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On one hand, thank god I get to play it on PC.
On the other hand, fuck Microsoft.
On the third hand, fuck Sony, too.
what third hand
looks down.
Oh.
Oh my.
exclusivity is shit and blatantly anti-consumer
Counterpoint: I don't see a point in buying consoles if they have no exclusives
a budget gaming pc that requires minimal upkeep or research into picking parts or putting them together
if that isnt a good enough reason, counterpoint: maybe consoles just have no point then
Consoles are mass produced and (usually) sold at a loss. I don't see how PCs can compete with that in terms of value.
Additionally, consoles receive better support from both their manufacturers and from large game developers.
Consoles are by far the best bang for your buck right now in terms of performance vs cost. A decent GPU alone today costs as much as a PS5/Series X. Unless you need a powerful desktop for other purposes, it's cheaper to buy a console and a decent laptop separately than it is to build a gaming PC.
Idk about that, if you're aiming for performance similar to what consoles get you can build a PC for pretty cheap
Short term, sure. But got 12 years of decent gaming out of my last PC that I just replaced in January. I don't know any consoles that continue to have releases over that sort of timeframe.
You're not making a counterpoint, you're making THE point against exclusivity
So, if you're only buying a console to play that one or two games, they are objectively not a good choice to buy for you. Or if you have multiple consoles just to play all the exclusives, not for any actual feature of the device or cause it does something specific you want (or has accessories others don't, like VR), same thing. This promotes innovation.
If games weren't exclusive, you could just buy whatever console fits your use case the best, offers the best performance, or the cheapest for more casual gamers who don't care about performance who just want to play something every now and then. That's good for consumers.
So what you said isn't a counterpoint at all. It's just your reason for buying them I presume, actually proving they are bad for consumers especially in your case. If they had no exclusives, you'd just play whatever game you want on whatever platform you chose, losing nothing.
screw all that exclusivity shit
God forbid they release it everywhere and compete to have the best console that people want to buy
but then they would have to compete on hardware
Won't anybody think of what that costs the poor billionaires?
Lately, PS Plus has felt like a better GamePass than GamePass. That almost certainly wouldn’t be the case if there is further market consolidation.
So I get Microsoft’s angle but ultimately I want to see them both compete for value and monopolies don’t do that. Also we’ve seen what Microsoft do with monopolies…
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.
Microsoft really needs more exclusive games to their system.
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.
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.
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.
So all is just Microsoft and Sony blaming each other of being more anti-competitive
Well ya, Sony is actively trying to block Microsoft from buying Activision Blizzard.
I also kind find this whole thing funny because Microsoft keeps enough cash on hand to just outright buy Sony without having to liquidate any assets so I'm willing to bet that'll be the eventual power move
If the FTC has any credibility at all, or even an illusion of credibility, at least that would be too big an acquisition.
About 14 billion short at current. Who know what a buyout would actual take beyond the regulatory requirements.
Well if the Activision Blizzard falls through then there's your extra cash lol
governments would never allow that, and im sure Microsoft is aware that they would never allow that
I keep hoping that since Microsoft owns Obsidian they might somehow allow Obsidian to make another fallout game... I miss good writing in Fallout.
They did the same thing with Bungie when Halo was announced for the Mac.
Wouldnt they make more making it more widely available?
Not necessarily. Sony pays them enough to offset the loss of sales for a year, and they can then go multiplatform after. Usually with a GOTY edition or some bonus content. The recent Tomb Raider games ar a good example of this.
What numbers are being tossed around I could only speculate, but that's the idea.
I wish it was illegal to do that. It's blatantly anti consumer. Exclusivity does absolutely nothing good for consumers and only harms them by pushing them to have to own multiple, otherwise redundant consoles.
