How to Kill Your Brand
Well well well. After my last post I was planning on going into how I was the biggest Xbox fan back in the day and then have just lost faith in them and now Sony decided they wanted to be a disappointment too. I guess I’ll just try to go in chronological order and start with the 360 and get to now and Sony.
I got into Xbox back during the original Halo CE. During an event at school, my friends had secured a room and several TVs and brought their Xboxs to LAN Halo. It was my first time playing Halo or an Xbox but I was hooked. I can remember playing Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow, thinking of what my gamer tag should be. The 360 came out and I still think it's one of coolest consoles we’ve had. I liked how when you played co-op games on the same Xbox/TV your controller would show you which player number you were, I’m assuming that it corresponded to which screen you were on the split TV but I don’t know for certain, it would make sense to do that. At the time I had iTunes on my PC and there was NO ISSUE getting the 360 to stream my music from iTunes. I remember during Dead or Alive 4, they had wanted Master Chief to be a guest character and Bungie said no because it wouldn’t make sense for Master Chief to be there, lore wise, but they made a Spartan for them to use. Now-a-days everything is whored out to anything, especially Fortnite.
Because I had iTunes I also had an iPod. I love MP3 players and I still have one now because I’m a physical kind of a guy, but I was trying to get away from Apple, I just wasn’t happy with what they were doing at the time and so I decided to get a Zune. Of course when I got my Zune, a few weeks after Microsoft came out saying they were discontinuing Zune. Cool.
So the Xbox One was coming out. Big event at E3 and I was on board. They were talking about how you would be able to interact with games in different ways from doing things on your phone, if you had a Windows phone, with voice commands through the kinect and there were going to be TV shows/live action shorts built around game stories. Pretty cool at the time but all turned into lies. Like a good Xboxer at the time I went out and got a Windows phone. I don’t know how many games actually were tied with phones but I remember Assassin’s Creed Unity had something. You could do like other AC games do where you send out your brotherhood assassins to do missions and get resources, whatever. I liked doing that on the phone more than having to do it in game. When your assassins finish a mission a chest would show up in game for you to loot. Another thing was there would be a building and you touch the screen to ping it and you look for several icons on the building. I don’t remember what that was for but I liked having these minigames to do when I was away from the game, watching TV, whatever. Other than that, in the presentation they showed you doing something in the Dead Rising game but I don’t know if that was actually used. Quantum Break had live action episodes, basically, throughout the game, Rise Son of Rome used voice commands but after that there was really nothing using all those things Xbox was promising. At the time I think Microsoft really wanted Xbox to replace people’s cable boxes because streaming wasn’t like it is now, the cable companies were moving towards these boxes and away from just straight coaxial cables.
I remember at this time they were saying how the Xbox One was gonna have to be online all the time. At the time that didn’t matter to me. I lived on my own, I was online from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed. I remember specifically someone in the comments saying something like “I work on a nuclear submarine and this sucks” and I was just thinking “If you’re on a nuclear sub then you have other things to worry about.” But the thing that really got to me was trying to stream my music. I could not for the life of me figure out how to do it. I had the Zune program on my PC at this time and the Xbox was like “No, no, no. You NEED Xbox Music on your PC for this.” Okay, let me go download that. “WELLLLLL you NEED Windows 8.1 and YOU’RE on Windows 7.” Fuck off. After that I started to falloff from Xbox.
This is just gonna be random crap now, I don’t feel like trying to make this flow right, get over it. I remember a parody song about the PS3, “How to Kill Your Brand,” maybe that will be relative again, basically clowning on the PS3 and how the 360 was better. Then Xbox One was going on about not being able to share games and Sony making a video about how to share games with PlayStation just by handing a game to your friend which is funny now with what they’re doing. I remember when I had a PS3, I didn’t have many games but I did have Ninja Gaiden 2 Black I think? Oh, Sigma 2, apologies. I was living with my parents at the time and at night we would turn off the modem/router. Don’t know why, it was just something my mom would do but one night I wasn’t sleeping so I tried to play Ninja Gaiden but I couldn’t because I HAD to be online for some reason. Then fast forward to Xbox One times, people complaining about always online and I’m like “Pffft, I don’t care!” and now that’s exactly where Sony and PlayStation are trying to get to again.
Present day; a few days ago Sony says starting in 2028 there will no longer be any new physical games for their platform. This is after GTA 6 said it wasn’t going to have a physical disc and after Sony delisted a ton (from what I’ve heard) of movies from people’s digital libraries because they lost the licenses or didn’t want to pay to renew the licenses. Xbox is already shitting themselves left and right and now Sony is pulling this shit. Now, as far as games go, I do things both physical and digital (obviously being a PC gamer) and I don’t really have any rhyme or reason as to which version I choose when I choose. All digital games aren’t detrimental to me but I do see why people care about it and hate this change. Some people are swearing off PlayStation as a whole ect, ect but for me, my concern is the future consoles not having disc drives at all. The same reason people want their physical games is why I have physical movies, anime series, TV shows, whatever. I like it, I get it, I’m not going to search around streaming services trying to find something I could own. But, I need something to be able to play them. I’ve seen articles that blu ray manufactures are seeing a 10,000% increase in demand, don’t know if that’s true or not, but playing movies is basically the reason I keep my Xbox One S. I might have to get a blu ray player whenever I hear that they’re just going to stop making them all together and hope between my Xbox One, PS4/5 and a future blu ray player they’ll last for the next 30 or so years I might live for or I’ll be so old that I won’t care anymore.
So…
a few years ago I decided to get a PS5 was for most single player games because
I wanted to play on my TV and not put so much stuff on my PC. Like it doesn’t
really make a difference to play here on my PC or over there on the TV, it’s
just some things I’d like to play on the TV. I didn’t get it for the exclusives
but @NEETproxy let me borrow God of War and Spider-Man, I got Horizon later,
yatta yatta. Mostly I don’t care about PlayStation’s exclusives or Xbox’s for
that matter but the reason I got a PS5 over an Xbox Series (dumb names also.
Xbox is bad at naming things) because anything on Xbox is on PC so IF for some
reason there was an exclusive I wanted on PS then at least now I could play it.
But pretty much my thought was single player on PS and multiplayer on PC since
it’s free. No PS+, no Xbox Live or
So I think all digital consoles was inevitable or it was going to be inevitable for these companies to try and push it. People don’t hang out at each other’s houses as much anymore, couch co-op games are practically non-existent so there’s less reason to make physical games to bring to a buddies house. I think this will hurt Sony to some extent but how much, who knows. People will move to PC and more towards pirating. I was slightly interested in God of War Laufey but now I’m not so sure and I’m positive this will hurt the sales of that game which is too bad. Like, people are already complaining about Laufey and going digital is only going to hurt it even more from the people who were actually going to get it. Makes me feel bad for Deborah Ann Woll.
I dunno… Again, for me, I really don’t care about PlayStation’s exclusives enough to need one. If the console doesn’t have a disc drive then I don’t really need it. Consoles are much easier to deal with then PCs but I might just have to make a separate PC for playing games on my TV. I could get a long HDMI cable to connect to my TV but that kind of seems annoying; bouncing back and forth, getting the game window on my TV. Back in the day the 360 was dominating then Xbox fell on its face during the Xbox One with promises that fell apart and technology that didn’t stay relevant. Now Xbox and PlayStation are shitting the bed and Steam is releasing a PC console that is more expensive then just building your own. I have been hearing that Steam is working with more companies to make SteamOS work with more PC hardware so that could be very cool. I would very much like that. As far as all this other stuff goes, I don’t know, it’ll be interesting to see how it goes, what lawsuits come out of it and what will ultimately change. Will enough people “vote with their wallets” for it to make a difference or not? Will this make games overall cheaper if they’re all digital? This is a lot sloppier than I had planned but the Sony, no discs thing really through me off but I really don't think Sony or Microsoft know what they're doing anymore. Let me know what you think, check out some of my other posts below and I’ll be back with hopefully some happier news. Bye-bye.
GTA 6 going digital only, Xbox exclusives, technology just getting worse and worse
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