I love Game Pass, but I don’t like monopolies. I wish regulators had blocked this. Also: https://www.theonion.com/just-six-corporations-remain-1819564741
I was laughing at the onion article and stopped- was that really published in 1998 ?!?!? Or is the date also a joke?
It reads like it’s from 98. The references to Blockbuster, Daimler-Chrysler, McDonnell Douglas, and Bill Clinton tipped me off this was an old one.
Wikipedia says that The Onion has had a website since '96, so it’s definitely possible! (Also, TIL The Onion has existed since 1988.)
I knew the onion is old, but didn’t imagine they would keep a website with old articles still up!
Why not? It costs nothing, appart from transforming the old format into something the current site can work with, or more likely, have the old site support tbe old format.
Some media organizations have started nuking old articles to please the Google algorithm
It really is that old. According to their Supreme Court amicus brief: “Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.” Seriously though, read that brief. It’s a masterful piece of satire.
The wayback machine has it archived as early as December 2017, no idea beyond that.
It’s hard to block mergers based on a company involved being a monopoly if none of the companies involved are monopolies or will become monopolies.
Regulators have to come up with a different set of rules to block “large but not monopolistic mergers” without also just effectively protecting the actual leader in a given industry from competition.
IDK how you block it when it probably doesn’t even make Microsoft the leader in the console space.
How have I never read that? That’s amazing.
What a sad day for gamers. Microsoft now has all it needs to extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on consoles, just as they do on PCs already, and the regulators will give them a wink and a nudge.
They can’t even manage to beat Steam on their own OS to be fair lol
Write a more stable gaming launcher on your own OS than a 3rd party company (impossible)
Is Steam competing with Microsoft’s “Netflix but with games” service?
No, and yet Steam is still winning. Game Pass can be a sick deal but many still prefer paying just a little more on a Steam Sale to own a game forever.
I do use steam so please don’t misunderstand this as bashing, but you don’t own anything on steam either. You rent it for life and access can legally be withdrawn if you act against the TOS. If you’re looking to buy games GOG is the only real option I know of.
I hear u on this, I’m just speaking to the real world use case. I get that Valve could shut off Steam tomorrow and that would be it, but the odds of that happening are low. What I’m saying is, if I usually take 2 months to finish a single-player game, and the game regularly goes on sale for $20, I’m always going to buy the game on Steam vs. Game Pass. That way, if I decide I want to play it 3 monrhs later, I don’t have to pay ANOTHER $10 to Microsoft to access it.
And if Valve takes the game away in 10 years? That sucks for game preservation reasons, but realistically I almost never play games that are more than 10 years old.
Steam versions of games just work a lot better. If Xbox had game pass on Steam, it would see a lot more take up I bet.
Except you don’t own it forever, as ISOmorph already explained.
Not yet.
I had no issues with GamePass for years and was like this isn’t as bad as people say. Then out of the blue I started getting the Download Gaming Services error and wasn’t able to play anything. Looked it up and this has been an issue for years. I tried all the solutions I could find and ended up just canceling my GamePass and haven’t used it since.
This is one of the reasons I don’t use GamePass, because it all goes through the crappy Microsoft Store which always gives me weird download errors, and when trying to research the issue it just leads to nothing that works.
God forbid you reinstall Windows and have your GamePass games on another drive. It won’t let you re-use that partition because the games folder is “owned by someone else” even when you’re signed into the same Microsoft account, and it won’t let you delete it because its protected by Windows… You either have to nuke the whole partition, delete it from Linux, or go through the whole take-ownership ritual which is buggy at best.
Fwiw, it’s actually easier to play game pass games using the GeForce Now cloud service then it is on your own PC. Which is weird.
Consoles are walled-gardens altogether. Also poor Sony set the markt rules with their 3rd-party exclusives for how many generations now?
If you want to keep gaming as far away from enshittificarion as possible, then set up a linux gaming pc. It’s not bad anymore.
Sony set the markt rules with their 3rd-party exclusives
This is Nintendo erasure.
Which 3rd party exclusives are they sitting on except Bayonetta 2/3? I can’t remember that many.
Nintendo has the same dumb practices, but they do it with their own IPs, which is a little less annyoing. Also they aren’t the main player like Sony has been for the last two decades. They just own the Mario-and-Zelda-tablet.
Which 3rd party exclusives are they sitting on except Bayonetta 2/3?
Few today, but who set the market rules? They were set in the late 80s.
In the 80s and 90s, third party exclusives were a necessity because you were making games for sets of hardware that were capable of dramatically different things.
No no they were not and in addition to that nintendo had contracts that outright forbade developers from working on other systems period.
They were capable of dramatically different things. Perhaps they also had those contracts, but Genesis couldn’t do mode 7, and the sounds that came out of the SNES were dramatically different. There were cases where a game would come out on each system under the same name but developed by two different companies with two completely different designs, because their capabilities were so different.
How do you come up with this shit?
Where did I lose you? Have you never played a game on a console from the 80s or 90s?
I’ve been looking into Linux Mint. Lemmy folks are so helpful here!
It’s awesome how user friendly Mint is. If you like it you might check out the Debian version of it (LMDE). In general it’s similar but doesn’t rely on Ubuntu which is maintained by a company, Canonical, that upsets linux people with some proprietary stuff. Ubuntu is just a derivative of Debian, so you just can go with the original.
Yeah I heard that whole SNAP thing is a sloppy slope for proprietary bullshit plans in the future
Don’t sleep on fedora either. Combined with flatpak, you’ll have a more up to date system.
I tried Fedora briefly before switching back to Ubuntu. It seemed like it was still forcing updates in a Microsoft-esque way that Ubuntu does not. On Ubuntu, most updates can be applied without a restart, but Fedora seemed to bundle a bunch of updates together without really telling me what was in them, and I believe it had an install step during shutdown or startup? Which is another thing I hated about Windows. Some of this could be false, as I have an atrocious memory, and some of it could have been user error, but the first foot that it put forward reminded me too much of Windows. On Ubuntu, I just disable snaps.
It doesn’t have to be done that way. From my understanding, fedora does it that way as a safety environment or something (could be wrong). But you can absolutely just do a dnf upgrade and keep on going. It’s the software center that invokes that reboot to install the updates.
But I use the same software center in Kubuntu without those restrictions. If it’s easy to toggle that off, I could have Fedora in my back pocket as an alternative for some day where Ubuntu gets too egregious with their Snaps, but so far, it’s easier to just stick to Kubuntu.
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I mean…I’ve never had a problem with a botched update on Ubuntu/Kubuntu before, so that’s a solution for a problem I don’t have.
We are so far away from that being even possible, let alone likely. Even Valve has successfully decoupled about 95% of PC gaming from Microsoft.
I’m talking about the platform, not the store front. Windows has far more than 90% of the PC gaming world market share, far more than what’s enough to monopolize the PC gaming scene; GNU and macOS are a super distant second and third place. Whenever most people talk about “PC gaming”, what they really mean is Windows, even though there are other PC platforms out there.
But if Microsoft did something so nefarious to Windows gaming, enough people could switch to Linux to punish them for it, since the last 5 years were spent making nearly every game work on Linux regardless. Microsoft tried to use their position to get you to buy every game through their store, and the market rejected it. That 90% they have currently is now afforded the privilege to be fickle with Windows usage, when before they didn’t have the option.
Big corpo is bad but Microsoft is far behind in the console space and in the gaming pc front. They won’t extinguish playstation anytime soon.
Except they just got CoD. Playstation is about lose one the mega-franchise cross-platforms games that “everyone” buys.
IIRC they did sign the deal that let’s the continue to get releases for a couple more years, but no way MS just keeps releasing their games on PS forever.
IIRC they did sign the deal that let’s the continue to get releases for a couple more years…
It is ten more years. If Sony isn’t able to come up with a decent alternative in a decade, well, I won’t exactly feel sorry for them.
More likely, they’ll just buy Ubisoft or EA.
We want lots of smaller corps competing, not just a couple giants. Every merger is one fewer of the former, regardless whether it forces one of the existing big corps to step up their game.
Not that ABK was small, and for once I’m split because holy hell did it need new management.
problem with this is the size of these companies, sony is not a megacorp in same tier as MS and they likely wouldnt be able to allocate funding for large gaming acquisitions such as EA
Being the market leader, Sony will have a much harder time making larger acquisitions than MS did, and this ABV merger didn’t exactly breeze through.
There’s kinda a precedent for that already though in Minecraft, the other mega-franchise cross-platforms game that “everyone” buys.
With Minecraft, the Java edition was & still is available on many different platforms, but the later Minecraft games that were made after the Microsoft takeover have, for the most part, only come out for Microsoft platforms. Minecraft Dungeons, for instance, never came out on GNU or macOS.
The Bedrock edition was ported to PlayStation, but for how much longer will it be available, I wonder…
That’s not true at all. Minecraft Bedrock Edition, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends are all available on both Playstation and Nintendo Switch. Bedrock Edition is available for Chromebooks. Dungeons and Legends are both on Steam and will run through Proton.
Bedrock Edition is not on Steam and unavailable on Linux and Mac. Dungeons and Legends aren’t available on Mac. In a strange twist, Education Edition, which is just Bedrock Edition with classroom oriented features, is available for Mac though.
but the later Minecraft games that were made after the Microsoft takeover have, for the most part, only come out for Microsoft platforms.
Today I’ve learned that the Nintendo Switch and PS4/5 are Microsoft platforms. Pretty much every console Minecraft game has made its way onto these systems.
Minecraft Dungeons, for instance, never came out on GNU or macOS.
Works just fine on Linux using Proton (they could totally prevent that if they wanted to) and Apple is pretty hostile to macOS gaming anyway.
Thankfully Minecraft Dungeons does work via Proton, though I’m not super familiar with macOS so I’m not sure if Proton works for macOS given that Apple’s platforms use Metal rather than Vulkan (though I hear a translation layer is being worked on for Vulkan->Metal).
Apple has their own Proton, called the Game Porting Toolkit, and it works well for games that don’t need a launcher & are mainly played with a keyboard and mouse, but I’ve found that game controllers don’t work very well with it.
There’s also MoltenVK, which is Vulkan for macOS, and DXVK, a DirectX-to-Vulkan-to-Metal layer that was used to play some Windows games on macOS before the GPTK came out.
Whilst monopolies are a terrible thing for consumers.
PlayStation and Nintendo still have the best first party lineups and IP available to them. I don’t think this is as big of a deal as people would like to make it seem.
I do agree this should have been blocked by regulators just as I thought with the Bethesda acquisition. Sony also with the acquisition of Bungie.
There should be a restriction on the purchasing of studios/publishers of a certain size.
Certainly isn’t going to hurt Sony or Nintendo. I also don’t think this is the big WIN that Microsoft thinks it’s going to be either.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
That applies to open software standards, what does it have to do with buying cash cows?
That applies to open software standards, what does it have to do with buying cash cows?
It has no real meaning anymore. It’s now a phrase people throw around as effectively a meme. You won’t get anything but a wrong answer to this question.
It does seem like some people just automatically post it on every thread that mentions Microsoft. Just because we all dislike something doesn’t mean we want to see the same low-effort comments spammed every time they come up in discussion like we’re still on Reddit!
Because, to the majority of console gamers in the Americas and Europe, Call of Duty, FIFA, GTA, and Madden are the Only Games That Actually Matter™. There are a few million people that buy PlayStations just to play 1-2 of those games to the exclusion of everything else.
Now that they’ve taken out one of the four major reasons why people outside of Asia buy PlayStations, they can extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on console gaming. It’s sickening.
And somehow, I don’t think that Sony resurrecting the Resistance series & making it into an annual release that always launches during the holiday season will make much of a difference.
They are nowhere near getting a monopoly of gaming. It sucks that studios are becoming more consolidated yes, but it’s not monopoly level which is why this merger wasn’t blocked.
It will be once Call of Duty becomes a console Xbox exclusive, and the millions of people in the Americas & Europe switch from PlayStation to Xbox in order to get their CoD fix. We’ve already seen this in the PC market, where CoD has been a Windows exclusive for years now, to the point where people won’t buy Macs because they can’t play CoD on them.
Buddy that is not THE reason people aren’t buying macs…
Apple’s got bigger problems when it comes to gaming than just whether or not Call of Duty comes out for Mac that year, and those problems are of Apple’s own creation.
Is there anything to back up the idea that call of duty is the behemoth it once was? Fortnite seems to be far more culturally relavent than war zone and seems to be both more profitable and have a larger player base. Don’t get me wrong cod is still a big game, I just have my doubts it’s making or breaking the whole industry.
It’s still an improper invocation of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish regardless; only Call of Duty came along with this sale, so by your own logic, they still can’t have a monopoly; there are several other franchises, owned by several other corporate entities that Microsoft doesn’t own, that would fit on that list of yours; and IMO, Resistance was never good anyway, so if they want to make their own Call of Duty, they’re starting from scratch, and they’ve got a decade to figure it out.
It applies to most business.
- You give a positive face to the market you’re in (Game Pass, Phil Spencer, pro-dev vibe, etc).
- You buy chunks of the market (Activ-Bliz-King is a massive chunk), while saying it’s good for the industry.
- You squeeze the company of its IP, while bleeding the market dry of money. All of which kills, or at least hurts that market.
Right now, Micro$oft is in the Extend phase.
If you bring up Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, especially since we’re talking about Microsoft, that is not what it means, and your definition has issues, because if you’re buying a big company for a lot of money, the last thing you want to do is extinguish it.
That’s not what “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” means. You just came up with three numbered items to correspond to the fact that there are three words in the phrase.
It doesn’t even apply to software standards lol. It’s a dumb “playbook” probably made by some coked out Microsoft middle manager in the 00s that wasn’t even widely successfully used. Lemmy’s crappy example of it is Google “killing” an extensible messaging protocol, which is nonsense because they didn’t kill anything (you don’t “kill” a protocol), they extended it into a proprietary version. You know, because it’s extensible.
The only relevance “embrace, extend, extinguish” has in today’s society is as an excuse to spread FUD and ragebait on Lemmy.
EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!
Nice Doctor Who reference
YOU ARE AN ENEMY OF MICROSOFT; YOU MUST BE DESTROYED
Yes, embrace, extend and extinguish my breast milk drinking.
Well at least Microsoft can’t ruin Blizzard any more than Activision ruined it.
say hello to the monkeys paw
Maybe we’ll get SC3, though I’m sure they’ll want to make it SC3 the mmorpg live service micro transaction game… Need additional Pylons? That’ll be 10c thanks…
Fuck Activision
Especially Bobby and all the ones he enabled
It’s a shame the UK’s Competitive Markets Authority let this merger go through after all. I can’t wait for the future, when 90% of the most popular games are made by 3 companies
the government was desperate for a post brexit trade deal
Now gut the boys club C Suite from ABK and help the thousands of employees.
Kotick is out in January at the very least. I think there is a 60 day waiting period before employees can begin unionizing, as part of the deal.
I hope you’re right! My Blizzard/Starcraft boycot ends when that parasite of a CEO leaves.
Might be wishful thinking on my part but maybe Microsoft will better utilize their IPs.
Yes!!!
That’s the hope…
Honestly this is bad for the gaming industry.
I understand a lot of game pass subscribers want more free stuff.
But just look at what Netflix had became after its success.
Or even just look at MS’s track record in using their monopolies to bully competitors.
Years later we will look at this and watch the tragedy unfold.
Pretty sure most of the abk staff were just keen to get rid of Bobby. Maybe shortsighted but hey, MS isn’t the worst company to work for.
Bring back Heroes of the Storm and add Master Chief in damnit
Wait, they axed hots?
like 5 years ago
It’s still running though, right? They’re just not currently adding anything more to it. I see my friends playing that game still from time to time.
They showed Alex Mercer from Prototype in their announcement video
They knew
That’s quite interesting, leaving aside all the monopoly arguments, I think this has potential to being very beneficial to all blizzard games, and so to us.
It looks like Kotick will be leaving after the transition so that’s a great start. My dream is that this all somehow leads to the full Overwatch PvE campaign coming back onto the table again (given that their attempts to provide long-term replay ability without doing the work seem to be floundering now, there’s a chance right?)
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It’ll definitely be interesting to see how MS treats Blizz’s ongoing IPs. There’s definitely opportunity to improve things there with Diablo 4 not keeping people’s attention and OW2… being OW2.
It would be funny if they renamed Toys for Bob to Toys for Phil.
Lol
Who, the rapper?
@KyuubiNoKitsune cool. Bobby firing when?
Apparently at the end of the year. Obviously going to get a good payout in the process…
@KyuubiNoKitsune as long as he’s gone I’ll take it
Same tbh
400 million payout as I understand it. And odds are very good he’s going to go to some other video game company. People like him don’t just disappear.
I saw someone mention somewhere that Unity has an open CEO position…
Apparently shitty CEOs make amazing bacon…
