Video Games

Micrsoft said "expect more consoles to be available on November 10" so I don't think it should be too hard to get one if you're persistant. Honestly they're handling this as best they can, yes scarcity can drive demand but a basic rule of business is never run out of the stuff you're selling.
https://twitter.com/Xbox/status/1308511392618565634

Also ebay is full of people flogging them, some in excess of £800.

They're just trying their hand, they'll be in for a surprise when they can't sell for a profit

hear that one X sales were up significantly on amazon yesterday lol

Funnily enough I read an article on people buying the wrong one.

I mean I'll be the first to say that the naming conventions are shit.

Yeah I saw a tweet doing the rounds about a 750% X sales increase or something but it sounds more like people not understanding how Amazon does their rankings. It goes by sales in a time period so for example to get an Amazon Best Seller book all you need is to convince 10 friends to buy the book at the same time right after it's available and it'll shoot right to the top and forever have the Best Seller badge.

@atz

This seems to be getting traction today. Pretty cheap compared to most at £19 for 3 months for Ultimate
https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/3-month-xbox-game-pass-ultimate-xbox-one-pc-ps1899-3547972

^ this is for Game Pass Ultimate, only needed if you've already done the £1 upgrade. As far as I know once you've upgraded to Ultimate you can't top up with Gold time. So the cheapest route at the moment is to get a year of Gold for £40, or 3 years for £120, then do the £1 upgrade. If you were to buy just Ultimate time for 3 years it would be £240.

I'm not sure what happens if you do the Ultimate upgrade for your Gold time, then let it run out and don't auto renew, then buy more Gold time. I don't think they'll let you do the upgrade for a £1 anymore.

Anyone playing No Man's Sky? Finally picked it up in a sale, really enjoying it - gentle space exploration - nice change of pace from God of War which i was playing through before

I keep meaning to get back into it. Played it a lot when it launched then completely stopped playing it.

They've done such an incredible amount of work to it since then so it deserves a second look. Apparently there's another large update coming this week too...

From what i read about the state of it at launch, they've done an amazing job turning it around - especially considering all the updates have been free. Definitely worth another look…

@atz

Ah yeah. Think I did 3 years of gold using Tunnelbear to VPN via Brazil so that I could redeem these
https://www.cdkeys.com/12-month-xbox-live-gold-membership-xbox-one-360-brazil

Then added the £1 to convert the entire thing to ultimate

@duncs @Sumo

Sorted it out. CDKeys didn't seem to want to sell me one but I found other routes so now have just shy of 3 years ultimate.

FYI - here are instructions to use VPN to use brazillian gold/live to get even cheaper GPU
https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/12-month-xbox-live-gold-brazil-membership-vpn-will-be-required-to-activate-at-electronic-first-3546605

https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/3-years-xbox-game-pass-ultimate-for-ps73-3525974

Released today... https://www.nomanssky.com/origins-update/

So much new stuff. Will probably get it out when the Series X launches.

https://www.pcgamer.com/it-looks-like-the-first-two-metal-gear-solid-games-are-coming-to-pc/

Curious as to the omission of MGS3, but positive news regardless

Amnesia games (The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs) open-sourced:

https://github.com/FrictionalGames

Fantastic games never been as stressed as I was playing the first.

Additional rumours of both games coming to PS5 as exclusive titles.

I wish I hadn't looked at No Man's Sky. Looks totally up my alley, so queued it for download. I suspect I'll be wasting a lot of time in the near future.

How does all this work - genuinely interested but don't know where to start.

Ok, may be dumbing it down too much, maybe not. Anyway.

Different countries have different pricing. UK tends to be more expensive, Brazil is one of the cheaper ones.

Microsoft only allow people in Brazil to actually redeem a Brazilian product/code.

You can get VPN software which routes your web browsing via another country. I use Tunnelbear, which has a plugin for Chrome that makes it easy to use.

So I can buy a Brazilian product, then switch on Tunnelbear and set my 'location' to Brazil. Then when go to redeem the product, Microsoft are happy that I'm in Brazil, so they let me redeem the code.

Once the code is redeemed then it's not region specific anymore, it's just associated with my account. So I can then switch off the VPN.

Separately, Microsoft offer two types of Game Pass. Gold, the old one, which offers the Xbox games, and Ultimate, the newer one, which offers games on Xbox and PC. Ultimate is more expensive. If you convert Gold to Ultimate you get something like 8 months Ultimate for every 12 months Gold.

But they're doing an offer where you can pay £1 as an intro for a month's Ultimate and it'll also convert any existing Gold 1:1.
You can only have up to 3 years of subscriptions at once.

So all that lot above said, the steps go

Buy 3 years of Xbox Gold from Brazil for fairly cheap (from someone like CDKeys or another reseller)
Switch on TunnelBear, set location to Brazil
Redeem 3 years Gold on Microsoft website
Switch off Tunnelbear
Use the £1 offer to convert your 3 years Gold to 3 years Ultimate.
(you can only do that £1 offer once, and once it's converted to Ult then it can't go back to Gold, so doing that AFTER you've got 3yrs of Gold is the main thing)

You should then have ~3years ultimate for about £80-90, rather than ~£450

Also here for a current example
https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/12-month-xbox-live-gold-brazil-membership-vpn-will-be-required-to-activate-at-electronic-first-3546605

I just let out and audible wow.

I'll try and get onto that today.

Another walkthrough here
https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/3-years-xbox-game-pass-ultimate-for-ps73-3525974

They limit your ability to redeem region locked products by your devices IP? What if you were on holiday or travelling? I'm surprised the company that makes the software running 80% of the worlds computers came up with such a basic solution. I assumed the account itself would be region locked like Steam accounts.