Xbox Update! Why are they making this??

The Xbox September update is here, just in time for fall. Xbox has a new console, and it's not what you think. And it's never been a better time to explore Night City. Just a reminder, if you take a look down at the description below, I have links for all sorts of Xbox gear. If you want to get in on this new generation of Xbox cloud gaming, I also have some links for some Samsung TVs that support the Xbox Game Pass app that they're coming out with. What is up, guys? Welcome to another weekend edition of Xbox Ready. I'm joined with my choomba, Jimmy. Now, I'm savoring every moment of this because we're both going out of town in just a couple of days. So you might not see the both of us on in these chairs for a while. So savor every minute. I know I am. We're going to take one week off. One week off. But in YouTube terms, that's like you're like going away for months, like locked away. So, yeah, we got a new Xbox update to talk about. I know that's pretty much all we've been talking about recently. Why do they keep updating this thing? Like, it's crazy. I feel like every week there's a new huge feature coming to Xbox. Yeah, they keep updating things like the Discord party chat situation. They keep testing new features. But this is an official rollout for everyone who owns an Xbox console. And it's pretty beefy. Lots of stuff included in this update starting with. And this is perfect for me because, you know, I just got the new Elite Series two core controller. You can change the color of your Xbox guide button on your controller if you have an Elite Series. That's funny, because I remember I saw someone do this on Reddit. You could do it on the PC with the Steam controller interface very easily just a couple of months ago. And Xbox was like, huh, I guess you can do that. Now they added it as a feature for the Xbox Series X. Pretty cool. Yeah, that's what everyone was saying in the replies when Xbox tweeted that out. They were like, you could do this on Steam like forever ago. Yes, we get it. Like for every cool feature that comes to a console, you could do it on PC like three or four years ago. Little stuff like that. Obviously, it's not going to solve all of Xbox's problems. Updating this customizable feature on your controller. I was excited about it. I have a neon sign that I have with my setup. It's the Xbox ready neon sign that I showed you. Yeah, I saw it on Twitter last night. Yeah, it glows bright green. And then I have my other lights glowing green when I'm playing Xbox and I switch it up when I play other stuff. And now I can match that guide button to those lights. Very pleased. I was super excited about it. And it was very easy, too. So all you have to do is one own an elite series to controller. Yeah. To go to your profile. They have a section now that just has color. And if you go to that, it will give you all sorts of options, not just green, not just white, blue, red, purple, yellow, you name it. That's pretty cool. The two tone look of the actual white controller makes it kind of fun, too, because you're getting a little extra color in there. The update I saw in here that I was excited about is with the Xbox game bar on PC. So you can share a link from this to a phone with texting and discord message pretty much anywhere you want. And then people will be able to see your captures on the cloud and hopefully download them, because that's the issue I faced is getting these things off my computer and into the cloud or on my phone. It's a lot trickier on a PC than it is on a PS5, or it just automatically uploads it to the app for you. Yeah, there's been a lot of back and forth with Xbox and, you know, their game sharing game capture. You know, remember when everyone was mad that they took the ability to share your screenshots directly to Twitter from your Xbox? Yeah, that was weird. And everyone was like, what the hell? And they were like, no, no, no, just kidding. Just kidding. We're going to work. So, yeah, they keep bouncing back and forth between, you know, ease of use when it comes to DVR and game capture. It's very interesting. But yeah, I think that's a cool update that they threw in. They also threw in some, you know, default storage options when you're installing games on your Xbox console, right? So you can go and say, hey, every game that I download that's optimized for the Series X and S, go ahead and put that in my internal storage. But all the backwards compatible stuff, Xbox One games, Xbox 360, OG Xbox. You know what? When I download those games, go ahead and just put them on my external drive. You don't have to go and like move them manually anymore. You can just have that. Or if you're not sure, you can let your Xbox decide for you. That's the third option. That's pretty cool. And I also saw that they completely revamped the library page of your games, which Sony has had to do multiple times on the PS5. It's important to kind of differentiate because it does get a little overwhelming at some times. With that same intention in mind, they added that to where you go and see all of your games and the My Games and Apps section. You now have those sections like, oh, these are the games you can play with Game Pass. Oh, these are the games that you have that are part of EA Play. Oh, these are the games that you claimed with Games with Gold. There's so many services. Yeah. So it's like those are all tabs for you when you go to the games. Yeah. When you go to the all game section of your library. Pretty cool. So everyone should update their Xbox on Sony. It's like you don't even have to say that because you can't log into the PlayStation store if your firmware is out of date. I don't know if they have anything similar on Xbox, but it's always funny. It's like at the end of their blog post. They're like, you should update today. And it's like, yeah, I guess I have my not really giving me much of a choice or else. Yeah, I have my Xbox in standby mode. So it updates when it's all nice, technically. So I turn it on and it's like, oh, it's already there. Also, as part of this update, as part of this blog that they posted on the Xbox wire, they mention a party chat noise suppression. Once again, it's available on Xbox consoles and Windows 10 and 11. Well, yeah, it's like weird that they took so long to add this feature. And Discord recently is fully on the Xbox. So pretty cool. Now for this next section, I'm really glad they're here because you are you've become over the past couple of months like the guy when it comes to handheld gaming devices, specifically the steam deck. He's got a little channel going on called Deck Ready, growing really, really fast, pulling tons of views. You should definitely check it out if you have the chance, if you're interested in the steam deck, if you're interested in other handheld gaming devices, because he covers them all, including this upcoming one, the Logitech G cloud gaming device. We've talked about it previously, but it's Tencent and Logitech's child that seems geared specifically towards the Xbox cloud gaming experience to the point where it's available for preorder on the Xbox Microsoft Store website. It's weird that you can buy it through Xbox like they're not involved. Right. Like it's Tencent and Logitech, but they're just focusing on Game Pass streaming with this thing. It's super weird, right? Like right out of the gate. The price is just way out of whack for what this is. You can get it for 300 if you preorder it early. But the official price is going to be 350, which when you look at the steam deck, it's only 400 bucks for the cheapest model. And at that point, you can play any steam game you already own on the thing and cloud gaming and cloud gaming. And it runs really well. It is strange because the thing about the price that jumps out to me is that, holy crap, this thing is the same price as a series S and the series S can do everything that that thing can do, except it's not a handheld, right? And it can download games and play them natively on the console. The only thing I would say when compared to the steam deck price wise is, yes, almost the same price as a steam deck. But I would imagine this is going to be way more readily available. It's not like you can go out and buy a steam deck right now. There are people who have been waiting months, months to get their steam deck. Is there a world where it's like, OK, I can't buy a steam deck, so I'll pick up this Logitech cloud gaming device? No, because you can get so many different things for cheaper, like the Nintendo Switch OLED is the same price ish. And you can kind of get it on sale all the time. The only thing I can really think about for why you would buy this thing is to emulate on it. It does have a pretty decent mobile chip in it, like it's a Snapdragon chip. But there's so many other emulator devices like the Neo and one X player and blah, blah, blah. There's so many different devices that, yes, they cost a little bit more, but they run full windows and like can play Warzone and Fortnite and Dead by Daylight and Destiny two, like all these games that you theoretically be streaming to this device. I don't know. I just don't know what the market is here, because I don't think you could ever get the price low enough for something like this to be worth it, where all I can do is stream games. It seems a little premature because they're marketing it on the Xbox wire as, you know, you could play Halo, you could play Deathloop, you could play Sea of Thieves on the go with Xbox cloud gaming. But I feel like at this point in cloud gaming's life cycle, either you have people who fricking hate it. They absolutely despise it, whether they've had a bad experience with it or something else, or you have people who are like, yeah, I think that's pretty cool. I don't think the love for cloud gaming is at the point where you can release a device specifically for it, especially when you do have things like the Nintendo Switch, like the Steam Deck out in the wild. People are calling it on Twitter and on social media like a glorified tablet with controllers. And like that honestly doesn't seem too far off. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong and I don't want to throw any hate to the people who have worked on this. And, you know, I like cloud gaming. Like I said, I was going to say, I get why they're working on it. I just don't. I really don't. They keep pushing new cloud stuff, like new things to play cloud gaming on. But it doesn't work right for most people. So once they figure that out, I can see the utility of something like this. But right now I'm like, there are just way too many better options. Yeah, there's also this picture of Phil Spencer floating around and he's standing next to Hideo Kojima. And it looks like he's has one of these things in his hands and he's playing around with it. I wonder if that has anything to do with the game that Kojima Productions is working on, exclusive for the cloud gaming Xbox service. I can imagine it kind of being like a 12 minute situation and a part of interactive situation, the games that they put out. Yeah, that makes total sense to me. Yeah, it seems like a stopgap game in between Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2 because Norman Reedus leaked that game. So we know it's happening. He was like, yeah, we're working on the second one right now. Like, oh, yeah, as far as these cloud handhelds go, not really going to recommend buying them. Like you have so many better options. It's insane for the same price point. And again, if you want to learn more about gaming handhelds going over to Deck Ready, check out Jimmy's videos, because he doesn't only cover the Steam Deck. I feel like that's confusion there. Yeah, we started with everything. Then we got sent a couple other ones like the INEO Next, which was OK. Then we got the One X Player Mini, which has like an AMD 5800U I want to say in it. And that thing actually is like pretty on par with performance with the Steam Deck. It's a little worse in some games and about the same, if not a little bit better than others. And of course, there's also the INEO Air, which people were like, oh, this is the Steam Deck killer. And it's not. So we've been looking at those lately. If you want to see some really cool handheld stuff, check that channel out. So we got to talk about Cyberpunk, and this is something you played Cyberpunk a while ago, right? I played Cyberpunk when it came out on PC and I 100% of it. And me, I have not played it. I played the demo for like an hour, an hour and a half, maybe two hours. And I put it to rest. I was like, I want to say it in early spring. And then everything changed when Cyberpunk Edgerunners came to Netflix. And I devoured that show in the same day. All ten episodes absolutely demolished it. I loved every moment of it. And immediately and I feel like this was the intention. Immediately I was like, I got to jump into the game because that was just so awesome. That was such an awesome experience. And it's so cool to see how faithful the show was to the game. And you see these little things. You see these different weapons. You see these different aspects of the game represented so well in the show. And people seem to agree because right now the player base for Cyberpunk 2077 has shot through the roof since Edgerunners was added to Netflix. According to IGN, there's over a million people playing Cyberpunk every day. Yeah, I saw that. That's crazy. And it has shot up on Steam because you can check any game on Steam. If you look up Steam charts like with the game, you can find this like page that shows you a graph of when the game peaked and where it's at like right now and where it was at over the like past 24 hours, like the past 24 hour peak. And it's just been climbing. And the crazy thing is to have it peak like that in the middle of the week is kind of unheard of. I highly recommend following a guy on Twitter named Benji Sales. His whole thing is he just breaks down like numbers like this. And he basically explained how crazy it is to have a million players a day for a week straight. Crazy. I mean, especially for a game that's already been out a couple of times, a game that launched in the way that Cyberpunk did. Yeah, the interesting thing is on PC at launch, like, yes, it was pretty buggy. And, you know, there are some issues with the economy and just like not being able to respect, you know, a little weird quality of life things, but it was largely a really good game. Like I'd give it a nine, probably just after beating the 100 percent story, doing all the fixer jobs, doing all the like NCPD missions, like everything like that worked great. I don't know. I just thought it was like a really, really good game that launched on PC, in fact, better than a lot of Bethesda games that get rated much higher. And then the last few years have just been bringing the console versions in line with the PC version. And now not only have they done that, they've added stuff and made it even better than it was at launch on PC. They've completely fixed the economy. They've added in more fixer missions. They've added in this edge runner stuff. They're fixing the police A.I. And they're also going to add in like vehicle fighting. So I think this is like a great redemption moment for this game. Yeah, it sucks when these games launch poorly, but if they fix them, I have no problem jumping back in. But Cyberpunk is a different situation because I think it was fine when it launched on PC. You love to see it. You love to see a good redemption. For me, the world of Night City, they did such a great job in crafting the lore and the atmosphere of that. It's one of the few games where every time I have the option, I'm driving in a car or I'm on route to another place. I love just like looking at the city and experiencing it in that way. You know how the first like 15 minutes of the Halo TV show was awesome because they were like, you know, these iconic sounds and like things that you see in the game. And I was like, oh, my God, this is like the game. And then, of course, after that, it's like Master Chief taking his helmet off. Here's this boring political plot. The Cyberpunk anime was like, oh, my God, this is just like the game. And it just did not let up for the rest of the show. And I think the game is it's better. I think it's cool if you play it in that order, right? You do the anime and then you play the game because the anime it has a great action scenes and the overall like arching story, I think is really good. But it does like really rapidly fly through like huge story moments. And then when you play the game, you see all those like fleshed out with these story. And it's a very similar story to to Edgerunners. So I don't know. I think the game is great. I think it's cool that it's doing well because I like CD Projekt Red. And I hope this means that after that first expansion, they do a second game. 100%, I think there was a missed opportunity on Xbox as part because over on PlayStation Plus Premium, you can play Cyberpunk as part of your subscription. And I'm sure a lot of people were like, dope, I watch the show. I'm going to play as part of my subscription over on Xbox. They don't have Cyberpunk on Game Pass. And I feel like there was a huge missed opportunity. There could have been a situation where people are so excited to jump into Cyberpunk after watching the show. They're like, oh, it's on Game Pass. Let me sign up for Game Pass. And just to play that game. Yeah, and I've been doing PSAs on PS Ready for a long time. Every time it goes on sale for $10, I'm like, buy it now for $10 because it's going to get the PS5 patch and then it will be worth paying $10 for. And I know they're going to raise the price to $70 or something like that. Yeah, and that's exactly what happened. They just put it on sale for $30. But it was going on sale for $10 for a really long time. Make sure you subscribe to Xbox Ready. Check back because I'm going to be talking to someone, a very, very prominent person from the Cyberpunk Edgerunners anime. Let's just say they have very high skills in netrunning.