Video Games are boring. An opinion.
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.
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.
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.
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" -
INDIE Live Expo, Japan’s premiere online digital showcase series , will debut never-before-seen games & content updates across more than 100 titles on May 25th.
Go play Returnal.
There just seems to be a big rise in F2P, battle passes, co-op focused looters, and just live service in general, they all just look and feel the same to me.
Luckily there are still plenty of games I like, but I'm not liking this live service boner the industry has developed in recent years.
Most modern western games feel the same to Me.
At the risk of sounding like someone stuck on nostalgia, most modern games are just too safe and soulless to me anymore. Where are the bombastic ideas, the 12hr stories built around the fact that someone just had a really cool concept and ran with it. Every game seems like they are trying to win some best story/actor/writing award and honestly it's beyond saturated at this point. Games just take themselves too seriously, and there's certainly a place for that, but not EVERY game needs that. Bring back high budget dumb, corny and creative games, so tired of all the tryhards. Not to mention the massive amount of neglected genres, hell i would even like more GTA clones at this point, and where tf did hack and slash games go lately?
3 days after xboxes most anticipated event, xbox websites are back talking about gamepass, its like as if nothing even happened, it was so shockingly average that all xboxes sites have been silenced, gamers should not take this event as the industry being dead