it must be very frustrating for Microsoft
their usual tactic of buying out the competition isn't an option because Gabe Newell is already a billionare (and a gamer), who won't sell for any price
and their backup strategy of tightening the screws of their competition on Windows can't work either, because he's funded a credible (almost) replacement for Windows
so for once they have to compete on fair terms
and when they do that: they lose
of course as a linux user i am not complaining about linux support, but for now it still looks like valve supports linux from the goodness of their heart, and not as a way to make money. lets hope that this changes.
Steam Machines were a direct result of that: Microsoft announced plans to block non-Microsoft app stores on Windows 8. This was a credible existential threat to Valve, which got off to a rocky start, and they wisely persisted despite Windows 8 (and yhe threat) flopping. Microsoft os no longer in a position to try and squeeze Steam, thanks to Valve's diligence, and Microsoft going half-cocked the first time.
microsoft doesn't need courage, they just need a few leaders dumb enough to try again.
(Still annoyed that Rockstar added BattlEye to GTA Online one day out of the blue, _and_ refuses to set the flag to allow it to work in Linux)
if microsoft shuts out Steam, then valve will lose more than 90% of its current revenue. despite the insurance policy that just might kill the company outright.
and, the more revenue valve gets from linux, the more of a threat it becomes to microsoft, which makes microsoft trying to shut out Steam even more likely.
our only hope is that regulators prevent microsoft from even trying...
Proton on Steam Deck is indistinguishable from Windows.
I've loaded Win64 Unity builds on the machine to test and they run perfectly every time. I actually dont see the reason I would bother with a native Linux build at this point. The machine doesn't even get hot despite my fear that it would doing something like this.
The only part of the SD experience that felt like "linux" was the OOBE wherein I had to arbitrarily restart the first time setup process 3-4 times before it finally worked.
I am at a point where I almost prefer to game on the linux handheld over my windows desktop. It really is a superior package in many ways. Games like Elden Ring, Arkham Knight, Euro Truck Simulator 2, etc., are so much better to play on a machine like this. On keyboard+mouse I struggled to enjoy these titles. I realize I could always connect a controller to my PC, but it never felt right to me in that form factor. Playing ETS2 on the couch is a completely different dimension of relaxation. I'd never touch this game on my PC.
I would have agreed, having played the windows build Baldurs Gate III on the Deck. But a week ago the developer put out a native Deck build that outperforms the windows build, which is very helpful in the later parts of the game.
DXVK is remarkably optimized and I think many people overlook that.
Really? I haven’t used it, but I’ve mostly heard good things. It really has ads everywhere and needs regular reinstalls and malware scrubbing?
Surely not warranting a response like this.
I don't know why anyone would prefer their games tied to a service in that way. Especially when we've seen other digital stores go belly up, resulting in inaccessible collections.
Nowadays I mostly buy PC games on GoG for that reason, but I have plenty on Steam. I do worry about it a little.
I would've much rather had the launcher and all that be optional, but I'm guessing that requiring Steam for games like Half-life 2 probably was the smarter move (from a profit perspective) than having it be optional, so that's the way the market went.
If you're just playing Silk Song now and then, you can buy it for $20 from Steam. I get you don't fully own it with steam, but it a hell of a lot closer to owning it than having temporary access via GamePass.
IMO the real issues for the more casual gamer (who is not a mobile gamer), is having either a decent console or cloud gaming. There's not a ton of options besides GEForce Now and XBox Cloud, and the Steam consoles are kinda crap and outdated at the moment. Also XBox cloud kinda sucks last I checked and had restrictions on multiplayer etc.
If XBox cloud gets as good as nVidia's cloud AND you get GamePass library access AND you can use a pretty dumbed down / cheap console for cloud gaming... then this might be a win for at least a subset. I think this is where they are headed? Even with all that, it's hard to beat Steam + GEForce Now which is the direct competitor.
I dream of a world where Windows is no longer the dominant OS for gaming.
it's a subsidised introductory price to capture market share and kill off the competition with the hope of creating a monopoly ("predatory pricing")
https://www.gamesradar.com/platforms/xbox-series-x/xbox-pres...
If it's services costs and 3rd party deals probably. But if you include the costs of all their 1st party games included day and date it's likely not, specially since they acquired Bethesda and Activision Blizzard.
A hint of that is that they are now releasing even their exclusive Xbox games now on PS and Switch 1/2.
this price rise was driven by them fearing cannibalisation of game sale revenues for the imminent new call of duty release
last year just on CoD they gave up $300 million (due to gamepass)
Seems MS bet on GamePass + all the publishers acquisitions moving lots of units of Xbox hardware but that simply did not happen, so now they pivoted to be the biggest 3rd party publisher and are releasing everything on all the other consoles, even their own original Xbox Studios games like Forza, Flight Simulator, Gears of War, etc.
If that's true, then selling software at low profit to sell hardware at low profit to sell software at high profit seems convoluted.
Whether the developers lose money as a result of the deal is extraordinarily hard to calculate and Microsoft doesn't disclose.
But like another commenter points out, if you're playing games like Silk Song or other similarly-priced games, it makes more sense to buy the game.
But yeah, you're absolutely right: lots of flaws with it, and I expect it will just get worse, much like Netflix.
Long live Steam, which I still use and love :)
I’ve had many conversations with people in their 30s who have not touched video games since the 360/PS3 era. Gamepass, even if just for a few months, makes a ton of sense for them if they have the time.
I say this as somebody who absolutely does not think people should be paying $30 for gamepass generally speaking and I think Microsoft/Xbox is incredibly weak right now. But there are certainly cases where it makes a ton of sense and Sony isn’t exactly offering a better alternative unless you want a Final Fantasy machine that’s library is dominated by PS3/PS4 remasters (which in many ways mimics the value prop of gamepass for those who have not been gaming for years).
There were three in the 90s that I know of. Have I missed some since?
But that's not necessarily the user base of Game Pass, especially when it was cheap. Many don't even play 1 new title per month.
And honestly, this is great. I shudder to think of a world where fucking Microsoft has a dominant position on gaming.
I've paid $10/month for a library of hundreds of games I can play on both PC and Xbox. We all knew that price was too good to be true but I've paid it happily for 5 years. We were waiting for the other shoe to drop and now it has. I've loaded up 2.5 years on my account at $20/month (the current retail price for Ultimate is $60 for 3-month cards.)
I've played countless indie games that I never otherwise would have taken a chance on. Even if I only played day one AAA games, the same $70 would get me one game on Steam for 2.3 months of the entire Game Pass library at the $30 price point or 3.5 months at the still-available $20/month price point. The game can't be resold on either platform.
Microsoft created a new business model that changed how I play games for the better. I can't see how the service isn't worth $30/month for 500+ games. (For a regular and not casual gamer.) This isn't shovelware like the Netflix library. There's a ton of high-quality games in there.
And I don't see how their price increase, which was inevitable and the timing of which was hastened by tariffs, has anything but a specious like to the merger.
Steam has done nothing but contrive a rent-seeker position for itself on an otherwise open platform. Maybe it's just because I'm old enough to remember a time when I could buy from the publisher without that middleman and click setup.exe for myself. And still retain the rights to resell and play offline without a middleman.
I really really doubt many people on this site have any problems paying fair amount of money to buy their entertainment. Real cost is when the platform tries cutting some part of service or you have a problem renewing the subscription or you move to another country and it causes problems etc.
It is just better to actually own it and steam is really well trusted compared to a company like Microsoft which is bottom of the barrel. GoG model is better though like some other people wrote already.
I don't think the Netflix model is a good fit for gaming. The games require a greater time commitment than your random TV show or movie.
> I've played countless indie games that I never otherwise would have taken a chance on.
My very uneducated guess is that 90% of Game Pass subscribers don't play nearly that many indie games. They probably don't even play 1 new title per month.
I think proton is such a huge thing,given what's happening with all OSes, that Valve should be considered great.
Also, we never had a portable pc gaming device ever,until now.
Because no way in hell I would support any Microsoft initiative in gaming? Or anywhere else for that matter.
Say what you will of Steam, but they made gaming on Linux not only viable, but in many ways better than on Microsoft. For thatbI will forever be grateful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So the story of the modern software development. Developer time and effort is minimised, and performance visible to user suffers...
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.
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
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.
The party that got screwed by that acquisition was, ironically, Microsoft. To be clear, this isn't a new discovery or idea; everyone was saying this during the acquisition, but Microsoft's corporate story is best summarized as "makes the worst possible decision at every turn yet still somehow does ok". If there's any reason the ABK acquisition should have been blocked, it might have been to protect Microsoft from itself, much akin to how parents have to keep babies from touching the stove.
ABK is a sinking ship that MSFT paid luxury yacht prices for. ABK should be renamed "King & Call of Duty Inc", but they're saddled with dozens of other properties and business divisions, including all of Blizzard, that make zero or negative money. This tethers a sinking ship, ABK, to a second sinking ship, Xbox, which similar to ABK has been sinking since, like, 2015, and hopes that the two sinking ships together might float.
There's a world where maybe Xbox leadership gets more involved, cuts fat, takes direct management of key laggard properties, maybe selling some off to focus up on what's driving revenue. But, again; Microsoft sucks. Their direct management buried Halo and Gears below the ground, from industry titans to totally irrelevant. The very real situation is that their leadership has totally lost confidence even in themselves, their failures are obvious and written across the sky, and that's led them to take a hands-off approach with ABK. But, again; ABK sucked. Eventually things get so bad that someone has to step in and make the really bad tactical decisions; raising prices and layoffs.
By 2030, Xbox will stagger on as an umbrella brand for a few zombie game studios + "gaming services on Windows". But, the hardware will be dead, and we'll see them begin to offload laggard studios/IPs/brands, either selling them off to other companies or spinning them off into independent companies which Microsoft holds a minority stake in.
I don’t think this acquisition helped gamers, I think it just didn’t matter. Microsoft is welcome to waste their own money.
I may buy a used one later on for that reason, specifically.
This process needs to be faster for these types of challenges to be more successful - both in the market and in consumer opinion. Markets move too fast, and the answer can’t be “FTC needs more of my money to hire more people.”
Why can’t it be that?
I’m not familiar with the inner workings of the FTC, so this is a genuine question.
If it were a rise between console generations or something, sure, but I don't get why there would be one since 2022.
I doubt this is driving the game pass price increase though.
I'd much rather the government do more to bring competition to Internet service providers where the regulatory/infrastructure barriers are much higher.
(I would have posted Lina Khan for president, but I recently learned she was born in the UK, so I'll take what I can get)
It's difficult to guess, with reasonable certainty, if the deal will kill all competition. Difficult given the competition that is out there on all fronts (Steam, Playstation, Nintendo, Epic).
So if it's not totally clear the deal is bad, it's overreach to block it. Layoffs and increased pricing isn't indicative of monopoly power. Lina's mandate wasn't to prevent layoffs, it's anti-trust. It's also too early to conclude anything from the deal that was closed so recently.
I like Lina Khan but predicting layoffs and price raises doesn’t really have to do with competition in the gaming sector. In fact it is pretty much everyone’s opinion that there are way too many games and way too many developers. That she is talking about price hikes and layoffs because that’s what you need for anti trust actions according to the case law should tell you: the problem is the courts.
What is good for the FTC is typically opposed to what is good for profits and we get standoffs like this.
What are you talking about? It's awesome having so many options, with so many great indy titles. One of the things that makes Steam so great in comparison to consoles. Who are these people asking for less choice?
The layoffs seem more damning but we would need a crystal ball to know if Activision could have skipped them if independent, or bought by another company.
Still it seems hardly clear cut and more story-crafting after the fact by a beurauceat rather than a proper analysis.
People gave Brendan Eich grief for political stances as a tech CEO but, say what you will, I think his actions were never based on a catastrophic misdiagnosis of which parties stand for what.
I think Yen was at least right that there were important anti-trust efforts that unfolded during Trump's first term, but they appeared to be politically selective, and at a completely different order of magnitude than what Kahn achieved afterward. Perhaps most head-spinning of all was when he claimed that none of his commentary was "intended to be political."
0. Screenshotted statement here: https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/654f16fa-d3ca-4304-bb2a-41c...
