We've been saying that Game Pass is the platform for years; I let my sub lapse, but even on PC I was nominally an Xbox gamer for years. I don't know who is doing the curation on the PC side of things, but if I were doing it myself in some kind of Ambien soaked nocturnal fugue state it would be more or less the same slate. But their This Is An Xbox campaign, which we go into in the strip, kinda hurts.
Not physically. Well, a little physically. I'm always going to be situated in the PC camp, but these were essentially PCs that went over by the teevee. If you ride out a console generation with a box that routinely killed itself in your service still came out on top, there must be some place in the vault of your heart reserved for these memories. So much of what we expect from console multiplayer is largely just that it Be Like Xbox In The Good Old Days. Parties, Achievements, Matchmaking, a lot of this stuff happened there because it could. Shit, man. I understand that it is somewhat heretical. But I even liked saying "Xbox, Record That." It was even cooler to hear your friend say it.
I don't want to be weird about it or whatever but I think the flippant tone of the campaign really misunderstands the severity of the message. I'm not sure I would even have done it, like. This is like when your dad moves out, and then when you go to his house for a court ordered visit, he shows you your new new room but it's mostly a couch and the rest of the room has all his stuff in it. Yes, it's Your Room to a certain extent. But this is about focus. Xbox was like a neighborhood bar, a place with identity and specificity; the only faction I ever swore to as a console partisan. After a message like that, I don't know what it is - and I'm not the only one.
(CW)TB out.
