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Comment by coffeebeqn | Hacker News Reader

Has anything objectively good happened to the consumers from consolidation in the gaming space, ever?

The bias that these kinds of analysis always have is: We'll never truly know what the world would have looked like if the merger wasn't allowed to happen. Like, it's easy and correct to say "the ABK acquisition resulted in bad outcomes for gamers, employees at ABK, and Microsoft itself" (in fact, the only winners were probably ABK investors). But it's impossible to say "these outcomes are worse than those that would have happened had ABK been left alone", because we cannot know.

One could also use your reasoning to claim that no statements can ever be made about the impact of economic policies, because once they're in place, we can't compare with a world where they wouldn't have been adopted.

Best we can do is keep a set of statistics and try to correct for multivariate bias. Doesn't mean we're navigating all of this completely blind.

Consolidation around Unity and Unreal has probably been good for everyone, yeah. Even Godot benefits from consolidation, they rely on good APIs for middlewares that were made for Unity and Unreal.

Some parts of Steam consolidation have been good. It forces kids to have stakes (their whole account) that they lose if they hack / cheat in multiplayer games. Objectively good. But having one store I don’t know: you pay both 30% and you are sourcing users for CSGO and DOTA2.

Anyway I don’t really know what consolidation means to you.

Hard disagree on Unreal Engine. Just knowing a game was made with Unreal 5 is enough to give me pause when considering playing a game because of just having the same problems in almost every game. Unstable frame rates, shader compilation stutters, over reliance on frame generation just to hit 60 fps (which should be a reasonable target WITHOUT framegen), assets in different games all looking very similar because it’s all just the same stuff bought from marketplace.

Meta Gear Delta and Borderlands 4 being the most recent disasters I thankfully avoide simply because I decided to hold off because Inknew they were made with Unreal.

While true, more fragmentation of the gaming engine market wouldn't make you more certain of what performance you can expect from a game.

Those games had performance issues, but calling them "disasters" is disingenuous to the truth of the situation. Did you play Expedition 33? That was UE5 too.

The primate brain loves pattern-matching, so your primate brain has pattern-matched "engine game uses" to "performance of game". Reality is more nuanced than that.

To be fair, my only criticism of expedition 33 are the game poor performances. I understand in this case it's warranted, as the art also tells the story, but i had to buy a new GPU to play an AA game, which I usually never do.

Unity has been pulling all sorts of shady things around their pricing and Unreal is getting press for being incredibly slow.

I don't think this is good for anyone.

Steam is an example of competition; without them MS (and even Sony/Nintendo) would have even more power over the industry.

> Consolidation around Unity and Unreal has probably been good for everyone, yeah.

I don't know about that. Unreal 5 games seem to have some real issues with clarity, ghosting, and dithering. There's plenty of analysis on the subject[1], and I'm not sure whether it's Unreal 5 or DLSS/TAA more to blame but I'm already longing for the days of more engine variety.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJu_DgCHfx4

Isn't that an issue with the studio pushing for more detail than the hardware can put out? Surely you could turn off graphical features like TAA without replacing a million lines of engine code. Or you could run the same engine with a custom renderer

I am really not sure about Unreal 5 anymore. It seems that it has lot of cool stuff in it. But at same time lot of that allows developers to be incredibly lazy and just get fidelity out of it and not performance. And then when you use something to get performance well fidelity gets smudgy...

So the story of the modern software development. Developer time and effort is minimised, and performance visible to user suffers...

> Consolidation around Unity and Unreal has probably been good for everyone,

Strongly disagree here. It worked out well for the businesses that can standardize on these engines and not spend resources making custom bespoke engines for sure, but as a gamer I remember the days when each game or company had their own engine which brought their own feel to the game. They could specialize it for exactly the type of game they were making.

In addition, Unreal Engine 5 in particular runs like absolute trash on many PCs (including my very high end machines). Its reliance on frame generation (fake frames) and super resolution (fake pixels) has predictably led to developers ignoring optimization even further - "just turn on DLSS 4x Frame Gen and DLSS Ultra Performance!" - see Randy Pitchford's recent rants on Twitter.

Consolidation of a whole industry around two closed source or private technologies is not good at all

What if I told you that a Unity source code license is a mere $5,000, and Unreal is source available for free? Does this change anything for you?

not really, hence the "private" part of my comment. It's placing a whole industry on top of a(nother) platform I can't control or have a say over and have to give them part of my revenue.

I understand their value for a studio in that I don't have to roll my own engine, but I wouldn't claim that's a good thing for the industry. Not if those are not open standards where I can swap components a la IBM PC, web standards, etc

I was thinking like M&A consolidation which Valve has done for some teams - more like acquihire - but not for competitors. But they could have but haven’t bought out itch.io and GoG and Riot for example

Consolidation (mergers and acquisitions generally) aren't necessarily bad universally.

It is hard to argue that Silicon and Synapse being acquired by Davidson and Associates to form Blizzard Entertainment was not good for gaming consumers for a long stretch of time.

But there is certainly a tipping point where this sort of consolidation really becomes a problem when it results in large entities with a lot of market power, or one side of the deal is already a large entity with a lot of market power. And the larger the consolidation, the worse it gets for everyone (except perhaps shareholders, though even this being arguably positive can often just be a temporary situation).

Unfortunately the only really viable exit strategy for a lot of VCs is to offload their startups to Alphabet or Meta sized entities which is immediately concerning from an anti-trust perspective because those companies are already so overly large (and a lot of their M&A is clearly just to kill would-be competitors, which is at the heart of anti-trust).

So the techbros were instrumental in making sure Lina Khan got the boot, despite the fact that she's been right about everything.

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