Maybe you’re thinking of Xbox All-access, which allowed users to buy Xbox + Game Pass Ultimate and pay them all over one year (or three, can’t remember).
They’re kind of working on one device that is basically smaller than an Apple TV and will connect to your TV and is thought to be strictly for streaming games and nothing more. Essentially would be this since you have no storage or resources for locally stored game playing.
This small device was seen on a shelf in a live stream a few years ago and there were some other rumors surrounding it.
Buy Xbox and then either subscribe to gamepass ultimate or buy the game and then subscribe to gamepass core (just renamed XBL gold) to play online. Its still dumb that you have to pay to play online but you still have the option to outright buy any MS published games.
Now those online services are supported by digital sales, like on PC storefronts. Digital makes up the majority of console purchases now too, but they still continue to charge for online, so it’s no wonder PC market share grew in the interim.
Well, it just says they’re including it with Game Pass. So you have the option of not actually purchasing the game for $70 (every year!) but you still get to play. There’s a lot of good games for both Xbox and PC so it’s a decent value proposition for a lot of people.
I don’t buy AAA games, so it’s kind of nice to have the option to play some of them without a big upfront investment. The real stars are the smaller and indie games.
It’s not for everyone, but for the cost of a Netflix subscription I can play a shitload of games on my PC and my kids get a huge library on the console.
This is why I like GamePass. There's a bunch of games on there that I probably wouldn't play otherwise. And yeah, they're not all great, but I've found some that I really enjoy.
China wants to remove the adverse affects of gambling/addiction from it’s populace, not the world. This is just another facet like their social media restrictions.
I’m alright with the games that give you daily rewards but they don’t have to be consecutive days. It still benefits people who log in everyday, but you at least aren’t entirely missing out
A lot of those executives own real estate and need to keep those numbers up. I wonder how long before we pay people to sit in offices just so they can inflate their value.
It’s not about office space. They built a new office which somehow doesn’t have enough capacity for everyone but it’s still mandatory two days a week. It’s just micromanagement at this point.
Not that difficult to say no to an abusive company.
It is very hard to say no to an abusive company. I guarantee you purchase something from an abusive company. You’re not going to consumerism your way our of consumerism.
There is extremely limited entertainment that is not based on abuse. It gets worse obviously outside of entertainment but I think you’d have a hard time naming any entertainment company of scale that isn’t abusive.
Then there’s the fact that you’d be using a device built on abuse to play the entertainment.
This is always just some corporate propaganda so entrenched that you think you can not buy a product to make change. Yet companies like Nestle can be well known for seeing water as a luxury and using literal child saves to harvest cocoa while being profitable year after year.
Game studios like Blizzard need labor rights and unions not people saying they’ll hold them accountable online by not buying a video game while Diablo 4 becomes one of the fastest selling games of all time. You’re just spending lip service to the corporate elite and chasing after a solution that doesn’t hold them accountable.
Yes literally every screen, console and movie player is built on abuse, so let’s not do anything about the companies that do openly abuse their employees and customers. It’s all bad anyways so might as well do nothing with your thumb up your ass.
Nestle does horrible things and literally has killed children but let’s do nothing and buy their products anyways. Not like there are multiple nestle boycott groups all over the internet spreading awareness. No they are just wasting their time.
You can stand up against abuse from one company while being unable to do much about another.
Doing nothing gets you nowhere. I’m not saying choosing to support a company or not is the end all be all but it is the damn minimum you can do. Unions and laws against monopolies is what we need.
I don’t understand if you misread or are just too upset here but I never advocated for doing nothing. I advocated for doing something while consumerism is doing nothing. It’s the same bullshit plastic companies sold us about recycling and now the whole planet is covered in plastic.
I also don’t understand what the hell you mean about laws against monopolies, those exist and those are literally why MS didn’t buy ABK like a year ago. Oligopolies are just as problematic if not more problematic than monopolies.
You keep “standing up against abuse” by not buying video game. I hope I am wrong and it fixes everything.
I can understand this comment for something like an abusive mineral miner in Africa selling electronics parts, or a food corporation that makes shared ingredients. Video games, though, are much more of a finished product, and easy to find competition for.
All major game companies abuse their employees. I agree with not giving them money but it will do nothing. The way people fight abusive employers is with with unions and organizing not with giving money to the other company that abuses employees.
Diablo 4 made sales records amongst the most I have ever seen gamers saying they will boycott something. I want to be wrong, I want this to do something but I see absolutely no information to support that. Meanwhile I do see regulations and unions making change in the real world.
I was disappointed to hear allegations of toxic work environments in Moon Studios, the people who made indie darling Ori and the Blind Forest. So while abusive employers are certainly an important issue, it doesn’t appear to be one that’s specific to large companies. Furthermore, it was never going to get solved under the supervision of Bobby Kotick - a man who was never going to leave unless something like the Microsoft deal happened.
There’s lots of horrible companies in the world, and I salute anyone’s efforts to boycott the ones doing horrible shit. Part of the reason I’m ambivalent about the merger is, I don’t even buy (or care about the success of) Activision games. But I don’t see that as a topic directly relevant to corporate merging/growth. Two publishers merge, that hasn’t added to the amount of employee abuse going on in each of their studios.
Oh I mean “live services” that are broken on release, designed to charge you for everything and will be taking offline the moment it’s no longer profitable.
How about gamers stop throwing money away and enabling this shit company to absorb everything around it and making worse and worse games. But that won’t happen. Y’all have the conviction of sliced bread when it comes to preordering.
No one forced indie devs to put their games on gamepass, why is it my fault? I will pay for what I feel is worth my money, and gamepass has surpassed that ten fold. When they decide to go the way of netflix by jacking up prices and reducing offerings then I will stop paying for it just like I did with netflix.
Not sure what you are even on about, I don’t even own an xbox. I use gamepass on PC. I have other choices, I also have a Steam account with over 1000 games on it. You just sound like a jaded asshole.
Look at how Epic was doing business. They threw around hundreds of millions of dollars to buy exclusivity. And Epic was small time compared to MS. What happens when they do the same but on a larger scale? They buy exclusivity to Game Pass forever? They're already buying gaming powerhouses, indie games are a drop in the bucket.
This merger should be opposed by everyone. It's a dark sign of things to come. They've already shown they WILL cut out all competition once they buy competitors.
They kind of can't buy any competitors at this point. They got through this acquisition by the skin of their teeth and have to cool it, and after all that, I doubt this leads to a future where they've got a larger market share than PlayStation. There's also just far too much competition in the gaming space for them to approach a monopoly. Epic couldn't will their store into superiority over Steam, especially when they're not doing anything to solve problems for their customers, and Microsoft still has to make good products to get you to buy them too.
Eh, I'm not that hopeful. the FTC asked them questions but it was never really going to stop them. MS has the capital to buy Sony, if it was feasible to do so. I expect them to continue to buy stuff up until they are actually denied. They have the lawyers to throw at the government in perpetuity.
That's far more cynical than I can meet you at, and it's probably why the merger isn't "opposed by everyone". Microsoft is already dancing right up to the line of antitrust, though I suspect that if they're broken up, the video game division remains in one piece, not several.
Been saying it since last year. The companies are so terrified of a recession that they’re going to cause one. The funny thing is that this time the market is actually trending up again. This time they just want their bonuses.
What we all have to keep this laser centered in our minds when we talk about this is that for the ruling class, recessions are an essential part of the process of increasing their chokehold on society.
Capitalists want everything to periodically catastrophically collapse and go up in flames, without it the easily exploitable field of workers would grow into a mature forest with unions and other mechanisms that gradually grew in power to ensure the fruits of worker’s labor were distributed in a remotely fair way.
Make no mistake, they WANT a recession and honestly I think they are probably confused they haven’t been able to instigate the early arrival of one yet.
When I saw the title, I was concerned.
Upon reading the article, I was really happy to see this.
Now that I actually think about it though, I DO play a gacha game and it would simply be impossible to exist if not for the gacha business style it utilizes. I’m very happy that so many people sink real money into it, as I simply am unable to do so myself.
I’m very happy that so many people sink real money into it, as I simply am unable to do so myself.
I get what you’re saying, but it does also create incentives to develop for whales.
Like, okay. Take Fallout 76. They – unlike with previous games in the series – do not have large, commercial DLC packages that come out. Rather, they have small, free, seasonal releases of content. Howard has committed Bethesda not to doing any commercial DLC for the game.
I was happy with that “large commercial DLC” model, and purchased them. But, okay, as it stands, I get a game that someone else is mostly paying for, right?
They sell a “premium” subscription for $12/mo, which provides some relatively-minor benefits.
And they sell various cosmetic items that people can place in their camp that one could hypothetically spend a pretty much unlimited amount on.
My problem is that financially, this constrains them to have basically no incentive to do anything other than develop new cosmetic items and sell to people who really want to buy them. And in the past, Bethesda has made some excellent large, commercial expansions for games in the series, like Far Harbor for Fallout 4.
This isn’t to argue in favor of or against the law in China, but to point out that the “someone else will pay for the game” model has some problems with it – if you aren’t paying anything, and someone else’s wallet is covering all the costs, it means that the game developer is entirely-incentivized to do development to appeal to whoever is paying for the thing, not you.
This doesn’t necessarily apply to multiplayer games though: the free-to-play part of the playerbase is there to pad the numbers and ensure queues are short (if it’s a match based game), cities are lively (if it’s a MMORPG), etc.
If the developer can’t appeal to those too, then you’re left with a ghost town of a game that can’t appeal to the whales either.
Also, the “whales” are by and large not unharmed rich people - it’s mostly poor people who are at risk for gambling addiction, such as many with adhd, depression, etc. The people who are targeted successfully by this model usually suffer for it.
She says the company abused its dominant position by requiring digital games and add-ons to be bought and sold only via the PlayStation Store, which charges a 30% commission to developers and publishers.
Maybe Nintendo has a similar practice with their Nintendo shop that they could be sued over, but regardless they’re still allowed to price their own games however they want.
Ultimately, I suspect the entire model for digital game delivery on consoles will have to change as a result of this case. Not that those changes would be bad, of course (indeed, they’re sorely needed), but they will occur as a result of console manufacturers having to open up their consoles to…sideloading (not sure this is the word, but it’s all I’ve got right now)?
The best thing about steam is you can buy keys from other sites
The worst thing about those sites is in most cases it results in the developer being ripped off because the keys are either stolen or purchased using stolen credit cards.
Countless devs have said they would rather people pirate their games than buy keys from those sites
This is true for a small category of sites I won’t name, but there’s also lots of sites that have a direct business relationship with the publisher. Ex: greenmangaming, gamersgate.
Remember kids, almost all freemium games make their money through manipulating your animal impulses to make you spend money on essentially nothing which you wouldn’t rationally want to spend. Disarming this particular skinner box seems like a positive direction.
I really hoped we would get a PS6 with a built-in stern cartoon Xi blocking the buy button in the PS store, pointing his finger and shouting “No! Finish your backlog first!” but I guess you can’t have everything in life
reuters.com
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