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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s kinda a precedent for that already though in Minecraft, the other mega-franchise cross-platforms game that “everyone” buys.
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.
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’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.
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 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.
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.
Well at least Microsoft can’t ruin Blizzard any more than Activision ruined it.
Fuck Activision
