I’m of the belief that sub-Genres of anything do matter. Gears and Halo are only similar in a rudimentary sense, but one appeals to me a lot more than the other just based on the sub-genre differences in gameplay. To an old timer who’s never played a video game, all shoot em ups are the same. Yes, and no. Mostly no.
A racing sim is one of my least favorite types of racing games, but an arcade racer is one of my favorite types of games overall. So yeah, it matters.
In regards to Xbox lack of exclusives. My understanding is the Series X won’t have exclusives at first because any Xbox brand exclusives will be XB1 compatible as well. Everwild is the next Rare project and it’ll be on both systems I’d imagine. I think it’s kinda good that they aren’t immediately killing XB1 off when Series X arrives.
I never realized there was a rest mode but I didn’t really miss it. I find that firing up my system and lunching YouTube is really snappy as is. The automatic sign in is a nice touch.