The point of first party exclusives is to make money from your store long term. If they make their first party titles available on other platforms, fewer people would buy a PlayStation, which means less long term royalties from store sales.
So you limit the customer base for your first party titles, but ideally you make a ton more on your store fees. That’s the same reason Valve makes first party titles, to get people on Steam, not to make money from game sales.
What they should do is make a handheld that can play PS4 titles. That attracts a different demographic and keeps control of the store royalties. But they really need to make sure it works well, since it’ll be competing with the Switch and Steam Deck (and similar handheld PCs).
Sure, it’s possible, but I think unlikely. This sounds like the normal BS reasons companies give when their investors want better margins. I’m guessing Tencent isn’t happy with profit margins and wants a better short term return for their stake.
But you’re right, it’s all speculation at this point.
Just do like Baldur’s Gate and release a portion as early access, then release the full game on all platforms when it’s ready. Ideally skip early access and just release when it’s actually ready, but the early access option is acceptable.
I doubt it. Fortnite alone probably covers all of those free games and then some, it’s an insane cash cow. Add to that Unreal Engine revenue and they’re not hurting at all for money.
Layoffs just means they probably finished the bulk of UE5 dev and are seeing softening revenues with the COVID spike being over, so they don’t have as much demand to get that and related projects done sooner. Amazon and other big tech firms have done similar layoffs, and it’s not because they’re losing money, but because they’re seeing an end to the crazy growth in the gaming industry due to COVID-19 demand changes.
So no, I really don’t think Epic is hurting for money, they’re just cutting costs to improve margins now that revenue is likely falling.
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.
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.
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.
Is that ever claimed anywhere? AFAIK, VR has just been marketed as a new way to experience a virtual world, not as the only way to be immersed in a virtual world.
I think VR would be really cool, but it just doesn’t seem to fit with my lifestyle at this point. And I’m not sure if I would be able to handle it since I and my spouse get motion sick quite easily.
That sounds like a separate thing entirely. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Valve has any say in how keys not sold through the Steam storefront are resold, so supposedly the lawsuit should target whoever is distributing keys in that way. AFAIK, Steam only offers two ways to buy a game–buy the game for yourself and buy as a gift–and in neither case does Steam offer the keys directly to users.
And then there’s this from the article:
In a statement back in 2021, Valve said that the charges didn’t pertain to PC games sold on Steam, but that it was accused of locking keys to particular territories at the request of publishers. It added that it turned off region locks for most cases (other than local laws) in 2015 because of the EU’s concerns.
So AFAIK Valve isn’t distributing resellable keys that are region locked, it’s region-locking at the point of purchase and allowing developers to request region-locked keys. So it would be on publishers to abide by EU laws, no?
The again, I don’t live in the EU, nor have I ever bought a physical Steam key (not sure if Valve directly offers that in any way).
I don’t think VR is going to work for us. My SO and I get carsick really easily, and my SO gets sick playing or watching FPS games on a normal screen. It’s mitigated somewhat by adjusting FOV and higher refresh, but it still causes issues within an hour (usually like 30 min).
I wonder how much of this statistics are from people like us, for whom even “tame” things like being a passenger in a car can cause motion sickness.