boonhet comments on Microsoft acquired Bethesda after hearing Starfield would be exclusive to PlayStation

[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 2 points 3 years ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

I don't care about Xbox's market share. I care about the consumers. And exclusives are bad for gamers.

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[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

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.

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[–] wagesof@links.wageoffsite.com 0 points 3 years ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

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.

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[–] wagesof@links.wageoffsite.com 1 point 3 years ago*

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.

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