Great! So I can’t use a hitbox on street fighter or my choice of racing/flight sim rig in games that aren’t first person shooters because of a problem that affects a genre I’m not even playing.

What a great solution that’s not far-reaching, extremely heavy handed, and has a great potential for Microsoft to milk customers and small businesses alike! /s

A lot of devices are just adapters to allow you to play fighting, racing sim, flight sim, rhythm games with controllers from other platforms because these niche genres are even smaller on Xbox and go completely ignored by large accessories companies.

That’s not going to change once these devices are blocked. It’s a very heavy handed (and potentially lucrative) approach to stopping FPS cheaters.

They were making strides with the FGC getting SF6 and adding Guilty Gear Strive to Gamepass and then do this. Makes no sense.

If all you got from what I said is “You like Xbox” then I agree there’s no point in continuing the discussion.

Good talk.

Saying Xbox has $2.4T at their disposal is ridiculous. They are such a small part of the overall company, they don’t have the pull of, say, the Windows team or Office team. Otherwise, why would they wait a whole generation when they could have just made moves when they were being outsold 2:1 during the XBO days? People really don’t understand how close Xbox got to going the way of Mixer or Windows Phone especially with Nadella made CEO right after that launch.

Playstation understood. And that’s why they went with this scorched earth policy expecting MS to make the sensible decision to close up shop if they could get Xbox to repeat last gen. There’s really no other reason for it unless you want to believe that somehow Xbox was going to not only catch up but overtake Playstation’s massive install base, rich IP library, and crazy talented 1st party studios by just having a bunch of 3rd party games that are already on PS5. That’s laughable.

Somehow Phil Spencer convinced Nadella to invest heavily in Xbox. But realistically, Xbox division is so inconsequential to Microsoft’s success, the only way he would realistically do it is if the ROI was massive. Hence giant acquisitions and not a tit for tat bid wars against Sony on a game by game basis. Jim Ryan gambled big and he lost big. And we’ll all suffer for it. Maybe not right away because Spencer doesn’t strike me as the type of person Ryan is, but he’ll leave one day and who knows who’ll be next.

Sony acquired 4 companies while this whole thing was playing out…

A lot of fault lies with Jim “we believe in generations” Ryan being super aggressive with their backdoor deals keeping as many titles off Xbox as possible and fostering a toxic community of “Xbox has no games.” Microsoft wasn’t going to let all their Xbox investment go to waste.

Playstation has a very strong 1st party library and a huge install base carried over from their very successful PS4 run. They could have continued to dominate based on that alone, and instead chose to be hyper anti-competitive to kill competition which isn’t unfamiliar territory for them. Lack of competition is what’s really bad for consumers/gamers.

Not saying this acquisition is good. It’s definitely not for me as a physical collector that believes in preservation. And this will only provoke the arms race of acquiring everyone on both sides. Probably the only winners in all this are indie devs which will have a lot of opportunities to make deals that help them make more creative, fun games than the AAA sequel-itis or remake/remaster-thons that have kept those games stagnant.

The opposite end of the spectrum are people who feel they need to set everything at Ultra. I found that’s as unnecessary as Steam Deck users setting everything to low. You can often drop settings to high or medium without significant hit to fidelity.

The small 800p screen of the Steam Deck allows for more unnoticeable concessions on top of that.

And even with all that, if you can’t hit 60fps, 40fps at 40Hz refresh feels much better and smoother than 30 and allows for more flexibility on settings.

At the end of the day, I’ll take a smooth consistent 30 over unstable 40 or 60. But I won’t bother if I also have to do so at the lowest settings. So far, I haven’t run into anything so demanding I have to compromise both significant fidelity and frame rate.

I get people don’t like to tweak everything and just want to play. Totally fair. But the Steam Deck is great for it, if you bother.