up their sleeves at E3, thats like the other half of their vision for XOne.
the thing that is worrying is the fact that they thought it was cool to focus on everything else when they are supposed to be a gaming console. They will have plenty of games come E3 but what does this reveal say about their ultimate goal and vision about the future of gaming?
When I first read their statement about competing with Apple and Google, I said wtf! But now I know.