It's a shakedown when the indie developer does it to the mega-corp It's sensible shareholder-first business best practices when the mega-corp does it to the indie developer.

What "it" are you referring to here? What is the studio doing that is bad when the roles are reversed? The article doesn't get into specifics, but all you have to do is look at the units sold for the consoles to understand why some companies might not bother with Xbox.

„It” is probably a stab in the back, if companies were capable such things. Microsoft published their previous games as Xbox exclusives so it’s safe to assume some kind of relationship existed. Microsoft stabbed lots of their employees in the back recently.

I feel like you’d have to be kinda mad to buy an Xbox over a PS5 this gen. PS is getting all sorts of new games and Xbox gets Halo 18.

It’s the budget pick. Series S sells multiples of Series X and GamePass is cheap. We live in the age of overabundance of all kinds of media so there’s is crapload of games, and exclusive situation doesn’t look _that_ bad compared to PS5, mostly because PS5 is bad too. I went with XSX because of the looks but that was before Microsoft went insane.

I'm confused, has Microsoft lost favor with people? I was under the impression that the PS5 had no exclusives whereas Xbox was bending over backwards to get new storefronts and all these games on gamepass on launch day. For the record I'm a PC Gamer, the only consoles I play are for Nintendo exclusives. So I am very much out of the loop on the situation.

Ah I can see that take, especially after reading the recent quotes from Zenimax employees about how the recent round of playoffs went too. The CEO also said "we'll first support the platform that has the most users purely out of resource reasons". He later says he expects to support all platforms eventually. So as much as I love to hate on Microsoft, this seems like more of the cold calculations of business than a response to a perfcoved slight. Xbox simply is not an attractive platform for anyone not owned by Microsoft to prioritize right now.

It's true that the PS5 has basically no exclusives, but the PS5 also has over double the market share of Xbox. Plus, porting to Xbox is a huge lift since the hardware differences between the Series X and S is like making two ports. It sounds like this studio would rather focus on a single good port to reach as many players as possible before moving to other platforms. Also, Microsoft definitely has been losing favor recently after mass layoffs (even for studios that have been successful like Virtuos) and multiple game cancellations like Perfect Dark (shuttered the whole studio) and Everwild. Zenimax supposedly had a game in early dev that Phil Spencer could barely put down, but the game was cancelled a few months later. Some folks are now wondering what the point of them buying up all these studios has been, if they're just going to cancel their projects years later after giving a thumbs up the whole time. From what I've read, it seems like this has been more so Microsoft fucking over Xbox to divert resources towards investing in AI 🤮

Xbox has more great games than I could ever play. Series S is powerful enough to run games at 1080p just fine. Gamepass seals the deal.