According to their Wikipedia, Techdirt only accepted money from Charles Koch’s foundation for a lawsuit (amongst other donors), and are owned by Floor64.
Floor 64’s website only has 2 people listed in their management team, but I couldn’t dig up if either are linked to the Koch’s (I was pretty cursory about it though).
The article was worth a read for this quote alone:
VGHF library director Phil Salvador puts it even more simply: “Generative AI video is a great way to preserve video games, in the sense that mirages are a great source of water.”
They surrendered when they thought day one console buyers and people who liked gimmicky dance game peripherals were one and the same, and never really caught back up.
Since then they’ve been pushing Game Pass hard, but that mythical era where you’d just need a TV, internet and a gamepad just never arrived for them. Streaming games is probably fine for a lot of casual gamers, but the casual gamers are already on mobile and tend to spend very little on games. Far too little for Game Pass Ultimate to make sense for them.
And I’m really unconvinced that day one Game Pass games are sustainable. Even with their piss-poor output over the last few years.
I also don’t like that games are no longer going down much in price over time. It seems everyone is far too happy to leave things at launch price to make subscriptions and crap sales seem like better value.
This kinda sucks to see. Less competition is a bad thing for everyone. Maybe it’s just me hanging onto every bit of nostalgia I have, but the Xbox generations were special.
I know that it can’t like…physically remove any of the good times I had with the systems over the years. But these consoles have been part of my life since 2001. So many friends and memories were created with these systems. In a way, it feels like your friend is dying, LOL. I know that’s extremely over dramatic, but like damn.
Some of the exclusives that came to the system were really special. It’s sad to see that over the past decade, there were really only a small handful of exclusives that were notable. Especially when early on we had some absolutely amazing stuff.
On a more serious note, I am extremely curious what this means going forward and how they will handle digital purchases a decade from now.
They’ll still make the Xbox consoles as long as they are selling. They’ll hopefully just ease off the “Exclusives” going forward.
It was a shitty way of trying to move consoles anyway.
Although they are late to the party, Sony is also trying to sell on PC and other storefronts. So my guess is that the console market isn’t treating either of them super well atm.
Microsoft needs to merge their ecosystems and make the Xbox a PC Game console for your tv. I shouldn’t own 2 different units that have Microsoft operating systems that can’t use the same software in 2025. Xboxes should be PCs that run Xbox games. Make a forked version of Windows that’s TV friendly and have the ability to “boot” into a version of Windows that users can run their own PC games on.
I understand how tricky that can be for piracy and whatnot, but there’s gotta be a better way by now. At the very least, Xbox should include Steam/Epic games integration.
Over the weekend, Spencer sat down for a lengthy interview with XboxEra in which he discussed his favorite games, talked about what various Xbox studios are working on, and dished on the industry at large. And he was also honest about Xbox no longer being part of any console war, as it shifts to selling Xbox games on other consoles, like PlayStation.
“I would love to make all of the money for all of the games that we ship, right? Like, obviously we make more on our own platform,” said Spencer. “It’s one of the reasons that investing in our own platform is important. But there are people, whether it’s their libraries on a PlayStation or Nintendo, whether it’s they like the controller better, they just like the games that are there.”
“I’m not trying to move them all over to Xbox anymore,” added Spencer.
Now, I don’t expect that to mean the sudden cessation of manufacturing of current Xbox hardware. I’m not entirely sure I believe that any of this means we won’t get another generation of the console at some point, either.
But I can see that happening. And everyone can already see how Microsoft has begun to pivot away from focusing on its console, has begun a far greater foray into cloud gaming through the Xbox Game Pass platform, and it has even begun moving away from the exclusivity we wrung our hands over months ago
I don’t think its as much as microsoft lost its just that all the consoles are the same, and pc and steam deck by extension plays all the games anyway for cheaper.
It’s likely more than half of adults in the US play video games. About 40% of those play some kind of shooter. There are 258 million adults in the US. That’s ~129 million gamers, and ~51 million “shooters”.
Out of 51 million, they think they can link one to a game and condemn the genre?
Not too much earlier; Wikipedia says the game was invented in 1986 by psychology student Dimitry Davidoff, a psychology student at Moscow State University.
In June 2006 a Rockingham school inquiry was launched after parents complained of the traumatic effects classroom Mafia was having on their fifth-grade children. Davidoff responded to the reports, saying that as a parent who had studied child psychology for 25 years, he felt that the game could “teach kids to distinguish right from wrong”, and that the positive message of being honest could overcome the negative effects of an “evil narrator” moderating the game as if it were a scary story.
If you enjoy the game you should check out The Traitors with its many international variants. I was surprised to read that the productions provide psychologists to help the contestants as it gets traumatic, but when I watched the first UK season there were a lot of people getting into emotional distress.
There have been a lot of people cast who really shouldn’t be on the show; it’s just a game!
The biggest difference of the TV show versus the home game is the home game just ends whenever all the killers are found. The TV show has to reach a set number of episodes, so there are mechanisms built-in to make sure there’s always at least one traitor up to the final episode.
I guess it depends which version you watch; I think the U.S. and Canada versions are 44 minutes without commercials, but yeah, it does have some filler. When someone’s actually good at the strategy it can be interesting hearing them talk through their plans.
This has been done over and over again to entice boomer parents to get their kids to stop playing video games. My parents didn’t let me buy any shooter games other than jet force gemini becuase they thought it was a exploration game…
It’s rock music. It’s “reefer madness”. Then it’s metal music with satanic messaging when played backwards. Now it’s video games. Same old blame game while never tackling the actual problems of lack of psych care, real societal pressures like financial difficulties, and more.
Especially in the era before just looking shit up on the internet when you hit a snag. I remember scouring levels in that looking for a path that I’d missed when I couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to go next.
Definitely a highlight of the N64 for me. It’s up there with the Zeldas in my book.
Boomers’ children are grown ass adults with their own kids now. Those parents are the ones who grew up playing games. This dumbass narrative doesn’t play anymore
techdirt.com
Aktywne