It's hard to block mergers based on a company involved being a monopoly if none of the companies involved are monopolies or will become monopolies.
Regulators have to come up with a different set of rules to block "large but not monopolistic mergers" without also just effectively protecting the actual leader in a given industry from competition.
Why not? It costs nothing, appart from transforming the old format into something the current site can work with, or more likely, have the old site support tbe old format.
It really is that old. According to their Supreme Court amicus brief: “Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.” Seriously though, read that brief. It’s a masterful piece of satire.
I used to be a huge advocate for Game Pass. I’ve played so many games I never would have without, and have saved so much from buying games and not liking them.
30 a month is insane. It now outpaces my buying rate and I can’t justify it. The lower tiers just don’t do it for me. They finally killed an Xbox Live customer since the 360.
Same here. This year I switched from using the Xbox Live to Game Pass upgrade thing to have it all the time, to paying full price for Game Pass only during the months when I’m actively using it.
The more expensive they make it, the less I’ll pay.
I’m exactly the same. Xbox gamer since the OG, and big fan of GamePass until recently. There’s no way I’m paying that much. Mine expires this month, and that’ll be that.
Jesus, did all you people pissing on fans of Game Pass stand outside of Blockbbuster back in the day?
I paid for a service KNOWING I was renting. KNOWING the service would eventually enshitify. KNOWING it was unsustainable at past prices. I rode the wave as long as it made sense, the ride is now over. It’s just like the Movie Pass deal a few years ago, milk it for all its worth while you can.
I don’t think the comment above is talking about GamePass specifically. They’re talking about the “I’ve been an Xbox customer since…” stuff. That kind of corporate loyalty is a scam. You never should buy a product because you owned the previous one. Do what’s best for you when it’s best for you. Don’t give them any loyalty. Make them earn your purchase.
Even if that was the intention, I used the platform while it worked for me, and I saw value. The minute I didn’t see the value, I left the platform. No tech company (and most companies) has had my loyalty for years. The minute they do something I don’t agree with, I’m out.
I liked Hollow Knight just fine, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy Silksong, but it definitely doesn’t have me super excited. Invincible Vs, though…that one I’m looking forward to.
The layoffs were already yesterday’s news, with basically no one talking about them. I don’t think MS needs any diversion tactics for that, and even then, Silksong wouldn’t be it.
That’s a valid opinion if you want ownership over everything else, fair.
But to blanket-label Game Pass as “shit” right from the start really isn’t fair to all those people for whom it was good value, and gave access to a lot of games they probably wouldn’t have been able to justify otherwise.
Personally it wasn’t for me, because I too don’t like subscriptions, but for some of my friends it was and I respect that.
It was good value in the short term…but anyone capable of forecasting longer than 36 months knew instantly it was an awful deal, even compared to someone who had Playstation Plus and its free games + discounted games since the Sony hack in 2011 and doubly so compared to someone who bought Humble Bundle instead.
It definitely was awesome if you were someone who gets bored of games easily and moves on. I think I get a high from the whole new game thing then it dissipates after a few hours.
Some have even left while they still have early access plastered all over it. When you load them they say "this is a work in progress and doesnt necessarily reflect the finished product.
I think “cool. I’ll play that when its finished because its a good concept” then its leaving gamepass.
Fuck you im not paying to be a beta tester. You should be paying me if anything.
It started off very good actually with the £1 upgrades and converting existing subs (so 3 years of Game Pass for £70!) but it’s time has come to an end.
What a sad day for gamers. Microsoft now has all it needs to extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on consoles, just as they do on PCs already, and the regulators will give them a wink and a nudge.
Except they just got CoD. Playstation is about lose one the mega-franchise cross-platforms games that “everyone” buys.
IIRC they did sign the deal that let’s the continue to get releases for a couple more years, but no way MS just keeps releasing their games on PS forever.
With Minecraft, the Java edition was & still is available on many different platforms, but the later Minecraft games that were made after the Microsoft takeover have, for the most part, only come out for Microsoft platforms. Minecraft Dungeons, for instance, never came out on GNU or macOS.
The Bedrock edition was ported to PlayStation, but for how much longer will it be available, I wonder…
but the later Minecraft games that were made after the Microsoft takeover have, for the most part, only come out for Microsoft platforms.
Today I've learned that the Nintendo Switch and PS4/5 are Microsoft platforms. Pretty much every console Minecraft game has made its way onto these systems.
Minecraft Dungeons, for instance, never came out on GNU or macOS.
Works just fine on Linux using Proton (they could totally prevent that if they wanted to) and Apple is pretty hostile to macOS gaming anyway.
Thankfully Minecraft Dungeons does work via Proton, though I’m not super familiar with macOS so I’m not sure if Proton works for macOS given that Apple’s platforms use Metal rather than Vulkan (though I hear a translation layer is being worked on for Vulkan->Metal).
Apple has their own Proton, called the Game Porting Toolkit, and it works well for games that don’t need a launcher & are mainly played with a keyboard and mouse, but I’ve found that game controllers don’t work very well with it.
There’s also MoltenVK, which is Vulkan for macOS, and DXVK, a DirectX-to-Vulkan-to-Metal layer that was used to play some Windows games on macOS before the GPTK came out.
That's not true at all. Minecraft Bedrock Edition, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends are all available on both Playstation and Nintendo Switch. Bedrock Edition is available for Chromebooks. Dungeons and Legends are both on Steam and will run through Proton.
Bedrock Edition is not on Steam and unavailable on Linux and Mac. Dungeons and Legends aren't available on Mac. In a strange twist, Education Edition, which is just Bedrock Edition with classroom oriented features, is available for Mac though.
We want lots of smaller corps competing, not just a couple giants. Every merger is one fewer of the former, regardless whether it forces one of the existing big corps to step up their game.
Not that ABK was small, and for once I’m split because holy hell did it need new management.
problem with this is the size of these companies, sony is not a megacorp in same tier as MS and they likely wouldnt be able to allocate funding for large gaming acquisitions such as EA
I’m talking about the platform, not the store front. Windows has far more than 90% of the PC gaming world market share, far more than what’s enough to monopolize the PC gaming scene; GNU and macOS are a super distant second and third place. Whenever most people talk about “PC gaming”, what they really mean is Windows, even though there are other PC platforms out there.
But if Microsoft did something so nefarious to Windows gaming, enough people could switch to Linux to punish them for it, since the last 5 years were spent making nearly every game work on Linux regardless. Microsoft tried to use their position to get you to buy every game through their store, and the market rejected it. That 90% they have currently is now afforded the privilege to be fickle with Windows usage, when before they didn't have the option.
I had no issues with GamePass for years and was like this isn’t as bad as people say. Then out of the blue I started getting the Download Gaming Services error and wasn’t able to play anything. Looked it up and this has been an issue for years. I tried all the solutions I could find and ended up just canceling my GamePass and haven’t used it since.
This is one of the reasons I don’t use GamePass, because it all goes through the crappy Microsoft Store which always gives me weird download errors, and when trying to research the issue it just leads to nothing that works.
God forbid you reinstall Windows and have your GamePass games on another drive. It won’t let you re-use that partition because the games folder is “owned by someone else” even when you’re signed into the same Microsoft account, and it won’t let you delete it because its protected by Windows… You either have to nuke the whole partition, delete it from Linux, or go through the whole take-ownership ritual which is buggy at best.
No, and yet Steam is still winning. Game Pass can be a sick deal but many still prefer paying just a little more on a Steam Sale to own a game forever.
I do use steam so please don’t misunderstand this as bashing, but you don’t own anything on steam either. You rent it for life and access can legally be withdrawn if you act against the TOS. If you’re looking to buy games GOG is the only real option I know of.
I hear u on this, I’m just speaking to the real world use case. I get that Valve could shut off Steam tomorrow and that would be it, but the odds of that happening are low. What I’m saying is, if I usually take 2 months to finish a single-player game, and the game regularly goes on sale for $20, I’m always going to buy the game on Steam vs. Game Pass. That way, if I decide I want to play it 3 monrhs later, I don’t have to pay ANOTHER $10 to Microsoft to access it.
And if Valve takes the game away in 10 years? That sucks for game preservation reasons, but realistically I almost never play games that are more than 10 years old.
It's awesome how user friendly Mint is. If you like it you might check out the Debian version of it (LMDE). In general it's similar but doesn't rely on Ubuntu which is maintained by a company, Canonical, that upsets linux people with some proprietary stuff. Ubuntu is just a derivative of Debian, so you just can go with the original.
I tried Fedora briefly before switching back to Ubuntu. It seemed like it was still forcing updates in a Microsoft-esque way that Ubuntu does not. On Ubuntu, most updates can be applied without a restart, but Fedora seemed to bundle a bunch of updates together without really telling me what was in them, and I believe it had an install step during shutdown or startup? Which is another thing I hated about Windows. Some of this could be false, as I have an atrocious memory, and some of it could have been user error, but the first foot that it put forward reminded me too much of Windows. On Ubuntu, I just disable snaps.
It doesn’t have to be done that way. From my understanding, fedora does it that way as a safety environment or something (could be wrong). But you can absolutely just do a dnf upgrade and keep on going. It’s the software center that invokes that reboot to install the updates.
But I use the same software center in Kubuntu without those restrictions. If it's easy to toggle that off, I could have Fedora in my back pocket as an alternative for some day where Ubuntu gets too egregious with their Snaps, but so far, it's easier to just stick to Kubuntu.
Which 3rd party exclusives are they sitting on except Bayonetta 2/3? I can't remember that many.
Nintendo has the same dumb practices, but they do it with their own IPs, which is a little less annyoing. Also they aren't the main player like Sony has been for the last two decades. They just own the Mario-and-Zelda-tablet.
In the 80s and 90s, third party exclusives were a necessity because you were making games for sets of hardware that were capable of dramatically different things.
They were capable of dramatically different things. Perhaps they also had those contracts, but Genesis couldn't do mode 7, and the sounds that came out of the SNES were dramatically different. There were cases where a game would come out on each system under the same name but developed by two different companies with two completely different designs, because their capabilities were so different.
There were plenty of games that took advantage of one console over the other due to the very different architectures and it was a wonderful and neat thing. That said this is not really the point being made.
It was stated earlier that Sony set “the market rules” when this is untrue. Nintendo in the 80s was incredibly anti-competitive and had a very closed off ecosystem and a tight grip over developers. It wasnt even a matter of whether the game worked on one console vs another it was a matter of nintendo dominating the market and retaliating against 3rd parties that tried to work with other developers. 3rd party exclusives and first and 2nd party devs focusing on one console is somethin thats been baked into the console market since nintendo came into power in the mid 80s.
Nintendo had a problem to solve back then, which was shovelware, so they incentivized fewer, higher-quality releases. Compared to today's market and the means we have to sift through shovelware, it was basically the equivalent of martial law to get the market on track. But for many years, competing consoles were just capable of dramatically different things. That tended to even out in the 6th gen, but even then, many devs would only release on PS2 because it cost too much money to make a game multiplatform, so you'd just target the one with the largest install base. Take a look at the 5th gen for how dramatically different the capabilities were between the Saturn, N64, and PlayStation; two of them were on CDs, one was on cartridges; Saturn sucked at 3D and pushed FMVs; PlayStation had a weird "Z-buffer" problem where vertices were really swimmy and shapes would wobble; N64 lacked the storage space to have many textures at all; draw distance and raw processing power varied wildly; on and on.
Whilst monopolies are a terrible thing for consumers.
PlayStation and Nintendo still have the best first party lineups and IP available to them. I don’t think this is as big of a deal as people would like to make it seem.
I do agree this should have been blocked by regulators just as I thought with the Bethesda acquisition. Sony also with the acquisition of Bungie.
There should be a restriction on the purchasing of studios/publishers of a certain size.
Certainly isn’t going to hurt Sony or Nintendo. I also don’t think this is the big WIN that Microsoft thinks it’s going to be either.
Because, to the majority of console gamers in the Americas and Europe, Call of Duty, FIFA, GTA, and Madden are the Only Games That Actually Matter™. There are a few million people that buy PlayStations just to play 1-2 of those games to the exclusion of everything else.
Now that they’ve taken out one of the four major reasons why people outside of Asia buy PlayStations, they can extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on console gaming. It’s sickening.
And somehow, I don’t think that Sony resurrecting the Resistance series & making it into an annual release that always launches during the holiday season will make much of a difference.
It's still an improper invocation of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish regardless; only Call of Duty came along with this sale, so by your own logic, they still can't have a monopoly; there are several other franchises, owned by several other corporate entities that Microsoft doesn't own, that would fit on that list of yours; and IMO, Resistance was never good anyway, so if they want to make their own Call of Duty, they're starting from scratch, and they've got a decade to figure it out.
They are nowhere near getting a monopoly of gaming. It sucks that studios are becoming more consolidated yes, but it's not monopoly level which is why this merger wasn't blocked.
It will be once Call of Duty becomes a console Xbox exclusive, and the millions of people in the Americas & Europe switch from PlayStation to Xbox in order to get their CoD fix. We’ve already seen this in the PC market, where CoD has been a Windows exclusive for years now, to the point where people won’t buy Macs because they can’t play CoD on them.
Apple's got bigger problems when it comes to gaming than just whether or not Call of Duty comes out for Mac that year, and those problems are of Apple's own creation.
Is there anything to back up the idea that call of duty is the behemoth it once was? Fortnite seems to be far more culturally relavent than war zone and seems to be both more profitable and have a larger player base. Don’t get me wrong cod is still a big game, I just have my doubts it’s making or breaking the whole industry.
If you bring up Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, especially since we're talking about Microsoft, that is not what it means, and your definition has issues, because if you're buying a big company for a lot of money, the last thing you want to do is extinguish it.
That's not what "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" means. You just came up with three numbered items to correspond to the fact that there are three words in the phrase.
That applies to open software standards, what does it have to do with buying cash cows?
It has no real meaning anymore. It's now a phrase people throw around as effectively a meme. You won't get anything but a wrong answer to this question.
It does seem like some people just automatically post it on every thread that mentions Microsoft. Just because we all dislike something doesn’t mean we want to see the same low-effort comments spammed every time they come up in discussion like we’re still on Reddit!
It doesn’t even apply to software standards lol. It’s a dumb “playbook” probably made by some coked out Microsoft middle manager in the 00s that wasn’t even widely successfully used. Lemmy’s crappy example of it is Google “killing” an extensible messaging protocol, which is nonsense because they didn’t kill anything (you don’t “kill” a protocol), they extended it into a proprietary version. You know, because it’s extensible.
The only relevance “embrace, extend, extinguish” has in today’s society is as an excuse to spread FUD and ragebait on Lemmy.
I don’t have an Xbox, but I’m thrilled any time companies add good customizable accessibility options. It’s good for folks who really need it, but also usually good for those of us who just like to customize everything as much as possible. Everybody wins.
Same here. While I’m very critical of Microsoft and tend to avoid a lot of things they’re involved in their continuous work on improving accessibility is one thing I’ve been really impressed with. I hope this approach will become more and more prevalent in both the gaming industry and in general as well.
With cross-play across all platforms, you and your friends can squad up no matter where you play — no Microsoft account required.
However, signing in with a Microsoft account unlocks full cross-platform functionality. It enables cross-progression, so your Campaign and multiplayer progress carries across devices. It also allows you to send invites and play with friends across platforms — like Xbox to PlayStation or Steam to Xbox.
Honestly, this is the way to handle the incorporation of platform-specific accounts; totally optional, but actually gives you a sensible benefit if you choose to go that route. Sony could learn a lot here.
Maybe we’ll get SC3, though I’m sure they’ll want to make it SC3 the mmorpg live service micro transaction game… Need additional Pylons? That’ll be 10c thanks…
Once again begs the question why Nintendo shuts their stores down far sooner and makes it so you can’t re-download your old purchases, other than greed/laziness. 
Sure, but if I already got an old Super Mario game on the Wii or DS, I can’t just re-download it on my Switch. I have to pay for Nintendo Online to play the games. It would be easy for Nintendo to see if I already own a game in their library of available games and allow me to play them without paying for the subscription. They also could make more games they already released on older Eshops and make them playable. The emulator to play old Nintendo games is right there on the Switch! But yeah, why sell the stuff once if they can just rent it to us anew every couple of years.
I don’t have an Xbox, so I don’t know if they only offer backwards compatibility for first party games? If no and they offer old third party games, then there is no excuse for Nintendo! If Xbox can do it, the biggest player on the console market can do it!
I do know that if they do, they explicitly had contracts in the past, when the games were published structured in a way that gives them permission to do so now. There is no way for Nintendo to do the same. They would have to negotiate new deals and it's not actually possible to do so for more than a small handful of third party games at absolute best.
Also, Microsoft is a far bigger company than Nintendo.
You can redownload your purchases on discontinued Nintendo platforms.
You know, I thought you couldn’t on the Wii anymore, but apparently you can…? It’s unclear to me but seems I may have been mistaken when I said you can’t. TIL.
30$/month is hilarious. We all knew they were going to increase the price to justify how much microsoft is spending but at that point you might as well buy your games. I guess it would make sense if you’re playing every day one release and are already subscribed to other things that are now included such as fortnite, ubisoft+…
but 99.9% of gamers are not that obsessed. I have a hard time believing there are many people willing to spend 360$ to play games that will disappear as soon as you stop playing. and I have a hard time believing most standard game pass subscribers will stay subscribed now that recently released games aren’t included. That was the only reason I bothered subbing for a month every year or so
Even if you play every day one release, there’s hardly one of those per month. The math used to work out, for a long time, that one month of Game Pass was about 1/4 of the cost of a full priced new release, so going for a subscription made some kind of sense for a certain kind of consumer. This is a hard sell.
Yeah I agree. I never used Gamepass as I am not the target audience, but the value proposition made sense to me and I understood why some people paid for it.
This new pricing makes no sense at all, wouldn’t you rather just buy the games you want at that point? $360 a year gets you a lot of games, even accounting for a couple of AAA day one purchases every year.
It’s a shame the UK’s Competitive Markets Authority let this merger go through after all. I can’t wait for the future, when 90% of the most popular games are made by 3 companies
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