TechRaptor - At one time or another I’m (Andrew Otton) sure we have all found ourselves looking at Metacritic. Sometimes we are only looking for some of the most critically acclaimed games for a particular year, another time we may just be looking at past popular games to get an idea of something we may be interested in, and yet another time we may, hopefully not too often, go to Metacritic so that we can use it as a tool for judging the worthiness of a game.
Microsoft just posted the third quarter of its 2024 fiscal financial results. The software maker made $61.9 billion in revenue and a net income of $21.9 billion during Q3. Revenue is up 17 percent, and net income has increased by 20 percent.
Xbox content + services up 62% while hardware down 31%... seems about right with the way they tout you don't need the hardware to play. People can play on their phones or smart tv or other means. I don't hardly play on my consoles directly since getting devices like the logitech g-cloud and ps portal. Which is to also say I have been playing more digital than physical because of these devices.
you should apply in MS PR team buddy, I think you will do a great job in my humble opinion :)
MS: "Xbox services and content without AB up 1%, with AB up 62%. Hardware down 31%. In total a loss of 350 mill."
darthv72: "Seems about right."
MS: "Excuse m ..."
darthv72: "I don't hardly play on my consoles directly."
MS:
What he said was facts. How he plays games is no concern of you. Don't get too mad about it.
I can tell people like you are an absolute minority..
If service is up means their fans and fanboys accepted this model and subscribed to it. The near future you will see a big decline because the service is saturated.
to you it may seem like the minority... but your bubble is shrinking because more and more are following suit. convenience is a hell of a drug and its also why physical sales only amount to 30% of overall game sales. times are changing, you either get with them or you get left behind.
But that's been ms for years. When things aren't going their way they try to change the way things are said. For instance console sales are down, they stop telling how many sold instead telling us how many hours spent in halo or headshots. So it makes sense console sales down just say people are playing on more devices then previous. What they won't say is how many xbox players jumped ship to ps5.
Hardware sales are so bad that Sony and Nintendo are blowing the sales off the water with their hardware.
If Xbox are losers, others aren’t..
Xbox already tried everything with Xbox live then subscriptions went down so much that they had to find something else. Their fans subscribed then reached saturation rather quickly.
Hardware and exclusive games is where it’s at! Keep gamers excited, announce decent software and people will support you
@shin
Well keep it simple Sony 's operating income is down 26% and Microsoft's is up 32%. No MS spin there, just facts. 😉
Cheers
MS is after diminishing consoles as a medium. They want to destroy this market because they couldnt win. MS’s vision is to dissolve console gaming.
Odd that a company that touts you dont need the hardware to play is already touting another console in the works.
They are not reliant on the HW but still want to maintain a presence (no matter how small) is a good thing. It shows commitment to the craft. It reminds me of SNK and how they made games for their own hardware (Neo Geo) while also making them for others because they knew there was a market to do so. They knew they would sell more to others but also sell to their own niche fan base.
Perfectly reasonable post down voted by insecure corporation friendly folk.... But not gamers. Real gamer want accessibility and ease of acquisition for all.... Company shills are the only ones still telling us that hardware locking people from games is good for us.
In the last two years they've started exiting the consumer market altogether. All of the newest Surface products are business models only. They can't seem to work out what they want to do with it.
Too expensive hardware when others offer the same or more for less? Good work, Green Team.
"Despite some early successes for Xbox games on rival platforms, Xbox hardware is down by a massive 31 percent this quarter."
"Without Activision Blizzard, Microsoft’s overall gaming revenue would have actually declined this quarter."
"Xbox content and services would have only been up a single percent without Activision Blizzard..."
"It looks like next quarter is going to be a similar story for gaming at Microsoft, too."
That is crazy... so A/B/K is carrying the whole Xbox gaming.
Oh and Microsoft will be fine. Windows, Office and Cloud are growing with each pc purchase.
Activision: "we gonna need a bigger rucksack/backpack please"
Microsoft: "why's that"
Activision: "to carry yo' weak ass'
Top brass have also wanted to start seeing returns on the 100 billion they have put into various Xbox related moves so seeing more multiplatform games is highly likely especially from abk
It's basically saying that PlayStation is the reason Xbox is afloat right now thinks to Ps5 versions of COD
The only growth MS will get out of the console industry is if it supports it's rivals platforms. Xbox is a pointless machine now. I can see them on a big push for live next, and they won't give up on trying to buy Steam.
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
Eventually they’ll realize the value is with the employee not the company. Buying an IP means nothing if the people who contributed are let go. They’ll get it one day.
tech is different because they buy threats and then kill them. Twitter bought Vine and did nothing with it. Despite people seemingly liking it. Could've had tiktok a decade before bytedance. go figure.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
GL compiles a list of some of the most mind-blowing video game narrative twists in recent memory, from The Last of Us to Outer Wilds
With articles like these cant you tag the games mentioned so that we can know ahead of time if there’s a spoiler to avoid?
Not clicking on your article otherwise.
Yes, use Gamerankings instead for more accuracy since it accounts for the two extra decimal places in the store.
While I think the stuff about the averages is interesting, I really doubt as much effort really goes into the average process as the author is suggesting. In a lot of ways I think it's all a lot of PR speak for "we have an advance algorithm that makes our averages a lot more meaningful than they actually are". For sake of argument, I took a look at Flower (PS4) on MC, which has a score of 91 and if you add up the scores and then divide by the number of reviews it comes out to 91.18 or the score that MC displays. Now, I don't have the time to look over every score to make sure they all match, though I doubt they would put a different score on their site if the site had a score in the first place.
In either case, neither of these things are what I consider "wrong" with Metacritic. For me, the biggest problem is that Metacritic is basically a fruit bowl and while the bowl has apples, oranges, bananas, maybe a mango and other things, they're all treated as a pear.By this I mean there is a different stats and figures, which are all changed to conform to new data and can result in skewed figures. To give you an idea, MC has a lot of sites that review games on different ratios. 1 out of 100 / 10 / 5, A - E / F, good or bad and in some cases nothing. Now, there are some people that claim that an 80, 8 and 4 mean different things, even though they're divisibly the same (4/5 or 8/10 or 80/100 is still 80%) and this maybe true. A lot of sites also toy with what exactly is considered "average", which varies from some saying it's 5 out of 10 (median), PSLS considers it a 6, several gamers and outlets consider it a 7 and Metacritic requires a 75/100 average to be "green" (this is like 61+ in every other medium). So, even if all the sites are giving the game "average" scores across the board, it still might be tanked by sites scoring things differently. Another problem I've heard of is letter graders are typically assigned a 1 / 5 score, so a C is 50, A is 100 and E is 0, which can VASTLY change the average, even though I've heard sites that consider an E as a 5/10 by default. Then there is Quarter to Three, which is based off how much the guy likes the game and crap like that shouldn't be on MC in the first place, as I consider it less helpful and relevant than even some troll reviews on Amazon or Best Buy...
Arguably another big issue with MC is that everything is viewed as something of a "snapshot". As the article mentions, they constantly talk about quality, but sites are typically only evaluated once and put on the site from then until the end of time. The problem with that is the site can change a lot in a couple of months and some writers might not meet Metacritic "standards", though they're listed simply because they work for a prestigious site. This is somewhat problematic, since it largely defeats the point of having an approval process in the first place.
I can keep getting into problems with Metacritic, but in the end it's hard to make a system that works without a lot of time and effort, which typically isn't feasible for any site. In the end, "smart" readers should find people that match their beliefs and trust their reviews or simply avoid reviews in the first place. After doing the critic thing for a number of years, there is a lot of backdoor / politics / biases / side factors that come into play and make many reviews questionable at best.
I always like to judge a game myself peoples tastes differ i only use scores of any type as a guideline.
And the world keeps on spinning.
I like to judge a game for myself, 'm currently going through my backlog. Just finished playing Brutal Legends, and now I'm currently playing Kane & Lynch....Literally playing a game released in 2007. Approximately 25 more games to go after I complete this one.