@silentmind: I’m not playing anything on any system. We used to get a half dozen must-play games per year. DD2 might win GOTY this year by default while being comically underwhelming.

I can’t ever remember gaming being in this bad of shape. Ever.

@deckard: You would be incorrect. The number of song routines in the movie has already been posted by Variety in an interview with Todd Phillips.

Fifteen. It’s not a troll. It’s the movie.

95% of the “players” are bots. Literally.

@chuckratm1: If their plan for years has been to get out of the hardware game, this is the slowest pullout in history.

I honestly think Microsoft doesn’t have a long term plan. They seem to just flail around like most American mega-corps chasing stockprice quarter to quarter with no long term strategy. Even Gamepass I think will fail long term. You’re never going to see an Elden Ring or a BG3 type game on Gamepass until it’s legacy software. In fact as the years go by I think we will see more and more it becomes a platform of shovelware and retro gaming.

@XAF1: Consoles ARE about the exclusives though. It’s why PS consistently wins even if Xbox has the better hardware. It’s why Nintendo is still around and why Sega as a console isn’t. Sonic was never Mario. Altered beasts didn’t make up for no Zelda. Street Racer was no Mario kart. We all knew it.

@blaznwiipspman1: I use gamepass as basically a demo platform. Subscribe for 1-2 months of the year, queue up like 10 downloads, play each of them for a couple hours, unsub.

Gamepass has probably saved me $800 or more not buying impulse games that I wouldn’t have played more than a few hours.

All my actual gaming is on the PS5.

Microsoft’s problem has never been tech or talent. It’s American corporate culture that has crippled them. Same thing that happened to Blizzard under Activision.

@Wraith3: I’m a gen Xer who was in his 20s when the prequels were released…and I can tell you from my generation with no nostalgia, Star Wars died somewhere during phantom menace.

Say what you will about the sequels, at least they look good and the acting is decent. EVERYTHING about the prequels were bad. CGI looked worse than John Carter. Acting was wooden because it was the early days of green screen acting. Dialogue is the standard Lucas-atrocious .

The 3rd is watchable, but if PM and AotC were the first SW movies made and the franchise didn’t already have a legion of adoring fans from the OG trilogy, we would have never seen the 3rd because they would have stopped making them.