It's a problem when cheating changes people's opinions on how fun the game is. If the game forces you to use a certain mechanic that you otherwise would have ignored, that often gives you a better appreciation for the game. In the case of a roguelike, if you can cheese the save system, you're no longer required to actually get good at the game systems and can instead keep reloading until the memorize the solution, which is the entire problem the genre is out to solve.
STS does allow you to cheese the game with its save system, which is why most roguelikes also delete the save file after they load it, only saving the game when you need to put a bookmark in it to come back later.
Unless it was part of a Call of Duty contract with Microsoft or something. Or the Sony deal was only for a few years, or it would cancel when FF16 failed to sell a certain number of copies.
It's for playing a PS4 game vs playing a PS5 game. If you want to play the PS4 version of Street Fighter 6 on a PS5, you can use PS4 controllers. If you want to play the PS5 version of Street Fighter 6 on PS5, you must use PS5 controllers. Basically just arbitrarily forcing you to buy new controllers when the others would have worked fine.
To state one last time, my perspective is that all exclusivity sucks, but it's better that Microsoft buys them than for Sony to have an uncontested high-end console market. That is not me taking Microsoft's "side". It's me not wanting a monopoly.
Once again you talk about it like the are owed the #1 place rather than having to, you know, compete for it.
Not at all. I'm saying they have little chance of making Sony even sweat without the acquisition or something like it. Even after this deal, they will not be the #1 console. It will just be closer, and close enough that they decide to stay in the console business.
By the way, a paradigm shift is already happening. For a lot of people their phones are their primary computing and gaming platform, and while I'm not a fan of the practices in it, a significant change in the market is anything but unpredictable.
That seems to be a parallel market rather than one that would overtake it. There's a non-zero amount of overlap, and you can find plenty of examples, but there seem to be games built for mobile and games that aren't. If this is the paradigm shift you expect to shake things up, are you saying you expect Apple or Samsung to enter the console market?
It would be a false dichotomy to treat acquisition and leaving the gaming market as the only two options. After all, aren't all the other companies they already acquired appealing enough? Or weren't they worth it? And if they weren't, why would this fix anything?
You know how Spotify has exclusives besides Joe Rogan but still got Joe Rogan exclusive? It's the same answer. A bunch of smaller acquisitions move the needle a little bit each. One large acquisition moves the needle a lot on its own. In aggregate, they all make the product desirable. Microsoft needs to move the needle a lot to catch up to Sony.
Sony cannot relax or they could catch up
Maybe now after this deal they can't relax, but they've been going down this path of requiring arbitrary upgrades from PS4 to PS5 in a way that Microsoft had not been, which is the kind of move you only make when you're relaxed enough to take advantage of your customers. Plus their own exclusivity deals.
If you think it's shady that Sony paid to have FF16 as an exclusive, why are you defending that Microsoft does that to Starfield? At least when it comes to Sony, Microsoft could have outbid Square for exclusivity
Defending is the wrong word. Why do you think Microsoft has Starfield? Because they outbid Sony. This acquisition happened because they outbid Sony as well. At the scale that Microsoft is operating at, they may as well buy them outright; and word on the street was that Zenimax and Square Enix were both seeking to be acquired. Activision only makes like 4-6 franchises anymore anyway, so it's basically the same thing as buying exclusivity to those franchises but with more upside.
It could be funding new studios, it could be playing from Sony's handbook
Exclusivity and studio acquisitions are both out of Sony's handbook. Microsoft just has a bigger pocketbook.
The ideal solution here, is that Microsoft's acquisition should be blocked but Sony should also be punished for anti-consumer tactics.
The ideal solution here is one that forbids exclusivity, but I have no idea how to do that ethically.
Yes it does matter. It still gives them advantages
Which haven't manifested in market share.
This makes it harder for upcoming innovators to compete, when that is what they have to face (or be bought out by).
It's shortsighted to assume Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo is what this industry will ever be and it's the most competitive we can expect it to be.
No, it's the only thing one can reasonably expect short an absolutely unpredictable paradigm shift. The longer this market has existed, the more difficult it is for a competitor to get into because the stakes and production values have been raised so high. There's a reason you don't see companies lining up to get into the microprocessor business, and it's because working with silicon requires an enormous capital investment. The only new players who emerged in this industry did so when mobile processors became that paradigm shift to shake things up. While these things are pretty much inherently unpredictable, the only one I can see happening is if consoles disappear entirely in favor of a more unified, open format akin to a PC, which means these three players are no longer in the industry for the reasons they are now.
That is the business that they are in. Lets see how they are doing and how much they need more when these come out. Why should they acquire more if it isn't even proven that they are handling the others well?
The fact that they didn't become a runaway success immediately after acquiring all of those other companies, including Mojang and Bethesda, is why the merger was allowed to go through. If we're talking about breaking up Microsoft, as a non-expert, I imagine the gaming arm of it stays in one piece.
If anything, those layoffs are not a good indication.
Everyone in tech had layoffs. Not only is it common after a merger, it's also common when credit becomes more expensive and the economy contracts.
Worse for who? Nintendo's consoles are profitable and Microsoft can definitely afford to sell units at a loss so that they can sell games, which is the same that Sony does.
It's worse for the consumer if Sony doesn't have a Microsoft to keep them in check. Now if you want a console that plays Grand Theft Auto VI, there's one place to go (because you're not playing that game on a Switch). The market is cornered. Microsoft can only sell consoles at a loss and stay in the market if their install base is large enough to make that money back later. No one knows what their break-even point is, but if they don't sell enough consoles, they're not getting enough game sales or Game Pass subscriptions to make that math make sense, and they have no incentive to continue producing consoles.
I see a lot of these arguments are ultimately taking pity on Microsoft
Don't mistake anything I'm saying as pity for Microsoft. They are where they are in the market because they tried to sell a horrible product back in 2013, for more money than their competitor did, and they divested themselves of a lot of studios that, long-term, could have dug them out of that hole in favor of some bad bets for where the market was headed. Also, I'm a Linux nerd. I could hardly be less interested in seeing Microsoft succeed. What I would hate more though is if Sony ran away with an entire sector of the market when they're doing a lot of nasty anti-consumer stuff too, including trying to acquire exclusivity of a lot of the stuff Microsoft just bought.
Oh, that's cool. Cool that the alternate networks ever existed, I mean. Not cool that they got shut down, but this is from the same people who shut down vanilla WoW to sell it back to you again.
Not only Microsoft as a whole is already a much larger company to Sony
With regards to this industry, it really doesn't matter.
On top of that, it seems like a remnant of Console War mindset to consider the ideal of the market to be a 50/50 or a 33/33/33 split.
That is the ideal. It means each one has to try their damnedest to earn the dollar of their consumer. Like you, I'd prefer that it was achieved by any means other than exclusives, but as long as it's a legal business practice, it will be an effective one.
It's not fine just because Microsoft is #4 rather than #2. Being #4 is not such an insignificant position in first place, and it's weird that it's assumed that Microsoft is owed an even position.
They need to be successful enough that they don't leave the console market entirely. Otherwise you create a monopoly in that space. There are some industries that are just colossally difficult for a new competitor to enter, and the console market is one of them. If you lose a competitor, it ruins the market for everyone.
If they want to make their platform more appealing, they should make better games for it.
Yeah, they've got this game Starfield coming out, plus Hellblade II, Fable, Clockwork Revolution, South of Midnight, etc. But games just take so long to make that it takes forever to make up for a deficit they created last generation. It doesn't make the market better for the customer, but it's far worse if Sony's lead is so immense that a console manufacturer doesn't profit from making consoles. That is, unless the entire console market disappears, but I don't think that'll happen for several decades at the earliest.
Do you think the Bethesda acquisition by itself, before Activision, would have been enough to turn PlayStation's 2:1 market lead into something far more even? Because I don't. And I think that's why the deal didn't get blocked. There's also tons and tons of third party competition in the gaming industry worldwide, so I don't think they're a threat to competition there either.
I don't think Modern Warfare 2 ever had fan servers. It's the one that infamously had a "boycott" over the lack of dedicated servers (which is different than private servers) because it was all peer to peer multiplayer.