$4500??

I prefer Superbole

Lol @ Disneyland costing $4,500 for a week for two people. It's expensive but give me a break. $200 a day per person for food and activities? What activities are you doing that aren't included in the ticket? Are you both eating steaks for dinner every night? A plane ticket that would cost $200 a person is probably close enough to where you can drive for cheaper. What transportation is needed that's $300? If you got a hotel chances are it has a free shuttle. If not, the dedicated bus is like $5 a person. No need for Uber or Lyft.

It would probably be more like $1500 total for two people for the tickets (assuming they got the $300 3 day thing or whatever), let's say the hotel was $125 a night, that's another $875. And let's pretend that plane tickets were $200 each, that's another $400. Throw in food all week and you're probably just at $3k but definitely under $3.5k.

AI said it so it must be true.

I'm not sure "under 3500" is the flex you think it is but yeah you could budget a cheaper vacation. However the discount 3 day thing is a socal special, park hopper and fast pass and all the rest adds to that, and if you're not a regular you'll pay for the character dining or whatever options which do get pricey. As far as transportation just getting from LAX to Anaheim and back will set you back even if you don't rent a car. 4500 seems ridiculous but I don't think it's out of line.

But the bottom line is that this thing is going to be expensive.

Yeah, sorry this even came up as a point of discussion. I had just wanted to throw out an example of "something that is clearly always more than $1000, but cheaper than a car or diamond ring". Maybe I settled on the wrong thing.

The latest rumor is a price of about $1200 USD with the full capabilities of a $3000-$4000 PC. I highly doubt any such claims until we see one in person, but it’s not like any components are getting cheaper these days. A decent gen4 1TB drive is now almost $200, and RAM & GPUs are even worse.
I’m very skeptical about them being able to keep the price of this thing down to a level that makes it desirable, but they’re clearly aiming for the pre-built PC market now.

I do wonder if these rumors were all pre-Asha Sharma CEO era. She seems to be in tune with the gaming market in a way that recent Xbox stewards were not. I hope she'd realize that a $1200 Xbox is not going to be a success, just like a $900 XboxRogAlly, or whatever they called that thing, was not either.

With costs going nowhere but up, unless they've already procured all the chips they need I'm not sure how cheap it's going to be. 1200 I feel would be on the low end, as ridiculous as that sounds.

Memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty:

We Are Xbox

Again, all the more reason to wait and stretch out the next console generation a few years. There is absolutely no reason to release in the next couple of years every reason to hold off. I think everyone realizes that we're getting diminishing returns in terms of advancement with each console release. MS and Sony don't make much money on the consoles themselves. Claire Obscura, RE9, Pragmata have all proven that there's plenty of life left in this generation and it's not just the latest powerhouse in graphics that always sell the most. A well made and novel game can still make waves. And again are people really clamoring for the next gen of consoles? The young kids aren't tied to consoles and are playing legacy games. I feel like it's an ever increasingly smaller percent of the gaming community that are chasing graphical fidelity. Especially amongst console gamers. So why not delay the next generation when memory and chip prices stabilize? You know, like in a couple of years when China invades Taiwan. I'm sure that won't do anything to the price of tech.

More from Asha and Matt:

'The big things that we're thinking about'

Graphics advancements have absolutely peaked - stop making the games so realistic that we can see the pores in the character's faces, nobody wants that.

I wish they would have asked them about keeping backwards compatibility going, there's so many legacy games out there to give new XBox owners an immediate library of classics while they save up for new titles (or just get the Gamepass subscription).

That was a great article. I had some serious doubts about their pick for the Xbox lead but she seems to have her pulse on what's going on a lot better than I thought she would. I think dropping the price of gamepass by 30% within 2 months of taking over send a clear message. She seems to realize the ship needs to be righted.



Seems like affordability and building the user base is a priority which is good. I guess we'll see what comes of it. See, this again proves that video game companies are at their best when their back is up against the wall and they have to be scrappy to fight for their customers.

But I'm calling it here. The future of gaming consoles will be monthly payments/leases. It will be like cell phones where you sign a contract for 2-3 years and you get their system included with your gamepass sub. That's how they make it "affordable" to more people. It's a shitty business model for the consumers because like cell phones, student loans, 8 year car loans etc. the American public is too stupid to realize that's a way for corporations to jack up the price. That's how we end up with $1000 cell phones, new college graduates with mortgage like debt and the average cost of a car at $50k. Americans are stupid when it comes to financial decisions. I mean we have payment plans for buying dogs. The only thing that might hold it back is the world wide market. Video game companies rely on a huge user base to buy games and the monthly payment model is not as popular in other countries. So I don't see Sony doing this and definitely not Nintendo. But MS is an American company so maybe they lead the way?

Also:
Is this an appropriate thing for a journalist to write?

Quote:

But Sharma, with Booty...

heh..heh...

Not a flex by any means. The point is it ain’t $4,500.

There was no real reason for the last generation either. I'm kind of curious how long after the launch of the new console that old console games were coming out, because it seems like it's getting longer and longer mainly because the audience aren't moving on as quickly? Could just be my perception.

It varies more between 1st party and 3rd party. I think Sony's last holdout for the PS4 was The Show '24, about 3.5 years into the PS5 gen.

The last PS2 game came out in 2013 -- alongside the PS4/XB1 -- and the last Wii game came out in 2019, a year before the PS5/Xbox Series.

But yeah, it's especially tough now because games are so eyewateringly expensive to produce that it's not realistic to recoup on a new generation alone. Gotta wait for the install base to build up.