Fuck Embracer. I was following the rumors for quite a bit and this is such a massive disappointment. Deus Ex has to be one of the most mismanaged video game franchises of all time. I don’t understand why they’d give up on a loyal fanbase in favor of an “original franchise”.
As a mass effect and dragon age fan, I empathize so much with you. Love deus ex too, so many rpgs just left ignored.
I really don’t understand it. All of these games would be smash hits. Let’s be honest even if they weren’t very good the franchises are known so well that they would all be bought, and older game sales would swell too. To me it’s a no brainier, make the game, it prints money. They’re just so terrified of having to… Invest in something to get a payout.
The only one remotely close to being a hit was the first reboot. I guess it depends on whether you count the "I can't believe it's not Deus Ex" franchises they kept spinning up for a while. The first Dishonored probably did very well.
It makes even less sense considering the pivot to an “original franchise.” If they’re cynically trying to print money, why not cash in on something with an established active fanbase? Seems like less of a risk.
I’d have bought a new Deus Ex game, regardless if it got badly reviewed. Not really interested in whatever they’re cooking up now. I’m sure most of us fans probably feel the same way.
If this is to be trusted (which is a big if), it’s very interesting Nintendo would not continue with the OLED screens. I’ve heard people theorize Nintendo is choosing to keep the OLED screen for a mid-cycle refresh, which I would believe; but would consumers be happy with the graphical downgrade?
Either way, assuming this is legit, it sounds like Nintendo is likely keeping the Switch form factor if they are still using small (ish) screens for the console. If this is the case, I wonder how likely a Wii U situation would be (where customers think it’s the same console they already have and don’t buy it)…
The only reason it would be remotely acceptable is to drive the cost per unit down because the rest of the hardware is expensive, but even then it isnt like this is cutting edge stuff. I’d just hate if it had some gimmick that no one will use like the IR sensor, and the go with an LCD.
I'd wait, at this point. The switch was nice as the first legitimate handheld that could play real 3D games, but the steam deck exists now and the switch is just my Nintendo machine. And even that's largely because I'm too lazy to rip my games and saves over. The stuff I've tried plays better on deck.
I could see a lot of the enthusiasts that drove their early sales on the Switch just not bothering and making it look rough until an OLED version comes out. It's not like they've never had consoles flop because they're out of touch with what people want.
It’s possibly a case of sourcing an exact sized/spec OLED panel in the time frame before release is harder than an LCD. Especially with VRR if it’ll be using that (and frankly, they’d be daft not to, as it makes gaming on lower spec hardware a lot more tolerable).
I dunno though. I’ve never sourced either. Could well be piss easy.
Or also possibly discoloration, I had an OLED display on my last phone, and while it was amazing in terms of deep blacks and vivid colors, the screen looked kind of tired and green-ish after 6 years of use… rip Galaxy S5
I never really got burn-in because I mostly ran my display at lower brightness levels, however pretty much everyone else I knew with an OLED just treat it like a normal display left cranked at max brightness 100% - safe to say I’ve seen a few devices with some pretty noticeable burn in text and UI element outlines 😅
My current phone is an LCD, and I may actually end up staying with LCD due to the extra brightness - particularly outside because I now use it as a bicycle computer too.
I’m a little disappointed Steam discontinued the LCD edition of their Deck (besides the 256GB model) but it’s pretty understandable looking at how competitive the handheld gaming PC market is getting, and how much of an improvement the OLED display is for colors, HDR, and battery life in particular
LCD for extra brightness? I don't think you've been keeping up as mobile OLEDs are usually brighter than mobile LCDs. Not that there are many LCDs left.
The Nokia XR21 is one LCD phone released in 2023:
IPS LCD, 120Hz, 450 nits (typ), 550 nits (HBM)
Another phone with brightness listen on gsmarena is the Oukitel WP30 Pro:
IPS LCD, 120Hz, 430 nits
Take a few popular OLED phones for comparison...
Galaxy S24: Dynamic LTPO AMOLED 2X, 120Hz, HDR10+, 2600 nits (peak)
iPhone 15: Super Retina XDR OLED, HDR10, Dolby Vision, 1000 nits (HBM), 2000 nits (peak)
Or for consoles, Steam Deck LCD is about 400 nits, while the OLED is up to about 600, or 1000 in HDR.
yep, ‘tis the way of the ceo. being so delightfully out of touch that you make the shittiest decisions possible just for your quarterly profits to be marginally higher
In general, he made decisions to attempt to buy the market rather than have the best services/console.
I'm not sure if MS is going to go the good route, but they have said that their acquisitions won't be console exclusives. I've understood that consoles lose money. Selling games is where you make it. Why limit your games to a single console? We're unlikely to see incredible dominance of a console in the future. You'd just be limiting your consumer base
MS has indicated that they will honor contracts and some promises were made to get their acquisitions through.
But everything has either been vague or outright said will be console exclusive. Bethesda is the earliest example of this, and we’ll probably see more later.
PS mostly makes their console exclusives in house. Even Spider-Man (the prime example people point to) was always intended to be console exclusive by Marvel and is only as good as it is because of Playstation funding.
The point of first party exclusives is to make money from your store long term. If they make their first party titles available on other platforms, fewer people would buy a PlayStation, which means less long term royalties from store sales.
So you limit the customer base for your first party titles, but ideally you make a ton more on your store fees. That’s the same reason Valve makes first party titles, to get people on Steam, not to make money from game sales.
What they should do is make a handheld that can play PS4 titles. That attracts a different demographic and keeps control of the store royalties. But they really need to make sure it works well, since it’ll be competing with the Switch and Steam Deck (and similar handheld PCs).
Lots of obvious astroturfing going on regarding this. I’ve seen this news everywhere from Slashdot to Reddit with people sucking Microsofts dick. It’s either that, or people are too young to remember the bullshit Microsoft pulled … since forever basically. People aren’t going to benefit from this merger. Microsoft is patient. Embrace, extend, extinguish is their strategy. 10 year agreements are nothing for them to wait out.
And it’s the same with every merger – “This will bring more competition, blah blah blah”, then merger goes through and half the people are fired, half the rest are rolled into existing systems, and some empty shell of the previous company just wanders along with no real spirit any longer.
I’m not happy with the state of consolidation in every market under the sun, but I’m sure as shit happy Bobby Kotick is finally going to fuck off and I’m happy I’ll be able to play activision games on gamepass. When gamepass inevitably enshitifies I’ll just get rid of my subscription.
Yeah I can see that. Nadella brought new energy and almost made MSFT look cool, but years later we can see how MSFT is basically gobbling up everything in every domain.
Update: Why am I being downvoted? Did you all forget that MSFT has acquired LinkedIn, GitHub, Mojang, Bethesda, ABK and 49% stake in OpenAI all under Satya? Each one of those are massive acquisitions.
Microsoft are far, far, far from being close to the leader in the market even with ABK on their books, so your FUD makes no sense. Pretty much no one in the entire industry is against the acquisition apart from their main competitor, Sony, who are the market leader and abuse that position every day of the year to pull content away from Microsoft.
ABK will operate like they do currently, just like Bethesda do, only now they have Microsoft money and backing.
The only people that this deal is bad for are people who only play on PlayStation consoles. Everyone else benefits.
You said nothing will change. They will be part of the microcrap veil and will follow their ways of doing things. Like not hire people and only contract for 18 months then get in new contractors to pick up where the recently fired left off… Like what happened at 343i.
Idk first thing about any of this, but I do think with MSFT controlling Windows, Azure, Xbox, GitHub, OpenAI, Teams; at some point one has to ask if MSFT is just too big for no good.
Think about it, a competing game studio might be paying MSFT for Windows licenses, Teams for internal communication, Azure for game servers, GitHub for hosting their source code, ChatGPT Pro for using AI in smart ways and finally a 30% cut to Xbox Store, only to compete with bazillions of first party titles under Xbox Game Studios.
Now think of a big publishers, they need to somehow compete with GamePass, which takes all the money MSFT can throw at it and makes game sales kinda irrelevant. Why would a consumer buy a $70 game when they can play other games for $15 max a month. Even if it’s $30 a month, it’s still a steal. Why would a studio go to a big publisher and give up bigger chunk of revenues (Outriders didn’t get much under Square Enix despite being on GamePass) when they could just become a second party developer with XGS and rake in whatever cash flow positive MSFT would give them before the game is even launched, with a bonus of marketing of “Day One With GamePass”.
In nut shell, MSFT makes a tonne money during development even if the game isn’t released on Xbox, and Xbox Game Studios slowly hollows out competing publishers by using the MSFT money to secure deals with third party studios or straight up acquiring them. They can adjust profitability by tweaking prices at several touch points of this huge Microsoft services pipeline.
If Xbox was broken away from MSFT, they’ll become yet another publisher, though a pretty big one, without the daddy money. It would make the industry more competitive between publishers, but it may also probably lead to egregious monetization strategies like we already see these days, because MSFT is uniquely positioned to do what they’re doing.
Similar things can be said about Amazon or Google. How is it that if Netflix succeeds AWS wins and if Prime succeeds, AWS still wins? How can Google make the search engine, video hosting platform, dominant browser and a ads platform and cross pollinate money like crazy? If big companies weren’t allowed to build such synergetic businesses, consumers might be paying to several different companies, but they’ll also be seeing competition in each of those domains, driving prices lower, hopefully.
So yeah, I support the idea of breaking up companies that start dealing with orthogonal domains that end up creating a nest of services that no competitor can easily break free from.
IDK, just because Microsoft has products in a variety of categories doesn’t pose problems in itself, the problem is when those products command a significant chunk of the market share to the point where they can control a big chunk of the market. From your list:
GitHub - problematic because it’s the biggest code hosting platform around, but on its own isn’t a big issue
Teams - doesn’t really dominate, and many orgs use Slack or something else for communication
Xbox and XGS - not an issue unless either dominates their respective markets; buying large publishers like Activision is a serious issue
Azure - they’re like second or third, so there should be a close watch to make sure there isn’t monopolistic behavior with integrations with GitHub, Xbox, etc
And so on. I don’t personally think they should be broken up, but acquisitions in sectors where they already have significant market share should be blocked.
Exactly, on their own the products aren’t harmful at all. The problem comes when MSFT can leverage their position to undercut prices or shoving their products in other products.
How can slack compete, despite being a superior product, when MSFT puts Teams in the effing taskbar of Windows and sells it for half the price, and bundles it with office?
How can bitbucket or gitlab compete if MSFT integrates npm, GitHub, Azure, GitHub Copilot, VSCode and so many other dev tools so well, for much lower price?
Azure is second, yes, but my company, like many other companies, uses Azure over AWS because MSFT gives a sweet deal where Azure, Outlook, OneDrive, GitHub, Teams are all bundled in such a way that it’ll be expensive to use individual companies for each, and also a big hassle. And when MSFT becomes an incubator for a startup, it’s even better deal for the startup. How can digital ocean, for example, compete with that?
I mean that’s what happened with Internet Explorer. Netscape couldn’t compete coz MSFT could give IE for free and bundle it into the operating system. Google did something similar by getting other softwares to bundle Chrome with them in the installation process, and also asking users to use chrome on all Google properties. Firefox can never compete with IE or Chrome or Safari, as long as these big companies can integrate their services and products so seamlessly.
So you’re absolutely right, individually none of the products are harmful, infact some of them are really good deals for consumers, but due to them all being under one umbrella, it’s hard for competition to thrive.
Both of these are free and open source. There’s a paid hosting tier for NPM, but it’s easy to self-host that.
But your larger point stands. The more tools they can package together, the more they can push out competition. Why use Slack if it’s a pain to integrate with GitHub and Office, but Teams works smoothly? This is certainly not unique to Microsoft, look at Apple as a clear example. The App Store forbids competition with Safari’s rendering engine, and that limits the competition other browsers can provide. Apple has its own ecosystem around iMessage and iCloud that don’t work outside that ecosystem. So if we’re going to make rules that target Microsoft’s bundling of functionality, it should also target Apple as well.
I’m less concerned about price and more concerned about exposed capability. IMO, Teams shouldn’t have any different access to Office or GitHub as Slack has. Once you have a large market share, you need to be extra careful about how your apps communicate to ensure that other apps can directly compete.
And as you mentioned, I think defaults are part of the problem. Mobile Safari isn’t dominant on iOS because it’s better, it’s dominant because it’s the default. Same with Edge on Windows and Chrome on Android. If there’s competition for a given product, it shouldn’t be bundled with the OS, and if the product is important for most users, it should prompt the user for what to use. I can see exceptions here for basic functionality (e.g. a dialer on a phone, or file browser on a desktop OS), but that definition needs to be very restrictive.
Glad I could make my point clearer. It’s hard to narrow down what feels wrong about this level of consolidation, and given MSFT’s track record in recent years, it’s hard to say they’re definitely going to become evil, but just that possibility feels scary.
Microsoft has already been evil, and I think there’s a good chance they’ll do it again if given the chance. The best company IMO is someone who is in second or third place (e.g. AMD v Intel, MS v Google, etc). As long as there are at least three competent players in a field, things tend to stay pretty competitive.
You just listed a bunch of Microsoft made products + GitHub + openAI (who they don’t control) - why shouldn’t they be allowed to control products they created?
You’re also talking like Microsoft is the market leader in game consoles when they’re a distant last and getting further behind. If this acquisition was blocked it would basically be game over for Xbox, and I would bet it would be sold off or go third party software only and exit the hardware market within a few years. Sony are the ones people need to be worried about here as they have a long history of abusing their dominant position and making blatantly anti-consumer moves based on that position.
Without Xbox as a competitor Sony would have free reign with no one to stop them. The video game industry is one of the most expensive industries any company can get into. Google tried and failed. Sega exited. Xbox is the last real competitor that entered and stayed and that was over 20 years ago, and the only reason it’s still around is to stop Sony from getting a monopoly in the living room.
You’re right. A company should be allowed to create and acquire other companies, no doubt in that.
The problem, as I listed above in the very long post, is unique to the big tech players where they can create such synergetic businesses that it’s pretty difficult for anyone to compete or break free from that.
What you’re saying makes great sense. Xbox indeed needs more and more IPs and more importantly much better quality control to compete with Sony. They lost the last generation, and they need to do everything in their power to course correct. After ABK, they would match Sony in number of IPs and maybe surpass them in number of studios. Fair enough. But, as a whole, this gives a lot more power to MSFT, and my question is simply whether it’s too much power or not.
Calling what Google did trying is a bad joke. Stadia failed because and exclusively because it was a fucking horseshit premise with no redeeming qualities.
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