Will Gamepass kill the Xbox development community?

[ThirdEidolon]

Noticed there were no threads whatsoever on Xbox and I figured it deserved one at least.

Do you think Gamepass is harming tangible sales for developers?

It had S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Heart of Chernobyl day one. How many actually bought it on pc though? Or even Xbox?

Do you think Gamepass is sustainable longterm, and will it drive developers away from Microsoft?

 

[Yousef]

I can tell you this right now; I’ve actually avoided buying so many games thanks to me already beating them on game pass. I think you’re right on the money.

 

[ThirdEidolon]

I can tell you this right now; I’ve actually avoided buying so many games thanks to me already beating them on game pass. I think you’re right on the money.

In my own personal case, it's translated to actual sales. I bought Stalker and I bought the Gunk. I also bought Flintlock. I don't imagine everyone does that, though.

Post automatically merged: Dec 11, 2024

I think gamepass is really good for the ones you don't want to commit to, like the new Indiana Jones game or P3R.

I'll try it, but I doubt I'll end up buying it.

 

[ATenderLad]

I think it's symptomatic of the larger problem, that Xbox sales aren't very competitive. Game Pass is meant to be an incentive, something that attracts a larger base to the system to drive up more sales in general, but that's not really materializing. I guess I'd say the Game Pass won't Kill the Xbox, so much as it won't Save the Xbox.

 

[Gorse]

I actually think that, from Microsoft's point of view, Gamepass is a great business venture.

Aside from the 360 (which was first-to-market and held its own for like a decade), the deal with XBox has always been that, in exchange for zero exclusives, a higher console price, and having to interact with Microsoft, you get the best performance from console video gaming, no questions asked. That's something that really grabs people who post on video game forums and play hardcore games like Cybergod: Unleashed and Oppai no Nazo [EX Edition], and it worked for many years, but the enthusiast market in today's video gaming culture can be tough to depend on.

Enter Gamepass and the Series S. It's half the price of a Series X, and you don't even have to buy the games. If you're a family considering a console for your kids or a dudebro looking to get in some FIFA with the boys after work, that instantly becomes the XBox's competitive advantage. You get an unlimited supply of prominent third-party titles whenever you want, running on a machine that would cost at least four times the price if it were a PC, and the peace of mind that you'll never have to fully commit to a $70 software purchase. And Microsoft gets all your money, forever. ?

I've never owned an Xbox console, but sometimes I'll see the Series S on Amazon and think "OH MY GOD, THINK OF HOW MUCH I'D SAVE..." That's what a significant chunk of the XBox target demo is thinking, too.

will it drive developers away from Microsoft?

If the chips ever came down and developers made moves away from Microsoft (they won't), M$ would start subsidizing new third-party games themselves in exchange for permanent availability on Gamepass. (Even if those games weren't exclusive.) They have the money and might to throw around, and the audience will always make it worthwhile for the people actually making the games to comply.

 

[Yousef]

I actually think that, from Microsoft's point of view, Gamepass is a great business venture.

Aside from the 360 (which was first-to-market and held its own for like a decade), the deal with Xbox has always been that, in exchange for zero exclusives, a higher console price, and having to interact with Microsoft, you get the best performance on console video gaming, no questions asked. That's something that really grabs people who post on video game forums and play hardcore games like Cybergod: Unleashed and Oppai no Nazo [EX Edition], and it worked for many years, but the enthusiast marketing in today's video gaming culture can be tough to depend on.

Enter Gamepass and the Series S. It's half the price of a Series X, and you don't even have to buy the games. If you're a family buying a console for your kids or a dudebro looking to get in some FIFA with the boys after work, that instantly becomes the XBox's competitive advantage. You get an unlimited supply of prominent third-party titles whenever you want them running on a machine that would cost at least four times the price if it were a PC and the peace of mind that you'll never actually have to buy full-priced games. And Microsoft gets all your money, forever. ?

I've never owned an Xbox console, but sometimes I'll see the Series S on Amazon and think "OH MY GOD, THINK OF HOW MUCH I'D SAVE..." That's what a significant chunk of the XBox target demo is thinking, too.

If the chips ever came down and developers made moves away from Microsoft (they won't), M$ would start subsidizing new third-party games themselves in exchange for permanent availability on Gamepass. (Even if those games weren't exclusive.) They have the money and might to throw around, and the audience will always make it worthwhile for the people actually making the games to comply.

At the risk of slightly steering off from what’s said here, gamepass is just too comfortable not to invest into. Yeah, sure, I can spend 120 dollars to try to games I may not like.
Or, I can spend 14 dollars, play both and never look back.
This isn’t hypothetical, that’s exactly what I did with persona 3 reload (which I winded up loving) and persona 5 tactica (which I pray gets deleted from not from game pass, but from existence)

 

[ThirdEidolon]

I actually think that, from Microsoft's point of view, Gamepass is a great business venture.

Aside from the 360 (which was first-to-market and held its own for like a decade), the deal with XBox has always been that, in exchange for zero exclusives, a higher console price, and having to interact with Microsoft, you get the best performance from console video gaming, no questions asked. That's something that really grabs people who post on video game forums and play hardcore games like Cybergod: Unleashed and Oppai no Nazo [EX Edition], and it worked for many years, but the enthusiast market in today's video gaming culture can be tough to depend on.

Enter Gamepass and the Series S. It's half the price of a Series X, and you don't even have to buy the games. If you're a family considering a console for your kids or a dudebro looking to get in some FIFA with the boys after work, that instantly becomes the XBox's competitive advantage. You get an unlimited supply of prominent third-party titles whenever you want, running on a machine that would cost at least four times the price if it were a PC, and the peace of mind that you'll never have to fully commit to a $70 software purchase. And Microsoft gets all your money, forever. ?

I've never owned an Xbox console, but sometimes I'll see the Series S on Amazon and think "OH MY GOD, THINK OF HOW MUCH I'D SAVE..." That's what a significant chunk of the XBox target demo is thinking, too.


If the chips ever came down and developers made moves away from Microsoft (they won't), M$ would start subsidizing new third-party games themselves in exchange for permanent availability on Gamepass. (Even if those games weren't exclusive.) They have the money and might to throw around, and the audience will always make it worthwhile for the people actually making the games to comply.

the goal eventually isn't even to have a console anymore i think. they want every device to be xbox enabled.

i still think this current dichotomy doesn't incentivize developers though, and that will become a problem.

Post automatically merged: Dec 12, 2024

At the risk of slightly steering off from what’s said here, gamepass is just too comfortable not to invest into. Yeah, sure, I can spend 120 dollars to try to games I may not like.
Or, I can spend 14 dollars, play both and never look back.
This isn’t hypothetical, that’s exactly what I did with persona 3 reload (which I winded up loving) and persona 5 tactica (which I pray gets deleted from not from game pass, but from existence)

but how many of those translate into actual sales, longterm?

 

[schir]

but how many of those translate into actual sales, longterm?

Not many. Some of the reports from the antitrust trial showed that being on Game Pass cannibalizes sales numbers, and if I were a developer I'd probably be worried about how that hurts the initial spike and long tail of my game. Game Pass seems like it trains consumers into not spending money on games, for reasons we can see in the posts upthread, and it seems like it wouldn't be in the developer's best business interest to do that for the smallest platform by market share when they could just release on Steam and Playstation and Switch instead where people are more willing to buy games.

If the chips ever came down and developers made moves away from Microsoft (they won't), M$ would start subsidizing new third-party games themselves in exchange for permanent availability on Gamepass. (Even if those games weren't exclusive.) They have the money and might to throw around, and the audience will always make it worthwhile for the people actually making the games to comply.

This is what they've been doing, to a degree. However, their internal practices for releasing games have degraded a bunch since the Xbox 360 days (iirc, one of the original Gears of War producers said on Youtube that Xbox management moved to a more patronage-based system than a results-based one around the time Phil Spencer took over in the Xbox One era, but I'm having trouble finding the video) so they've been trying to get the development muscle by buying out studios and paying millions to hundreds of millions to get games on Game Pass, per leaks from last year.

This has been a double-edged sword because it's increased the operating cost of the Xbox division to no longer be a negligible part of Microsoft's total revenue. That Activision buyout ate up a huge chunk of Microsoft's cash on hand at a time when interest rates were rising and it's looking like the money people at Microsoft are now expecting a stronger ROI for all that cash they've invested, and that means putting their games on as many platforms as possible and cutting staff to boost margins.

I don't know that it makes sense for developers to put their games on Game Pass when it hurts their sales the way it does and with the way that Xbox is a shrinking platform. This is doubly so when we consider that the Game Pass deals have dried up, as we would expect to see from the cost cutting measures described above. 70 billion dollars is a lot of money to spend, even for a large corporation like Microsoft, and they can't just keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars on exclusivity deals when they're trying to make back that 70 billion dollar hole in the balance sheet.

However, even setting all that aside, the other elephant in the room is that developers just can't get their games onto Xbox because the back end is breaking, for reasons related to the aforementioned staff cuts. The publishing end of Xbox is a skeleton crew right now and that's making it difficult for even the people who want to get their games onto Xbox to do so.

So I guess to answer the question at the top of the thread: yes I think Game Pass will kill the Xbox developer community, inasmuch as the things Xbox is doing to try and push Game Pass is hurting the division as a whole in the long-term.

 

[ThirdEidolon]

I

Not many. Some of the reports from the antitrust trial showed that being on Game Pass cannibalizes sales numbers, and if I were a developer I'd probably be worried about how that hurts the initial spike and long tail of my game. Game Pass seems like it trains consumers into not spending money on games, for reasons we can see in the posts upthread, and it seems like it wouldn't be in the developer's best business interest to do that for the smallest platform by market share when they could just release on Steam and Playstation and Switch instead where people are more willing to buy games.


This is what they've been doing, to a degree. However, their internal practices for releasing games have degraded a bunch since the Xbox 360 days (iirc, one of the original Gears of War producers said on Youtube that Xbox management moved to a more patronage-based system than a results-based one around the time Phil Spencer took over in the Xbox One era, but I'm having trouble finding the video) so they've been trying to get the development muscle by buying out studios and paying millions to hundreds of millions to get games on Game Pass, per leaks from last year.

This has been a double-edged sword because it's increased the operating cost of the Xbox division to no longer be a negligible part of Microsoft's total revenue. That Activision buyout ate up a huge chunk of Microsoft's cash on hand at a time when interest rates were rising and it's looking like the money people at Microsoft are now expecting a stronger ROI for all that cash they've invested, and that means putting their games on as many platforms as possible and cutting staff to boost margins.

I don't know that it makes sense for developers to put their games on Game Pass when it hurts their sales the way it does and with the way that Xbox is a shrinking platform. This is doubly so when we consider that the Game Pass deals have dried up, as we would expect to see from the cost cutting measures described above. 70 billion dollars is a lot of money to spend, even for a large corporation like Microsoft, and they can't just keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars on exclusivity deals when they're trying to make back that 70 billion dollar hole in the balance sheet.

However, even setting all that aside, the other elephant in the room is that developers just can't get their games onto Xbox because the back end is breaking, for reasons related to the aforementioned staff cuts. The publishing end of Xbox is a skeleton crew right now and that's making it difficult for even the people who want to get their games onto Xbox to do so.

So I guess to answer the question at the top of the thread: yes I think Game Pass will kill the Xbox developer community, inasmuch as the things Xbox is doing to try and push Game Pass is hurting the division as a whole in the long-term.

If you manage to find that video talking about a patronage based switch, I'd be curious to see it.

I never heard about this, but it makes a lot of sense in hindsight. Especially when you consider everything is moving towards Life™ as a service, and they want every device to be a potential Xbox, without a dedicated console, long term.

 

[Yousef]

but how many of those translate into actual sales, longterm?

Oh sorry I didn’t see your reply to me.
I’ve heard there’s a portion of revenuethat goes to the devs but I have zero concrete data on that unfortunately.

 

[schir]

If you manage to find that video talking about a patronage based switch, I'd be curious to see it.

I never heard about this, but it makes a lot of sense in hindsight. Especially when you consider everything is moving towards Life™ as a service, and they want every device to be a potential Xbox, without a dedicated console, long term.

I went and checked the Gears of War credits page to remember the person's name. It was Laura Fryer, and she was the executive producer on Gears at the time. I was thinking of this video of hers, talking about where Xbox went wrong and some of what was happening behind the scenes when the shift started happening.

 

[ThirdEidolon]

Oh sorry I didn’t see your reply to me.
I’ve heard there’s a portion of revenuethat goes to the devs but I have zero concrete data on that unfortunately.

it wouldn't be a large amount though, lets be honest. gamepass is what? 15 dollars a month?

 

[moonbits]

I like Gamepass a lot, it connects me with my friends and allow us to try different games but the sales aspect of it is a bit sketchy, nobody would buy your game if it's on Gamepass but more people play it.

 

[Yousef]

it wouldn't be a large amount though, lets be honest. gamepass is what? 15 dollars a month?

lmao this is The second time I didn’t get a notification. Nope, I think game pass is not very profitable by its own merit. There’s no hardlined numbers to prove this but there’s also no real signs showing otherwise. Most of the games there are IPs owned by Sega, EA and the monopoly of game devs Microsoft owns (which covers stuff like activision and Bethesda) and SOME indie games. Keyword: some. It’s really random but they don’t stick around for long, acting morsoe as glorified renting periods.

 

[DadBowser]

Not many. Some of the reports from the antitrust trial showed that being on Game Pass cannibalizes sales numbers, and if I were a developer I'd probably be worried about how that hurts the initial spike and long tail of my game. Game Pass seems like it trains consumers into not spending money on games, for reasons we can see in the posts upthread, and it seems like it wouldn't be in the developer's best business interest to do that for the smallest platform by market share when they could just release on Steam and Playstation and Switch instead where people are more willing to buy games.


This is what they've been doing, to a degree. However, their internal practices for releasing games have degraded a bunch since the Xbox 360 days (iirc, one of the original Gears of War producers said on Youtube that Xbox management moved to a more patronage-based system than a results-based one around the time Phil Spencer took over in the Xbox One era, but I'm having trouble finding the video) so they've been trying to get the development muscle by buying out studios and paying millions to hundreds of millions to get games on Game Pass, per leaks from last year.

This has been a double-edged sword because it's increased the operating cost of the Xbox division to no longer be a negligible part of Microsoft's total revenue. That Activision buyout ate up a huge chunk of Microsoft's cash on hand at a time when interest rates were rising and it's looking like the money people at Microsoft are now expecting a stronger ROI for all that cash they've invested, and that means putting their games on as many platforms as possible and cutting staff to boost margins.

I don't know that it makes sense for developers to put their games on Game Pass when it hurts their sales the way it does and with the way that Xbox is a shrinking platform. This is doubly so when we consider that the Game Pass deals have dried up, as we would expect to see from the cost cutting measures described above. 70 billion dollars is a lot of money to spend, even for a large corporation like Microsoft, and they can't just keep spending hundreds of millions of dollars on exclusivity deals when they're trying to make back that 70 billion dollar hole in the balance sheet.

However, even setting all that aside, the other elephant in the room is that developers just can't get their games onto Xbox because the back end is breaking, for reasons related to the aforementioned staff cuts. The publishing end of Xbox is a skeleton crew right now and that's making it difficult for even the people who want to get their games onto Xbox to do so.

So I guess to answer the question at the top of the thread: yes I think Game Pass will kill the Xbox developer community, inasmuch as the things Xbox is doing to try and push Game Pass is hurting the division as a whole in the long-term.

The back end is breaking? Haak is a Chinese dev trying to self publish and as far as I'm aware, including within circles in where this was talked about initially, no other devs were acknowledging any kind of of issues and Haak is also nothing that any of us are missing in our libraries. I'd challenge you to show demonstrable evidence that there is an issue with the "back end" at Microsoft that is keeping people from publishing on the platform and even more so, that this imaginary issue is driven by staffing cuts. No offense, but this reads like a buzzfeed article.

 

[Amag0k1]

Sorry for long response.

I actively avoid these subscription models, and will buy physical copies out of principle where i can, as long as scalpers do not jack up the price on ebay!
For me, imho recent mainstream gaming for the most part is predatory, and tends to be about squeezing money out of the consumer even after the sale, rather then providing an experience which resonates with them well after they have finished the content such as with older games from the 1990s up till around 2010s when we started to see a massive shift from a fun art peace, to a focus on predatory principles (spear fishing wales).

(rough dates, feel free to chime in on when you think gaming started to become more predatory for the majority being developed).

Do not misunderstand, there are still games provide positive experiences, and resonate with people well after they have finished, games such as Elden Ring, SIGNALIS and many others, but they are a dying breed, partially related to subscription services like you mention.

Ultimately, "gaming" by so called triple A publishes these days are more about garnering continued spending through packs, add on, and gambling mechanics, and other earning, such as data scraping and analytics, rather then providing experiences.

One could argue that pushing for continued revenue is funding the industry, but this is a red hearing, cost go up due to share holder return promises, with the people who make their games being replaced with cheap labor to "get it done" who have no investment in the product. (eventually even AI and automation will take those jobs!).

For me, the subscription service aims to get rid of physical, giving people no choice but to subscribe (focus market), and then what is provided will be the predatory game over real story telling and fun experiences.

There are always exceptions to the rule, please let me know your opinon on this. And sorry for my bad English.

 

[Psychonara]

Something to keep in mind is that Nintendo Switch Online also has a Game Pass style service with its retro system apps. But here's a good question to ask, why is it so hard for Nintendo to put some of the best 3rd party titles the NES, SNES, N64, etc. had to offer on their own service? Why are Mega Man X & Super Castlevania 4 not on the SNES online app after all these years. It's probably because Nintendo is not willing or able to pay enough of a licensing fee or whatever to Konami, Capcom, etc. who sell these very same games on the Nintendo Switch. The Mega Man X Collection often sells on the Switch for the same price as an NSO subscription fee.

So when we look at Xbox's Game Pass, we have to consider that Xbox/Microsoft is probably paying publishers a great deal of money to allow their games to remain on Game Pass for such an extended period of time (games also are taken off & also return at the whim of the games' publishers), and when you consider how many of the studios represented on the service are now part of Microsoft Game Studios, from a business standpoint, it's a pretty clever system of consolidating, not so much expanding, your market.

Basically, the way it works is that Microsoft pays a publisher to allow the games on Game Pass and as long as Microsoft continues to pay, the publisher is willing to keep the game on the service. They also probably provide player data to publishers as well. Xbox is not a big platform, but it has a lot of mom & dad's money to throw around, and if you're a publisher (at least one whom Microsoft hasn't bought yet) who also knows that you're not gonna sell too many games on Xbox the traditional way as you may already be doing on Switch, Playstation, Steam, etc., the money from what Microsoft/Xbox pays + any digital sales, may be more than enough.

 

[BunnyLain]

I'd argue the NSO thing isn't really a worry for Nintendo, they don't plan on selling their old titles and if they did their audience would eat it up. Anyone with any interest in retro games knows how to get them and play them in a thousand other ways. NSO for games like Tetris 99 and other benefits is how they're playing it.

But as for gamepass, it's totally cannibalizing sales. The whole industry has walked itself into a nightmare situation when it comes to pricing and the expectations of the consumer. If I represent any % of people who play games, its a one and done thing. I play Okami like once every half decade maybe and I imagine a lot of people are like that. When the games done there's plenty of others to move onto. CoD has a yearly release for more than just the MP, which if unreal taught us anything, isn't the main reason people buy the game.

I'm not even sure if the upfront money from gamepass is good for devs either since you're going to lose day one sales to people who will just check it on gamepass and long tail sales from people that already played it and people that look towards gamepass if its still there. But gamepass isn't even the only way games devs have sort of dug their own grave.

With retro games having such a legacy and so many other free titles competing for time on mobiles and from independent art groups that can get by with people supporting them. New games struggle for time and attention, but tie that in with people being able to just wait for a sale or see it bundled in with an offer, then you can see why gamers are less enthusiastic about giving over their cash.

I also hate the argument for physical releases now, we all grew up with carts and disks I get that, but since they've had failures and rot. They don't hold the value they once did. Ultimately these are all formats to hold a digital file, the true way of preserving that is to keep a copy of the file and share it around so it can never be lost. So with so many games now days not even shipping the full file on the disk or patching it later, you can see where you still have to trust the service provider to give you what you need. A frustration.

I imagine one day steam will have its moment and then everyone will go into panic mode trying to work out how to back up their collection of 1000+ games (which is a topic in on its own) they are about to lose.

So long ramble aside, yea I feel gamepass was a misstep by Microsoft, but Sony stated the terms of engagement with their PSN reaction to the 360. Microsoft's response was just overkill. But from the perspective of people who want to play games, hot damn is it a good deal! I get to play the new release for less than the price of a game every month? Really puts an end to the whole fear of missing out.

So really I feel its bad for devs, bad for publishers and great for gamers! Until the studios cant pay the devs, we get massive lay offs and then a surge of smaller indie groups again that are all fighting against each other for money and attention. Games are a bit of a brutal business.

 

[Don Patch]

For anyone not MS, yeah, it's clearly unsustainable (unless development is funded or subsidized by MS)

Since MS owns a near monopoly on the industry it kinda depends on what their margins end up being vs. the cost of development.

Unless you mean for the actual box the Xbox...
I've been in the boat for years now with speculating that MS is going to transition Xbox from an actual physical thing to a brand of software service(s) you access from other devices. From my observation, that was/is the plan with most western devs. Hence the push towards streaming.
"Grab a USB access-stick and log into "Ubisoft NOW" to play the latest Assassin's Creed update" type of thing.

 

[Skeetos]

It genuinely has been cutting into profits. It's one of the reasons MS closed down Tango, Hi Fi Rush was already a side project that wasn't expecting big profit, but the potential target it had missed because most people played it on Game Pass. I don't see the Xbox brand lasting much longer if some of these big titles don't succeed. I'm still hoping Gears E-Day and Perfect Dark don't suck. It's a possibility though. Not to mention even though they don't like to admit it, The Series S holds back a lot of games, and I think it's one of the main reasons we haven't seen a crazy boost in graphics or physics this generation.
I just hope the next console gen doesn't suck so I can go back to being excited for stuff again.

 

[CaesariusMagnum]

Gamepass is killing Xbox in my opinion. The Series X/S are being outsold by the PS5 by like 3 to 1. Nobody's buying the games on Xbox, and with their recent shift to cloud gaming, "everything's an Xbox" except an actual Xbox.

 

[Nidstang]

It's both hurting Xbox and isn't hurting Xbox. It 100% discourages people from purchasing games, but their profit model is no longer to sell games. Their profit model is to sell subscriptions. They make more money off of people paying for Gamepass every month, than they do people buying a handful of games every year.

Further, they're A: relying on people subscribing, and not using the service. They want people to stay subscribed even if they're not actively using it to play games, because "it's such a good deal". It doesn't cost them anything, they don't need an active game rotation, and they still make money off of these people.

And B: they are purposely getting consumers used to not owning their games, so they can just rotate games in and out, or (presumably) eventually revoke purchases, or release a digitl-only console without backlash. And people stay subscribed out of the hopes their favorite games eventually get added, or rotated back in.

This is a pretty good opinion video on the subject, and I pretty much agree entirely.

 

[LiberoVulpesLiberoVulpes's icon]

It makes no sense for a dev to want their game to be on there, its a literal: "We pay you with exposure bro." Whatever Microsoft pays, its likely not comparable with the sales that the game could have gotten by itself.

I don't see how the hell is this sustainable, especially for smaller studios, maybe if they are owned by Microsoft... Oh.

People just never learn, how many things get removed from a streaming service due to licenses already? Game Pass is the exact same thing but videogames.

I hate subscriptions.

 

[Skeetos]

It makes no sense for a dev to want their game to be on there, its a literal: "We pay you with exposure bro." Whatever Microsoft pays, its likely not comparable with the sales that the game could have gotten by itself.

I don't see how the hell is this sustainable, especially for smaller studios, maybe if they are owned by Microsoft... Oh.

People just never learn, how many things get removed from a streaming service due to licenses already? Game Pass is the exact same thing but videogames.

I hate subscriptions.

Gamepass is the reason Hi-Fi Rush didn't meet expectations. Gamepass killed Tango. That's enough for me to say nah. And it pushes games as a service. Xbox won't last much longer if this rumored console doesn't meet expectations, which it probably wont. If you bought any Series games on disc you don't even own the game. It isn't on the disc anymore. It just engages the online license. At least PS5 games are on the disc. I play majority PC so I've been getting screwed for a long time but at least Valve is aware of the licensing issue and Gabe apparently has a killswitch for Steam where if it ever has to go down indefinitely you will still be able to play your games.

 

[BunnyLain]

I want to chime in that games subscription services are driving people away from the hardware so we can never have fun games controllers ever again that do fun things... like pressure sensitive face buttons or VMU things or just idk anything creative. I hope the switch 2 has something fun.