I understand there will be driver issues. I’m a developer that has to work with Oracle. NVidia doesn’t scare me… I have $3000 in content already in 4 months of XBox. It wouldn’t make sense to cheap out on the hardware. I would go Intel 12900, 32G DDR5, RTX 3090, 4Tb m.2. I’m not going to have to update anytime soon. And I will still have my XBox.
But at least with PC, I feel like I can have things under control. Imagine doing bush trips with all my airports and scenery along the way, and being able to do it without worrying I will be forever locked out on that account. Sure, there is a 99.9% chance I can do that now on XBox, but there is that 0.1% chance I won’t and then on my main account, I will be locked out and there isn’t a thing that can be done about it after that. I’m a very unlucky person. My dad’s favorite quote to me was “If it wasn’t for bad luck, you would have no luck at all”. I don’t want to go into a bush trip knowing there is that chance, and if I do get a bad leg save, to be kicking my rear that I went and did it knowing what might happen. So I use the spare account that if I get locked out, no big deal, its a disposable just for the bush trips. If I’m on PC, when I have an issue with an addon, I can report it to the developer, and I know they will be confident they can fix it. Right now, the last month that I have been reporting various XBox specific bugs, I literally feel like I have to apologize to the developers. And yes, one I had a long conversation with, and yes I ended up having to give THEM a pep talk. How do you maintain confidence after that? Then to hear other developers talking about they are reconsidering their commitment to XBox. Sure, that would be for future addons. But what about my current $3000 investment? If they are struggling this badly when there are XBox specific issues, how sure can I be that they don’t pull current product off the marketplace for XBox? There. I said it. The pink elephant in the room. Not everyone is experiencing what I’m experiencing, because not everyone has 300+ addons on XBox, of which a host of them now have specific XBox issues, and they are feeling helpless. What does that mean for my current $3000 investment?
You have some developers wondering what is going on. Its taken months for someone to look at their product on XBox. You have other developers taking guesses at what is wrong, releasing updates, and they don’t fix the problem. It was a guess. At what point does my $3000 investment end up a $2500 one with product being pulled off the marketplace? At what point do I start losing money? Yes, of course the developers like the revenue from XBox. And if it is a problem with their addon that also happens on PC, they have all the confidence in the world the issue can be resolved. Bring them an XBox specific error, and you hear about how difficult it is to test, how difficult it is to support, etc etc etc. And you can sense the frustration. I can understand their viewpoint, but I don’t think they get mine. How do you go about feeling safe with your purchases you encounter that? I’m just the consumer. Its not my fault that its so hard to develop and test on XBox. The bigger developers, yeah, they aren’t going to pull out. But what about the smaller developers. The ones whose addons only have rating counts in the teens or less. They’ve sold how many copies on XBox. If they run into issues like this, how long before they say the increase in sales isn’t worth the support costs. Since we are talking about developers that most people don’t buy products from, most of you all aren’t going to care. For me, I have to start wondering, when are they going to start pulling out, and I start losing money unless I go to PC. I didn’t want to bring that up, and I’ve been dancing around the conversation point, but yeah, there it is. I don’t like the possibility of being locked out content I bought, and I don’t like the possibility of losing content I bought. I’m not worried about what won’t come to XBox in the future. Some of the stuff that is developing XBox specific issues, its not high end stuff. There doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason what will break and what won’t. And when you talk to the developers when you do have an XBox specific issue, you hear the same level of frustration I know all too well. Remember before I mentioned Oracle driver hell? I’m at the point where my team spends so much time managing drivers, changing passwords, having to worry about Wallet, I could just go on. Probably about 20 hours a week for the team combined just goes into supporting Oracle related nonsense, and so I’m at the point where its not worth it to me and I will convert all my databases to Azure SQL. So yeah, I can definitely see if frustration builds with these smaller developers and XBox support costs go too high, they are more than likely to pull out of XBox marketplace. So now in Paul Harvey’s words, you see the rest of the story. I’m just not feeling safe with my purchases. But I’m going to point out, not everyone buys everything. Not everyone is buying the stuff I figure I might lose. Not everyone has the same issue or same viewpoint I do. The only place I feel 100% confident with my investment right now is PC.
This is my hobby. Being able to fly in the plush recliner with heat and massage, you really have no idea how big a selling point that is for me. But I don’t feel safe in it right now with my investments. So I don’t mind throwing $11K at a solution where I can feel safe (it wouldn’t be just the computer. I would have to get a computer desk, a comfy gaming chair, a monitor, and if I am having to go that far, might as well throw in VR so that investment doesn’t seem like just a lateral move). In a way I kind of feel like I have to do it.