Xbox has accused Sony of paying Game Pass 'block fees' to developers
videogameschronicle.com
videogameschronicle.com
"These kinds of platform agreements are common in the games industry, and in documents made public as part of the Epic vs. Apple lawsuit last year, PlayStation was even mentioned as blocking the appearance of third-party games on Game Pass."
How are "blocking rights" legal?
Don't they violate anti-trust / competition laws?
Circumstances can make it illegal, however.
Laws don't have to matter for you to waste a court's time. In fact dragging out court cases is a common legal tactic.
> The legal system isn't known for being the corruption oasis that movies make it out to be.
Your experience differs from mine. It also differs from most lawyers I know. Lawyers aren't famous for drinking heavily because they think they're making the world a better place.
Why do you think the court system works? What country do you live in?
Epic Games is notorious for giving "free games" where consumers get the game for free, but EG is paying the publisher/developer behind the scenes. So the game creators are getting paid.
When Sony or Microsoft acquire game studios or publishers, both the goal and method is the same - giving their platform an advantage by paying a lump sum for control over the target platforms and storefronts of one or more games.
So it’s presumably also a case-by-case thing, like other big acquisitions / cumulative patterns of acquisitions.
So far, the industry seems to be “healthy enough” in spite of these sorts of deals. The big storefront/console competitors that are attacking each other are all huge and evenly matched, so none of them can exert this sort of control over anywhere near a majority of the market.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like it. It's not uncommon in the pharmaceutical industry either: When a drug patent expires the company will sometimes pay generic manufacturers to not manufacture the drug for a period of time.
Which seems like a clear and direct consumer harm. So isn't that illegal, even under the strictest definition?
>Since 2001, the FTC has filed a number of lawsuits to stop these deals, and it supports legislation to end such “pay-for-delay” settlements.[1]
The FTC lists 4 cases since 2019, but there seems to have been a bunch more prior to 2019 that only have press releases[2]
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforceme...
[2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/terms/935
1. The arrangement in question relates to trade of copyrighted works; which means that any antitrust lawsuit has to jump over the hurdle of not restraining the copyright monopoly. Separability of copyright and exclusive licensing are also considered to be well-established components of the copyright monopoly.
2. The consumer welfare standard is so high a bar to antitrust enforcement that a lot of clearly illegal behavior is never prosecuted.
That last one deserves more explanation. In the 1980s a bunch of federal judges decided to repeal US antitrust law from the bench. They argued - with scant evidence - that antitrust action had to prove that consumers were harmed by monopolistic action. This is the exact same argument Apple and console vendors use to justify locking down their products; that it actually benefits consumers to have to buy their software from sources authorized by the hardware manufacturer.
In practice, there is no monopoly that does not improve consumer welfare. Monopolies are the most stable business arrangement and can bully the rest of the economy into doing what the customer wants. The whole point of antitrust is that we don't want to live under privately-owned government, not that avocados could be 2 cents cheaper.
As you point out, it's pretty accepted in the copyright industry to have exclusivity deals. If I want to get Katy Perry's album, then I buy the Capitol records one, I can't get it from Sony. Or I can only stream on services where that artist is available, so if it's not on Tidal, then tough luck for users of that service.
With console video games, you can’t just pop the game disc into any disc tray that plays games. You can’t run your downloaded Xbox game on the PlayStation. The thing you licensed (since we don’t own them technically) is tied to proprietary hardware.
Imagine if you had to own a Mac in order to listen to your music you bought on iTunes/Apple Music
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/support-for-rights...
Imagine if any music I buy on bandcamp could only be played via a bandcamp app or software on bandcamp’s proprietary hardware.
But that doesn't mean the courts will side with me and not you. Strict logical coherence isn't always adhered to. It's even been called "the hobgoblin of little minds" - so perhaps Emerson would take your side on this.
You don't make the mattresses yourselves, you purchase from a manufacturer and sell in your storefront. There are only a few different mattress manufacturers.
Your rival, instead of adjusting prices or organizing better marketing, simply plays the manufacturers not to sell to your store for six months.
Unless you can rapidly find a brand new source of mattresses or have a very healthy rainy day fund, you will likely go under fairly quickly after selling your remaining stock.
This leaves only one store in town, and they can set the price to whatever they want. Now that they are the only established incumbent they can easily recreate this scenario with any new mattress stores that want to open in your city.
Now the people of your city have only one store for mattresses, and have to pay whatever is asked for. This is not because the business did anything especially well to win more customers, or because you did anything wrong. They simply destroyed the competition through anti-competitive behavior and have negatively affected everyone else in your area.
This is why it is illegal.
As well, although this may not contradict what you intended to say: patents, for example, precisely grant "the right to exclude." Exclusive territories are a frequent way to do this. So in that case, it isn't necessarily illegal.
Sure, its great for 'consumers', but it won't be long term. Will Xbox require mandatory three year game pass or onstar when you buy it? Would that be an antitrust violation?
This is incorrect. They may violate anti-trust but usually don't.
exclusive contracts between manufacturers and suppliers, or between manufacturers and dealers, are generally lawful because they improve competition among the brands of different manufacturers
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
What? How do monopolies help the consumer?
In fact the government is nothing else but a very large version of this, a big monopolist who solves a collective action problem.
MySpace in 2007 had 80% of social network traffic, turns out it could not do what it wanted. Advanced tech economies generally consist of monopolists replacing each other, not bazaar economies.
Not necessarily, especially if the switching cost is too high. For example, if Microsoft does something monopolistic, which they had done, people aren't going to switch to Linux. Therefore the government had to step in.
Less risk than if they weren't monopolies, which is the entire point.
It may still be possible to beat a monopoly by being extremely good and aggressive right on time when your competitor is napping. e.g. Firefox and Chrome vs IE. If IE team hadn't been dismantled and added tabs and other UI features, worked on performance and security improvement, we may have been using IE 25.
Shareholder democracy does not count.
So, as a copyright holder you have the "right to exclude" granted by law - but not to coordinate with other rights holders to distort the market when exercising that right.
"Blocking rights" or "negative options" would therefore seem to be illegal, in line with this decision. [Edit: no wait; there's no coordinate between more than two parties here, as there was with Apple negotiating with all copyright holders at once to coordinate a higher price. Changed my mind]
The judicial idea that suddenly took hold forty years ago (after the xerox prosecution that killed xerox dead in the seventies) that consumers have to be harmed immediately not merely by reducing competition which would harm them in time, was very "motivated thinking" in my view. Japan was soaring, so suddenly our monopolists might be thugs but they were our thugs.
BTW, the historical rubric for such law is "restraint of trade." This was common law in Britain and its colonies long before the Sherman Act (which reduced the penalies for it and at least reduced the chance of tort remedies. Sherman's brother - a general - was also a civic railway executive.)
The sherman act starts by saying "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal. "
Couple things:
1. Because it's a federal statute, it has to be within congress's powers, which is why it only applies to interstate trade/commerce, rather than purely intrastate.
2. All contracts are a restraint of trade of some form. So this was a bad codification of common law.
This immediately led to judges adding words (IE finding only contracts that "unduly" restrain trade are void).
It has only gotten worse in the past century.
So when you say "in the 80's they decided to repeal it from the bench", this is right, but it would also be fair to say "judges were forced to try to interpret this thing for a century because it was badly written, and some eventually decided the earlier interpretations were wrong".
Congress could have fixed all this at any point.
I don't follow... how is this true? "I will give you X and you will give me Y" is a contract right? What is it restraining either party from doing?
Just that the game is available through some channels and not others? Because that’s normal in retail. There are exclusivity deals everywhere.
Or is there some reason to believe Sony is somehow pressuring publishers to take an unfair deal? It’s possible, but I haven’t read about that yet.
You can't say "yes" or "no" to this question.
Exclusive deals do not automatically violate anti-trust / competition laws. If one of the companies involved has been found to have a monopoly then it is more likely they will.
From the Justice Dept on the Sherman Act:
Exclusive dealing is frequently pro-competitive, as when it enables manufacturers and retailers to overcome free-rider issues misaligning the incentives for these vertically-related firms to satisfy the demands of consumers most efficiently. For example, a manufacturer may be unwilling to train its distributors optimally if distributors can take that training and use it to sell products of the manufacturer's rivals. Other benefits can occur as well, as when an exclusivity arrangement assures a customer of a steady stream of a necessary input.
But exclusive dealing also can be anticompetitive in some circumstances. For example, exclusive dealing may allow one manufacturer, in effect, to monopolize efficient distribution services and thereby prevent its rivals from competing effectively.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopol...
The FTC says this:
As discussed in the Fact Sheets on Dealings in the Supply Chain, exclusive contracts between manufacturers and suppliers, or between manufacturers and dealers, are generally lawful because they improve competition among the brands of different manufacturers (interbrand competition). However, when the firm using exclusive contracts is a monopolist, the focus shifts to whether those contracts impede efforts of new firms to break into the market or of smaller existing firms to expand their presence. The monopolist might try to impede the entry or expansion of new competitors because that competition would erode its market position. The antitrust laws condemn certain actions of a monopolist that keep rivals out of the market or prevent new products from reaching consumers.
Sony has never been found to have a monopoly on gaming (and no a "monopoly on Playstation gaming is not the same thing").
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
I this Microsoft is going to struggle to persuade courts that Sony has the market power to exclude them from the computer gaming market though.
Probably aren't. Gamedev is the wild west of software.
Microsoft lets me play it on PC or stream it for $10 or $15 a month. The lower barrier to entry has let me try out and discover a bunch of new titles I actually enjoy.
Console gaming is more popular than PC gaming.
Since Sony is known for having high quality exclusives more people are going to buy a PlayStation than an Xbox because they don't want to miss out on possible exclusive.
This is literally the reason why you are seeing Microsoft buying up some of the most loved game franchises like Skyrim and making them Xbox/Windows exclusives.
It's costing them massive amounts of money compared to what Sony has spent on buying some of the best game studios in the world.
The console experience is still much easier. My Xbox Series S controller won't even sync to my PC right now.
I even brought the USB controller adapter since Bluetooth wasn't working. I have to find my old Xbox One controller.
On my PS4 I turn the controller on. Select the game, I'm done
It just works.
I prefer PC gaming , but lately I just want to chill on my coach, playing Crash 4.
I guess it's possible via unholy levels of customization to get a PC to wake on input via gamepad. And then open a GUI with full gamepad support.
* BUT STEAM DECK*
Great, PC gaming without Gamepass or official support for anything not on Steam.
For example: https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/how-to-fix-bricking-on-ps5-17...
How about Macs , you can't really do anything to fix a MacBook Air if it just doesn't want to turn on the next day.
Same thing with gaming laptops. Do we really need to have a true Scotsman argument, is real PC gaming only done on a tower desktop PC that you built yourself. And for the HN crowd of course this needs to be running a customized installation of Arch Linux.
Of course, my perspective is a bit different because I own both consoles.
Or: Sony pays a part of the development-cost for the right to be involved on how/where the final product goes on sale.
Without further evidence from Microsoft to back this malicious framing of the matter, this sounds very reasonable to me.
Instead of discovering talented studios, (more or less) carefully curate and support them until the eventual point of acquisition (like Sony does IMO), or focusing on finding talented individuals to scale your in-house R&D (like Nintendo does IMO), Microsoft's strategy is to buy entire machines which create games proven to be commercially successful.
The downside to this is that those large studios Microsoft buys are currently complementing the in-house portfolio of all console-makers.
If those studios at one point stop serving all platforms for some strategic reasons of their parent company, many of the games they offer today might not be economic anymore and would end up not being developed.
I wonder how such a move would impact the variety of games available today...
It seems it's still all fun and games made by individuals in some basement.
Until the content of a specific game is offending someone, then it's suddenly a political issue until that one game is gone.
Would be good to have a serious political discussion not only about the dopamine machine social media, but also about the millions of "cow clicker" games and how also those may impact on youth and the nation as a whole...
Because Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on Gaming.
Nintendo and Sony hold huge shares. Steam owns a large percentage of games sales on PCs.
And iOS and Android gaming combined are bigger than PC and console gaming.
Other businesses besides gaming, I don't know. I know Microsoft does not have a monopoly on gaming.
However, I do think that them buying up large game studios will ultimately be bad for consumers. They're swinging money left and right to try to become a monopoly.
I'd far rather see that model of investment than one which says "I give you money, I decide where you can't sell your game."
I have more problem with Epic doing exclusives via payments for games that are already released.
This is only true if your engine is abstracting nothing away and there wasn't any common denominator in APIs across systems.
Given that neither is the case for popular game engines, the statement is wrong. You also don't have to test gameplay related things on both systems, only technical aspects, and only a small subset of them.
The most high profile case I recall is Rust, but there've been others
There is no ABI stability, except linux kernel syscalls and the alsa-lib (for how long?), on glibc/linux based OS.
And we are talking really short time frames. For instance with glibc gnu symbol versioning, game binaries compiled on a recent glibc will break all distros older than 1 year and a half. Game devs must be careful to compile against a VERY old glibc (like a decade?), what a pain. It is not that dark: cross-platform 3D engine devs are aware about this and are carefull about this (usually).
Game binaries are also destroyed by the accutely toxic c++/libgcc_s ABIs (did happen again very recently). Hopefully, compilers have -static-libgcc and -static-libstdc++ options, but it does solve only partially the issue. Many games are using c++ (I have an extremely negative opinion about this language), and the static libstdc++ is not libdl-ing any of its dependencies from the system, then those dependencies end up in the static loading list of the ELF binaries... often with nasty gnu symbol versions. To fix properly this, it would require a fork of gcc(clang?) static libstdc++ which does have a libdl mode, namely does libdl everything from the system.
To say the least, the main culprits are... gcc and glibc devs (IBM? MIT?). It is so accute, I started to think conspiracy: microsoft pulling the strings in the shadows, or those devs trying to blackmail valve/game studios with planned obsolescence (are laws already setup against this type of accutely toxic scam?).
Since the game binaries should libdl everything from the system, they must be simple and pure ELF64 binaries. Namely, using a minimal set of relocation types, no c/c++ main(), and have to manage system TLS variables (for instance errno) with the sysv ABI __tls_get_addr() (this may require a bit of ELF header parsing... if there is an clean ABI way to reach the ones from the libdl-ed ones).
Game binaries would statically load only libdl (not even libc) to dynamically load the video game core libs: xcb libs, libxkbcommon(wayland/x11), wayland code is static into the binaries, libasound (pulseaudio/pipewire/jack/etc are hidden behind the alsa-lib API), libgl, vulkan, and even the libc if requiring anything from it (name resolution?).
About 3D programing, vulkan would have to be used very conservatively, nothing fancy.
proton is a massive amount of literaly and fairly, garbage, software, microsoft grade. It is a money sink hole for valve, not to mention if I recall properly, it does include straight copies of closed source windoz components, that to make things even worse. I manage to build a lean wine win64/vulkan/dx12->vulkan(at least avoid that thing which is dxvk) with a C compiler, but I know that nearly no doz game will content themselve from that to actually run.
The current reality is that it really does increase the testing surface area by a substantial amount. Even if it's only +10-20%, the addressable market on Linux is nowhere near that size, so it is really difficult to make a good business case for supporting Linux natively. Large studios could certainly do it, though it'd basically be getting "subsidized" by other target platforms; small studios though, not so much, the math just simply doesn't make sense currently.
The engine abstractions only do so much for you - at the end of the day, it's another thing you have to test and provide support for, with the latter being the most troublesome and resource-intensive, in my experience.
Where it rapidly can get dicey is optimizations related to rendering, and that's also commonly a massive "unknown" up-front. This includes "GPU" optimization itself (ie shading) and also optimizing for CPU=>GPU pipeline/bandwidth -- both of which are difficult to abstract and/or the abstractions that exist tend to leak a lot.
The latter is the area where I've personally experienced the most pain and those situations are often full of unknowns & full days of developer time spent working on/debugging platform-specific issues from an actual Linux test machine. Having to devote full days of developer time to Linux-specific GPU-related debugging is painful -- specifically because it rarely generalizes or improves experience on other platforms. For a small/indie team, it's extremely expensive because of the big "unknowns" that exist (ie lack of familiarity & uncertainty of outcome, etc), and especially because of the opportunity cost/the time spent is likely to benefit <2% of customers, at best, which is a very difficult pill to swallow unless you've got a really big pie to begin with!
I'll end the same way that I began: Proton very good, great even! =D
Yes, I've metaphorically had my face stepped on over and over for this thought, but I do see some winds of change blowing.
Steam Deck is an inflection point.
Anyhow, one day I got word from one of our partner companies that they were witness to Sony making an arrangement with a major reseller in that industry segment to not feature our products at the most important tradeshows in the industry in exchange for discounts and other compensation. They must have done that with multiple vendors because that year we went from being featured in dozens of booths to almost not having any product on the show floor.
I was absolutely incensed. The problem is, when you have asymmetry of financial and legal power of that magnitude the laws almost don't matter. When spending $250K on a retainer just so that a law firm will take your case puts you in financial peril, well, you have to choose your battles. They caused massive damage to us using such techniques.
Anyone who doesn't believe business is a bloody contact sport isn't in touch with reality. It can get brutally ugly. I have the scars to prove it.
In the modern world of the internet, providing both a platform and a service ultimately stifles competition which ultimately harms consumers.
It's great that small studios are reaping the wild cash injections due to Game Pass, or PS+ or Apple's thing. It can be a life changing amount of funding. I'm happy for them. But it can't continue indefinitely without extinguishing the entire industry.
It's getting harder and more expensive to publish, whether bootstrapped or otherwise. And the publishers are rapidly conglomerating.
The early 21st century was ripe with rampant piracy and unbundling. And now we're practically worse than where we started. We own less, nothing is portable, we are slaves to the recurring subscription, and we must sell ourselves to the platform to put food on the table.
It's all so depressing.
Now I'm growing my book collection instead. No subscriptions, DLC or microtransactions for those at least.
[1] Star Wars Battlefront II (2017), Ace Combat 7, and Mass Effect Legendary Edition
No subscriptions, DLC, or microtransactions... yet.
> No subscriptions, DLC, or microtransactions... yet.
Hopefully not the future: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
I suppose it's a bit like advertising a platform that makes money via advertising, which hasn't collapsed yet.
Studios are free to not publish on those subscription services if they don't want to.
It seems odd to complain that consumers are able to get a wealth of content for cheap.
If the business model doesn't work, don't put the game on gamepass.
lmao, you had me up until here.
[0]: https://www.eurogamer.net/skyrim-dlc-timed-xbox-360-exclusiv...
[1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/after-five-years-of-xbox-exclusivi...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2007/06/gta-iv-downloadable-c...
This sort of behaviour was well established in the industry.
All of this is shitty, but its like two pigs arguing who is more covered in mud.
Bungie used to make games for macOS. The predecessor Marathon Trilogy was originally released on macOS (and only Marathon 2 was ported to Windows). Halo was supposed to be originally released on macOS too, and then Microsoft bought the studio and turned it into an Xbox game, leaving all of the existing macOS userbase out in the cold.
Their purchase of Bungie also screwed up the IP rights to Oni. Wikipedia says that when Microsoft acquired Bungie, negotiations with Take-Two Interactive (which owned a share of Bungie) left Take-Two with the rights to Oni, and the sequel was eventually canceled. I don't have a citation on this but from what I understand, nobody is willing to touch Oni again (not even for an HD remake) because something about the IP rights is so messy that nobody wants to (or maybe nobody is even able to) untangle it. Which really sucks because it was a great game.
Of course modding difficulty doesn't translate directly to how well Proton will run it, but I fear it will make it difficult for it to be optimized.
I've personally been involved in one business discussion involving folks from Apple about platform exclusivity for an app.
The app had been previously featured in the app store, and had no feature changes when the review process screetcyed to a halt. I'm hoping someone on HN remembers the details, but I'll try to Google and update this comment if I find the article. In the mean time, take it wirh a pinch of salt as I may be misremembering.
(Though the laissez-faire answer to Microsoft’s frustrations remains “well Microsoft’s publishing platform should pay more than a figment of Sony’s marketing budget if it’s actually a profitable/sustainable business unit”)
In the game industry specifically though, Microsoft has many faults:
Microsoft made Halo an Xbox exclusive when people were waiting for it on PC, so how can they complain about anyone blocking anything? This wasn't the only time:
Halo 2 was a Windows 7 exclusive because they soft-locked it to some version of DirectX they wouldn't release on XP, and it took the pirates 5 minutes to make it work on XP, clearly that was artificial.
Microsoft promised that Rare's upcoming game Kameo would be on the Xbox, but they converted it to a 360 exclusive to try to drum up sales for 360.
They started charging people to use their own internet connections with Xbox live, so we all played on VLANs with the games on LAN mode, now every game company charges to play online.
Anyway, Microsoft is a terrible company, always has been, always will be.
They also invented Pluton, put ads in the start menu, blah. Don't give them money.
This push to move to subscription may ruin gaming as an artform, and the more these companies fight and fuck that up, the better. Hopefully if they bicker enough it'll ruin the whole concept of a subscription.
You lost me here. The solution is to improve library portability and backwards compatibility, not clinging to increasingly-obsolete physical formats.
Imagine putting a cartridge in your phone for every app. Insanity.
I can continue buying SD cards and putting them in my smartphone far after my smartphone vendor, OS vendor, or other developers stop supporting it. On an old enough digital-only console, there may or will be no way to use software that has been purchased for it. There are currently not ways to use software that could be purchased secondhand on consoles because there is no individual market or transfer option for it.
It's a scam.
Game consoles used to mean plug and play instantly and it works every time, but now it means subscriptions and mandatory updates and installation processes and different hardware levels (pro, regular; series x, series s), it's become a bad deal.
So companies move to PC, and now every company has a "client" to try to walled-garden their own games (blizzard, epic, steam, ubisoft, whatever bethesda formerly had, microsoft store, etc).
Games should be games; not work, not con jobs, not contractual obligations.
We need laws that fix the ability to resell digital-only games and programs and media. Whether or not storage is removable.
The analogy isn't about backing up and exporting games you already own, it's about continuing the use of hardware you own beyond the vendor's support.
Sideloading APKs allows management of software independent of a vendor app store. Do USB drives for game archival allow you to install any game, whether or not you bought it from the console store?
(Luckily none of them are for the Xbox, since Xbox doesn't give a shit about game preservation even if you have the physical media.)
When it doesn't: "IT'S A BLOCK FEE"
Nintendo is the only winner, and i suspect Apple in the coming years will be the only one competing with Nintendo, since Sony abandoned the handheld market, and Microsoft has no interests in the mobile market
GamePass is the bastardisation of gaming, that'll end up killing gaming as we know it, and the Xbox brand, it is not even profitable for game studios, it's just an attempt for Microsoft to pump a meaningless number, and it doesn't even help their earning reports
EU is moving to force Apple/Google to open up their ecosystem for 3rd party stores, Sony/Microsoft have 0 presence there, if steam doesn't try, then it's game over for all 3 of them
I suspect in the mid-long term, Apple, Google, Epic will be the 3 main actors of the gaming industry
Microsoft will give up and focus on their cloud gaming infrastructure
Looking at console and game sales, it is clear that Microsoft is not a strong gaming brand; even when their competitors are struggling with supply chain issues, they fail to capitalize on that
https://www.vgchartz.com/ a great website to gain some precious knowledge about their individual performance
It reminds me of what happened to cable TV. Back in the 1980s cable channels all had definite brands to uphold. The cable bundle meant, however, that you had to take them all or leave them all. You couldn't pick your favorite news channel, you had to get all of them. Like the Discovery Channel? You pay for the Hallmark Channel.
Cable channels thus don't have any motivation to be any good. They get paid whether or not you like them, whether or not you watch them. So why bother?
The cable industry "thrived" for many years by simply jacking up the price, something that people tolerated for a while but each time they increase the price they lose a few subscribers, every time there is a funeral a cable TV subscriber is gone and they don't get replaced by anyone new.
It irks me that young people who didn't live through this think anything is going to be different with GAME PASS. Each time I see that logo on my Xbox it makes my blood boil -- I am thinking about getting rid of it since it doesn't play music well, doesn't play HEVC videos at all, and there aren't that many games I want to play on it. I still keep it though because it plays Blu-Ray.
You pay a monthly subscription fee in order to watch your Blu-Ray movies? You know you can pickup a used Blu-Ray player at goodwill and friends for like $20?
For a while my main use for the XBox has been as a media client for Jellyfin but it's pretty annoying because it doesn't play HEVC files. Microsoft changed something about its music player and it doesn't work with Jellyfin anymore.
I haven't played games on the XBox for a while. It's not like I might not play games on it again but I still have a Nintendo 3DS, Steam, both of which have a considerable backlog for me.
- Apple - the perennial "also-ran" name in gaming fundamentally don't get gaming. Never had, never will.
- Google - Stadia will die within the next 2 years. Wager my house on that.
- Epic - Yeah they will be around.
I don't want to sound offensive but you sound like you know close to nothing about the game industry. You've not even mentioned Valve and you discount the fact that Microsoft have bought up multiple huge gaming studios in the past few years - deals worth multiple billions. Anyone with even a brief interest in the market would likely find your prediction nothing short of delusional.
I did mention Valve (well.. Steam, but it's the same)
Valve have 0 presence on mobile
The mobile gaming market is growing, while the PC market is on the decline [1]
And as i said, the EU is making moves to force both Apple/Google to open up their ecosystem for more stores
Epic has a presence with Fortnite and is known with their fights against Google/Apple
Smartphones are getting more and more powerful and are able to play demanding games (Genshin Impact, and recently Diablo Immortal)
We see more and more games that released both on mobile and desktop at the same time (Tower Fantasy is the latest one), but also indie titles that you see on Steam (Dead Cells for example)
> and you discount the fact that Microsoft have bought up multiple huge gaming studios in the past few years - deals worth multiple billions
They bought Desktop/Console studios, that market is on the decline, so it is not a smart investment for them
If they make games for both desktop/mobile, then yeah i'd agree with you, but that's not the case
There is still some hope they change that with Activision purchase
It's like with demography, the effect will be seen in the mid-long term
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-gaming-proves-to-be-a-g...
Mobile games are timewasters filled with microtransactions for every little thing. (Don't want to wait a week for this task to complete? $5 makes it happen in seconds.) Having one platform out-earn another doesn't mean the others are dying. PC gaming was dying/dead 15 years ago, but it didn't go anywhere.
It's this exact reason why they can't crack the market despite a large number of attempts.
"Cracking the market" for an art form like video-games isn't a matter of revenue, think of it more like tv, film or books.
The best games are made by the most talented developers, alongside the best game designers and directors targeting the most powerful consoles. These are the factors of making the best experience you can make in the video-game world.
You can't - I'd wager won't ever - find something like the Last of Us on a mobile, yet anyone who knows anything about gaming knows that is a game that will sell millions of consoles.
You play crap games on your phone for 5 minutes at a time because you can, but you go out and buy a console because you want to be immersed in the latest the art form has to offer because you want to.
A simple framing question; do you want to watch the new Top Gun on your 5 inch screen iPhone screen?
I bought a switch to play portable versions of PC indie games but since I got the Deck I haven't touched it.
Production of units has picked up so the order bottleneck is easing up, which is part for the course with Nintendo as well: I couldn't find on OLED model anywhere for months & months after it's release for my kid.
The downside of course is significant bulk. Battery is less of an issue, despite what some people say. If I'm playing a demanding game away from a power source I just tweak the power settings, sometimes lower the resolution and let FSR (which works great) help improve the visuals, and getting 2-3 hours on even the most demanding games is then not an issue. 4-5 hours on less demanding games. And carry a battery pack that will supply an extra charge. But yeah, definitely it doesn't work so well if you have to have something that will fit in a pocket.
Valve? MS will compete that way indirectly. I snagged a SteamDeck - I haven't played games this much in a long time. Since getting it I've played through a bunch of triple A games (God of War, replayed the mass effect trilogy, etc), and a whole host of Nintendo exclusives via emulation.
The fact that Nintendo lawyers are working overtime taking down youtube SteamDeck videos that barely even mention emulation feels like an admission that they know the steamdeck is a threat. They sure didn't seem to work as hard to take down videos showing emulation for other platforms like the Aya Neo.
Valve have 0 presence on the mobile market, Steam Deck is an attempt, but it still is desktop titles
They made a mistake imo by going with X86 CPUs, they should have went with ARM and a translation layer for X86 (hw accelerated)
This way they could support Android ecosystem natively, release their store on Android, and start to publish/sell android games as well as universal mobile/desktop titles
That's why i mention Epic, i suspect that'll be their plan, they'll become a store on Android (probably also iOS) and publish premium mobile games
> The fact that Nintendo lawyers are working overtime taking down youtube SteamDeck videos that barely even mention emulation feels like an admission that they know the steamdeck is a threat
Nintendo has strong IPs, they will sell no matter what, wich gives them a strong advantage at selling a lot of devices consistently, every generations