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Microsoft acquired Bethesda after hearing Starfield would be exclusive to PlayStation
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh that'll never happen, it would pretty much mean Sony voluntarily killing the market for PS5. And it'd mean a major overhaul of how the PS5 works if they don't want to develop for multiple software platforms in parallel. The PS5 doesn't use D3D or Vulkan, it has its' own graphics API right now.
It would all be great, but I can guarantee that Sony will never go for it. They'd be spending a bunch of extra money just so they could reduce their long-term income.
That's funny, because next year is the 20th anniversary of the first ever store-exclusive PC game, Half-Life 2. I still remember the Steam logo anal penetration gif from those days, because everyone hated the forced Steam client install (and its' frequent updates) so much.
It's trash that they did this to games that were originally going to be Steam games, but I can't fault them for this. It's the only way to enter the market and even that was not enough. Steam's hold on the market, while largely built on Gaben's pro-consumer policies, is so big that if Gaben were to die, the next owner of the company could do absolutely anything short of breaking into your home to smash your PC and 99% of their users would never migrate, even if a better platform appeared. That's because nobody wants to buy games from multiple stores and everyone already has all their games on Steam. GOG has only gained the marketshare it has because it has found a very specific niche - DRM-free games, mostly older ones. Neither Epic nor Steam are going to do that because they both want to be the general "any game you want" store and most AAA games' publishers aren't going to allow DRM-free to happen.
There's not going to be a 3rd major generic PC game store to compete with Steam and Epic anytime soon. Several billions of dollars worth of exclusive deals and free games would be needed to start one and now that people have shown their rightful hatred for exclusive deals, I don't think anyone wants to attempt it again. Sure, you could do better than Epic did by prioritizing a better user experience and giving away even more free games and buying or building several studios to churn out dozens of first-party exclusives instead of paying for exclusives, but you'd need more money than Epic has burnt on it, because now you're still competing with Steam AND everyone already hates the idea of a store that isn't Steam. And Epic had Fortnite money AND Tencent money to do it.