As time went on, he developed a reputation for big promises and hype and underdelivering - viewed by some as straight up lying. He arguably killed the Fable brand. He presented a tech demo for the launch of the Kinect that was thought to be a real game, that was mostly smoke and mirrors. Following Fable 3’s poor reception, he makes his own company and hypes up “Curiosity”, essentially a bad clicker game with a promised prize to the person who gets the final click. The tech was bad, and the “prize” was supposedly a share of the revenue from their following project Godus. That project was not good (which was only expected to be at all due to his penchant for inflating expectations), and the cherry on top was that the person who won the prize for the aforementioned Curiosity game never received a dime.
A bad clicker game that you could pay money into to make your clicks worth more, might I add. And I believe that the words “will change your life” was used to describe the prize. And that part of the prize was to play Godus early and they got bored pretty quickly of it.
And that part of the prize was to play Godus early and they got bored pretty quickly of it.
The guy didn’t even look like he had any interest in that kind of game to begin with. And, really, why would he? He’s just a random bloke who tried playing a brainless clicker game, and won the jackpot. There’s nothing that predestined the prize winner to be into any of this. Even Molyneux’s greatest hits in the god game/management genre are still *very" niche games.
Also yeah, Godus was a disaster on many, many levels and very far from those.
The whole thing was very flawed from the beginning.
Even if you know nothing about the past of this guy, the fact that he made a blockchain-based business sim should tell you all you need in order to form an opinion.
He exaggerates or straight up lies about the games he has made. Despite some of them being very good, they still under delivered on many outrageous claims Moleneux has made.
Like with Fable, he once said shit ranging from that you’d be able to do shit like carve your name in a tree and watch it grow and the scar evolve over time and even seemingly minor things like fighting a dragon as a boss which didn’t come to fruition.
Originally he was a well liked, well respected autuer game designer from back in the days when that was still a thing. He made games like Populous, and people thought he was pretty cool.
Around the time of Black and White, the cracks started to show. He had bought into his own hype, and had a real tendency to over promise and under deliver. But, even though it didn’t exactly match up to some of his more grandiose descriptions, Black & White was still a very good game, so people didn’t mind.
Fable was where things really went off the rails. The thing is, Fable was a very good game, a fun but largely quite contained RPG, feeling more like a western take on a Zelda game than anything (as in the N64 Zelda games).
But it was not the game that Molyneux promised. Not even slightly. The game he described was one that would have nearly photo realistic graphics, and a vast open world where you could literally see a distant mountain peak and set off to climb it. A world where you could kill a man in a duel, and his son would grow up dedicating their life to one day hunting you down and killing you. A world where you could conquer whole nations with armies of darkness at your command.
Think Skyrim crossed with Mount & Blade crossed with Crusader Kings crossed with Star Citizen. Now imagine that game releasing at the same time as Morrowind.
So by this point people were starting to understand that Molyneux was fundamentally incapable of a) reigning in his imagination, and b) operating in the modern world of game development.
And then we got to Curiosity. If you don’t know, it was a mobile game where all you did was tap on a big cube made of layers of little cubes. Every time you tapped on a little cube it got destroyed, and everyone was working together on this, so each cube was destroyed for everyone. The goal was to destroy all the layers and reveal the centre, and whoever destroyed the last layer would win a prize. Kind of dumb, very simple. But Molyneux, Molyneux hyped this to the heavens. This wasn’t just a “game”, oh no, this was a grand social experiment the likes of which the world had never seen before, and the winner would recieve something “truly life changing.” Molyneux hammered that point a lot. “Life changing.”
What they recieved was that a character would be named after them in Godus, the Kickstarter game Molyneux was making. Oh, and they’d get “a portion” of the revenue from the game (it was never publicly stated how big that portion would be).
That was back in 2013. Ten years later Godus is still in early access, backers are clamouring for refunds after basically none of the Kickstarter promises were met, and the winner of Curiosity has not been contacted by the company since 2016.
He has never seen a cent of the money he was promised.
I played it obsessively for the first season and got pretty decent at it.
The second season started, I got disconnected from my first four games about 3 rounds into each. Played it once more on the day that you could cheese the Infallible achievement by running Hoverboard Heroes over and over.
Never played it again. Certainly never touched it since it went “free”.
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.
ConcernedApe continuing to be legendary. I’ve not played Stardew for a long time but knowing this game made this game was made by one person… the coding… the story… the graphics… the music. It’s just mind boggling. Absolutely amazing.
I should start a new character and experience all the stuff that’s been added.
Because in our society we very much need money and gambling sells itself by making you believe you’ll get money. Cosmetics in games has no such issues.
EDIT: as long as you can’t sell them for money a la CSGO.
Paid cosmetics being fine stems from a time where not every other game weaponized FOMO by basically hacking your brain. Yes, it is still easily avoidable by a lot of people, but we shouldn’t allow vulnerable people being preyed on.
That’s the biggest issue I can think of. You can only water so many plants, chop so many trees, and pick so many rocks in the mine before you run out of stamina. I’ve had plenty of times where I would go to bed at 2 PM because there was nothing else for me to do. Having eight characters means 8x the stamina, so you can do 8x more work per day. But even for the things that do not require stamina, there are only so many items for forage, so many villagers to talk to, etc.
If this was written by the Devs it would seem to confirm that Deepened Pact stacking with Extra Attack is intended. Seems absolutely insane to me but what do I know.
In 5e I can take a level of warlock and at character level 5 the cantrip outdamages a heavy crossbow.
I can make a warlock 2 / bard 3 and both of their selected cantrips scale based on Character level.
You should absolutely be able to mix and match extra attack features. There isn't a reason, other than 3+ attacks is a primary fighter feature, that extra attacks shouldn't stack.
“On 27 March 2012, Good Old Games announced that it was branching out to feature “AAA” and independent titles in addition to older games. The site was rebranded to GOG.com.”
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