As former Xbox CEO Phil Spencer prepares to exit, we caught up with incoming CEO Asha Sharma and newly promoted CCO Matt Booty to learn about what the future holds for Microsoft’s gaming operation.

  • dragontology@retrofed.com
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    3 days ago

    Yeah, it’s not so much gamerscore as it’s gamer history. So if you look at my gamerscore, the actual number of points doesn’t really matter, but you can see I’ve been gaming on Xbox for like 20 years, I’ve played so many games, you can judge me as a gamer based on what I’ve played and how far I got. It’s not fair to mistreat a person based on gaming preferences, I’m just saying you get a clearer picture. So on mine you’d see a lot of RPGs, action/adventure games, point and click adventures (Dontnod/Telltale stuff), and Metroidvanias. You wouldn’t see many sports games, racing games, or simulation games, and that would tell you things about me as a gamer.

    Of course, I’d been playing video games for about 20-25 years before I ever heard the name “Xbox,” but that’s not tracked.

    We could get into how achievements are just a stupid collectible for gamers, but are used by Microsoft to monetize anonymized gaming metrics to inform publishers how their games are played. Not all of them care, and this service is part of what Microsoft charges ~30% for, it’s not an extra service. Some do, and most famously to my knowledge, it’s why you didn’t get an evil path in Fallout 4, because an overwhelming majority of Fallout 3 players went for the good karma achievements. Fallout 3 gave you achievements at levels 8, 16, 24, and 30 (the cap), but it also noted your karma level (good, neutral, or evil). And at each level it was like a stupidly overwhelming win for good, so they assumed most players didn’t want the evil option. I mean, they did give you a couple evil factions to work with (the Institute if you were scientifically evil, and the Brotherhood of Steel if you were militarily evil), but ultimately your character is a good person.