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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

Digital-only consoles are a trap, not a blessing [thegamer.com]:

The Xbox Games Showcase [thegamer.com] may have been the best of the hours of adverts beamed into our eyeballs this weekend, but it wasn't perfect. I mean, in an ideal world we wouldn't get so mindlessly excited about spending money anyway, we'd just play the games we love and then ruminate deeply on them in the vast, cavernous libraries where we write our criticism. But it is human to want, to covet, and to plant our flag in the ground for a team that does not care about us, only how much currency we have in our wallets.

Alongside the exciting game reveals – Doom: The Dark Ages, Fable, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, South of Midnight, too many to count – Xbox revealed a brand new console: the Xbox Series X digital edition [thegamer.com]. It follows in the footsteps of PlayStation's similarly slimline console, and is terrible news for gamers the world over.

Xbox wants to get you into its ecosystem by any means possible. We've known for years that consoles are often sold at a loss because that money is made up by the vast profit margins of selling the games themselves. So if Xbox offers a low-cost console to get you hooked, more people will be able to buy those profitable games.

It seems that the digital-only Series X is an acknowledgement of the issues with the Series S. The lack of power means many developers have skipped over Xbox entirely this generation, due to the fact that Microsoft reportedly wants any game available on Xbox to be able to run on the lesser hardware as well as the big, black box.

However, I'm here to tell you that this low-price console is not the blessing you may think it is. Xbox isn't the saviour of the poor, swooping in with angel wings to offer a games console to those who previously couldn't afford it. It's a corporation that wants your money, and a digital-only console gives it the monopoly on your wallet.

[...] A digital-only console is a trap, a last gasp from Phil Spencer as he tries to boost the sales of Xbox's underperforming service. When a company is happy to acquire countless enormous game studios only to lay off swathes of the workforce (thanks, Geoff, for finally mentioning that [thegamer.com], by the way), it's clearly being mismanaged.

For years, Xbox was a footnote on Microsoft's expenses list, but now it's spending billions of dollars on acquiring studios, it's under a lot more scrutiny. The worst case scenario is that you invest in the Xbox plantation, only for Microsoft to pull the plug on the whole thing. Your games, unavailable. Your console, bricked. It seems hyperbolic but recent years of games being pulled from existence sets a precedent. At some point, it could happen to an entire ecosystem.

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