I love Game Pass, but I don't like monopolies. I wish regulators had blocked this. Also: https://www.theonion.com/just-six-corporations-remain-1819564741
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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I was laughing at the onion article and stopped- was that really published in 1998 ?!?!? Or is the date also a joke?
It reads like it's from 98. The references to Blockbuster, Daimler-Chrysler, McDonnell Douglas, and Bill Clinton tipped me off this was an old one.
Wikipedia says that The Onion has had a website since '96, so it's definitely possible! (Also, TIL The Onion has existed since 1988.)
I knew the onion is old, but didn't imagine they would keep a website with old articles still up!
Why not? It costs nothing, appart from transforming the old format into something the current site can work with, or more likely, have the old site support tbe old format.
Some media organizations have started nuking old articles to please the Google algorithm
It really is that old. According to their Supreme Court amicus brief: “Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.” Seriously though, read that brief. It’s a masterful piece of satire.
The wayback machine has it archived as early as December 2017, no idea beyond that.
It's hard to block mergers based on a company involved being a monopoly if none of the companies involved are monopolies or will become monopolies.
Regulators have to come up with a different set of rules to block "large but not monopolistic mergers" without also just effectively protecting the actual leader in a given industry from competition.
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What a sad day for gamers. Microsoft now has all it needs to extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on consoles, just as they do on PCs already, and the regulators will give them a wink and a nudge.
They can't even manage to beat Steam on their own OS to be fair lol
Write a more stable gaming launcher on your own OS than a 3rd party company (impossible)
Is Steam competing with Microsoft's "Netflix but with games" service?
No, and yet Steam is still winning. Game Pass can be a sick deal but many still prefer paying just a little more on a Steam Sale to own a game forever.
I do use steam so please don't misunderstand this as bashing, but you don't own anything on steam either. You rent it for life and access can legally be withdrawn if you act against the TOS. If you're looking to buy games GOG is the only real option I know of.
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I had no issues with GamePass for years and was like this isn't as bad as people say. Then out of the blue I started getting the Download Gaming Services error and wasn't able to play anything. Looked it up and this has been an issue for years. I tried all the solutions I could find and ended up just canceling my GamePass and haven't used it since.
This is one of the reasons I don't use GamePass, because it all goes through the crappy Microsoft Store which always gives me weird download errors, and when trying to research the issue it just leads to nothing that works.
God forbid you reinstall Windows and have your GamePass games on another drive. It won't let you re-use that partition because the games folder is "owned by someone else" even when you're signed into the same Microsoft account, and it won't let you delete it because its protected by Windows... You either have to nuke the whole partition, delete it from Linux, or go through the whole take-ownership ritual which is buggy at best.
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Consoles are walled-gardens altogether. Also poor Sony set the markt rules with their 3rd-party exclusives for how many generations now?
If you want to keep gaming as far away from enshittificarion as possible, then set up a linux gaming pc. It's not bad anymore.
Sony set the markt rules with their 3rd-party exclusives
This is Nintendo erasure.
Which 3rd party exclusives are they sitting on except Bayonetta 2/3? I can't remember that many.
Nintendo has the same dumb practices, but they do it with their own IPs, which is a little less annyoing. Also they aren't the main player like Sony has been for the last two decades. They just own the Mario-and-Zelda-tablet.
Which 3rd party exclusives are they sitting on except Bayonetta 2/3?
Few today, but who set the market rules? They were set in the late 80s.
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I’ve been looking into Linux Mint. Lemmy folks are so helpful here!
It's awesome how user friendly Mint is. If you like it you might check out the Debian version of it (LMDE). In general it's similar but doesn't rely on Ubuntu which is maintained by a company, Canonical, that upsets linux people with some proprietary stuff. Ubuntu is just a derivative of Debian, so you just can go with the original.
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We are so far away from that being even possible, let alone likely. Even Valve has successfully decoupled about 95% of PC gaming from Microsoft.
I'm talking about the platform, not the store front. Windows has far more than 90% of the PC gaming world market share, far more than what's enough to monopolize the PC gaming scene; GNU and macOS are a super distant second and third place. Whenever most people talk about "PC gaming", what they really mean is Windows, even though there are other PC platforms out there.
But if Microsoft did something so nefarious to Windows gaming, enough people could switch to Linux to punish them for it, since the last 5 years were spent making nearly every game work on Linux regardless. Microsoft tried to use their position to get you to buy every game through their store, and the market rejected it. That 90% they have currently is now afforded the privilege to be fickle with Windows usage, when before they didn't have the option.
Big corpo is bad but Microsoft is far behind in the console space and in the gaming pc front. They won't extinguish playstation anytime soon.
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Whilst monopolies are a terrible thing for consumers.
PlayStation and Nintendo still have the best first party lineups and IP available to them. I don’t think this is as big of a deal as people would like to make it seem.
I do agree this should have been blocked by regulators just as I thought with the Bethesda acquisition. Sony also with the acquisition of Bungie.
There should be a restriction on the purchasing of studios/publishers of a certain size.
Certainly isn’t going to hurt Sony or Nintendo. I also don’t think this is the big WIN that Microsoft thinks it’s going to be either.
Well at least Microsoft can't ruin Blizzard any more than Activision ruined it.
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Fuck Activision
Especially Bobby and all the ones he enabled
Honestly this is bad for the gaming industry.
I understand a lot of game pass subscribers want more free stuff.
But just look at what Netflix had became after its success.
Or even just look at MS’s track record in using their monopolies to bully competitors.
Years later we will look at this and watch the tragedy unfold.
Pretty sure most of the abk staff were just keen to get rid of Bobby. Maybe shortsighted but hey, MS isn't the worst company to work for.
Now gut the boys club C Suite from ABK and help the thousands of employees.
Kotick is out in January at the very least. I think there is a 60 day waiting period before employees can begin unionizing, as part of the deal.
I hope you're right! My Blizzard/Starcraft boycot ends when that parasite of a CEO leaves.
Might be wishful thinking on my part but maybe Microsoft will better utilize their IPs.
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It's a shame the UK's Competitive Markets Authority let this merger go through after all. I can't wait for the future, when 90% of the most popular games are made by 3 companies
the government was desperate for a post brexit trade deal
They showed Alex Mercer from Prototype in their announcement video
They knew
That's quite interesting, leaving aside all the monopoly arguments, I think this has potential to being very beneficial to all blizzard games, and so to us.
It looks like Kotick will be leaving after the transition so that's a great start. My dream is that this all somehow leads to the full Overwatch PvE campaign coming back onto the table again (given that their attempts to provide long-term replay ability without doing the work seem to be floundering now, there's a chance right?)
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