Laughable selling this as “Improving gamer experience” breaking another existing standard.
Saying this especially from the DIY angle where custom controllers are kinda the thing.
Also lol because “competitive” gameplay. Gear always wins the day - just like in meat space.
Ah well, one good thing may come from this: Plenty of cheaper second hand controllers that I may buy as replacements to connect to my Steam Link. This one isn’t too picky when it comes to controllers. My current mix on that is a Steam Controller, a Wii-U controller and some no-name “works-on-all” wireless controller.
I seriously considered getting one for my wife about 6 months ago. She’s a casual controller gamer on her laptop, so I thought I’d spring for something with a little quality for her.
I had an official Xbox controller in my hand ready to check out and decided against it because when I looked, there were so many accounts of the controller just falling apart on people. It’s not worth paying a premium $80 for a controller that doesn’t last a year.
She still plays on a 10 year old black 360 controller with a wireless adapter and has zero problems.
Generates e-waste as controllers are bricked for no reason.
Kills costly custom built accessibility controllers. No consideration for marginalized users whatsoever.
Retroactively screws all customers over.
Goes as far as breaking peripheral compatibility with a discontinued console.
Is it to kill cheating devices used on competitive titles? Is it a money grab? It probably won’t achieve either. From a customer protection standpoint I’m wondering if this position can be attacked legally.
Nevertheless it reminds me that other time when Spencer was daydreaming about buying Nintendo and it feels like Microsoft is being a little unhinged as of late.
The more I read about this the more baffling the move seems. It's not going to end cheating. It might inconvenience cheaters, if even that and it's only going to create negative PR for Microsoft, especially since this is impacting people who use modified controllers for accessibility issues. It's especially weird given how carefully Microsoft has tried to craft an image of being "pro-consumer" this console generation. Then again I imagine the executives who make these decisions rarely think these things through. At the very least it is a good reminder that there is no such thing as a pro-consumer for-profit corporation.
Yes, there’s a proprietary authentication mechanism. It’s been used in all controllers from the Xbox One, released in 2013, onward. At the moment, at least publicly, it remains uncracked. That’s actually quite impressive!
I think a lot of people are interpreting this news to mean that all third party Xbox controllers will stop working. Controllers from the likes of PowerA, Razer or 8bitdo. But they will still work. They are licensed by Microsoft and contain their proprietary authentication processors.
Some third party accessories like the Cronos Zen allow other controllers (Joysticks, wheels, PC gamepads, Playstation controllers etc.) to work with Xbox - and also often contain ‘cheat’ mechanisms (like automatic direction input to compensate for gun recoil in shooters). They require you to connect an authentic Xbox controller to them and hijack communication to do ‘authentication’ via the authentic controller. Perhaps Microsoft has worked out a way to detect this?
Lastly, there are some cheap third party controllers, often from Chinese manufacturers, that seem, at the moment, to ‘just work’ without being licensed by Microsoft. General online consensus seems to be that they’re using recycled authentication chips - but perhaps some contain cracked copies of the algorithm and Microsoft has figured out a way to tell?
It’s these last two categories that Microsoft is presumably cracking down on.
For the record, you don’t have to take “everything else” out first. It’s actually quite accessible once removing the Steam Deck back plate, which is easily done with a Phillips head screwdriver. The bulk of the 2-4 hour estimate on iFixit is dealing with the battery adhesive. (source: I’ve opened my Steam Deck to swap the SSD, and I just opened it to attempt a band-aid fix to the right bumper after dropping the Deck directly on it while waiting for the part to restock)
Usually consolidation is done by expensive buy outs (which this one was). And if the company is public, the CEO’s next goal (since it now has valuable IP and has eliminated a competitor), is to make that money back and do so fast (see Disney with Marvel, Star Wars, etc.). This means exploiting its newest IP, farting out something that a known audience / fanbase will show up for (again - unfortunately - see Disney).
This doesn’t necessarily guarantee shitty outcomes (see Andor in the case of Star Wars being bought by Disney, see Overwatch after Activision bought Blizzard), but usually it comes with the territory of new bosses eventually trying to squeeze more value out of the IPs and team resources they purchased (see “Secret Invasion” by Marvel under Disney, and see “Overwatch 2” by Blizzard under Activision).
Depending on the company, they’ll also do MASS layoffs to “eliminate redundancies” - which in theory means firing people whose jobs encompass the exact same practice, but in reality means a bunch of people are about to have their work load doubled.
The people at the very top of the bought out company will get HUGE piles of cash, plus some requirements they stay on board usually for some amount of time… and then most of them will probably bail the moment their stock “vests” - allowing them to start up new companies and begin the cycle of “make stuff, then get bought out by big company” all over again.
Rarely a key person stays on board for some time (see Carmack with Facebook / Oculus for example), but eventually even the most passionate dev sees that their new bosses will never fully get behind them in the way they were able to do when they were not owned by said parent company.
From a broader “industry-wide” perspective, it’s probably not great either, because the mass layoffs at a gigantic well-regarded company means more workers competing across a mostly non-unionized industry for less jobs (and if you’re just starting, now you’ve got to compete with someone who has “Blizzard” on their resume).
Worse still - because the video game industry is already pretty exploitative of its workers, since it (like VFX) mostly came into being after the Reagan era completely destroyed the public perception of unions, the jobs everyone will be competing for will just have even worse conditions since soooooo many (younger folks especially) dream of working on video games (until they get their first industry job, get a few years under their belt, and been there for more than one studio closure and decide that - if they ever want to enjoy having time with their family, owning a home, and living somewhere for more than 5 years, they probably should change jobs to some relevant field in software dev that pays better, has less hours, and is overall more stable).
One thing missed is the fresh set of eyes on old IP.
Some of the older games / IP that is being bought over has had no or little interest with the old group, so the new company may have a team inside that says “hey we use that now”.
It doesn’t always work. But it’s better than nothing.
One thing missed is the fresh set of eyes on old IP.
Right - like the Andor example.
I feel like Andor was a result of someone talented taking advantage of the Disney Star Wars money hose that got lucky that the corporate Eye of Sauron (aka a bunch of producers and company execs) weren’t watching them too closely.
On the opposite side, look at what Microsoft did to Halo (under Don Mattrick’s leadership, btw). They decided they didn’t want to pay Bungie a nice fat thank you in their potential contract renewal, instead decided to keep the Halo IP, spin up a studio with only a handful of key people and then people who had no idea what Halo was for their LITERAL FLAGSHIP IP.
In general, I am skeptical of how companies will handle IP after big buyouts / corporate consolidation. That way when an Andor comes along, I’m pleasantly surprised instead of finally satisfied as a result of high expectations.
Layoffs have already hit this and other industries, including Microsoft, regardless of buyouts, and since this deal is fresh, it will likely happen again in the near future. But there's no need for them to squeeze value out of what they bought. They can revive dormant IPs just by making sure they run on modern platforms and putting them on Game Pass. That alone is a tremendous amount of value that Activision couldn't get regardless of how much they squeezed.
And a lot of people who leave or are let go in these situations go on to form new studios. If you think about it too, it doesn't make much sense that the jobs would disappear. The industry will support a certain number of games being produced, and someone's got to make them still.
A worse outcome to me still seems to me to be a world where Sony is uncontested in its console space.
All of what you said is true, but usually consolidation results in a net negative overall. It’s why we (at least used to) have anti-trust laws. Companies - regardless of industry - tend to be monopolistic when they can get away with it.
However, I will say that your point about “reviving dormant IPs” is just another way of framing (albeit much more charitably) what I described previously. Capitalizing on well-known or well-regarded IPs with built-in large fan bases who will likely buy based on name recognition rather than what its Metascore is or how well it runs according to technical tests run by Digital Foundry.
Also, I agree with you that as long as Sony and Nintendo exist in the console space, the industry can probably endure. That sort of consolidation would probably result in some really bad shit. Price gouging, no more owning games - just licensing with shaky terms that they can change at any time, required subscriptions, upgrades, more egregious micro-transactions… ugh… as long as there are major competitors, they will do things like this every time one of the other one makes a greed-driven decision that pisses off the consumers.
I just wish we had the number of big game companies we had in the 90s and 2000s. There used to be dozens of pretty big name independently owned game dev studios in the city where I am, and now - among those still even open - I can’t think of a single one still independently owned. The only 2 big ones I know of now in the area are subsidiaries of 2 major giant companies.
Trusts would be a very extreme case of consolidation, and if Microsoft were to qualify (they're close), it's certainly not because of its presence in video games.
I don't think I'm being charitable at all when I say these old games are dormant IPs. Star Wars Episode 3 was only a handful of years old when Disney bought Lucasfilm, and they were still making all sorts of merch and other products. Actually dormant IPs would be things like Metal Arms and Tenchu. They're not powerhouse franchises, but they're fodder for porting to modern platforms and bolstering Game Pass. Activision is reluctant to revive any of this stuff because it's money that could be spent on Call of Duty.
As to your last paragraph, it was inevitable, but we've been slowly trending toward getting that diversity back in the industry. It may not hit your town specifically, but the Devolvers, Paradoxes, TinyBuilds, Embracers, and Anna Purnas of the world are finding success catering to the customers the mammoth AAA companies abandoned.
It's all for game pass. They want to lock people into their favourite games with a subscription, that's where the money is for Xbox at the moment, all these buyouts are for securing their service as 'the one to want' before others clamber into the space. So I suspect things at ABK will continue as they have been doing for the most part, but with the games on game pass and maybe some more Xbox ports.
The interface gets a little better and that’s it basically? (Alternatively: They try to spin a social medium around it and fail somewhat and succeed somewhat?)
At first, I was somewhat surprised that this was even a question - then I reminded myself that they’re asking how the merger will affect the industry, not the players.
I don’t care how it affects the industry. I’m not a high-level executive with a gaming company. Are you?
For the players, I don’t think it’ll be that great. Whatever savings are made due to the merger won’t be passed on to us. They never are. What’s good for players is competition between many companies, all doing their best to attract customers. An enormous, monolithic conglomerate will do us no favors.
There are too many articles posted in gaming communities which are actually just business articles which happen to be about companies involved in making games. Obviously it affects everything, but like you I don’t care about business bullshit!
Yeah, that’s what the last two sentences are about.
A big company will take fewer creative risks and be more likely to limit investments to proven formulas. They’d rather just churn out sequels to huge moneymakers. On the other hand, more competition means more incentive to try something new and interesting in the hope of hitting it big.
Yeah, but the big company that the bigger company just bought refused to make smaller games and constrained their catalogue over the past 20 years to make fewer and fewer games. This bigger company, via Game Pass, has an incentive to put out more games than Activision has been. Microsoft has an incentive to try to compete with Sony in a way that Activision hasn't had competition for Call of Duty since...when was the last good Battlefield game?
The most aggravating thing for me personally as a PC gamer with an obsession with fidelity/graphics, is any Microsoft acquisition becomes focused on console first (to sell Xbox) which leaves every game as a neutered PC port that had to be made shitty enough to run on consoles… It’s very irritating.
…for now. This is actually why I don’t like that this merger has gone through. My guess is the strategy will be spending the next few years making GamePass such a value that it’s basically a must-have and dominates the market. Then they start jacking prices up and ruining the service.
We’re literally watching that happen to just about every tech company right now. My Lemmy front page right now is “YouTube/amazon/netflix/disney+ are all jacking prices and ruining the services.” Although modern MS has a lot going for it, they have a long, long history of this exact behavior. And aside from that, it’s just a feature of unregulated or poorly regulated capitalism. All consolidation eventually leads to negative outcomes for consumers.
The only Activision game I care about is WoW, but the game changed so much in a niche hardcore direction that even with Microsoft owning them, my hope is very limited about the game, probably I’ll never play again.
Right!? Was telling my partner the only game I’ve had more fun in than BG3 was WoW. When she asked why dont i play it, i had to explain how the WoW i feel in love with doesnt exist anymore. I played Vanilla extensively and never made it to the max level and had so much fun exploring and doing wpvp against characters my level, it was insanely fun. I had to quit cause i ruined my computer with Limewire, and picked it up again in the Cata expansion and the game was a shadow of what it used to be. Felt like it was a rush to max level and the soul of the game had been ripped out…
Classic WoW exists & you could play Vanilla again if you wanted do. However that’s not really what I’m talking about. For me peak WoW was Legion and Pandaria probably and I still somewhat liked Cataclysm up until the final patch at least.
What is happening now is that if you have no interest in Mythic raiding or Myhtic+ timed dungeons, then there is barely anything else. The cash shop is also increasingly ruining everything, there is also how thanks to WoW tokens my brain just won’t allow me to casually buy something expensive on the AH anymore since gold has a tangible real $ value & then there is the abomination called the Trading Post.
WoW is just pointless errands now. It’s so bad. All the things that made if fun have been removed or minimized. I don’t think I’ll ever return to it after Dragonflight. I’d rather wash my sink full of dishes than do another pointless grind. Vanilla wow back in the day was something truly special. It’s gone now, it won’t be back but I’m lucky I got to experience it before it soured.
I don’t know or care about the industry. Execs can lick my dick;
Player-side we can expect half a dozen well-known IPs to become Microsoft-platform exclusive. Like locking players from using Wine/Proton and only working on XBox and Windows.
Mind you, talking about it selfishly… It will not affect me. The only game from Blizz I played in the past 15 years is StarCraft 2, and only for the campaign, and I finished that quite a while ago. And on Activision’s side there’s… Crash and Spyro. Kinda cool nostalgia-bait games but I can do without. Plus I doubt we’ll be seeing them again after the remakes from a couple years back.
I actually don’t play many “AAA” games. All the titles I played in the past 2 years, with the exception of the Zeldas and Baldur’s 3 have been either Low-Scale industry releases or straight up Indie projects.
From a completely selfish standpoint, I hope they’ll do something with the neglected IP. Would love to see a new Sierra game, though that might just be the nostalgia speaking :)
Other than that, I recall Microsoft not going to interfere with any unionization attempts due to a neutrality agreement?
In the same vein: I hope they make a new Killer Instinct. PS4 was THE console for fighting games last generation. Microsoft is sitting on IP that would create a lot of hype for a sequel in the fighting game community. The dual sense controller is rumored to have a mushy D-pad while the Xbox controller has a very clicky one. Microsoft could make a real statement about fighting games having a home on the Xbox. To me, it seems like a really obvious strategic decision. The only problem is that fighting games are relatively niche so the weight of that decision isn’t too high.
The only problem is that fighting games are relatively niche so the weight of that decision isn’t too high.
Really? I thought fighting games got quite a bit of press attention, at least whenever a new game releases. Specifically because there aren’t a lot of them around but the interest is still pretty big.
I always saw them as kind of like a prestige thing. It might not be everyone’s favorite genre, but having the best fighting game looks good on your platform as a whole. There’s a certain… pedigree to them because of their arcade roots.
Anyway, I hope you’ll get your wish. It’s always a shame when these kind of titles are just languishing away because some company bought the rights but decides to sit on them.
You might be right. It does seem like we’re entering another golden age of fighting games. But fighting games don’t have nearly the audience of some of the other genres. Most people who buy Mortal Kombat don’t even play online. It’s not like a lot of shooters or MOBAs where it’s a daily ritual for huge numbers of people. The people who are like that, are really like that, but it just isn’t a lot.
The employees being treated better under MS is probably the only positive about a trillion dollar conglomerate purchasing multiple of the industry's largest third party publishers in the industry's largest purchase ever.
This acquisition doesn't benefit the average gamer in any actually good way
Just more monopolies coming I’d wager. Disney is supposedly looking at buying EA. Microsoft and Sony have shown they both would rather buy companies and consolidate studios over how it was before.
As others have said it’ll be not good for the gamer/consumer. Nor will it be good for people working in the industry.
This is the correct answer. The same is playing out in so many other industries; the big players don’t bother innovating anymore, it’s easier to make more money by buying out their smaller competitors and essentially killing them by subsuming them.
Consumers have fewer and fewer real options for anything, everything costs more and more (the majority of current inflation is actually driven by execs realizing they can just raise prices and blame it on the “economy”), and the quality of everything is going down because why bother with quality when the goal is to make more money?
“But the free markets will solve this! A company making a better product will win over consumers!”, the market liberal says. “Oh, a competitor! We can’t have that, let’s buy them and make sure they can’t affect our bottom line” says the megacorp, and before you know it the “superior option” will have disappeared because producing it was 15% more expensive than producing shit.
The big players don't bother innovating anymore, which is why they don't see any other option except to sell to someone bigger than them. Meanwhile, publishers that used to be small are getting much larger by offering the breadth of games that the biggest publishers haven't for 20 years. To think that things can only get worse is to ignore what's happening right in front of us.
That assumes Phil Spencer’s daddy wants to spend more cloud-earned cash on toys that nobody will use. While Microsoft is undoubtedly the bigger company, Sony’s revenue is much more dependant on Playstation.
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