bear

Its that Stacks on Stacks game being added to Pro, not The Crew. It's getting to the point where buying games on Stadia doesn't make much sense as the chances of it being added to Pro in the near future are so high because there are so few games on the service. Kine and Trials next month I reckon.

Microsoft have already clarified that the Gammill misspoke during that Game Stack video. They do seem interested in either buying or opening a studio in Japan or somewhere else in Asia though. Spencer has said as much and a few weeks ago on the bombast Jeff Gerstmann mentioned something in passing about them being linked to Platinum.

Sony patented a bunch of stuff and people assumed that the PS5 was going to have turbo awesome backwards compatibility because literally everything a company ever files a patent on is immediately turned into something you can buy six months later. Until we start seeing some proper details on what is and isn't backwards compatible with the PS4 and PS5 there isn't much point getting worked up about what Cerny said. I thought it was reasonably clear at the time that the majority of PS4 games would work just fine on a PS5 but some might need tweaking. I'm not sure if it's just stupidity or people trolling, probably the latter tbh, but what he said seemed to get instantly twisted into "only some of the 100 most popular games will work on day one!!!, Sony hate BC".

I'm not sure why you cut out my comments on the CELL processor as that gives better context to what I said. The PS5 is clearly an evolution of the PS4. We've known since that first Wired story that Sony were placing a huge emphasis on the SSD and the benefits it would bring to the table. It's a different approach to what Microsoft have done for the Series X but they are both ultimately variations on standard PC hardware. Developers will be able to carry forward a lot of what they learned this generation. With PS3 Sony were effectively telling developers who had spent a lot time and money mastering the Emotion Engine (Christ) of the PS2 that all that knowledge was now going in the bin and they'd have to start from scratch to get the CELL processor to sing. Oh, and we're adding in this Nvidia GPU late in the process so the tools you'll be working with are all on fire and PSN is held together by string and sellotape.

It's not like a PS3. Sony might not have done a great job highlighting the benefits of their design but it's clearly been designed around fixing what they perceive to be flaws in the last generation of consoles. The PS3 was built around the idea of showcasing the CELL processor and Sony had to go to Nvidia for a graphics solution relatively late in the development of the console when it became apparent CELL wasn't going to be able to do all the heavy lifting on that front.

More calm analysis here. People are weird.

Its nowhere near an Xboxone style balls up. It was disappointing and tone deaf but they didn't announce anything that they look like they are going to have to rollback on before launch. The Xboxone was revealed with a terribly communicated plan around used games, a daft emphasis on TV, a big chunk of waffle about spending a fuckload on some NFL partnership and the bundling of Kinect.

It won't be that. NVME is a standard so there's going to be companies producing faster and cheaper drives all the time. It might take time for there to be good upgrade options available but they absolutely will arrive at some point. Probably late 2021 at the earliest though.

I wonder will MS use that SSD expansion slot in other devices or possibly license it to third party manufacturers to try and drive down the price of memory expansion over time? It looks ideal for the next update of the Surface Studio for instance.

The longer Digital Foundry video is a bit dry but it's well worth watching. Being able to brute force Gears of War:Ultimate to run at 4K and add HDR to titles like Halo 5 and Fusion Frenzy without going in and altering the games themselves is very impressive. Quick resumes for multiple games looks like something you'd get used to very quickly and miss when you went back to playing on a platform that doesn't support it. MS seem to be hugely confident in what they are building with the Series X and their willingness to show it off early reflects that. They didn't show any new games in that DF video but there was still a bunch of "oh that's clever" moments. I just hope the system, and memory cards aren't too expensive.

Only from a distance of at least two metres.

The impression I get from stuff like that Business Insider article and listening to people like Jeff Gerstmann is that the support from Google hasn't been great up to this point. I mean that both in terms of paying developers to put their games on the service and also the tools available to developers. Games like Red Dead and Doom running comparably on the One X and Stadia would seem to back that up.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/10/21173004/microsoft-xbox-series-x-xcloud-plans-features-details-gdc-2020-live-stream I don't think they'll show off or announce anything major but might be worth keeping an eye on.

I wonder what numbers MS would regard as success for this generation of Xbox. Selling Gamepass/Xcloud subscriptions seems to be the most important thing going forward so in theory at least the Series X/S could end up selling less than the Xboxone but ultimately be more successful for Microsoft if the Xcloud side of the business takes off in a big way over the lifespan of those consoles.