It's official, Microsoft now owns ABK
It's official, Microsoft now owns ABK
Today we welcome the teams at Activision Blizzard King to Team Xbox. It's a good day to play.
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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 You rent it for life and access can legally be withdrawn if you act against the TOS.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.
There were plenty of games that took advantage of one console over the other due to the very different architectures and it was a wonderful and neat thing. That said this is not really the point being made.
It was stated earlier that Sony set "the market rules" when this is untrue. Nintendo in the 80s was incredibly anti-competitive and had a very closed off ecosystem and a tight grip over developers. It wasnt even a matter of whether the game worked on one console vs another it was a matter of nintendo dominating the market and retaliating against 3rd parties that tried to work with other developers. 3rd party exclusives and first and 2nd party devs focusing on one console is somethin thats been baked into the console market since nintendo came into power in the mid 80s.
Nintendo had a problem to solve back then, which was shovelware, so they incentivized fewer, higher-quality releases. Compared to today's market and the means we have to sift through shovelware, it was basically the equivalent of martial law to get the market on track. But for many years, competing consoles were just capable of dramatically different things. That tended to even out in the 6th gen, but even then, many devs would only release on PS2 because it cost too much money to make a game multiplatform, so you'd just target the one with the largest install base. Take a look at the 5th gen for how dramatically different the capabilities were between the Saturn, N64, and PlayStation; two of them were on CDs, one was on cartridges; Saturn sucked at 3D and pushed FMVs; PlayStation had a weird "Z-buffer" problem where vertices were really swimmy and shapes would wobble; N64 lacked the storage space to have many textures at all; draw distance and raw processing power varied wildly; on and on.
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.
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.