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Microsoft acquired Bethesda after hearing Starfield would be exclusive to PlayStation
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Does it feel to you like competition is close between the two consoles without this acquisition?
Not the other person but no. Microsoft really needs more exclusive games to their system. I
Want the three major systems to do well because that means there's lots of good games to play. But it seems microsoft have forgotten about making good games leading consumers to choose Sony.
Fuck exclusivity
It sucks, but gamers buy consoles for the exclusives. PS has way better exclusives and look how much better it sells.
If Xbox doesn't start doing decent exclusives, it'll cease to exist as a platform and we'll only have PS and Switch left.
Basically, if Microsoft doesn't do anti-competitive things, they get punished by the free market. It sucks, because I LOVE the fact that Xbox games come out on PC day 1 now, buuuuuuut that's gonna be no good for Xbox market share.
I don't care about Xbox's market share. I care about the consumers. And exclusives are bad for gamers.
Monopolies are also bad for gamers. Playstation can engage in more anticompetitive behaviour when Xbox ceases to exist.
Only way to improve the situation would be something like a contract where they each agree not to do exclusives for X years or something, then revisit it when the contract expires.
How about we stop trying to force players to live in our walled garden and just try to sell software? The top three platforms are all just PCs anyway at this point.
Hah, good one.
All of the platforms make most of their money from digital market fees. Consoles themselves are loss-leaders I believe (at least they used to be). Each of them wants you to be stuck in their platform. Steam has the weakest grip of them all, because you can just go buy your games from another store, but luckily for them, the only other store that's even halfway decent is GOG.
There's very little that can be done about the whole damn thing unless either the EU or the US decides to force console manufacturers to open up their platforms to 3rd party stores. Which, to be clear, I would absolutely love. But I doubt it's going to happen.
You've got the solution backwards. We don't need ps5 to allow a third party store. The hardware is just another pc, any proprietary accelerators for inline decompression or not.
The solution is them releasing a store on other operating systems there's nothing keeping them from releasing their apis and game engines in windows or Linux so they can easily release the ps5 store for general purpose PC.
I agree that this will never happen. Being pro consumer removes their control over said consumer. They're stuck in the 80s mindset that came out after the atari debacle. Lock it down to block any and all outside innovation and police the platform to stamp out any competition that may profit off of their effort.
Steam is as open as it is because gaben has a hard limit on anti consumer lock in. There's no steam exclusivity because steam itself doesn't have any only steam for x years because money policy. That comes directly from the top.
Epic's bullshit one year exclusivity trash caused a backlash that I still haven't forgotten. No amount of free games will let a lot of us allow that camel's nose into our tent.
Oh that'll never happen, it would pretty much mean Sony voluntarily killing the market for PS5. And it'd mean a major overhaul of how the PS5 works if they don't want to develop for multiple software platforms in parallel. The PS5 doesn't use D3D or Vulkan, it has its' own graphics API right now.
It would all be great, but I can guarantee that Sony will never go for it. They'd be spending a bunch of extra money just so they could reduce their long-term income.
That's funny, because next year is the 20th anniversary of the first ever store-exclusive PC game, Half-Life 2. I still remember the Steam logo anal penetration gif from those days, because everyone hated the forced Steam client install (and its' frequent updates) so much.
It's trash that they did this to games that were originally going to be Steam games, but I can't fault them for this. It's the only way to enter the market and even that was not enough. Steam's hold on the market, while largely built on Gaben's pro-consumer policies, is so big that if Gaben were to die, the next owner of the company could do absolutely anything short of breaking into your home to smash your PC and 99% of their users would never migrate, even if a better platform appeared. That's because nobody wants to buy games from multiple stores and everyone already has all their games on Steam. GOG has only gained the marketshare it has because it has found a very specific niche - DRM-free games, mostly older ones. Neither Epic nor Steam are going to do that because they both want to be the general "any game you want" store and most AAA games' publishers aren't going to allow DRM-free to happen.
There's not going to be a 3rd major generic PC game store to compete with Steam and Epic anytime soon. Several billions of dollars worth of exclusive deals and free games would be needed to start one and now that people have shown their rightful hatred for exclusive deals, I don't think anyone wants to attempt it again. Sure, you could do better than Epic did by prioritizing a better user experience and giving away even more free games and buying or building several studios to churn out dozens of first-party exclusives instead of paying for exclusives, but you'd need more money than Epic has burnt on it, because now you're still competing with Steam AND everyone already hates the idea of a store that isn't Steam. And Epic had Fortnite money AND Tencent money to do it.
I don't think they forgot, but to get the throughput that Sony has takes a lot of studios...that they're trying to buy right now. I'm not a fan of it, but it's too hard for someone else to enter the console space, so I don't see another way for that gap to close.
They have and had studios. They just put all their funding into milking franchises that peaked in the 360 generation.
Sony didn't gain the lead because of quantity. It was through quality and good variety, starting at the end of the PS3 lifecycle that carried into the last generation.
Microsoft should improve their ability developing quality games. Their last showcase showed maybe they have some coming.
I have to agree with the other comment… it’s not a quantity thing. Sony’s first party games have just been a far higher quality than Microsoft’s for a while. I can’t think of many Must Have Xbox games, but all the big exclusive games Sony releases are top of the chart must have games.
You can't think of any must have Xbox games because they all come out on PC right away and PlayStation arbitrarily holds them for a few years.
Eh, I don’t think so. I don’t play PC games so they weren’t on my mind, and I wouldn’t consider PCs games in the console wars discussion anyway. Could be wrong but could you give some examples of major must have Xbox exclusives?
Halo, Gears, Sea of Thieves, and Forza are all big deals. For me, personally, Hi-Fi Rush is one of the greatest action games ever made.
The PS5 is still difficult to even purchase in the first place, isn't it?
And if Playstation wanted to make inroads on PC, Microsoft has a leg up in the PC market as well by dent of being Microsoft and making the OS, so Xbox controllers are more plug and play than Playstation ones, they can optimize performance better, etc.
Overall I don't think Microsoft becoming even more of a monopoly would help anybody but Microsoft.
shortages are largely solved actually
I don’t see how market consolidation benefits consumers. I’m not sure that I understand the point you are making?
Without something significant to move the needle back toward Microsoft, Sony will be the de facto high-end console manufacturer, which isn't good for consumers.
I understand the point you are making, but combating market consolidation with more market consolidation doesn’t help consumers in the long term.
I agree, but short of legislating out the ability for exclusivity deals, I don't know what else could be done.
I don’t like exclusivity deals and platform fragmentation either, I think it’s anti-consumer. But to be fair I don’t think the Microsoft deal is just about that.
Microsoft’s market cap is something like 23x that of Sony’s; the reason they are in 3rd place is entirely down to mismanagement. It’s pretty typical for Microsoft to find themselves in this position in many of the markets they have chosen to occupy over the decades, and so they instead use their deep pockets to buy their way to being market leaders. Microsoft have a long history of using acquisitions to buy out or block competitors, to the detriment of the market.
We saw what happened when Microsoft got a whiff of success in the 360 era. The Xbox One was anti-gamer and anti-consumer, and it didn’t happen by accident: that’s straight out of Microsoft’s playbook.
The increased competition might be nice in the short term, but it gives Microsoft an opportunity to disproportionately influence the gaming industry for decades into the future imo.
That's not an accident. That's exactly what happens in a functioning market, and it's why it's not desirable for Microsoft to fall too far behind, even if it was by their own mismanagement. The things they'd need to produce to compete with Sony at this point would be produced on something like a 5-7 year lag, so even if they had the perfect plan right now, it wouldn't manifest until 2030.
That’s so short sighted.