All three game console makers have now abandoned X integration

[jedberg]

Amusingly this was posted on reddit, and the top comments were all "What's X?" "Oh they mean Twitter why doesn't the headline say that?" "I thought this was some Xbox integration, didn't realize it was Twitter".

Talk about the worst rebrand ever.

[ryandrake]

I thought the headline was talking about the X Window System, like "Wait, did they actually run Linux and X?"

[duxup]

I still call it Twitter because 100% folks will know what I mean.

X ... even if they know what X is, it's too short and people mishear it / misunderstand it.

[bunderbunder]

Judging by the header of their own embeds, it seems like even X themselves have conceded that their service's real name is X (formerly Twitter).

[adleyjulian]

HBO to Max might be second for me. I associated premium and original content with the name HBO (Game of Thrones for example). I get they're trying to convey that it's not just prestige dramas, but in a world where people have multiple streaming services I think it makes sense to standout in terms of quality.

Close number 3 is Angie's List. It's been 3 years and the top link still says "Angie's List is Now Angi".

[piva00]

In my mind I went through the train of thought: "is this something related to Xbox? Ah no, it said the three game consoles, wait, did they support X [the window system]?? Ah, no... It's Twitter".

A stupid rebrand continues to be stupid...

[Zenzero]

Anecdotally I am hearing more people shifting back to just calling it Twitter.

[burnte]

> Talk about the worst rebrand ever.

I don't think they could have chosen a more generic name than the world's default variable.

[detourdog]

I clicked here just to confirm it was twitter under discussion.

[hnburnsy]

SpaceX, ModelX, xAI, seems like a pattern.

[furyofantares]

Recent rebrands:

Twitter/X: Confusing, throws away a good brand, associates the brand even more closely with Elon, and doesn't really do much to make it feel like a platform for more than tweets. Very bad.

Google/Alphabet: Causes financial reporting to mention Alphabet. Extremely minor annoyance, mostly nothingburger.

Facebook/Meta: Successfully ditched a bad brand and got a stylish name without much baggage to umbrella their projects and do new projects under. Doesn't seem overly associated with the metaverse. Actually very good rebrand.

[Uehreka]

As someone who just had to build integrations with all the big social media sites, this tracks. People thought I was crazy when I came back with the research that our TikTok integration would be free, and then our X integration would be $42000 per month. It’s absurdly easy to slide down their pricing ramp, which is more like a series of cliffs: $100/mo for basic, $5000/mo for Pro, at least $42000/mo for Enterprise once you exceed Pro’s limits. There are no amounts in between. It’s like building an API integration against a box of dynamite.

[Y_Y]

    if valid(API_KEY):
      detonate()
    else:
      detonate()

[NelsonMinar]

420 is a weed joke

[koolala]

"Free"

[curtis3389]

This seems like a no-brainer for the console makers. The consoles are already sold, and they're making back any losses from that through games sales and subscriptions.

Then X comes along and asks for half a mil a year. I'm sure they looked at their usage numbers and how people feel about X, and they decided they could cut the feature and not lose many/any customers. Feature cut; projected revenue remains the same; problem solved.

[jonhohle]

Modern Twitter/X to me is a lot like modern Star Wars. A lot of people, including myself, liked the early work, but the current management (and arguably a whole lot of people) seem to have liked very different ideas and gone with those rather than the things I thought made the original interesting.

Of note: while the headline is completely accurate, I had no idea this was about X/Twitter and thought it was some game tech. At least in the gaming world of my kids and myself, social integration is a lot of fun. It’s possible that this was a money pit, but with all the garbage on Twitter, having a simple way to post game stuff seems like an odd category to weed out.

[throwanem]

The garbage is the point. Musk and like ilk don't hate the "cathedral," so called, because they believe it steers the public discourse; they only hate when they can't feel like they're the ones doing the steering.

[paxys]

When Twitter first rolled out their paid API tiers my company tried to reason with their sales reps that charging us for the privilege of letting our users share their content with Twitter was absurd considering Twitter was the one gaining more from the interaction than us. They wouldn't budge and asked us for I think $300K/month because of our high volume. "Lol, no" was a very easy answer.

[creshal]

I really wonder what kind of business model you need to able to afford Twitter's API pricing. It seems so outlandishly ridiculous that it kills any use case I can come up with.

[dehrmann]

Should have countered with "we'll keep the integration if you pay us $2,000 per month."

[me_me_me]

"You want us to pay you, so our users create content for your platform?"

What do you even say to that as twitter sales rep?

[NelsonMinar]

I used to share a lot of screenshots from PS5 to Twitter. It was one of the easiest ways to get pictures off the platform. Now I use the Playstation App on my phone which works OK but is a bit clumsy. The Switch has a really wacky way of getting pictures off it; it runs an HTTP server on an ad hoc WiFi network when you ask it to!

Every week I miss something else that we lost when Twitter got ruined.

[anotherhue]

Wayland is the future.

On a serious note, did you know you can boot to gamescope and have a steamdeck like experience on your computer? https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

FSR scaling and everything.

[taeric]

I confess I thought this was a possible read for longer than makes sense. I still don't think of the social network as X. Curious how long it will take me to do so.

I'm also curious why I would care that my console does or does not have linked accounts with social. Now curious if they have other networks.

[jauntywundrkind]

Having actually spent a while pulling down & compiling dependencies & gamescope, on an AMD rx580, no, I could not boot to gamescope. Very unclear to me why it wouldn't start, wasn't leaving much for logs, but it wasn't starting in embedded/direct launch mode. (I really wanted to try Cyberpunk 2078 in HDR mode, which conventional Wayland desktops cannot do yet.)

That said there are some much more polished attempts that should just work if you're willing to boot a purpose built os. I intend at some point to start cribbing pieces from chiemraOS, which seems to be what many are built off of, including the very very excellent Bazzite. Their gamescope-session work in particular seems crucial, https://github.com/ChimeraOS/gamescope-session/blob/main/usr...

[ygra]

This is about ex-Twitter, not the X Window System.

[oidar]

X is actively hostile to potential users/reader - I see no reason to look at any x domain related content.

[morkalork]

On multiple occasions a Twitter post is reposted on hn/reddit and in the hn/reddit thread people are complaining about how nobody is reading the Twitter replies and are just blindly reacting to the original post. Sorry, we're all missing the context but if you don't have an account, that's all it shows. So hostile. It turns away potential users at every step.

[h2odragon]

Never did see what "Twitter integration" added to anything, especially in cases like this. What does it add to the game? what does "Someone just achieved game token" tweets offer to the rest of the world?

Same for any other social media; its not even "peanut butter in the chocolate" kind of natural marketing gimmick: its "you got your floor wax in my reproductive anatomy" wtf were they thinking in the first place?

[rchaud]

Correct, these integrations are mostly for spamming game-related activity to Twitter/other social networks.

[__rito__]

Musk actually was (and probably still is) bullish on long-form video content on twitter. He projected it as the twitch dethroner.

I think that's what it was about.

Being able to stream directly to twitter from Xbox/PS.

[pcloadletter_]

I'm beginning to suspect that Musk's takeover of Twitter was a Bad Idea.

[turblety]

I'm convinced Musk is intentionally trying to kill Twitter, and it's going exactly as planned.

[CaptainOfCoit]

That's all a matter of perspective. Bad idea for who? Musk? Certainly. The rest of us? Maybe a good idea, depending on what the final outcome(s) will be.

[wojciii]

I'm just mad at the unsupported cesspool X has become and I'm glad that it's dying.

[MisterBastahrd]

"We had something that was working, but then our owner decided to be a wingnut and turned the entire platform to a highly unprofitable pile of radioactive shit" is a hell of a business move. There's a reason that most super-rich people tend to deal with political content in a very hands-off manner publicly. If he had kept his opinions to himself instead of being a terrible shitposter, they likely still wouldn't be making any money, but the company would also be worth far more than it currently is.

[shultays]

Twitter charges corporates for using Twitter? If anything, the consoles should charge Twitter, for bringing in users and content

[dvh]

I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. If the goal is to remove corporations from Twitter and turn Twitter into platform paid by people for the people, than it could be a good thing. Enterprises just flood Twitter with spam.

[nshunter]

Social tie ins with gaming never truly worked despite about a decade of experimentation. Lots of the features from social networks instead got included in game design rather than relying on facebook and x for engagement.

I imagine that UGC will still find easy mechanisms for sharing per title, but as a defacto option from big game makers it's done.

[t_mann]

I recently tried to open an X account, the process was punishing: the captcha was six images of ~5 dice each from an acute angle, and I had to click the one where the top faces added up to 15. That takes considerably more time than "select all the cars", especially if the correct image is among the last. And that challenge was repeated 10 times (with a counter to 10 shown from the start, so it wasn't just that many because of retries after failure). I actually went through with it, but in the end I failed to sign up because the verification email never arrived.

I've since been wondering whether Musk now wants it to fail, so he can draw a line under this chapter and shift focus back to his more succesful ventures.

[flutas]

> the captcha was six images of ~5 dice each from an acute angle, and I had to click the one where the top faces added up to 15. That takes considerably more time than "select all the cars"

This has been a fairly standard captcha for the past few years across the "more attacked" providers.

That one, Rotate the [object] to match this direction, Click the item in this image with the highest value, Click the dice that add up to [X], Which of these items doesn't belong, etc.

They are all much more difficult than previous ones, and I've long wondered if they are compliant with various disability laws.

[AlienRobot]

To be fair, I tried to create an Instagram account with my own website's domain as e-mail address, because I didn't want to use my phone number. When I tried to confirm my e-mail I got a simple "there was an error, try again" message. I looked it up on Google and it seems they just instantly suspended my account. I had to login in the account that I didn't even know was created to see I was suspended, so I could appeal, only to get told to confirm my e-mail again, and then they asked me to link a phone number, by which point I gave up. I hear they may even require a photo on top of that.

[WillPostForFood]

I'm sure that was super annoying, but Twitter/X has always had a terrible spam/bot problem. This at least is showing an attempt to take that seriously, even at the cost of new user acquisition.

[renewiltord]

Social media sites can't charge to post. That sounds like a misunderstanding of who is providing the value here.

[JohnMakin]

It is however pretty reasonable to charge for API usage. Twitter in the past was a bit generous as to their limits. That said, absurd API pricing like this are meant to actively discourage you from using the API, which definitely does not help the product even if it may slightly help their bottom line.

[nullsmack]

X who?

Just say Twitter. Nobody in their right mind is ever going to call it X legitimately.

[m3kw9]

Elon been really talking sht lately esp regarding Apples AI, zero understanding before tweetinf