On one hand, thank god I get to play it on PC.
On the other hand, fuck Microsoft.
On the third hand, fuck Sony, too.
what third hand
looks down.
Oh.
Oh my.
exclusivity is shit and blatantly anti-consumer
Counterpoint: I don’t see a point in buying consoles if they have no exclusives
a budget gaming pc that requires minimal upkeep or research into picking parts or putting them together
if that isnt a good enough reason, counterpoint: maybe consoles just have no point then
Consoles are mass produced and (usually) sold at a loss. I don’t see how PCs can compete with that in terms of value.
Additionally, consoles receive better support from both their manufacturers and from large game developers.
Consoles are by far the best bang for your buck right now in terms of performance vs cost. A decent GPU alone today costs as much as a PS5/Series X. Unless you need a powerful desktop for other purposes, it’s cheaper to buy a console and a decent laptop separately than it is to build a gaming PC.
Short term, sure. But got 12 years of decent gaming out of my last PC that I just replaced in January. I don’t know any consoles that continue to have releases over that sort of timeframe.
Idk about that, if you’re aiming for performance similar to what consoles get you can build a PC for pretty cheap
So, if you’re only buying a console to play that one or two games, they are objectively not a good choice to buy for you. Or if you have multiple consoles just to play all the exclusives, not for any actual feature of the device or cause it does something specific you want (or has accessories others don’t, like VR), same thing. This promotes innovation.
If games weren’t exclusive, you could just buy whatever console fits your use case the best, offers the best performance, or the cheapest for more casual gamers who don’t care about performance who just want to play something every now and then. That’s good for consumers.
So what you said isn’t a counterpoint at all. It’s just your reason for buying them I presume, actually proving they are bad for consumers especially in your case. If they had no exclusives, you’d just play whatever game you want on whatever platform you chose, losing nothing.
The games are the only “actual feature” of any gaming devices. Any superior hardware without software is just a piece of tech demo.
You’re not making a counterpoint, you’re making THE point against exclusivity
That depends on weather you want consoles to exist or not. Personally I think it’s more exciting that we have different consoles.
screw all that exclusivity shit
God forbid they release it everywhere and compete to have the best console that people want to buy
but then they would have to compete on hardware
Won’t anybody think of what that costs the poor billionaires?
Lately, PS Plus has felt like a better GamePass than GamePass. That almost certainly wouldn’t be the case if there is further market consolidation.
So I get Microsoft’s angle but ultimately I want to see them both compete for value and monopolies don’t do that. Also we’ve seen what Microsoft do with monopolies…
Does it feel to you like competition is close between the two consoles without this acquisition?
Not the other person but no. Microsoft really needs more exclusive games to their system. I
Want the three major systems to do well because that means there’s lots of good games to play. But it seems microsoft have forgotten about making good games leading consumers to choose Sony.Microsoft really needs more exclusive games to their system.
Fuck exclusivity
It sucks, but gamers buy consoles for the exclusives. PS has way better exclusives and look how much better it sells.
If Xbox doesn’t start doing decent exclusives, it’ll cease to exist as a platform and we’ll only have PS and Switch left.
Basically, if Microsoft doesn’t do anti-competitive things, they get punished by the free market. It sucks, because I LOVE the fact that Xbox games come out on PC day 1 now, buuuuuuut that’s gonna be no good for Xbox market share.
I don’t care about Xbox’s market share. I care about the consumers. And exclusives are bad for gamers.
Monopolies are also bad for gamers. Playstation can engage in more anticompetitive behaviour when Xbox ceases to exist.
Only way to improve the situation would be something like a contract where they each agree not to do exclusives for X years or something, then revisit it when the contract expires.
How about we stop trying to force players to live in our walled garden and just try to sell software? The top three platforms are all just PCs anyway at this point.
Hah, good one.
All of the platforms make most of their money from digital market fees. Consoles themselves are loss-leaders I believe (at least they used to be). Each of them wants you to be stuck in their platform. Steam has the weakest grip of them all, because you can just go buy your games from another store, but luckily for them, the only other store that’s even halfway decent is GOG.
There’s very little that can be done about the whole damn thing unless either the EU or the US decides to force console manufacturers to open up their platforms to 3rd party stores. Which, to be clear, I would absolutely love. But I doubt it’s going to happen.
You’ve got the solution backwards. We don’t need ps5 to allow a third party store. The hardware is just another pc, any proprietary accelerators for inline decompression or not.
The solution is them releasing a store on other operating systems there’s nothing keeping them from releasing their apis and game engines in windows or Linux so they can easily release the ps5 store for general purpose PC.
I agree that this will never happen. Being pro consumer removes their control over said consumer. They’re stuck in the 80s mindset that came out after the atari debacle. Lock it down to block any and all outside innovation and police the platform to stamp out any competition that may profit off of their effort.
Steam is as open as it is because gaben has a hard limit on anti consumer lock in. There’s no steam exclusivity because steam itself doesn’t have any only steam for x years because money policy. That comes directly from the top.
Epic’s bullshit one year exclusivity trash caused a backlash that I still haven’t forgotten. No amount of free games will let a lot of us allow that camel’s nose into our tent.
I don’t think they forgot, but to get the throughput that Sony has takes a lot of studios…that they’re trying to buy right now. I’m not a fan of it, but it’s too hard for someone else to enter the console space, so I don’t see another way for that gap to close.
I have to agree with the other comment… it’s not a quantity thing. Sony’s first party games have just been a far higher quality than Microsoft’s for a while. I can’t think of many Must Have Xbox games, but all the big exclusive games Sony releases are top of the chart must have games.
You can’t think of any must have Xbox games because they all come out on PC right away and PlayStation arbitrarily holds them for a few years.
Eh, I don’t think so. I don’t play PC games so they weren’t on my mind, and I wouldn’t consider PCs games in the console wars discussion anyway. Could be wrong but could you give some examples of major must have Xbox exclusives?
Halo, Gears, Sea of Thieves, and Forza are all big deals. For me, personally, Hi-Fi Rush is one of the greatest action games ever made.
They have and had studios. They just put all their funding into milking franchises that peaked in the 360 generation.
Sony didn’t gain the lead because of quantity. It was through quality and good variety, starting at the end of the PS3 lifecycle that carried into the last generation.
Microsoft should improve their ability developing quality games. Their last showcase showed maybe they have some coming.
The PS5 is still difficult to even purchase in the first place, isn’t it?
And if Playstation wanted to make inroads on PC, Microsoft has a leg up in the PC market as well by dent of being Microsoft and making the OS, so Xbox controllers are more plug and play than Playstation ones, they can optimize performance better, etc.
Overall I don’t think Microsoft becoming even more of a monopoly would help anybody but Microsoft.
shortages are largely solved actually
I don’t see how market consolidation benefits consumers. I’m not sure that I understand the point you are making?
Without something significant to move the needle back toward Microsoft, Sony will be the de facto high-end console manufacturer, which isn’t good for consumers.
I understand the point you are making, but combating market consolidation with more market consolidation doesn’t help consumers in the long term.
I agree, but short of legislating out the ability for exclusivity deals, I don’t know what else could be done.
I don’t like exclusivity deals and platform fragmentation either, I think it’s anti-consumer. But to be fair I don’t think the Microsoft deal is just about that.
Microsoft’s market cap is something like 23x that of Sony’s; the reason they are in 3rd place is entirely down to mismanagement. It’s pretty typical for Microsoft to find themselves in this position in many of the markets they have chosen to occupy over the decades, and so they instead use their deep pockets to buy their way to being market leaders. Microsoft have a long history of using acquisitions to buy out or block competitors, to the detriment of the market.
We saw what happened when Microsoft got a whiff of success in the 360 era. The Xbox One was anti-gamer and anti-consumer, and it didn’t happen by accident: that’s straight out of Microsoft’s playbook.
The increased competition might be nice in the short term, but it gives Microsoft an opportunity to disproportionately influence the gaming industry for decades into the future imo.
We saw what happened when Microsoft got a whiff of success in the 360 era. The Xbox One was anti-gamer and anti-consumer, and it didn’t happen by accident
That’s not an accident. That’s exactly what happens in a functioning market, and it’s why it’s not desirable for Microsoft to fall too far behind, even if it was by their own mismanagement. The things they’d need to produce to compete with Sony at this point would be produced on something like a 5-7 year lag, so even if they had the perfect plan right now, it wouldn’t manifest until 2030.
So all is just Microsoft and Sony blaming each other of being more anti-competitive
Well ya, Sony is actively trying to block Microsoft from buying Activision Blizzard.
I also kind find this whole thing funny because Microsoft keeps enough cash on hand to just outright buy Sony without having to liquidate any assets so I’m willing to bet that’ll be the eventual power move
If the FTC has any credibility at all, or even an illusion of credibility, at least that would be too big an acquisition.
About 14 billion short at current. Who know what a buyout would actual take beyond the regulatory requirements.
Well if the Activision Blizzard falls through then there’s your extra cash lol
governments would never allow that, and im sure Microsoft is aware that they would never allow that
after hearing Starfield might be exclusive to PlayStation
@hybridhavoc @Spaenny …but isn’t it by Bethesda which is owned by Microsoft? 🤔
Maybe try reading the article.
Or even the headline.
It’s now owned by Microsoft.
I keep hoping that since Microsoft owns Obsidian they might somehow allow Obsidian to make another fallout game… I miss good writing in Fallout.
Considering that Bethesda doesn’t seem to have enough people to work full time with two major releases simultaneously, giving Fallout to other studios wouldn’t be that far fetched. Otherwise Microsoft would have to wait for Elder Scrolls 6 release to have a full team working on a Fallout game, and that release window is rumoured to be 5-6 years from now. So 8+ more years without a real main series game in one of their big franchises seems like bad business…
Interesting thing is that Microsoft has the key building blocks from Interplay era under their banner already. Through Obsidian they have Tim Cain, Chris Jones and Feargus Urquhart, who lead the first two Fallout games. inExile has Brian Fargo, the original idea man of the series. And Bethesda has the IP. They could really get the original team together to cook up a new game.
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They could really get the original team together to cook up a new game.
I shit you not, that was likely an idea MS had when they started buying up all the studios. But the boys are slowly starting to retire from game development or have moved on to greener pastures and other ideas, so good luck on the prospect of some OG Fallout/Wasteland stuff coming.
Plus, let’s not delude ourselves into thinking MS gives a shit about the customers, the franchises or anything other than their own wallets.
And Bethesda has been a shitshow for a while now and it shows in their games. Poor management leads to poor development and poor products. If they have 3000+ employees and only releases one game every 5(+/-) years. And the games are still so alpha-levels of broken upon release that the Modding Community have to fix every release, for the same bugs, every time, you’re doing something wrong.
I’m not trying to be super negative here. Cynical? Sure. But mostly just trying to give another perspective.
I believe something is coming. But don’t get your hopes up too high. In the end, it’s more that likely just about milking something that maybe should have remained dead.
They did the same thing with Bungie when Halo was announced for the Mac.
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Not necessarily. Sony pays them enough to offset the loss of sales for a year, and they can then go multiplatform after. Usually with a GOTY edition or some bonus content. The recent Tomb Raider games ar a good example of this.
What numbers are being tossed around I could only speculate, but that’s the idea.
I wish it was illegal to do that. It’s blatantly anti consumer. Exclusivity does absolutely nothing good for consumers and only harms them by pushing them to have to own multiple, otherwise redundant consoles.
Do you feel that Nintendo should be obliged to divest itself of the Mario, Zelda, and Metroid franchises?
