• OfficialThunderbolt@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • Kayn@dormi.zone
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        1 year ago

        Is Steam competing with Microsoft’s “Netflix but with games” service?

        • coyotino [he/him]@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • ISOmorph@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            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 You rent it for life and access can legally be withdrawn if you act against the TOS.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.

            • coyotino [he/him]@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              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.

          • verysoft@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            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.

    • Rayspekt@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Sony set the markt rules with their 3rd-party exclusives

        This is Nintendo erasure.

        • Rayspekt@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • lemillionsocks@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                No no they were not and in addition to that nintendo had contracts that outright forbade developers from working on other systems period.

                • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

                  • lemillionsocks@beehaw.org
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                    1 year ago

                    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.

        • Rayspekt@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

            • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              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.

                • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

              • terminhell@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

    • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • OfficialThunderbolt@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • Aaron@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      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.