You can innovate without shoving lock-in and exclusives down users' throat. I don't agree that they are necessary for progress.
Those are never used for innovation purposes, but for market control ones. Totally different goal. If anything, I see using such methods as anti-innovation.
Anyway: I think that this acquisition will be very beneficial to hardcore Bethesda fans - most of them are really disappointed in latest Bethesda decisions and products (cough, 76, cough) and would really welcome less microtransaction-focused products and more single-player experience with great story. Also, perhaps MS will invest their resources to finally bring the Creation Engine BT uses to some semi-modern level?
I was writing a wall of text, but I just figured out it's pointless. Once again this whole argument boils down to the fact that you are somehow making MS (and other companies) responsible for not recognizing Linux as an amazing gaming platform and not supporting it.
Which does NOT mean you can harness the thread for your own purposes.
The topic of this thread is Microsoft's recent purchase. It absolutely will not be turned into another Linux thread, and "X is evil" is not acceptable in general.
I think the reason is that console players usually sit on a couch or floor. This makes it hard to play on k+m.
If I remember correctly, Starcraft was available on consoles at one point. It's funny just thinking about how unfair it would be if you played with a k+m against someone using a controller haha.
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Well that's because the console wars are fought by 12 year olds. They generally don't own gaming PCs.
I see consoles as a subset of PCs. The only thing you can't do on a PC is play console exclusive games (but sometimes even this is not necessarily true if emulators are available). With PC, you can play 4K games on your TV (soon to be 8K if you can afford the RTX 3090), you can use controllers, play multiplayer games, etc... Consoles are essentially PCs that optimized for games and are tied to a single storefront.
Anyway: I think that this acquisition will be very beneficial to hardcore Bethesda fans - most of them are really disappointed in latest Bethesda decisions and products (cough, 76, cough) and would really welcome less microtransaction-focused products and more single-player experience with great story. Also, perhaps MS will invest their resources to finally bring the Creation Engine BT uses to some semi-modern level?
I agree about the creation engine. In fact, my suspicion about the lack of progress on new games has been that Fallout 4 was already a bit more than the engine is capable of handling, and that they're having trouble developing a new engine. Maybe MS can help with this. Maybe.
Either way, the fact that MS would make something exclusive to their console means they are anti-competitively giving advantage to only their system. And if it happens through buying studios which before were not making anything exclusive, means they are explicitly making things worse for the whole market. I think it's pretty self explanatory, not sure what even there is to debate here.
Anti-trust should shoot down such things as a routine, if only it would have worked of course, as above.
While I agree that such practices are almost universally more destructive than productive, the precedent, legal and otherwise, is already established to massive degree. Only one publication company is normally allowed to print a certain book title or periodical...not 5 different ones. Only one movie studio is allowed to release films based on a certain universe at one time. TV shows are owned exclusively by only one network at a time. I can't go to KFC and order a whopper. If a restaurant carries Pepsi, they're not also carrying Coke. If I buy a Honda, I can't go to Ford and expect them to replace parts on my car.
On the contrary, video games have broken that mold, with many products appearing across a wide spectrum of marketplaces, and all sorts of partnerships being developed between publishers to release titles all over the world. But that doesn't simply erase the right of that studio to utilize clearly established exclusivity practices if they choose to. (It's just that I find it to be a useless pressure tactic that's simply going to wind up costing that publisher/producer/studio a lot of overall sales, in both the short and long term, and I wish they would stop doing it. Arguing that it's somehow "malpractice" actionable at a legal level is not sound, however. [But...it is still actionable: just don't buy any exclusive titles. Starve the practice, and it will die.])
The problem is that anti-trust was simply ignoring a lot of such issues, that's how they became "established". I doesn't make them any better for the actual market in my view. Companies get a way with a lot of such stuff because no one stops them.
As long as they finaly get a new engine i really don't care much. Corporate is corporate. Microsoft might be a bit better but we all know this is because of xbox pass and not their good intentions to fix Bethesda
The problem is that anti-trust was simply ignoring a lot of such issues, that's how they became "established". I doesn't make them any better for the actual market in my view. Companies get a way with a lot of such stuff because no one stops them.
Choosing whether to allow a particular vendor to stock your product is not an antitrust issue. It's a choice of where I think my product will sell best. Or whether I approve of the practices of a said vendor.
Any matter of antitrust needs to show that practices are resulting in monopolies, breaches of contract, illegal distribution of goods, price rigging / discrepancy against only a certain demographic or area, etc. It does not prevent businesses from being aggressively competitive...
...nor does it prevent businesses from making unwise or self-destructive decisions based on greed.
And no part of antitrust focuses on the consumer needing to be satisfied with the results. As consumers, we always have exactly the same choice: buy the product or service at the asking price, wait for a bargain, or leave it. That's how we vote. Dollars. The business practices that get the most votes win.
As long as they finaly get a new engine i really don't care much. Corporate is corporate. Microsoft might be a bit better but we all know this is because of xbox pass and not their good intentions to fix Bethesda
Maybe! If there was ever a chance of Beth finally ditching Gamebryo and creating something actually up-to-date, this would be it. Now that MS invested, and knowing the all-but-guaranteed sales they're going make with an "Elder Scrolls" title at release, it only makes sense that they'd deliver.
They're not dumb, either. They are fully aware of the lackluster reception of FO4 (when compared to any Beth game since the release of Morrowind), and how embarrassing the FO76 debacle was. I'm sure they know what they're facing with both Starfield and TES6.
I would imagine not. It's a great way for MS to put the thumb-screws to Sony. While it's possible that the title's potential is huge enough that it might prompt some actual cooperation between the two...I think it's far more likely that Sony will find an equally appealing title to clamp down on in order to try to hold their ground.
As long as MS is not locking their titles to the Windows store as the only distribution channel, like Forza, I'm ok with this deal.
As for exclusives; they are bad for consumers as they artificially raise the price of the product by strong-arming the consumer to buy another product they may have no interest in, from the same vendor.
Here you go, that'll be $30 for God of War. Hey do you have batteries a PC with a Sony sticker? That'll be a small $400 surcharge then. No your existing 16 core, 64 GB RAM and Geforce 3080 won't do because .... Sony just says so. You want financing with that?
Until the courts across the world have settled the Apple ecosystem questions, this corporate practice is not likely to change. Creating moats ("platforms") is going to continue until companies are forced to stop. They won't stop until monopoly decisions have been ruled upon to prevent this behavior.
I have nothing against consoles as such. I think it's great that content consuming households can get cheap hardware that is able to run code, and that the console vendors ship these units for reasonable prices. It's also great for publishers as these cheap units have helped expand the market for software and media entertainment products.
Feeling tempted to hop on this cliché but welcome speculation wagon that Fallout: New Vegas 2 might actually happen, now that Bethesda and Obsidian are under the same roof~~~this time as siblings.
Feeling tempted to hop on this cliché but welcome speculation wagon that Fallout: New Vegas 2 might actually happen, now that Bethesda and Obsidian are under the same roof~~~this time as siblings.
I mean to be fair after The Elder Scrolls: Blades and Fallout 76 their products could not get any further downhill, so they will either still be as horrible as those or get better again.
They also bought Nokia for some-such ridiculous amount of money. My guess is that this will be the death-blow Bethesda was waiting for after the Fallout76 debacle. Sooner or later, GamePass will be the only way people consume games on PC&Xbox, and that entire sub-business doesn't lend itself to 200 million freedom dollars in development costs. But maybe I'm wrong, worked out for Netflix...
I would prefer game studios all seperated, fragmented, no umbrella corp around them, especially not Microsoft. A studio pitches an idea, somebody thinks, sure, here's 60 million, go ahead, and then you just leave them alone, the goal being a standalone game that has no micro-transactions in them, aka the product speaks for itself. Sony has been very good at this in the last decade.
With Microsoft, you will see many (ultimately) useless, meaningless games be produced, cookie-cutter-copies of tired-out genres. Which makes Zenimax the perfect fit, I guess. But Microsoft is throwing money at an artistic problem (if you ask me). You don't get The Witcher 3 if you're not basically operating under your own rules.
It's not good for the industry because it's a pretty anti-competitive move. Consolidation of these big publishers is never healthy, especially when one swallowing things is MS. And MS removes someone who was deteriorating their DX lock-in.
Microsoft has a much bigger push for quality over just putting something out no matter how broken it is, If this purchase was pre FO76 it likely would of been pushed back another 3 or 4 years if not just outright killed given all the bugs and anticonsumer bs they pulled.
