The people I know that like Xbox like Game Pass and Buy Once Play Anywhere. Xbox is the value proposition for people that want to play on Console + {PC/Handheld}.
I own a decent library of retro games, sized in the hundreds.
Part of my intake process is to rip my games onto a digital format. Owning the physical media, and acquiring the backup legally, gives me a strong legal foothold for creating backup discs or using emulation.
I would recommend looking at a wide variety of sources of information. Some YouTube channels, GamersNexus being one, focus heavily on spinning a gloomy narrative. By wide variety of information channels, I don't mean a different YouTube channel.
1. Q1-26 wasn't the worst performing YoY quarter for new PC sales since Covid.
2. The biggest sector hit was the low end computers. That's not usually what we are talking about with pc gaming.
3. Costs go up on PC gaming, but the costs are going up for consoles too.
4. New memory fabs are going to start coming online in 2027 and 2028. This is a short term crunch.
5. The whole interviewing someone in their living room about their bad professional experience and representing it as journalism feels icky to me.
If PR value gets panels installed faster than they otherwise would be who cares. The most important thing is we install as much solar as possible as quickly as possible, because we're killing ourselves fighting wars for other energy sources that poison our entire planet to use.
1. An Xbox Live/Playstation Plus is required for any online multiplayer functionality.
2. DRM Free still matters with multiplayer games. Minecraft is a perfect example, where you can run your own client/server and play with people, and there really doesn't need to be any other middle man involved.
3. With how good home internet is now, it's not a big deal to host game servers from your home on an old computer. Running big central servers really only matters if you care about matchmaking or games with a lot of simultaneous players.
Consumer protection is a type of regulation, but if you can brand a rule as "Consumer protection" it will poll better than "regulation" because that's how marketing works.
I don't see this as "regulation". I see this as extending the same consumer protections that existed in the era of analog physical media to the digital age.
Yes. Look at the market research. It's growing specifically fast in Asia, but there is also strong growth with North America.
Having a PC to check your email, order off amazon, and download recipes is dying. Buying a PC and using it for video games is raising. The PC hardware is getting more expensive, but the upgrade cycles are also extending. If you look at the steam hardware survey most gamers are 1-3 GPU generations behind.
If you look at the total cost of ownership PC gaming is not awful compared to consoles. It's higher, but not as high as the initial price tag makes it look. There is no monthly Playstation Plus or Xbox Live subscription. These can run between $80/yr to $240/yr. PC games often have access to deeper discounts. The PC has additional utility, and modern PC components are holding exceptional resell value.
I'm optimistic about PC gaming because if Steam begins acting as an evil gatekeeper then game developers can adopt other avenues to deliver the games to their players. It's an open platform. People are using Steam now because it adds value. People will stop using Steam if it subtracts value.
I think it's a fair comparison. Steam can change their behavior to become much more user hostile at any point, and hold our triple digit steam libraries hostage.