lustyargonian @ lustyargonian @lemm.ee

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2

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487

Joined

2 yr. ago

Something something streisand effect

Why wouldn't one be anxious about impending environment crisis and inability of institutions to act quickly enough.

One benefit of shouting at your kids and generally dismissing their emotions is that you can enjoy your retirement without them anywhere near you and die alone.

ex-X formerly Twitter.

Yeah that may be true, but this is an old subreddit with basically news articles about BJP (ruling party lead by Modi) spokespersons saying dumb things in public.

Yup. Try checking shitbjpsays subreddit someday.

Do all cancelled projects get wiped off of internet?

Glad I could make my point clearer. It's hard to narrow down what feels wrong about this level of consolidation, and given MSFT's track record in recent years, it's hard to say they're definitely going to become evil, but just that possibility feels scary.

Things are good, until they're not.

Yeah you're right. Doom Eternal is great. I'm playing Metro series and even that's pretty good in terms of balancing story and gameplay.

It's just that coming from Remedy, Max Payne's basic formula of corridor shooter probably doesn't match their other games anymore, so I'm curious to see how they're going to remake it.

You're right. A company should be allowed to create and acquire other companies, no doubt in that.

The problem, as I listed above in the very long post, is unique to the big tech players where they can create such synergetic businesses that it's pretty difficult for anyone to compete or break free from that.

What you're saying makes great sense. Xbox indeed needs more and more IPs and more importantly much better quality control to compete with Sony. They lost the last generation, and they need to do everything in their power to course correct. After ABK, they would match Sony in number of IPs and maybe surpass them in number of studios. Fair enough. But, as a whole, this gives a lot more power to MSFT, and my question is simply whether it's too much power or not.

Exactly, on their own the products aren't harmful at all. The problem comes when MSFT can leverage their position to undercut prices or shoving their products in other products.

How can slack compete, despite being a superior product, when MSFT puts Teams in the effing taskbar of Windows and sells it for half the price, and bundles it with office?

How can bitbucket or gitlab compete if MSFT integrates npm, GitHub, Azure, GitHub Copilot, VSCode and so many other dev tools so well, for much lower price?

Azure is second, yes, but my company, like many other companies, uses Azure over AWS because MSFT gives a sweet deal where Azure, Outlook, OneDrive, GitHub, Teams are all bundled in such a way that it'll be expensive to use individual companies for each, and also a big hassle. And when MSFT becomes an incubator for a startup, it's even better deal for the startup. How can digital ocean, for example, compete with that?

I mean that's what happened with Internet Explorer. Netscape couldn't compete coz MSFT could give IE for free and bundle it into the operating system. Google did something similar by getting other softwares to bundle Chrome with them in the installation process, and also asking users to use chrome on all Google properties. Firefox can never compete with IE or Chrome or Safari, as long as these big companies can integrate their services and products so seamlessly.

So you're absolutely right, individually none of the products are harmful, infact some of them are really good deals for consumers, but due to them all being under one umbrella, it's hard for competition to thrive.

Me too. Max Payne 3 is like the previous entries, just a bit more focus on close range corridor shooting with cover mechanics. Similar to previous entries but with a very stylized story telling.

It'll be interesting to see how a linear shooter from back then would translate to today's time. Would it be more like Last of Us where each encounter is thrilling and tense, or would it be like Max Payne 3/Uncharted 4 where you move from one level to another with a moving plot line?

Yeah I can see that. Nadella brought new energy and almost made MSFT look cool, but years later we can see how MSFT is basically gobbling up everything in every domain.

Update: Why am I being downvoted? Did you all forget that MSFT has acquired LinkedIn, GitHub, Mojang, Bethesda, ABK and 49% stake in OpenAI all under Satya? Each one of those are massive acquisitions.

Idk first thing about any of this, but I do think with MSFT controlling Windows, Azure, Xbox, GitHub, OpenAI, Teams; at some point one has to ask if MSFT is just too big for no good.

Think about it, a competing game studio might be paying MSFT for Windows licenses, Teams for internal communication, Azure for game servers, GitHub for hosting their source code, ChatGPT Pro for using AI in smart ways and finally a 30% cut to Xbox Store, only to compete with bazillions of first party titles under Xbox Game Studios.

Now think of a big publishers, they need to somehow compete with GamePass, which takes all the money MSFT can throw at it and makes game sales kinda irrelevant. Why would a consumer buy a $70 game when they can play other games for $15 max a month. Even if it's $30 a month, it's still a steal. Why would a studio go to a big publisher and give up bigger chunk of revenues (Outriders didn't get much under Square Enix despite being on GamePass) when they could just become a second party developer with XGS and rake in whatever cash flow positive MSFT would give them before the game is even launched, with a bonus of marketing of "Day One With GamePass".

In nut shell, MSFT makes a tonne money during development even if the game isn't released on Xbox, and Xbox Game Studios slowly hollows out competing publishers by using the MSFT money to secure deals with third party studios or straight up acquiring them. They can adjust profitability by tweaking prices at several touch points of this huge Microsoft services pipeline.

If Xbox was broken away from MSFT, they'll become yet another publisher, though a pretty big one, without the daddy money. It would make the industry more competitive between publishers, but it may also probably lead to egregious monetization strategies like we already see these days, because MSFT is uniquely positioned to do what they're doing.

Similar things can be said about Amazon or Google. How is it that if Netflix succeeds AWS wins and if Prime succeeds, AWS still wins? How can Google make the search engine, video hosting platform, dominant browser and a ads platform and cross pollinate money like crazy? If big companies weren't allowed to build such synergetic businesses, consumers might be paying to several different companies, but they'll also be seeing competition in each of those domains, driving prices lower, hopefully.

So yeah, I support the idea of breaking up companies that start dealing with orthogonal domains that end up creating a nest of services that no competitor can easily break free from.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

Don't know about their milk, but they surely knead some great dough.

Not just woman but also lactating cow, camel, goat, cat, dog, monkey... unbelievable right.

Fun fact, dairy milk actually contains proper estrogen, like all the lactations of mamals.

Metro Last Light, Lies of P and RDR2. Mid, fast and slow paced games lol.

You're right, they've been hands off and basically done bare minimum for marketing and promotion. And it hasn't been working well for them at all, exhibit A: Halo Infinite, exhibit B: Redfall. Clearly they can't sustain this anymore.

Starfield has been probably the first example where they actually got invested in the production, delayed a game by a year, got their entire QA team test it. Layoffs from top to bottom at 343 is probably another example of them intervening.

Regarding exclusionary buyouts, I don't know if you aren't aware of it. But it has been a thing in this industry for decades. This is how Sony got where it is today, by being highly competitive by making exclusionary deals and buying studios with whom they had exclusionary deals with for years. Sony entered this industry out of nowhere and bought their way into success, and everyone agrees that only made the market more competitive. Xbox had no games and was not bringing competition in market, and now that it has more games, it's anti competitive?

The difference with MSFT is that they bring their games to PC (an open platform) via Steam, and to Xbox, along with a price accessible service of GamePass, so it doesn't force a gamer into first buying a $400 console and then a $70 game to play on it.

We can agree to disagree, my original point is primarily around lack of confidence in MSFT's ability to manage these studios and do justice to their legacy. Sure making workspaces less toxic and inclusive for everyone is a massive win, but will employees stick around under a new management that seems pretty incompetent to eff up their own flagship series (Halo).