Yes they do, I can only assume this is a combination of you not keeping up with physical media/city media, or social media internet talk, and not watching TV. There also may be a regional issue. This is especially true since they have only been aggressively pushing Gamepass since 2020 with the current strategy.
No, they don't. If they do stuff like billboards or trailer promotions in films, it's extremely selective and irregular. Social media is NOT what I'm talking about here, I specifically mentioned traditional outlets and avenues, as social media would somewhat go in-hand with WOM. I don't watch too much TV these days, but whenever I did have some time to sit around and have it on in the background on certain channels, there was much more likely a chance of me catching a PlayStation advert than an Xbox one.
Them pushing GamePass aggressively since 2020 ties in neatly with the launch of the Series systems, hence this generation. That's been my focus on this the whole time.
No it's both, because even if they were tix the content issue (MK4/Tekken compared to VF for example) they were still over relying on arcade release to sell systems primarily. If what you said wasn't the issue, then the other consoles would have sold a lot higher numbers of arcade titles outside the handful they did.
The majority of the arcade titles that were on other systems (as in, purely arcade ports) also lacked a lot of home-exclusive content, so they fit the criteria of what I'm describing. I specifically mentioned that point for a reason. Your other statement made it seem as though arcade-style games had already gone out of favor and that Sega pushing arcade or arcade-style games at all was the issue.
Except, arcade-
style games, as in games with arcade-centric game design, were still very popular going into the 32-bit generation. It's just that those games also had the sense to include a lot of content and since most of those games didn't have arcade versions, there was no situation where that content risked already being "exhausted" by the target audience before the home version came out.
PS1's biggest pushes in 1994 and 1995 were games like Tekken 1 & 2, Wipeout, Destruction Derby, Jet Moto, Battle Arena Toshinden, Loaded, Twisted Metal, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (they even got a six-month exclusivity deal for that in NA), etc. All either arcade games, or arcade-style games. Even 1P-wise in addition to what I mentioned, there was also stuff like Motor Toon Grand Prix and Parappa the Rapper, also very arcade-styled games in terms of game design.
So basically, Sega and Sony's strategy in relying on either arcade ports or arcade-styled games wasn't that much different from 1994 - most of 1996. Sony's only started to change with the release of games like Crash Bandicoot, and stuff like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider (the latter of which also came to Saturn around the same time and IIRC pushed a lot for the system between TV ads and magazines, unless Sony had marketing exclusivity).
The bigger shift towards relying less on arcade ports or arcade-centric (in terms of game design or pick-up-and-play design) for Sony happened in 1997 and onward thanks to games like Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy VII. By that time, though, Sega was releasing quite a lot of non-arcade Saturn games like the Dragon Force series, Shining the Holy Arc, Enemy Zero and in 1998 continuing that with Shining Force III, Panzer Dragoon Saga, etc. They for all intents and purposes started shifting away from relying on arcade ports and heavily arcade-centric games in pushing Saturn around the same time Sony did with PlayStation.
The only difference is, PlayStation actually persisted long enough to have that shift fully settle in as both 1P and 3P studios ramped up AAA releases given the healthy install base justifying the bigger budgets for games like MGS, Legend of Dragoon, Parasite Eve, RE2, Dino Crisis, Xenogears etc. Saturn effectively died in terms of the major market by early-mid 1998 and so AAA dev efforts on it by that point had stalled and died. Actually, they were already getting scaled by before mid-1997!
In the 360 Era at the peak, Microsoft had almost as many studios as post bethesda buyout which was ahead by only what 2? You can do a archive by year on the wikipedia page for Xbox Game studios where the page was called Microsoft Game Studios and see the old lists.
As for games of FP, Microsoft released 38 FP exclusives on 360, excluding Kinect games, before Xbox One, and 5 after. For a total of 43. 18 of these were fully in house, 3 were partially in house.
Right, meaning the other 17 games were made by external studios, with MS just publishing them. I was solely speaking about in-house 1P teams and in-house 1P releases during the 360 generation from MS.
When you break it down to internal teams, that number drops sharply from 38 to something much smaller, even more so if you don't count DLC expansions as separate releases.
You seem to be thinking of Zenimax and Activision in a bubble, for getting about the internal studios thy already had, and the acquistions they had before Zenimax, which are in several cases working on more than one project, in order to come to this conclusion.
Nope, I'm aware of Ninja Theory, Obsidian, Compulsion, inXile, Playground etc. But now that you've brought it up, it's not like we've seen much from these teams either since they were acquired. Or at least, not much that has stuck around.
Obsidian had The Outer Worlds and that kind of came and went. Playground, TBF, has Forza Horizon and that's doing pretty well. Nothing from Compulsion or inXile since their acquisitions. Hellblade II was revealed in December 2019 and almost three years later has but very scant updates, and could even be as late as 2024. I understand that teams still have projects committed to even post-acquisition, and there are transition periods, but you can't compare any of these acquisitions to Sony's of Insomniac and say they have been bearing fruit at an expedient, well-managed pace in comparison.
Game Pass has been around since 2017 nd we haven't seen any evidence f this, same as the Sony fan crying about "lower quality games" that still hasn't happened.
That's highly subjective. I sure wasn't expecting As Dusk Falls to be what it's turned out to be going from the 2020 trailer reveal, which I (and many others) presumed was concept art. The game might have a decent story, but given it's published by XGS and could've been a great chance at injecting something more narratively-driven into the Xbox catalogue, it doesn't necessarily look like a game that was capitalizing on the capacity of its funding source.
At the bare minimum it could've been something a bit more involved and gotten a lot more attention as a result.
Your Halo example is flawed. As Dusk Falls has been individually advertised more often than usual, and you are still going with an assumption based on nothing every Microsoft 1st Party game is going to be Halo level AAA with matching ad budget, that's not how this works, that's not what Sony does, it's not what MS did before the Kinect cut their studios down, this is imagination. Also the brand is Xbox, not Gamepass, Gamepass gives Access to XBOX.
Where has As Dusk Falls been individually advertised? Any of that through the traditional avenues? Or is that mostly WOM and mentions on random podcasts?
I'm not under the presumption that every MS 1P game will be Halo Infinite in terms of AAA (actually I would hope they'd be better all-around considering the myriad of issues facing that game), or have that type of marketing budget. However, one thing MS does struggle with is long-form messaging for their individual games. They clog up the vast majority of news about their games for the June Showcase and after-show, and rarely is there any OFFICIAL news (as in from the dev teams themselves, not superfans who claim to be insiders getting access to games and talking about them in elaborate write-ups) on those games until the next following year.
Even that isn't guaranteed, though. Since Everwild's reveal we've heard no further details on game mechanics, story, lore, characters, themes and in fact have heard more about its troubled development status, just indicating it was revealed way too soon. Same goes for Perfect Dark reboot, which is (or at least was) in even more troubled state. So you have that, then combined with the general lack of game-specific advertising through many of the traditional avenues and whatnot when it comes time for these games to come out, and I think that's a big problem MS still haven't solved and are pretty far away from solving.
No it's not, you aren't familiar with Xbox stuff at all are you?
I keep pretty close watch on Xbox developments, same with PlayStation ones.
Especially since the biggest flaw of Sega regarding it's games and lack of high-selling block buster sellers, is not an Xbox issue, as they don't have that issue, and with Gamepass they may never have that issue.
You're conveniently ignoring that part of the entire reason for GamePass's existence was to shore up goodwill from the dedicated Xbox fanbase in the waning years and to overcome the problem of their 1P games selling considerably less across the board. That even goes for the big marquee games like Halo and Gears.
If you want to bring up the market environment where Sonic 3 was selling less than Sonic 2, and theorize/analyze on why that happened, but not see a similar trend in MS IP like Halo and Gears of War, then that's a very selective reading on your part. If you're denying that MS's 1P games don't sell necessarily well these days (and keep in mind, they have also said that GamePass leads to more game sales, tho data suggests that's mainly for indie games seeing big WOM through the service and probably having softer debuts on other storefronts or platforms), then just look at any NPD charts, or other software charts for other regions. Heck, look at Most Played GamePass charts for Xbox while at it.
Where are the Halo numbers? Why has it not been in NPD Top 20 outside of its debut month (IIRC)? Where is Forza Horizon 5 in NPD? Yes, Xbox games have a high digital ratio, but so do PlayStation's, and many of Sony's games continue to place in Top 20, even Top 10 of NPD months after release. Same with Nintendo, who probably have the most evergreen 1P games out of the Big 3.