Huh.
It will launch on November 4 for $49.99, and is compatible with Xbox consoles, PC, iOS, Android, and select smart TVs.
Launch territories include Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Czechia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Guatemala, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Trinidad & Tobago, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with additional markets to follow.
So they’re clearly still chasing the “everything’s an Xbox”.
Which I still don’t get whose buying into that. How is it different than pc games, besides needing an Xbox account and I’m assuming an Xbox live subscription to play online? You’re giving Microsoft control of your games, for what exactly?
Is this only targeting existing “Xbox people”? Do those still exist?
The explanation is that XBOX is basically doing the opposite of Steam. They’re transisitoning from a hardware platform to a software platform. “Everything is an XBOX” refers to 2 things:
I don’t really know why this isn’t very clear to everyone at this point.
I get it, I just don’t get why anybody that isn’t somehow still an Xbox fanboy would buy into that.
What value are they adding? Their streaming service is terrible. Maybe it made a little sense when game pass was impossibly cheap? Even then, it’s real money to not even pretend to own your games.
So why Xbox instead of getting pc games from your preferred store, and maybe remote play from some other service if that’s your thing. It’s as many hoops to jump through as normal pc gaming, so I don’t even see the convenience and simplicity excuse that normal consoles usually get.
I totally get the pushback on the “you will own nothing” but also a lot of times, I don’t want to. I spend $1500 on a new PC every ~5 years and spend a bunch of money on games I don’t play, and miss out on others that I don’t want to spend the money on. I almost never go back and play those games ever again, other than maybe the top 1%.
In theory I might explore an option like this, but in reality I have experimented with it and it’s completely unplayable.
Yeah, for all the criticisms of Microsoft, not understanding “everything is an Xbox” is not one I understand, it seemed pretty obvious to me. Though, I suppose we’re in the minority, as I’ve heard the “what the hecc does that mean” from everyone from normies to tech literate people. I don’t get it.
Not to mention the fact that they just effectively killed their own cloud gaming platform, which was the use case where this form factor made the most sense.