Clearly you weren't playing the odds there.

Due to my many annoyances as of late...
1 Month XBOX Game Pass Ultimate (only if you are NOT a member already it says). Stupid imo, but free if you want it and not a member and might want to try it. First to pm gets it.

Good news, everybody! Level Up Your Look: Xbox and Crocs Launch Exclusive Gaming-Inspired Classic Clogs

For the man who has everything except taste and dignity.

I occasionally wear Crocs (they're comfortable in a pinch) but I wouldn't wear those if they were free.

Must…resist…FOMO…must…

^ And far from free at $80.

I wouldn't wear those if you paid me $80 each time I wore them

I was gonna say that but I mean $80 is $80.

A few days ago someone posted Black Friday console sales:
https://bsky.app/profile/matpiscatel.../3m7du6uaaec2p

I mean maybe it's viral marketing for the NEX Playground (it's basically an android box with Kinect-like games... on subscription) but geez how the mighty have fallen.

Yeah, that is pretty sad. And it almost seems like they don't even care anymore. Not even trying to hold on to what is left of its community.

Strange to spend all the time and money to build up a pretty loyal fanbase and then just turn its back on said base. Granted, I know they were always going to Pepsi in this battle, but it is like they decided to quietly quit and become Shasta.

I’ve always favored Xbox because I had Gamepass and I know people who work there, but when I was looking at Star Wars Outlaws as a title I didn’t have past franchise connections to (like AC or Far Cry), I thought maybe I should start transitioning my cross-platform purchases to PS5. I just went with Xbox again, as it’s nice to know where your games are likely to be, but that transition will probably happen sometime.

Now that they've bought so many devs, their reasoning for needing hardware has dwindled. Makes very good financial sense to turn XBOX into a service like Steam and eliminate the stand-alone hardware. Let others license the name, just like they did with the Asus handhelds.

As I said when the XSX came out, it wasn't the advancement that the PS5 was. The controller was near-identical, no force feedback like the PS5 controller. No VR peripheral. They really didn't try this generation. Then hiking up the price of their console (while not improving or refining it in any way) later in the life-cycle was definitive confirmation that they just DGAF.

I think Gamepass is the primary reason I still have an Xbox, and that train ride is about to end considering the "normal" price of Gamepass and the gradually disappearing loopholes.

I just hope what iteration the Xbox becomes, I can still keep and play all my Rock Band music. I would be scared to know how much total money I have spent on that game over the years all the way back to the first one, including instruments and whatnot. Even my DLC content has to be in the thousands at this point.

And that is not even including all the money I spent on the Guitar Hero franchise through those years as well. Luckily, I kept my DLC buying for the GH games to a bare minimum.

The XSX is a nice piece of hardware and a bit more powerful than the PS5 (though obviously outclassed by the PS5 Pro). I do think the Xbox ecosystem is impressive in ways that Sony hasn’t matched, from a superior Quick Resume to niceties like being able to download a game you don’t own from the app.

They’re definitely last in line these days when it comes to controllers (although I do find the Xbox controller more comfortable than the DualSense). I was disappointed by the lack of VR support, but the PSVR2 didn’t exactly set the world on fire and had zero sustained first party support, so maybe that was a wise decision in retrospect. (I think there’s PSVR2 is very neat but I basically never use it.)

The original Xbox was the system that got me back into console gaming, and it’s such a drag to see the state of Xbox these days.

Now I'm curious, since I don't notice the difference: what's superior about the Series X's quick resume compared to the base PS5?

Quick Resume is the ability to launch into a game incredibly fast, right where you left off without any loading screens/time. And you can swap between multiple games pretty seamlessly. I don’t think PS5 does that at all, does it?

The only downfall is it can crash multiplayer games, but you don’t really want to use that feature for those games anyway, since it would have to constantly ping a server.

Oh, I guess I never trusted it (or I never expect to play more than one game at a time). It does seem to resume for one game really quickly though.

Also the decision to make expanded memory limited to a single manufacturer's proprietary external expansion card, rather than any appropriately-specked SSD installed internally was a very expensive and unnecessary one.

Early on I don't think it made that much of a difference since everything was priced sky high anyway, but certainly as prices dropped it made a difference to the consumer.

It worked great, honestly. I’d use it to swap between one long game and one puzzle-type game all the time.

But, since moving over to a PC, I don’t entirely miss it.

This is where I agree. Dumb idea. I have an expansion card I paid like $150 for and it's barely a gig. They have a bigger one but I think it's like $300. But the Xbox controller is definitely more comfortable (as was said earlier) and easy to hold. The PS5 controller has the superior vibration and the speaker (which I couldn't care less about) and the feedback from the triggers (which is very nice). The Xbox UI is better IMO. Gamepass is better than PS Monthly or whatever the heck it's called.

If and when Xbox goes the way of Sega and says "we will just make games" then I'll jump over to PS5. But as it stands, my PS5 is my least played system. I only turn it on for exclusives and even then the last one I played was FF7 Rebirth.

PS5 is null for me now. It’s basically SW2 (Metroid: Beyond) and X/S (Ninja Gaiden 4). I like the Xbox, I think it’s a super console. I did play 2005 GoW on PS5 today and may continue to do so, but I got to get more Beyond in.