Games

The thumbnail image is hilarious. Quintessentially AI - some of the details are so impressive! But then... Backwards thumb stick mouse! The cable is in three pieces lol (or maybe the thumb stick mouse needs several adapters in a row)... Nonsensical single speaker? Squared heart shape mouse mat opposite the "mouse"?? Hang on why are there two pc towers? It just keeps getting worse and worse the longer you look at it lmao

I’ve released a game on PC game pass (and Steam), and I can tell you that it’s painful for the devs too, before the players ever run into these issues.

One thing that was especially frustrating is that there is no way to automate the process of uploading a build. You have to drag and drop giant files (which you first had to get hold of from the build server in a usual setup). And click buttons and stuff. And wait a lot between steps.
When we mentioned the desire to automate this, so we could automatically deploy eg nightly builds, MS sounded like that was an interesting idea they hadn’t heard of before. WTF.

And stuff like that missing will automatically mean that the quality of the build on that platform is worse. No nightly build, but only build on demand requiring human work time and frustration means no frequent testing by QA on the platform, until they absolutely have to.

It's baffling that a software company isn't able to give best software experience in their own operating system and software stack.

Yeah I treat gamepass like a demo to try the game sometimes. But if it's something I know I will play, I just buy it on steam. Its such a pain. Half the time the game won't launch. The only reason I keep it around is because my kids play on my Xbox sometimes

This is the best summary I could come up with:

That's really one of the main issues with the Xbox app — the consistency of the content delivery experience is sub-par compared to, well, Steam, which right now remains totally and absolutely the benchmark for these types of services on PC.

The Xbox app also frequently sports separated multiplayer pools that won't connect to Steam, owing to the extra hoops developers often have to do to get that working correctly.

And sure, Microsoft can't wave a magic wand and force developers to prioritize their platform over Steam — assuming they would even have the resources to do so — but for the end user, all they see is an inferior product offering with PC Game Pass branding on it.

I'm also endlessly annoyed that there's no cloud save upload visibility in the app too, which has created version mismatch scenarios for me moving between my ASUS ROG Ally, my main gaming PC, and my Xbox.

I'm not suggesting Microsoft should, or even could, simply dump its PC Game Pass operation into Battle.net, but it might be worth exploring how a different content delivery system, bypassing the aging mechanisms of the Windows 8 era, might solve a lot of these problems.

Microsoft needs to explore ways of achieving this absolutely desirable pro-consumer goal of "any game you own, on any platform you want, with all of your progress intact" — all without increasing the burden on its developer partners in the process.

The original article contains 1,754 words, the summary contains 241 words. Saved 86%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I've downloaded it on PC just because it's on game pass but when I saw some of the issues and how they were fixed on Steam but not the Xbox app, I've not played. Waiting to see if my friends will get the game and if so I'll just buy on Steam as it's a much better experience