SS: Microsoft wants total control over console and PC gaming.
If game companies would stop consolidating themselves into bigger and bigger corporations, that would be great. The bigger the company, the more profits they need in order to sustain themselves at their size. There is only so much you can profit from games without turning them into microtransaction mess. There must be a sweet spot for game company size so they’re able to produce AAA games without needing to add microtransaction to make the game profitable to pay their employees.
It would also be great if game companies stopped trying to isolate themselves. Stop building your own launchers and shops and stop resisting GeForce Now and similar services.
It’ll happen. It’s what always happens. They’ll be forced to diversify if they don’t do so willingly.
In the past it seemed like the opposite is happening. Each publisher pumps out their own store, so they can circumvent the cuts they would have to pay to Steam, GOG, etc. Generally their own stores and launchers are worse than the established ones (especially Steam) and in the end I have to run even more garbage on my machine.
Some pull out of GFN because they want to push their own streaming ambitions, some pull out for absolutely no visible reason. Activision being such a case. They don’t have a competing streaming service, but deny GFN from hosting their games. Beats me what the fuck they are thinking.
You only have to look at Microsoft’s squandered purchase of Rare to really understand where their motives lie.
Honestly I feel like that was the point it became obvious. That was just a fuck you.
Oh no, they appear to have highlighted all of the important parts with a sharpie
Microsoft wants total control over every market they can
They did a real good job with Redfall after the last purchase. And Starfield keeps getting delayed… gotta release good exclusives to eliminate anybody lol
Not if you just buy the whole game industry and make it exclusive to your console!
On the other hand, Psychonauts 2 was great, Pentiment was great, Hi-Fi Rush was great.
And Starfield keeps getting delayed
To be fair to Microsoft, that was because (like most Bethesda games) it was a complete mess and needed a lot more QA work. I’d rather it get delayed rather than released broken.
That’s Microsoft’s playbook. If you don’t offer a better product than your competitor, pull out every dirty trick in the book to undermine them.
Yes, Microsoft would like to dominate the console market and leverage that to push people into the Microsoft PC ecosystem.
Since they’ve done poorly with the “make a better console with games people want” strategy, they’ve pivoted to their strength, which is a huge pile of money that they can deploy to try and get control of the content which Sony can’t match.
They’ll say what they need to in order to get this approved, but long term they’ll absolutely leverage their ownership to achieve their goals.
Yes and they also want to dominate the “absolutely everything else” market ; if not now, eventually. If they could just own all the world’s data and all the worlds operating systems and all the world’s gaming platforms and all the world’s everything-else, that would be just ducky, I’m sure.
Matt Booty made a stupid booty mistake. Also, every big company wants a monopoly.
From the link:
Yes, but: A Microsoft representative told Axios that the company cannot legally share the email’s contents, but that it was sent by Booty in 2019.
That would mean that whatever Booty may have said about Xbox trying to beat PlayStation preceded the company’s early 2022 bid to buy Activision Blizzard.
Yeah… don’t they get that makes it worse since it shows forethought?
Yikes. Sounds like the FTC needs to step in and wrist-slap them with a meaningless fine.
how about a day’s profits? okay, a half-day’s profits, final offer.
A fine for… what?
Anticompetitive practices. Those are illegal.
TLDR: “Microsoft does a capitalism.”
I get why it’s news, but also, isn’t this exactly what publicly traded companies are supposed to do in our current system?
I see we’ve already got to the comment without reading the article phase of the fediverse 😞
Its an entirely redacted email…
Note that the lawyers are claiming this about the email, and we don’t know what the email says.
In my experience, any sentence submitted in an appeal that starts with “The court also failed to consider” is usually a long shot. Especially if it’s about stuff like whether certain evidence should be considered or published, because appellate courts almost never modify the decisions of the trial courts.
This is a surprise?
Still waiting for the ground breaking next gen game bursting with creativity released from one of these Microsoft acquisitions.
Starfield? 😀
I haven’t followed the hype cycle but is it looking like it’s going to be anything more than Daggerfall in space? Which is a great core concept, but it’s not exactly “bursting with creativity”.
Daggerfall itself was a level of creativity we haven’t seen in the gaming industry since. Obviously they aren’t just reskinning that game cause it’s OLD. To say that Starfield is not creative because it is “just” copying Daggerfall sounds a little tonedeaf.
It was a genuine question, because I’m honestly not keyed in to the marketing buzz, and I’m generally disinterested in big publisher marketing. Also, “Daggerfall in space” wasn’t a dig; I absolutely love No Man’s Sky, but that game to me, in terms of ethos and mechanics, is Space Daggerfall in all the best ways.
I should also stipulate, I’d say “creativity” to me means exceptional aesthetic qualities, writing, or mechanical novelty. There are many very good and fun games that I wouldn’t call “bursting with creativity”. I love Skyrim, it’s an incredibly entertaining, beautiful, and compelling game; but it was a step back for the series in terms of innovating the genre the way Daggerfall and Morrowind did.
But yeah, to be perfectly honest, with small developers who treat their workers well like Motion Twin, Supergiant, or Hello Games, I can’t really get invested in any Bethesda games beyond being kind of curious.
That’s totally fair, apologies if I came across a bit blunt. And to be fair: the jury is definitely out on whether this game is “bursting with creativity”. My point was just that it being heavily influenced by Daggerfall does not imply a lack of creativity, if anything quite the opposite. That said this is Bethesda and their track record for creativity is definitely on a downward spiral…
