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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

I normally respect Ars a lot for their reporting, but they also conveniently ignore Minecraft that not only continues to get support on other platforms but other platforms also get any of the spinoffs.

To my knowledge Microsoft never made any commitment saying that Bethesda games would always come out on other platforms.

I also still think that Sony is being incredibly hypocritical here with how they are responding considering their love of making exclusive contracts. Final Fantasy being a big example right now but it seems to be a trend that Square and Sony will continue.

It remains to be seen how Sony will actually handle Bungie.

Ultimately the way I see it, is the Activision deal actually a good thing? I don't know, it is a lot of studios going under Microsoft. But on the flip side Sony has a very nasty tendency of getting cocky in gaming and making some very anti consumer decisions. Ex: The price of the PS3, backwards compatibility, cross play multiplayer, and others.

The simple fact is we need competition in the console marketplace, without it I doubt we would have ever gotten any playstation games on PC, which they still seem reluctant to support at all.

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If you know someone who plays Minecraft on their Switch, or on their phone, or on their tablet, or on their Xbox, or if they play it on their Windows PC and were therefore railroaded into getting the Bedrock Edition, you can't play with them from Linux or macOS. You need a Windows PC with Bedrock Edition to play with them. Minecraft is a perfect example of Microsoft taking a cross platform game and using their power to turn previously well supported non-Microsoft platforms into second class citizens.

It’s infuriating because MS could literally press a button and make Bedrock available for Mac, since the Education edition (literally Bedrock) is already on Mac.

To MS’ credit, they were fast (~10 minutes) processing my refund for the Mac edition, and they saved me $30 because the iPhone Bedrock is $10 and works perfectly at full frames with minimal input lag when mirrored to my Macbook Air M1.

I use my Switch pro controller which “just works” when paired to my phone while my nephew plays on his Switch. I have an iPhone SE 2nd gen.

/edit we have to play on a realm because P2P cross-platform multiplayer is hilariously broken on Switch and MS timeline for fixing it seems to be “hmmm never”

TBQH "Mac edition" aka Java edition is the version most experienced gamers want, maybe unless all your friends are on bedrock already. Java edition has all the good mods, including mods that add content and mods which just provide QoL fixes to the vanilla experience. Bedrock players can join Java edition servers if the Java server is running the geyser mod, so if your server admin knows what he's about your bedrock edition friends can still play with everybody else (hence the above maybe.)

Totally agree with this, though even with Geyser Bedrock players are second class citizens (some mods don't translate well to Bedrock clients, e.g., furniture mods).

Java is the better way to play Minecraft generally, which is unfortunate because the performance is still really bad.

The performance gap definitely exists, but at least it has narrowed a bit with recent releases. Particularly, with the 1.18 release Java edition finally separated render distance and simulation distance. Bedrock edition (and java edition mods like spigot) had this already for years, but before 1.18 in Java edition you couldn't turn up your render distance without also increasing the number of chunks your game was simulating. For single player (where the chunk processing is happening on your computer, not the server), this makes a huge difference.

Yes, same for Linux. During lockdown my kids wanted to catch up with their friends by playing together on Minecraft, but as we had windows at home (and no switches in the store) it was a pain. Thank goodness for the work of someone called Christopher who made a Linux bedrock launcher.

Weirdly, despite issues and delays getting the latest versions to work, I'd argue this is the best way to enjoy minecraft. Very smooth low CPU load compared to Win10 or Java, and works well with keyboard and mouse.

The story with Java vs Bedrock edition is far more complicated. Microsoft, even with all of their resources, is in a bit of a pickle with this one.

First off, while the two games are roughly 95% the same, they are entirely different codebases (Java & C++), with their own bugs, quirks, incompatible formats, protocols, a couple unique mechanics, etc.

Java Edition (the OG Minecraft) has too huge of a following; it was heavily reverse-engineered early on, with a couple independent efforts (Fabric, Forge) creating modding bridges that enabled a thriving community of mod makers, that many servers heavily rely on. Even if you only consider the creator communities on YouTube (like Hermitcraft, Empires SMP, SciCraft) - some creators from these communities have millions of subscribers. You can't neglect Java edition because you will alienate an enormous part of your community and basically kill the brand. In fact Mojang's strategy is usually to release new features in JE development snapshots, and trickle them to Bedrock Edition once a stable JE release is cut.

But JE is also some of the most poorly-optimised software in existence, even after you install third-party mods (Sodium, Iris) that fix a lot of the performance issues. To even have a remote chance at supporting all the underpowered platforms, Bedrock Edition (formerly Pocket Edition) had to be created. Mojang/Microsoft is in one hell of a pickle, maintaining two parallel implementations of their core product, bending over their backs to maintain feature parity, with no real hope for cross-play ever.

Now why is there no Bedrock for Mac & Linux, is indeed a very good question. Perhaps it has less to do with being evil and more to do with the fact that these are likely already niche, as a total slice of JE installations, and Microsoft doesn't see a market there. Personally I am not bothered, as I prefer Java Edition anyway, but I understand why someone could get upset over it.

Funny thing is, thanks to Minecraft JE being Java, it works quite well even on completely unsupported platforms. The community built custom cross-platform launchers, figured out pretty quickly how to run the game natively on M1 Macs, heck it runs perfectly fine under *BSDs as well.

> The community built custom cross-platform launchers, figured out pretty quickly how to run the game natively on M1 Macs

Java Edition works really well even on my A12 iPad Pro using Jitterbug!

Bedrock clients can join Java edition servers if the Java server is running the Geyser mod, which acts as a compatibility shim between the two. It works pretty well.

Of course it would be nice if Microsoft/Mojang bridged the gap themselves instead of leaving it to the community, but that'll never happen.

Yeah, and similarly, you can probably get Bedrock to run on Linux through WINE. You can also play Breath of the Wild on Windows with community-made emulators. But what's interesting in this question isn't what's technically possible through enough ingenuity from the community, but what's officially supported.

Bedrock edition through WINE would be a very shitty experience, particularly since Java edition runs so well on Linux, and because WINE (afaik) wouldn't help MacOS users. But the Geyser compatibility shim really does work properly. Between these two options, Geyser is the clear winner.

> "But what's interesting in this question isn't what's technically possible through enough ingenuity from the community, but what's officially supported."

I confess I'm not sure what "interesting" means in this context. What is officially supported matters much less to me than what is possible and practical. I think generally, experienced gamers are comfortable installing mods and are better served by whichever engine has better modding support (be it official or unofficial.)

The context is that Sony claims to be afraid Microsoft's acquisition of ActiBlizz would make Call of Duty Xbox-exclusive. Sony's fears would be realised if Microsoft made CoD officially Xbox-exclusive, even if there was a community-maintained workaround which would make it technically possible for IT people to play CoD on PlayStation.

The way Microsoft is treating Minecraft with respect to Linux and macOS would be an example of what Sony is afraid of, which goes against my parent comment's claim that the article "ignore[s] Minecraft that not only continues to get support on other platforms but other platforms also get any of the spinoffs"; I claim that Minecraft is a perfect example of the kind of thing Sony should be afraid of.

Ah yes. Well, I evaluate the situation as a gamer, not as though I were Sony. Sony will do whatever Sony wants to do, I won't try to predict that since Sony has a history of doing things which seem irrational. For instance they forbid Fallout/Skyrim mods from adding content on the playstation edition of those games, even though such mods are permitted on the Xbox editions. Inexplicable, I couldn't have predicted that before they did it, but that's Sony for you.

I agree that the situation is different when evaluated from the perspective of a highly technically skilled player than from either the perspective of a less technical person or the perspective of a company which wants to do business with less technical people.

> or the perspective of a company which wants to do business with less technical people.

Trying to understand Sony through such a lens is folly, see: the inexplicable limitations on Fallout/Skyrim modding. "less technical people" with Xboxes enjoy modding Fallout and Skyrim, but Sony chose to severely limit that on their platform and the reasons they gave never made any rational business sense.

Sony is best understood as an irrational animal with a history of biting people without apparent provocation. Sony leadership does not understand many if not most of the businesses Sony is involved in, so they self-sabotage often.

That Bedrock supports every major console + Android/iOS but Linux/macOS had to stick to the (still updated) Java version is not really a comparable situation. Even if your view is it was done solely as an abuse of power you're not going to find many game companies looking to support 4 major 3rd party ecosystems get blamed for turning Mac/Linux into a second class citizen by not keeping it synced with the other releases - the markets are just tiny.

Well-supported non-Microsoft platforms were turned into second class citizens after the IP was bought by Microsoft. That's what's important here.

I think the market has plenty of choice between Playstation, Switch, Xbox and PC. Xbox and Playstation are even basically the same consoles in a different box and with a chip sprinkled onto the motherboard here and there; it's not like the olden days of special PS2/PS3 chips that all need to be handled manually.

The biggest problem in the video games industry is that all companies that have any kind of control abuse anti-consumer practices to keep their profits up. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are all terrible in their own unique ways.

On PC there are some nice(r) players, but PC gaming is neither affordable nor accessible to people who are fine with their Chromebooks already and just want to play video games once in a while. Right now your choices are often "overpay for a prebuilt computer at your local store" or "find out what a PCIe lane is supposed to be and what the 5 in DDR5 even stands for". If you're not turning on your computer every day, you're definitely getting interrupted with updates from software you don't recognize, and that assumes you managed to set up the right driver (hint: not the one that auto-installed!) for your PC.

I hope Valve's efforts take off, not just in the handheld space. The new Steam Big Picture works quite well and the Steam Deck rarely feels any different from a console. At the same time Linux game compatibility has changed drastically since the days of the Steam Box programme. This would open up the gaming market to new players and make PC gaming much easier to get into.

You are right about the hardware side of the Xbox and Playstation. Their differences are minimal at best.

However I would not include PC and especially not Switch in this conversation. Since often what you hear is something like "I have a Switch and ..." and then your platform of choice. Some of that is price, the games Nintendo has, but ultimately Nintendo just doesn't compete in the same space. They don't have to.

On the PC front (which you mention just adding some more context) I think many of us here need to be careful about actual expectations of the PC gaming market. Not only is it expensive but you need the space and in some cases the technical experience to deal with issues that come up.

For a lot of people a console is a good option given you can buy the hardware and you will be able to run any new games for around 10 years, maybe even longer given how this generation transition is going. You can mostly just assume your game will work and won't have compatibility issues. You also likely already have a TV you can connect it too.

That isn't to say that the PC market is small, not by any means. But there is a very real reason that consoles are a good option for many people.

My point with mentioning that is more, it really is just Playstation vs Xbox for this conversation. PC is important but it's it isn't going to stop a console maker from making anti consumer decisions. I agree that all of the companies engage in bad practices, I just don't want an unchecked company. Just like I don't want Playstation to go out of business either.

Maybe Steam could make a dent in that, but so far any of their attempts seem more complimentary to your existing setup vs a replacement. I know some people say they game solely on a steam deck but I don't fully get that.

> but so far any of their attempts seem more complimentary to your existing setup vs a replacement.

For starters, I can respond to this line: I haven't gamed on a Microsoft product since I switched to Valve's Proton. That's a good thing, and Valve putting that leverage there really opens the door for other manufacturers. Better yet, it kicks both Microsoft and Sony in the pants and asks them to come up with a better reason to exist than "API exclusivity". That's badass, in my book.

As for Sony, I don't think it's hard to see that they're struggling here. The end of the PS4's lifecycle was a bit of a mess, and resulted in Sony changing their attitude for a lot of things like crossplay and publishing to PC. The featureset for the PS5 is almost comically gimmecky, the games cost too much, and without backwards-compatibility the game library would be almost empty. It distinctly feels like Sony's strategy of using exclusives to bolster cross-platform releases isn't working anymore.

My point here isn't to bash Sony, but to highlight that they have professional agency and have repeatedly made poor choices in software and hardware. It's fine if you want to zoom-in on the decidedly small arena of "Sony vs Microsoft", but it's hard to look at their fight and say that it's not Sony's fault.

everything here is true but the “gimmicky” bit. The controller is the most exciting thing to happen to games (outside of the actual games) since the Wii

The old Steam Box program tried to solve many of the problems with PC gaming you describe. Common performance targets with prebuilt boxes that just work. You don't buy a computer, you buy a Box.

I do think the Switch is a competitor to the bigger players, though, but only for certain games. There's a huge market out there that just wants to play some fun, casual games, and doesn't care about the latest Call of Duty. This market is the reason the mobile gaming industry is worth hundreds of billions and why Nintendo remains a success. The Switch placates the needs for many people that would've otherwise bought an Xbox or Playstation: it's better suited for gaming than a mobile phone and less expensive and "gamer" than the alternatives. It being handheld also puts it in a unique position that Microsoft and Sony are trying to compete against with their mobile game streaming services.

To me, Animal Crossing and Pokemon are not that dissimilar to Final Fantasy and Call of Duty. These games could be ported to the higher spec'd competitors but they remain exclusive. It's interesting how "I've got a Switch and an Xbox" has become relatively normal but "I've got an Xbox and a Playstation" hasn't. Nintendo has done really well convincing its customers that their funky tablet somehow lives in a category of its own.

I agree with most of this, except that I'm even more bullish on the Steam Deck. My wife has never been much of a gamer, but bought a Steam Deck. Now she can play her cozy games in a way she never could before. It's not great for AAA gaming but its accessible in ways that only Nintendo's consoles have been in the past.

I've had the same experience, despite my GTX 1080 I'm mostly gaming on my Deck these days. Everything just works, the form factor is nice, and the games are affordable.

I've also seriously considered setting my PC up for a SteamOS dual boot, but sadly Nvidia being Nvidia makes that difficult to do.

There are some glitches here and there, but SteamOS could easily be mistaken for a console system rather than a Linux distro.

> But on the flip side Sony [...] some very anti consumer decisions.

Microsoft is one of the kings of anti-consumer decisions. Just recently we've had the Windows 11 TPM requirements, Windows 10 forced updates, Minecraft Bedrock Edition shenanigans, the trash fire that is Microsoft Teams, ads in Windows, telemetry in Windows, and Microsoft blackmailing me into giving them my PII by preventing me from accessing my legally purchased copy (from Mojang) of Minecraft until I did...

...and that's ignoring the stuff from the past few decades: "Secure Boot", Windows bundling with consumer devices, and Internet Explorer bundling with Windows, just off the top of my head.

Wikipedia has a whole list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

You mean the same Minecraft that Mojang sold me back in the day and that now requires a Microsoft account to play offline?

Probably not a big problem for Sony, but as someone who bought the game I am kind of pissed about that.

But I totally agree with you about Sony being hypocritical.

It’s an account. Has nothing to do with how many platforms can run the game. Which is what this Call of Duty promise is about.

While I don't love that particular trend, it isn't like that trend is really a new one in the industry. It seems like every company is trying to push their ecosystem and forcing you to login wherever they can.

The only reason this particular case is weird is because its a Microsoft account on Playstation.

Not saying it's a good practice, but I don't know if in that case I would solely attack Microsoft.

I am on Switch and only needed Microsoft account to play online though?

But either ways, it's not relevant to this situation. We are talking of game.being made available. Not about whether it has login to the parent company or not.

Let's not forget that Sony was the last to allow cross platform multiplayer on Minecraft.

PC players with old Mojang accounts were made to create and migrate to Microsoft accounts in order to continue playing. Either that or do what I did, and crack their launcher and only play on "offline mode" (no account verification) servers.

Microsoft accounts ask for a lot of personal information that they simply don't need, and I feared that opting not to provide that personal information would likely put my account at risk for being capriciously banned by bureaucratic anti-botting systems in the future. Furthermore, should I ever need a Microsoft account for some more important reason, I would not want that connected to an account I game online with. Mixing work and play is a bad idea, and having two separate accounts seems like a likely setup for a capricious ban sometime in the future. So yeah, I once bought this game from Notch and had a legit account for it, but now I have to pirate it because Microsoft decided to get invasive and nosy.

>To my knowledge Microsoft never made any commitment saying that Bethesda games would always come out on other platforms.

I'm not sure if a "technically we didn't promise anything" is that good of an excuse when you tell the regulators that it wouldn't be beneficial to you to withhold games from other platforms.

I actually logged in to write my verbal response after reading this

"The Japs period, Nintendo has the same cocky attitude after success post-Wii, post-Switch"

On Ars? I can’t see it anywhere.

> I normally respect Ars a lot for their reporting

I used to, but anything not Apple is usually met with mockery, disdain, or a combination of the two.

> The price of the PS3, backwards compatibility

Aren't those technical tradeoffs with backwards compatibility either limiting technical choices to change architecture or increasing price by adding additional hardware to remain compatible?

The PS3 had a bad history with backwards compatibility. The original model had hardware based compatibility, by adding in the additional components, which I will admit had a cost associated with it.

But then they switched to software compatibility, which on its own is not a bad decision. But the issue was they removed the software backwards compatibility from later PS3 hardware without a good explanation.

I think there is a very good reason that the ps4 was not backwards compatible with ps3 games, the architecture was very different. But at the same time they are pushing playstation now as a way to play those older games, and it appeared anti consumer. Why could you not just put in the game and it would start streaming it.

On the flip side we had Xbox. Which a couple years after the launch of the Xbox one started their backwards compatibility initiative. Which allowed you to put in the disk for an older game and it would download a version of the game that would work on your new hardware. Now this was not for all games, but it was ultimately a free addition.

Sony was also very wishy washy on PS5 backwards compatibility, which was very frustrating. It felt like working with ps4 games was an afterthought for them. Ultimately it turned out fine, but it caused a lot of confusion.

Previously this was more of an issue than it was today. Since consoles are basically a PC now compatibility shouldn't be much of an issue, but previously it would have been a big issue.

Original release PS3s in North America and Japan had both the PS2 CPU and GPU on the board for full backwards compatibility. Later models and the European release units lacked the GPU and so that was emulated in software which caused a few issues. So it was a partial software emulator. Sony later removed the PS2 CPU from later PS3 Phat models and onwards.

Later they released PS2 classics on PSN that use full software emulation. A lot of PS2 games don't seem to work well with that emulator from what we know from jailbroken PS3s. Games also needed specific tweaks to the emulator to work. Perhaps they could have done what Microsoft did with 360 and had but maybe they felt like that was too clunky?

I purposefully have the original PS3 for the hardware compatibility.

But I thought it was fully software emulation in later hardware but it was partial? Well I guess that would at least give an explanation.

I knew it was buggy, but it always felt odd to remove it since even a buggy option would have been better than no option. But if it did still have some hardware component that would explain it.

It seems to me that your description confirms that this was mostly caused by the technical decision to use rather unusual architecture for the PS3. With the PS4->PS5 compatibility it also feels from the outside like they genuinely didn't know for certain and the internal verification process want going as planned. Very different from an anti-consumer money grab

> I also still think that Sony is being incredibly hypocritical here with how they are responding considering their love of making exclusive contracts. Final Fantasy being a big example right now but it seems to be a trend that Square and Sony will continue.

At the end of the day this is literally all that is needed to get this merger approved. Sony has exclusivity for one of the top MMOs and Microsoft wants a competing offering in World of Warcraft.

It’s so beyond hypocritical for Sony to be taking this stance and I hope they are eventually laughed out of court.

I'm still bitter about FF leaving Nintendo after FF6.

I am just bitter about FF7 Remake and FF16.

Every game that has exclusive content on Playstation

Not because I don't have a PS5, I do. But I refuse to support those types of business decisions. Particularly when there is exclusive content.

Edit: Fixing FF15 to FF16

Aren't a lot of those Playstation exclusives time limited? I.e. for a year or two it's PS exclusive afterwards the company can release it for any platform they want.

I don't think we fully know what the actual situation is for that.

The FF7 remake came out in 2020 and is still not on xbox and there is no indication it will. Now that did come out on PC though.

Deathloop came out on Xbox but it is unclear if that would have happened had Xbox not bought Bethesda or if Sony would have tried to keep it exclusive.

The annoying part is that we just simply don't know what that situation actually looks like.

Microsoft claims that FF7R, FF16 and Silent Hill 2 will never be released on Xbox due to their contract with Sony.

https://www.thegamer.com/microsoft-sony-blocking-final-fanta...

FF7 could never have worked on n64.

...not without the Disk Drive and a can-do attitude!

(you're right though, the sacrifices required for an N64 port would ruin the game)

You mean the Nintendo exclusive?

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