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Comment by paol | Hacker News Reader

Thank $deity someone did. Microsoft owning both the biggest platforms and the biggest publishers is a glaring example of what anti-trust regulations should exist to prevent.

Every anti-trust regulator in the world would have auto-blocked the merger after 5 minutes of examining the situation. Unfortunately actual anti-trust enforcement seems to have fallen entirely out of fashion.

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Microsoft is 3rd place on consoles, non-existent on pc, non-existent on mobile. And this deal would have moved it to 3rd place in publishing.

> non-existent on pc

You may want to think a little longer on that ;)

So should you.

Xbox has a digital marketplace on which game developers (sometimes a dreaded publisher) sell games and Microsoft gets a cut of the deal. Microsoft makes money because a game is sold on the Xbox digital marketplace. Microsoft has no (popular) equivalent to Steam, GoG, Epic Games Store, etc., and as such have no (popular) way of monetizing PC games sales.

(As in, we're still talking about a games market and not an OS market. OP doesn't have to rethink their claim that MS is "non-existent on pc" because they practically are.)

As a MSFT shareholder I agree. As a citizen of the world I think it's fine to stop multi trillion dollar companies from expanding anymore regardless of impact and I think most reasonable people would agree

If you are a shareholder of MSFT, please tell them to stop making Windows 11 full of ads.

>>to stop making Windows 11 full STOP

W11 is utter trash (as I type this from W11 PC and when I mouse over to the left, it pulls up ads ... how can I block this at my router? anyone know the domains it pulls from. I need a blacklist of all MS ad domains.

Also, here was something that just happened this morning ;; I opened my machine, and I clicked on the firefox menu icon, and it fucking opened microsoft EDGE. It HIJACKED the firefox icon.

I had to reboot... and it added a fucking "search bing" thing to my menu bar... WHAT THE FUCK. I didnt set this up.

Why is W11 making ANY changes to my machine autonomously????????

https://i.imgur.com/F8jdaUH.png

https://i.imgur.com/mBos3Do.jpg

I am still baffled they even made W11. I really thought Windows10 was going to turn into like... Windows. As in, they just keep updating it- why the hell do we need more versions!

The self-ware Bing/Sydney AI is procreating.

lol no, i don't use windows they can milk it as much as they want

That’s not what anti trust means though. If that’s the reasoning the commission acting outside it’s purpose.

I think anti-trust has been narrowed so much we've lost sight of the goal. The point of this stuff is because capitalism and democracy kind of break down when a single private entity becomes too powerful. If "anti-trust" can't apply to globe-spanning behemoths crushing all their competitors then it's a dumb thing and we should start doing something better

>non-existent on pc

What's the share of PC gaming on Microsoft Windows vs. not on Microsoft Windows?

They don't get any money from people playing on Windows. All the money goes to Valve

My gaming PC doesn't have a Windows license because I like Microsoft or Windows.

Written on my Mac Studio.

Your mostly correct - but it's wrong to say 'non-existent' on PC due to how successful PC Game Pass is

Isnt gaming a big draw to buying Windows in the first place?

Thanks to Proton, most games work on Linux, as long as they don't have any anti-cheat rootkits.

ProtonDB rates 28% of the top 1000 games as platinum ("runs perfectly out of the box"). The rest either need some tweaks, have some issues, or just don't work. My assumption is that most gamers don't care too much tweak with their games, so I wouldn't put that much weight on the gold category. And when it comes to silver and below, that can be pretty nasty.

And when looking at the top 20 most played games on Steam, there's some pretty big titles missing. PUBG (5th most played) is borked, CoD MWII (6th) is borked, Destiny 2 (9th) is borked, Rainbow Six Siege (10th) is borked, FIFA 23 (11th) is borked, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT (13th) is silver, Rust (14th) is bronze and Dead by Daylight (20th) is bronze. So when it comes to "most players", there's definitely a lot of gaps too.

I have a Steam Deck and I can have pretty good gaming experiences on it. Surprisingly even. But it's definitely not perfect, and one of the reasons why I can feel pretty confident in owning a Steam Deck is that I still have a Windows-based gaming PC that I can fall back on.

Don't know about the rest, but destiny 2 works fine on linux...you will just get banned by anti-cheat. The only reason you can't play Destiny 2 on linux is because Bungie won't allow it. It even has working anti-cheat.

So the only online games you can play on Linux are full of blatant cheaters?

>non-existent on pc

Hmmmmmmmm........

I think I agree, but would this logic apply to Nintendo in the mid-80's? I think that (at least in the United States), the NES was probably the biggest game console, and Nintendo was almost certainly the biggest publisher for it.

Nintendo was taken to court and forced to pay out over anti-competitive business practices. Granted, the specific charge was price fixing and the settlement of sending coupons to consumers was ridiculous, but I could imagine an FTC that wasn’t asleep at the wheel who split the company’s hardware and software divisions.

No, the industry was new and not worth close to what it is now. Plus a lot different, arcades we’re still pretty dominate at that time.

Maybe not at the beginning because home video games were new and different, and there was plenty of competition from Sega and Atari and others.

But in a related note, Atari was forced to create a new company to publish some of its coin-op games to fend off monopoly accusations. (It later turned out to just be a shell game.)

Thank $deity someone did. Microsoft owning both the biggest platforms and the biggest publishers is a glaring example of what anti-trust regulations should exist to prevent.

I can't speak for the UK, but in the US, there are plenty of industries where the creator of a product is not also allowed to be the distributor of the product.

Movie companies aren't allowed to own theaters. In most states, auto makers aren't allowed to own dealerships. Beer companies aren't allowed to own bars. The list goes on.

Software is not one of those industries.

Do you think this will actually have a good outcome for UK gamers? I can definitely foresee UK gamers not having access to products.

No-one is going to stop selling games in the UK, they would be leaving money on the table if they did.

Instead, they might move development away from the UK. Bad for developers, sure.

I dont see how development would be affected.

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