I'm not sure what is wrong here, taking into account that it's usual for Sony to make titles produced by their subsidiaries as exclusives for PS only (yes, e.g. God of War was released on PC too, but that was almost 4 years after the initial launch as PS4 exclusive). At least Microsoft releases games on Windows simultaneously with Xbox launch, and these Windows releases could run on Linux too (thank you Valve & Proton). Not possible with Sony stuff.
The issue is that this isn't Microsoft bootstrapping a new division that produces games exclusive for their platforms. This is a problem of Microsoft trying to buy one of the larger existing game publishers with some very popular titles and likely make many of them Microsoft platform exclusive.
That's why I additionally pointed about Windows releases. With Microsoft exclusive, you can play the title on Xbox, Windows PC, Linux PC, Steam Deck. With Sony, it's PS only.
What kind of "newer"? I only consider Spider-Man: Miles Morales as "new enough" and it was still released over 2 years ago. When God of War: Ragnarok will be available on PC? You get Xbox titles on PC on the same day of their console release.
Returnal which came out April 2021 and the PC version just released, technically Destiny 2: Lightfall (if that counts) was day-and-date.
Sony still has an incentive to sell hardware and keep games exclusive though. Unlike Microsoft, they don't control Windows and don't have an incentive to keep Windows the gaming OS of choice. Microsoft is also trying to push their own Xbox Game Pass and get users gradually away from Steam.
The fact that Sony, who Microsoft insists is absolutely obliterating them in the gaming space, doesn't have the money to enact these sorts of massive mega-mergers seems telling that this kind of a deal is not just a natural part of the market. Rather, Microsoft is just leverating their wealth from their other businesses to armstrong the market.
Wow. Microsoft releases games for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Xbox? And thanks to tremendous efforts by third parties they work on other platforms? Amazing!
I doubt you or most people would consider Breath of the Wild not to be Nintendo exclusive despite it being on TWO different Nintendo platforms and playable on other platforms thanks to third parties. Microsoft plays the exclusive game too no matter how much people like to pretend that they don't control Windows and benefit from keeping it the dominate PC gaming OS.
You can't run yuzu or Cemu on PS even if you wanted too. The Sony's platform is tremendously locked. Also I mentioned Proton in my original post, you get Linux compability for the "Microsoft exclusive" game basically for free.
> Also I mentioned Proton in my original post, you get Linux compability for the "Microsoft exclusive" game basically for free.
You got my hopes up:/ I just looked and I don't see a single COD game showing proton/steamdeck support on steam. Maybe there's workarounds for some of the old ones, but I don't think any recent ones with working anti cheat have anything but Windows support.
The old ones work pretty okay. I played through WWII's campaign on my Steam Deck and a bit of multiplayer too. Black Ops III as well although my campaign save broke itself multiple times so I gave up. The Modern Warfare reboot and up ones seem to not work though. I think they also have more extensive anti-cheat too that might not be doable on Linux.
I was so sure that rise of PC ownership would spell the end of consoles. I still can't believe console gaming grew and became even more entrenched the last 10 years. It would be like if blockbuster grew and became more popular with the rise of netflix.
> Even if the CMA tried to enforce a so-called "behavioral remedy" to keep Call of Duty multi-platform, that move would not "address the myriad ways Microsoft could circumvent its obligations," Sony wrote. Sony also said Microsoft has a "history of non-compliance with behavioral commitments," pointing to Bethesda as well as previous broken commitments regarding Windows and Internet Explorer.
Whichever Microsoft decision maker caused the Edge icon to be forced onto all Windows users desktops (sometimes repeatedly), sure has given Sony some high profile evidence to work with.
Microsoft never made any commitments (behavioural or otherwise) about Bethesda game exclusivity so how on earth did they brake any?
The only commitment they made for that deal was the keep existing games supported on the platforms they already existed and to uphold any existing agreements.
And they have uphold both of those. Elder scrolls online is getting all the same support on PlayStation as Xbox and both Ghostwire Tokyo and Deathloop released as timed PlayStation exclusives as agreed on earlier contacts.
Pretty rich for Sony to complain about exclusives. I guess Sony considers Call of Duty more of a game changer than the God of War and Horizon franchises.
In a perfect world, there would be no platform exclusives, especially not on consoles, unless we're talking about money-starved indie studios taking funding so they can survive as a company. The expensive consoles are all basically the same devices with some special tricks here and there. Sure, integrating games with the console OS will take some time, but most of the game isn't nearly as platform specific as these companies pretend it is.
In practice, every console brand is paying developers for exclusive rights, even just for timed exclusives. From Apple to Valve, the entire industry is riddled with companies trying to make their platform have an artificial edge above the others, because the truth is that the consumer doesn't really care what hardware the games run on; "you can't have this if you buy from our competitors" is the norm.
This causes silly things like Spiderman being a Playstation exclusive character in that Marvel game and absurd side effects on surrounding platforms (like that time you could make a Fortnite account on Playstation that only worked on Playstations despite the cross-platform nature of the game).
For the good of the consumer, I hope the merger gets cancelled, though I don't think it'll happen. Sony doesn't get to complain, though, as it has relied on these exact shady business practices for decades now.
> From Apple to Valve, the entire industry is riddled with companies trying to make their platform have an artificial edge above the others, because the truth is that the consumer doesn't really care what hardware the games run on
+100 Absolutely insane that we have mostly general purpose computing devices hindered by marketing deals and not technical infeasibility.
Sony didn't buy an existing multi-platform game franchise and make it exclusive with though. Their most recent purchase was Bungie and Destiny remains multiplatform.
Of God of War and Horizon, the first was from an internally founded studio, and the latter was purchased all the way back in 2005.
You’re correct, but Sony has convinced studios to sign Xbox exclusion clauses for some of their game, like FF7 Remake and Bloodborne.
With their sizeable investments in Square and From Software, Microsoft is upping the ante of the game they are both playing. Sony is simply looking at potentially losing their biggest third-party moneymaker and they’re complaining. Microsoft have them dead to rights. It’s gonna get uglier.
I fully expect either Square or From to be straight up bought by Sony in retaliation.
> Pretty rich for Sony to complain about exclusives. I guess Sony considers Call of Duty more of a game changer than the God of War and Horizon franchises.
I would have agreed with you if you were to mention Sony deals with Square Enix, but both God of War and Horizon were pretty much in house exclusives, developed by studios funded directly by Sony, like Halo was for Microsoft at some point.
Activision is a massive corporation, though, and the CoD franchise routinely earns hundreds of millions of dollars per release. The scale is nowhere comparable.
> because the truth is that the consumer doesn't really care what hardware the games run on
That's baloney. If someone is remotely interested in strategy games for example (MMOs, Real time strategy or Civ like complex games) they are better run on PCs because of keyboard and mouse. There is also the consumer who has the money to splurge out on a high end GPU and wants to run games at high refresh 4K. And there are old dinosaurs like me who could never get used to controllers, and I tried. Got an Xbox controller for my PC for Elden Ring, couldn't get used to it, switched back to KB/Mouse, finished game easy.
> I’d love to have just 1 gaming box, that can do everything!
My PC does that.
I guess if good strategy games come out on XBox/PS5 and they support regularly KB/Mouse I might get a console. Then again, lack of KB/Mouse is just one of my gripes. No modding and a general purpose computer locked down to do a few things make consoles useless for me. On my PC I can do whatever I want.
> I guess Sony considers Call of Duty more of a game changer than the God of War and Horizon franchises.
GoW and Horizon became as big as they are today while being PS exclusives from day one, so them being exclusives tomorrow is business as usual. CoD has been multi-platform since day one, so becoming an Xbox/Windows exclusive would represent a very significant change.
I normally respect Ars a lot for their reporting, but they also conveniently ignore Minecraft that not only continues to get support on other platforms but other platforms also get any of the spinoffs.
To my knowledge Microsoft never made any commitment saying that Bethesda games would always come out on other platforms.
I also still think that Sony is being incredibly hypocritical here with how they are responding considering their love of making exclusive contracts. Final Fantasy being a big example right now but it seems to be a trend that Square and Sony will continue.
It remains to be seen how Sony will actually handle Bungie.
Ultimately the way I see it, is the Activision deal actually a good thing? I don't know, it is a lot of studios going under Microsoft. But on the flip side Sony has a very nasty tendency of getting cocky in gaming and making some very anti consumer decisions. Ex: The price of the PS3, backwards compatibility, cross play multiplayer, and others.
The simple fact is we need competition in the console marketplace, without it I doubt we would have ever gotten any playstation games on PC, which they still seem reluctant to support at all.
Aren't a lot of those Playstation exclusives time limited? I.e. for a year or two it's PS exclusive afterwards the company can release it for any platform they want.
I don't think we fully know what the actual situation is for that.
The FF7 remake came out in 2020 and is still not on xbox and there is no indication it will. Now that did come out on PC though.
Deathloop came out on Xbox but it is unclear if that would have happened had Xbox not bought Bethesda or if Sony would have tried to keep it exclusive.
The annoying part is that we just simply don't know what that situation actually looks like.
While I don't love that particular trend, it isn't like that trend is really a new one in the industry. It seems like every company is trying to push their ecosystem and forcing you to login wherever they can.
The only reason this particular case is weird is because its a Microsoft account on Playstation.
Not saying it's a good practice, but I don't know if in that case I would solely attack Microsoft.
I am on Switch and only needed Microsoft account to play online though?
But either ways, it's not relevant to this situation. We are talking of game.being made available. Not about whether it has login to the parent company or not.
Let's not forget that Sony was the last to allow cross platform multiplayer on Minecraft.
PC players with old Mojang accounts were made to create and migrate to Microsoft accounts in order to continue playing. Either that or do what I did, and crack their launcher and only play on "offline mode" (no account verification) servers.
Microsoft accounts ask for a lot of personal information that they simply don't need, and I feared that opting not to provide that personal information would likely put my account at risk for being capriciously banned by bureaucratic anti-botting systems in the future. Furthermore, should I ever need a Microsoft account for some more important reason, I would not want that connected to an account I game online with. Mixing work and play is a bad idea, and having two separate accounts seems like a likely setup for a capricious ban sometime in the future. So yeah, I once bought this game from Notch and had a legit account for it, but now I have to pirate it because Microsoft decided to get invasive and nosy.
I think the market has plenty of choice between Playstation, Switch, Xbox and PC. Xbox and Playstation are even basically the same consoles in a different box and with a chip sprinkled onto the motherboard here and there; it's not like the olden days of special PS2/PS3 chips that all need to be handled manually.
The biggest problem in the video games industry is that all companies that have any kind of control abuse anti-consumer practices to keep their profits up. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are all terrible in their own unique ways.
On PC there are some nice(r) players, but PC gaming is neither affordable nor accessible to people who are fine with their Chromebooks already and just want to play video games once in a while. Right now your choices are often "overpay for a prebuilt computer at your local store" or "find out what a PCIe lane is supposed to be and what the 5 in DDR5 even stands for". If you're not turning on your computer every day, you're definitely getting interrupted with updates from software you don't recognize, and that assumes you managed to set up the right driver (hint: not the one that auto-installed!) for your PC.
I hope Valve's efforts take off, not just in the handheld space. The new Steam Big Picture works quite well and the Steam Deck rarely feels any different from a console. At the same time Linux game compatibility has changed drastically since the days of the Steam Box programme. This would open up the gaming market to new players and make PC gaming much easier to get into.
You are right about the hardware side of the Xbox and Playstation. Their differences are minimal at best.
However I would not include PC and especially not Switch in this conversation. Since often what you hear is something like "I have a Switch and ..." and then your platform of choice. Some of that is price, the games Nintendo has, but ultimately Nintendo just doesn't compete in the same space. They don't have to.
On the PC front (which you mention just adding some more context) I think many of us here need to be careful about actual expectations of the PC gaming market. Not only is it expensive but you need the space and in some cases the technical experience to deal with issues that come up.
For a lot of people a console is a good option given you can buy the hardware and you will be able to run any new games for around 10 years, maybe even longer given how this generation transition is going. You can mostly just assume your game will work and won't have compatibility issues. You also likely already have a TV you can connect it too.
That isn't to say that the PC market is small, not by any means. But there is a very real reason that consoles are a good option for many people.
My point with mentioning that is more, it really is just Playstation vs Xbox for this conversation. PC is important but it's it isn't going to stop a console maker from making anti consumer decisions. I agree that all of the companies engage in bad practices, I just don't want an unchecked company. Just like I don't want Playstation to go out of business either.
Maybe Steam could make a dent in that, but so far any of their attempts seem more complimentary to your existing setup vs a replacement. I know some people say they game solely on a steam deck but I don't fully get that.
> but so far any of their attempts seem more complimentary to your existing setup vs a replacement.
For starters, I can respond to this line: I haven't gamed on a Microsoft product since I switched to Valve's Proton. That's a good thing, and Valve putting that leverage there really opens the door for other manufacturers. Better yet, it kicks both Microsoft and Sony in the pants and asks them to come up with a better reason to exist than "API exclusivity". That's badass, in my book.
As for Sony, I don't think it's hard to see that they're struggling here. The end of the PS4's lifecycle was a bit of a mess, and resulted in Sony changing their attitude for a lot of things like crossplay and publishing to PC. The featureset for the PS5 is almost comically gimmecky, the games cost too much, and without backwards-compatibility the game library would be almost empty. It distinctly feels like Sony's strategy of using exclusives to bolster cross-platform releases isn't working anymore.
My point here isn't to bash Sony, but to highlight that they have professional agency and have repeatedly made poor choices in software and hardware. It's fine if you want to zoom-in on the decidedly small arena of "Sony vs Microsoft", but it's hard to look at their fight and say that it's not Sony's fault.
everything here is true but the “gimmicky” bit. The controller is the most exciting thing to happen to games (outside of the actual games) since the Wii
The old Steam Box program tried to solve many of the problems with PC gaming you describe. Common performance targets with prebuilt boxes that just work. You don't buy a computer, you buy a Box.
I do think the Switch is a competitor to the bigger players, though, but only for certain games. There's a huge market out there that just wants to play some fun, casual games, and doesn't care about the latest Call of Duty. This market is the reason the mobile gaming industry is worth hundreds of billions and why Nintendo remains a success. The Switch placates the needs for many people that would've otherwise bought an Xbox or Playstation: it's better suited for gaming than a mobile phone and less expensive and "gamer" than the alternatives. It being handheld also puts it in a unique position that Microsoft and Sony are trying to compete against with their mobile game streaming services.
To me, Animal Crossing and Pokemon are not that dissimilar to Final Fantasy and Call of Duty. These games could be ported to the higher spec'd competitors but they remain exclusive. It's interesting how "I've got a Switch and an Xbox" has become relatively normal but "I've got an Xbox and a Playstation" hasn't. Nintendo has done really well convincing its customers that their funky tablet somehow lives in a category of its own.
I agree with most of this, except that I'm even more bullish on the Steam Deck. My wife has never been much of a gamer, but bought a Steam Deck. Now she can play her cozy games in a way she never could before. It's not great for AAA gaming but its accessible in ways that only Nintendo's consoles have been in the past.
I've had the same experience, despite my GTX 1080 I'm mostly gaming on my Deck these days. Everything just works, the form factor is nice, and the games are affordable.
I've also seriously considered setting my PC up for a SteamOS dual boot, but sadly Nvidia being Nvidia makes that difficult to do.
There are some glitches here and there, but SteamOS could easily be mistaken for a console system rather than a Linux distro.
> I also still think that Sony is being incredibly hypocritical here with how they are responding considering their love of making exclusive contracts. Final Fantasy being a big example right now but it seems to be a trend that Square and Sony will continue.
At the end of the day this is literally all that is needed to get this merger approved. Sony has exclusivity for one of the top MMOs and Microsoft wants a competing offering in World of Warcraft.
It’s so beyond hypocritical for Sony to be taking this stance and I hope they are eventually laughed out of court.
If you know someone who plays Minecraft on their Switch, or on their phone, or on their tablet, or on their Xbox, or if they play it on their Windows PC and were therefore railroaded into getting the Bedrock Edition, you can't play with them from Linux or macOS. You need a Windows PC with Bedrock Edition to play with them. Minecraft is a perfect example of Microsoft taking a cross platform game and using their power to turn previously well supported non-Microsoft platforms into second class citizens.
It’s infuriating because MS could literally press a button and make Bedrock available for Mac, since the Education edition (literally Bedrock) is already on Mac.
To MS’ credit, they were fast (~10 minutes) processing my refund for the Mac edition, and they saved me $30 because the iPhone Bedrock is $10 and works perfectly at full frames with minimal input lag when mirrored to my Macbook Air M1.
I use my Switch pro controller which “just works” when paired to my phone while my nephew plays on his Switch. I have an iPhone SE 2nd gen.
/edit we have to play on a realm because P2P cross-platform multiplayer is hilariously broken on Switch and MS timeline for fixing it seems to be “hmmm never”
TBQH "Mac edition" aka Java edition is the version most experienced gamers want, maybe unless all your friends are on bedrock already. Java edition has all the good mods, including mods that add content and mods which just provide QoL fixes to the vanilla experience. Bedrock players can join Java edition servers if the Java server is running the geyser mod, so if your server admin knows what he's about your bedrock edition friends can still play with everybody else (hence the above maybe.)
Totally agree with this, though even with Geyser Bedrock players are second class citizens (some mods don't translate well to Bedrock clients, e.g., furniture mods).
Java is the better way to play Minecraft generally, which is unfortunate because the performance is still really bad.
The performance gap definitely exists, but at least it has narrowed a bit with recent releases. Particularly, with the 1.18 release Java edition finally separated render distance and simulation distance. Bedrock edition (and java edition mods like spigot) had this already for years, but before 1.18 in Java edition you couldn't turn up your render distance without also increasing the number of chunks your game was simulating. For single player (where the chunk processing is happening on your computer, not the server), this makes a huge difference.
Yes, same for Linux. During lockdown my kids wanted to catch up with their friends by playing together on Minecraft, but as we had windows at home (and no switches in the store) it was a pain. Thank goodness for the work of someone called Christopher who made a Linux bedrock launcher.
Weirdly, despite issues and delays getting the latest versions to work, I'd argue this is the best way to enjoy minecraft. Very smooth low CPU load compared to Win10 or Java, and works well with keyboard and mouse.
The story with Java vs Bedrock edition is far more complicated. Microsoft, even with all of their resources, is in a bit of a pickle with this one.
First off, while the two games are roughly 95% the same, they are entirely different codebases (Java & C++), with their own bugs, quirks, incompatible formats, protocols, a couple unique mechanics, etc.
Java Edition (the OG Minecraft) has too huge of a following; it was heavily reverse-engineered early on, with a couple independent efforts (Fabric, Forge) creating modding bridges that enabled a thriving community of mod makers, that many servers heavily rely on. Even if you only consider the creator communities on YouTube (like Hermitcraft, Empires SMP, SciCraft) - some creators from these communities have millions of subscribers. You can't neglect Java edition because you will alienate an enormous part of your community and basically kill the brand. In fact Mojang's strategy is usually to release new features in JE development snapshots, and trickle them to Bedrock Edition once a stable JE release is cut.
But JE is also some of the most poorly-optimised software in existence, even after you install third-party mods (Sodium, Iris) that fix a lot of the performance issues. To even have a remote chance at supporting all the underpowered platforms, Bedrock Edition (formerly Pocket Edition) had to be created. Mojang/Microsoft is in one hell of a pickle, maintaining two parallel implementations of their core product, bending over their backs to maintain feature parity, with no real hope for cross-play ever.
Now why is there no Bedrock for Mac & Linux, is indeed a very good question. Perhaps it has less to do with being evil and more to do with the fact that these are likely already niche, as a total slice of JE installations, and Microsoft doesn't see a market there. Personally I am not bothered, as I prefer Java Edition anyway, but I understand why someone could get upset over it.
Funny thing is, thanks to Minecraft JE being Java, it works quite well even on completely unsupported platforms. The community built custom cross-platform launchers, figured out pretty quickly how to run the game natively on M1 Macs, heck it runs perfectly fine under *BSDs as well.
Bedrock clients can join Java edition servers if the Java server is running the Geyser mod, which acts as a compatibility shim between the two. It works pretty well.
Of course it would be nice if Microsoft/Mojang bridged the gap themselves instead of leaving it to the community, but that'll never happen.
Yeah, and similarly, you can probably get Bedrock to run on Linux through WINE. You can also play Breath of the Wild on Windows with community-made emulators. But what's interesting in this question isn't what's technically possible through enough ingenuity from the community, but what's officially supported.
Bedrock edition through WINE would be a very shitty experience, particularly since Java edition runs so well on Linux, and because WINE (afaik) wouldn't help MacOS users. But the Geyser compatibility shim really does work properly. Between these two options, Geyser is the clear winner.
> "But what's interesting in this question isn't what's technically possible through enough ingenuity from the community, but what's officially supported."
I confess I'm not sure what "interesting" means in this context. What is officially supported matters much less to me than what is possible and practical. I think generally, experienced gamers are comfortable installing mods and are better served by whichever engine has better modding support (be it official or unofficial.)
The context is that Sony claims to be afraid Microsoft's acquisition of ActiBlizz would make Call of Duty Xbox-exclusive. Sony's fears would be realised if Microsoft made CoD officially Xbox-exclusive, even if there was a community-maintained workaround which would make it technically possible for IT people to play CoD on PlayStation.
The way Microsoft is treating Minecraft with respect to Linux and macOS would be an example of what Sony is afraid of, which goes against my parent comment's claim that the article "ignore[s] Minecraft that not only continues to get support on other platforms but other platforms also get any of the spinoffs"; I claim that Minecraft is a perfect example of the kind of thing Sony should be afraid of.
Ah yes. Well, I evaluate the situation as a gamer, not as though I were Sony. Sony will do whatever Sony wants to do, I won't try to predict that since Sony has a history of doing things which seem irrational. For instance they forbid Fallout/Skyrim mods from adding content on the playstation edition of those games, even though such mods are permitted on the Xbox editions. Inexplicable, I couldn't have predicted that before they did it, but that's Sony for you.
I agree that the situation is different when evaluated from the perspective of a highly technically skilled player than from either the perspective of a less technical person or the perspective of a company which wants to do business with less technical people.
> or the perspective of a company which wants to do business with less technical people.
Trying to understand Sony through such a lens is folly, see: the inexplicable limitations on Fallout/Skyrim modding. "less technical people" with Xboxes enjoy modding Fallout and Skyrim, but Sony chose to severely limit that on their platform and the reasons they gave never made any rational business sense.
Sony is best understood as an irrational animal with a history of biting people without apparent provocation. Sony leadership does not understand many if not most of the businesses Sony is involved in, so they self-sabotage often.
That Bedrock supports every major console + Android/iOS but Linux/macOS had to stick to the (still updated) Java version is not really a comparable situation. Even if your view is it was done solely as an abuse of power you're not going to find many game companies looking to support 4 major 3rd party ecosystems get blamed for turning Mac/Linux into a second class citizen by not keeping it synced with the other releases - the markets are just tiny.
Aren't those technical tradeoffs with backwards compatibility either limiting technical choices to change architecture or increasing price by adding additional hardware to remain compatible?
The PS3 had a bad history with backwards compatibility. The original model had hardware based compatibility, by adding in the additional components, which I will admit had a cost associated with it.
But then they switched to software compatibility, which on its own is not a bad decision. But the issue was they removed the software backwards compatibility from later PS3 hardware without a good explanation.
I think there is a very good reason that the ps4 was not backwards compatible with ps3 games, the architecture was very different. But at the same time they are pushing playstation now as a way to play those older games, and it appeared anti consumer. Why could you not just put in the game and it would start streaming it.
On the flip side we had Xbox. Which a couple years after the launch of the Xbox one started their backwards compatibility initiative. Which allowed you to put in the disk for an older game and it would download a version of the game that would work on your new hardware. Now this was not for all games, but it was ultimately a free addition.
Sony was also very wishy washy on PS5 backwards compatibility, which was very frustrating. It felt like working with ps4 games was an afterthought for them. Ultimately it turned out fine, but it caused a lot of confusion.
Previously this was more of an issue than it was today. Since consoles are basically a PC now compatibility shouldn't be much of an issue, but previously it would have been a big issue.
Original release PS3s in North America and Japan had both the PS2 CPU and GPU on the board for full backwards compatibility. Later models and the European release units lacked the GPU and so that was emulated in software which caused a few issues. So it was a partial software emulator. Sony later removed the PS2 CPU from later PS3 Phat models and onwards.
Later they released PS2 classics on PSN that use full software emulation. A lot of PS2 games don't seem to work well with that emulator from what we know from jailbroken PS3s. Games also needed specific tweaks to the emulator to work. Perhaps they could have done what Microsoft did with 360 and had but maybe they felt like that was too clunky?
I purposefully have the original PS3 for the hardware compatibility.
But I thought it was fully software emulation in later hardware but it was partial? Well I guess that would at least give an explanation.
I knew it was buggy, but it always felt odd to remove it since even a buggy option would have been better than no option. But if it did still have some hardware component that would explain it.
It seems to me that your description confirms that this was mostly caused by the technical decision to use rather unusual architecture for the PS3. With the PS4->PS5 compatibility it also feels from the outside like they genuinely didn't know for certain and the internal verification process want going as planned. Very different from an anti-consumer money grab
>To my knowledge Microsoft never made any commitment saying that Bethesda games would always come out on other platforms.
I'm not sure if a "technically we didn't promise anything" is that good of an excuse when you tell the regulators that it wouldn't be beneficial to you to withhold games from other platforms.
> But on the flip side Sony [...] some very anti consumer decisions.
Microsoft is one of the kings of anti-consumer decisions. Just recently we've had the Windows 11 TPM requirements, Windows 10 forced updates, Minecraft Bedrock Edition shenanigans, the trash fire that is Microsoft Teams, ads in Windows, telemetry in Windows, and Microsoft blackmailing me into giving them my PII by preventing me from accessing my legally purchased copy (from Mojang) of Minecraft until I did...
...and that's ignoring the stuff from the past few decades: "Secure Boot", Windows bundling with consumer devices, and Internet Explorer bundling with Windows, just off the top of my head.
I'm not sure why any business would trust Microsoft with anything. They have decades of history of finding loophole into any contract or just outright breaking deals.
On their gaming branch they managed to repaint themselves as saint to community but the way they have been stacking major studio and distributors acquisitions is quite worrying. Once the Activision one is finished they will definitely have monopoly over several types of games (but probably not if you look at it as a whole).
Microsoft is dreadful for game creativity. Xbox has never had the creative edge...that's is why they acquired.....they are run like. cutthroats.....that is all they can do ...Sony has respect for their gamers.... Microsoft has respect for no one.
Bethesda had a deal with Sony to keep Deathloop as a timed PlayStation exclusive. After Microsoft bought Bethesda they honored that deal and released the game excusively on the competing platform.
They never offered to release Starfield on PlayStation just like Sony never offered to release Spiderman on Xbox when they bought Insomniac.
> Sony never offered to release Spiderman on Xbox when they bought Insomniac.
This is an absurd angle for one comical reason:
Spiderman...is Sony property. Like Sony Entertainment Corporate. They bought the rights in the 90s. That's why Spiderman only recently joined the MCU. This is Nintendo letting Valve make a Mario game..but requiring it to be on Nintendo platforms. That all checks out.
Sony's fair complaint here is that Microsoft made public statements (without contracts) that they wouldn't do what they did and then did it anyways. Their angle is that MS will find ways around the COD problem by releasing new IP or spinoffs based on it.
> Sony's fair complaint here is that Microsoft made public statements (without contracts) that they wouldn't do what they did and then did it anyways.
Except they never did that. What Microsoft said is that they would keep existing games supported on whatever platform they are on and honour any existing contract. They have done both.
The article above clearly quoted MS stating that it would be absurd to only release Starfield as an exclusive...and then they did. That is exactly what I said.
That was Todd Howard before the merger went through. So at the time he did not work at Microsoft.
Also the paragraph after the being quoted goes.
> Elsewhere in the interview, Howard admits that the parties haven't fully discussed the details of multiplatform publishing as part of the purchase deal.
Also the quote was about the next elder scrolls but starfield.
Spiderman is not Sony Computer Entertainment property, and spiderman has been on literally every single console since the original atari. It isn't even remotely the same. The valid comparison would be using Crash Bandicoot, but that actually went multiplatform!
I wonder what Sony is thinking when they make these contracts with some of the game developers. Games like Genshin Impact and FF7 Remake are never going to be released on Xbox, even though they are on PC. And I have a feeling that the same thing will happen with FF16. And then there are other games that can be sold on Xbox but not on Game Pass. Sony is blocking Xbox's gaming possibilities while complaining that Microsoft is trying to take CoD away from PS. Isn't that a bit hypocritical? Maybe Sony should start by getting rid of their own contracts that keep games away from Xbox.
Sony giving a company a ton of money to stay independent and release a PS exclusive game is absolutely different from Microsoft just buying a $70 billion company just because they can.
The usual sony fanboy argument is that sony exclusives are different because Sony bootstrapped the studios. But why bootstrapping as opposed to outright buying an existing studio is different?
The older versions will keep working for other platforms, Microsoft is investing in the development of new versions, it will take the same kind of money, and probably even more than developing any of the previous versions.
Sony started this exclusive game shitshow. They can't complain when it is lead to their ultimate logical consequences.
This is a strawman argument that falls apart when you start looking at it even a little bit closer.
If MS doesn't buy Activision, that continue can move along perfectly fine and be an extremely profitable company serving two platforms. They have always done this and one could say they produce a "commodity" game. MS is trying to monopolize it and Sony doesn't trust MS that they will continue to keep it a "commodity" product. They could technically honor any commitment by creating a bad "lite" game and have a really good full game only on Xbox for example.
Sony pretty much developed their own IP to make it part of the PS package. They needed more reason for people to buy so they invested heavily and took risks making exclusive games. Some of them panned out and some didn't, but the ones that did help sell the PS. Why should they sell that to XBox? It's considered a feature of the PS.
It's like saying since Tesla didn't sell their battery to other EV manufacturers (making it exclusive to Tesla), Toyota should be allowed to buy the largest drivetrain manufacturer in the world because they started this whole exclusive shitshow.
> If MS doesn't buy Activision, that continue can move along perfectly fine and be an extremely profitable company serving two platforms.
We actually don't know this. It's not a guarantee that an extremely profitable company doesn't want to exit the market and will exist "as is" in perpetuity. The fact that they've put themselves into a position to be bought out is its own strong signal they are considering exit strategies.
Activision's own history is full of being the bucket other huge publishers (messily) exited into. (Vivendi, being a huge example, and itself carrying the combined exited weight of Sierra, Davidson, and Knowledge Associates. Blizzard being another strange example.)
Companies generally have very strong "will to live" certainly, but boards get tired and investors get cranky, and sometimes companies "need" to make an exit.
It's possible Activision remains a large publisher if the Microsoft buy out fails. It is also just as possible that vultures see what is left of Activision as a dead man walking and start to pick at it immediately and strip mine it for parts. (Atari, Infogrames, THQ, …) It is also just as possible that Activision will be between a rock and a hard place and forced to take the next best offered deal. (Would you be just as upset if Activision became Sony exclusive? Or if Activision became just another branch of EA?)
The alternatives right now include a lot more than just the binary of "Microsoft buys Activision" and "Activision remains in its current state", especially because "Activision tries to sell to Microsoft" is a strong signal that the current state either isn't sustainable or isn't as strongly as interest to the board/investors as people might think.
"Activision continues to exist as-is" is a bad reason to block the purchase. Activision may not survive either way. ("Activision may not survive either way" of course isn't a good reason to be pro-buyout, of course, either. I'd think that goes without saying, but sometimes here on HN the obvious needs to also be reminded in conversations full of polarized opinions. I'm not explicitly pro- or anti-buyout here, I'm just reminding everyone that companies sometimes die and there's no "natural state" here to argue about.)
(I don't have much to add to the speculation about exclusives and will they/won't they Microsoft keeping their bargain on cross-platform initiatives. I think that debate is going to keep going in circles.)
> The fact that they've put themselves into a position to be bought out is its own strong signal they are considering exit strategies.
This is 100% not true. Companies don't have to put themselves in a position to be bought to have offers thrown at them. There are literally 100s of examples of this. Every company can be bought for a price. That's primarily the mismatch. This is the reason Instagram and Whatsapp sold for the prices they did at the time they did. When they were bought, everyone was shocked at the obscene sum of money for such a small team. In hindsight amazing purchase, but at that time Zuck had to throw an obscene sum at them to get them to say yes.
Also public companies have a fiduciary duty consider *all* offers and see if its valuable for shareholders. At a certain price, it will become a, no brainer, extremely valuable offer. The only other hurdle is getting the ok from regulators which is where they are stuck now.
The rest of your response hinges of the fact that we don't know the unknown variables and therefore the decision is not simple. But this argument could be made for literally every decision in life and we would all be stuck doing nothing. We have to make decisions based on what we know and accept that there will be a margin of error. Ideally we also know all the risk factors but that's literally impossible.
> Companies don't have to put themselves in a position to be bought to have offers thrown at them.
We're past the stage where offers have been thrown at them. We're at the stage where wedding vows have started to be exchanged "pending regulatory approval". Companies do have to put a lot of work into those parts of the M&A stages (they've done multiple rounds of fit vetting and offer/contract approvals and investor handshakes, etc). At the waiting for regulatory approval stage they've already gone above and beyond any "fiduciary duty" they are expected to perform to already seeing the M&A as the "foregone conclusion". They've agreed to be bought and have put tons of work into being bought. A lot of companies don't come back from that when the regulatory agencies disapprove and shut the whole thing down. At the very least it is a morale blow for all the of the hard work of the M&A process up to that point and boards/investors often seem to become more certain that the next step is an exit, especially after the pain of a failed exit.
> The rest of your response hinges of the fact that we don't know the unknown variables and therefore the decision is not simple. But this argument could be made for literally every decision in life and we would all be stuck doing nothing. We have to make decisions based on what we know and accept that there will be a margin of error. Ideally we also know all the risk factors but that's literally impossible.
We aren't making any decisions here. Other than I guess picking sides in "anti-buyout" and "pro-buyout". I admitted I'm not feeling like my opinions weight to either side, I'm just pointing out the possible real world fallout of "anti-buyout". That's nothing to do with decisions at all. I am just pointing out all the unknowns because people are assuming that supporting "anti-buyout" means supporting the status quo and that's absolutely not the same thing.
I wish I'd known Microsoft owned Bethesda, I wouldn't have tried out Fallout 4 this year at all. Is there any decent game Microsoft doesn't own the company of? At least No Man's Sky isn't owned by them. I dumped Minecraft after Microsoft bought them.
Maybe we should follow the unix philosophy with companies. Do one thing, and do it well, and seek to optimise compatibility rather than building huge monolithic companies that seek engulf everything smaller.
As long as they keep coming to PC, I honestly don't care much, especially when the so called "exclusives" are now ending up on PC after a few years. Activision-Blizzard has been awful for years now, maybe Microsoft's own special awful will mix with theirs and somehow allow for something that isn't a predatory game or mocking their core audience with gems like "Don't you guys have phones" paraphrasing.
Consoles these days are nothing but glorified mid-to-low tier PCs at a good price (usually costs the company money), that end up causing PC ports to be horrible messes as well as delay improvements in the industry due to the hardware. Not to mention, they're walled gardens.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadSony still has an incentive to sell hardware and keep games exclusive though. Unlike Microsoft, they don't control Windows and don't have an incentive to keep Windows the gaming OS of choice. Microsoft is also trying to push their own Xbox Game Pass and get users gradually away from Steam.
The only recent significant studio acquisitions I can think of already had a long history of making PS exclusives (e.g., Insomniac).
But they never cared about windows and Xbox players when the game stakes were low enough for them to play the exclusive game.
Developing new versions and new games will take as much money and probably more than the initial versions.
I doubt you or most people would consider Breath of the Wild not to be Nintendo exclusive despite it being on TWO different Nintendo platforms and playable on other platforms thanks to third parties. Microsoft plays the exclusive game too no matter how much people like to pretend that they don't control Windows and benefit from keeping it the dominate PC gaming OS.
I can't run Halo Infinite or Forza Horizon 5 on PS5 either regardless if I wanted to.
You got my hopes up:/ I just looked and I don't see a single COD game showing proton/steamdeck support on steam. Maybe there's workarounds for some of the old ones, but I don't think any recent ones with working anti cheat have anything but Windows support.
> Even if the CMA tried to enforce a so-called "behavioral remedy" to keep Call of Duty multi-platform, that move would not "address the myriad ways Microsoft could circumvent its obligations," Sony wrote. Sony also said Microsoft has a "history of non-compliance with behavioral commitments," pointing to Bethesda as well as previous broken commitments regarding Windows and Internet Explorer.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/eu-fines-microso...
So, why can't Sony trust Microsoft's Call of Duty offer? Answer: They're Microsoft.
Whichever Microsoft decision maker caused the Edge icon to be forced onto all Windows users desktops (sometimes repeatedly), sure has given Sony some high profile evidence to work with.
The only commitment they made for that deal was the keep existing games supported on the platforms they already existed and to uphold any existing agreements.
And they have uphold both of those. Elder scrolls online is getting all the same support on PlayStation as Xbox and both Ghostwire Tokyo and Deathloop released as timed PlayStation exclusives as agreed on earlier contacts.
They never made anything that would contractually bind them to do something, but they made statements that don't seem to align with their actions.
In a perfect world, there would be no platform exclusives, especially not on consoles, unless we're talking about money-starved indie studios taking funding so they can survive as a company. The expensive consoles are all basically the same devices with some special tricks here and there. Sure, integrating games with the console OS will take some time, but most of the game isn't nearly as platform specific as these companies pretend it is.
In practice, every console brand is paying developers for exclusive rights, even just for timed exclusives. From Apple to Valve, the entire industry is riddled with companies trying to make their platform have an artificial edge above the others, because the truth is that the consumer doesn't really care what hardware the games run on; "you can't have this if you buy from our competitors" is the norm.
This causes silly things like Spiderman being a Playstation exclusive character in that Marvel game and absurd side effects on surrounding platforms (like that time you could make a Fortnite account on Playstation that only worked on Playstations despite the cross-platform nature of the game).
For the good of the consumer, I hope the merger gets cancelled, though I don't think it'll happen. Sony doesn't get to complain, though, as it has relied on these exact shady business practices for decades now.
+100 Absolutely insane that we have mostly general purpose computing devices hindered by marketing deals and not technical infeasibility.
Of God of War and Horizon, the first was from an internally founded studio, and the latter was purchased all the way back in 2005.
With their sizeable investments in Square and From Software, Microsoft is upping the ante of the game they are both playing. Sony is simply looking at potentially losing their biggest third-party moneymaker and they’re complaining. Microsoft have them dead to rights. It’s gonna get uglier.
I fully expect either Square or From to be straight up bought by Sony in retaliation.
I would have agreed with you if you were to mention Sony deals with Square Enix, but both God of War and Horizon were pretty much in house exclusives, developed by studios funded directly by Sony, like Halo was for Microsoft at some point.
Activision is a massive corporation, though, and the CoD franchise routinely earns hundreds of millions of dollars per release. The scale is nowhere comparable.
That's baloney. If someone is remotely interested in strategy games for example (MMOs, Real time strategy or Civ like complex games) they are better run on PCs because of keyboard and mouse. There is also the consumer who has the money to splurge out on a high end GPU and wants to run games at high refresh 4K. And there are old dinosaurs like me who could never get used to controllers, and I tried. Got an Xbox controller for my PC for Elden Ring, couldn't get used to it, switched back to KB/Mouse, finished game easy.
Would you reconsider if you could connect a keyboard/mouse to a PS/Xbox and play strategy games?
I’d love to have just 1 gaming box, that can do everything!
My PC does that.
I guess if good strategy games come out on XBox/PS5 and they support regularly KB/Mouse I might get a console. Then again, lack of KB/Mouse is just one of my gripes. No modding and a general purpose computer locked down to do a few things make consoles useless for me. On my PC I can do whatever I want.
GoW and Horizon became as big as they are today while being PS exclusives from day one, so them being exclusives tomorrow is business as usual. CoD has been multi-platform since day one, so becoming an Xbox/Windows exclusive would represent a very significant change.
To my knowledge Microsoft never made any commitment saying that Bethesda games would always come out on other platforms.
I also still think that Sony is being incredibly hypocritical here with how they are responding considering their love of making exclusive contracts. Final Fantasy being a big example right now but it seems to be a trend that Square and Sony will continue.
It remains to be seen how Sony will actually handle Bungie.
Ultimately the way I see it, is the Activision deal actually a good thing? I don't know, it is a lot of studios going under Microsoft. But on the flip side Sony has a very nasty tendency of getting cocky in gaming and making some very anti consumer decisions. Ex: The price of the PS3, backwards compatibility, cross play multiplayer, and others.
The simple fact is we need competition in the console marketplace, without it I doubt we would have ever gotten any playstation games on PC, which they still seem reluctant to support at all.
Every game that has exclusive content on Playstation
Not because I don't have a PS5, I do. But I refuse to support those types of business decisions. Particularly when there is exclusive content.
Edit: Fixing FF15 to FF16
The FF7 remake came out in 2020 and is still not on xbox and there is no indication it will. Now that did come out on PC though.
Deathloop came out on Xbox but it is unclear if that would have happened had Xbox not bought Bethesda or if Sony would have tried to keep it exclusive.
The annoying part is that we just simply don't know what that situation actually looks like.
https://www.thegamer.com/microsoft-sony-blocking-final-fanta...
(you're right though, the sacrifices required for an N64 port would ruin the game)
Probably not a big problem for Sony, but as someone who bought the game I am kind of pissed about that.
But I totally agree with you about Sony being hypocritical.
The only reason this particular case is weird is because its a Microsoft account on Playstation.
Not saying it's a good practice, but I don't know if in that case I would solely attack Microsoft.
But either ways, it's not relevant to this situation. We are talking of game.being made available. Not about whether it has login to the parent company or not.
Let's not forget that Sony was the last to allow cross platform multiplayer on Minecraft.
Microsoft accounts ask for a lot of personal information that they simply don't need, and I feared that opting not to provide that personal information would likely put my account at risk for being capriciously banned by bureaucratic anti-botting systems in the future. Furthermore, should I ever need a Microsoft account for some more important reason, I would not want that connected to an account I game online with. Mixing work and play is a bad idea, and having two separate accounts seems like a likely setup for a capricious ban sometime in the future. So yeah, I once bought this game from Notch and had a legit account for it, but now I have to pirate it because Microsoft decided to get invasive and nosy.
The biggest problem in the video games industry is that all companies that have any kind of control abuse anti-consumer practices to keep their profits up. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are all terrible in their own unique ways.
On PC there are some nice(r) players, but PC gaming is neither affordable nor accessible to people who are fine with their Chromebooks already and just want to play video games once in a while. Right now your choices are often "overpay for a prebuilt computer at your local store" or "find out what a PCIe lane is supposed to be and what the 5 in DDR5 even stands for". If you're not turning on your computer every day, you're definitely getting interrupted with updates from software you don't recognize, and that assumes you managed to set up the right driver (hint: not the one that auto-installed!) for your PC.
I hope Valve's efforts take off, not just in the handheld space. The new Steam Big Picture works quite well and the Steam Deck rarely feels any different from a console. At the same time Linux game compatibility has changed drastically since the days of the Steam Box programme. This would open up the gaming market to new players and make PC gaming much easier to get into.
However I would not include PC and especially not Switch in this conversation. Since often what you hear is something like "I have a Switch and ..." and then your platform of choice. Some of that is price, the games Nintendo has, but ultimately Nintendo just doesn't compete in the same space. They don't have to.
On the PC front (which you mention just adding some more context) I think many of us here need to be careful about actual expectations of the PC gaming market. Not only is it expensive but you need the space and in some cases the technical experience to deal with issues that come up.
For a lot of people a console is a good option given you can buy the hardware and you will be able to run any new games for around 10 years, maybe even longer given how this generation transition is going. You can mostly just assume your game will work and won't have compatibility issues. You also likely already have a TV you can connect it too.
That isn't to say that the PC market is small, not by any means. But there is a very real reason that consoles are a good option for many people.
My point with mentioning that is more, it really is just Playstation vs Xbox for this conversation. PC is important but it's it isn't going to stop a console maker from making anti consumer decisions. I agree that all of the companies engage in bad practices, I just don't want an unchecked company. Just like I don't want Playstation to go out of business either.
Maybe Steam could make a dent in that, but so far any of their attempts seem more complimentary to your existing setup vs a replacement. I know some people say they game solely on a steam deck but I don't fully get that.
For starters, I can respond to this line: I haven't gamed on a Microsoft product since I switched to Valve's Proton. That's a good thing, and Valve putting that leverage there really opens the door for other manufacturers. Better yet, it kicks both Microsoft and Sony in the pants and asks them to come up with a better reason to exist than "API exclusivity". That's badass, in my book.
As for Sony, I don't think it's hard to see that they're struggling here. The end of the PS4's lifecycle was a bit of a mess, and resulted in Sony changing their attitude for a lot of things like crossplay and publishing to PC. The featureset for the PS5 is almost comically gimmecky, the games cost too much, and without backwards-compatibility the game library would be almost empty. It distinctly feels like Sony's strategy of using exclusives to bolster cross-platform releases isn't working anymore.
My point here isn't to bash Sony, but to highlight that they have professional agency and have repeatedly made poor choices in software and hardware. It's fine if you want to zoom-in on the decidedly small arena of "Sony vs Microsoft", but it's hard to look at their fight and say that it's not Sony's fault.
I do think the Switch is a competitor to the bigger players, though, but only for certain games. There's a huge market out there that just wants to play some fun, casual games, and doesn't care about the latest Call of Duty. This market is the reason the mobile gaming industry is worth hundreds of billions and why Nintendo remains a success. The Switch placates the needs for many people that would've otherwise bought an Xbox or Playstation: it's better suited for gaming than a mobile phone and less expensive and "gamer" than the alternatives. It being handheld also puts it in a unique position that Microsoft and Sony are trying to compete against with their mobile game streaming services.
To me, Animal Crossing and Pokemon are not that dissimilar to Final Fantasy and Call of Duty. These games could be ported to the higher spec'd competitors but they remain exclusive. It's interesting how "I've got a Switch and an Xbox" has become relatively normal but "I've got an Xbox and a Playstation" hasn't. Nintendo has done really well convincing its customers that their funky tablet somehow lives in a category of its own.
I've also seriously considered setting my PC up for a SteamOS dual boot, but sadly Nvidia being Nvidia makes that difficult to do.
There are some glitches here and there, but SteamOS could easily be mistaken for a console system rather than a Linux distro.
At the end of the day this is literally all that is needed to get this merger approved. Sony has exclusivity for one of the top MMOs and Microsoft wants a competing offering in World of Warcraft.
It’s so beyond hypocritical for Sony to be taking this stance and I hope they are eventually laughed out of court.
To MS’ credit, they were fast (~10 minutes) processing my refund for the Mac edition, and they saved me $30 because the iPhone Bedrock is $10 and works perfectly at full frames with minimal input lag when mirrored to my Macbook Air M1.
I use my Switch pro controller which “just works” when paired to my phone while my nephew plays on his Switch. I have an iPhone SE 2nd gen.
/edit we have to play on a realm because P2P cross-platform multiplayer is hilariously broken on Switch and MS timeline for fixing it seems to be “hmmm never”
Java is the better way to play Minecraft generally, which is unfortunate because the performance is still really bad.
Weirdly, despite issues and delays getting the latest versions to work, I'd argue this is the best way to enjoy minecraft. Very smooth low CPU load compared to Win10 or Java, and works well with keyboard and mouse.
First off, while the two games are roughly 95% the same, they are entirely different codebases (Java & C++), with their own bugs, quirks, incompatible formats, protocols, a couple unique mechanics, etc.
Java Edition (the OG Minecraft) has too huge of a following; it was heavily reverse-engineered early on, with a couple independent efforts (Fabric, Forge) creating modding bridges that enabled a thriving community of mod makers, that many servers heavily rely on. Even if you only consider the creator communities on YouTube (like Hermitcraft, Empires SMP, SciCraft) - some creators from these communities have millions of subscribers. You can't neglect Java edition because you will alienate an enormous part of your community and basically kill the brand. In fact Mojang's strategy is usually to release new features in JE development snapshots, and trickle them to Bedrock Edition once a stable JE release is cut.
But JE is also some of the most poorly-optimised software in existence, even after you install third-party mods (Sodium, Iris) that fix a lot of the performance issues. To even have a remote chance at supporting all the underpowered platforms, Bedrock Edition (formerly Pocket Edition) had to be created. Mojang/Microsoft is in one hell of a pickle, maintaining two parallel implementations of their core product, bending over their backs to maintain feature parity, with no real hope for cross-play ever.
Now why is there no Bedrock for Mac & Linux, is indeed a very good question. Perhaps it has less to do with being evil and more to do with the fact that these are likely already niche, as a total slice of JE installations, and Microsoft doesn't see a market there. Personally I am not bothered, as I prefer Java Edition anyway, but I understand why someone could get upset over it.
Funny thing is, thanks to Minecraft JE being Java, it works quite well even on completely unsupported platforms. The community built custom cross-platform launchers, figured out pretty quickly how to run the game natively on M1 Macs, heck it runs perfectly fine under *BSDs as well.
Java Edition works really well even on my A12 iPad Pro using Jitterbug!
Of course it would be nice if Microsoft/Mojang bridged the gap themselves instead of leaving it to the community, but that'll never happen.
> "But what's interesting in this question isn't what's technically possible through enough ingenuity from the community, but what's officially supported."
I confess I'm not sure what "interesting" means in this context. What is officially supported matters much less to me than what is possible and practical. I think generally, experienced gamers are comfortable installing mods and are better served by whichever engine has better modding support (be it official or unofficial.)
The way Microsoft is treating Minecraft with respect to Linux and macOS would be an example of what Sony is afraid of, which goes against my parent comment's claim that the article "ignore[s] Minecraft that not only continues to get support on other platforms but other platforms also get any of the spinoffs"; I claim that Minecraft is a perfect example of the kind of thing Sony should be afraid of.
Trying to understand Sony through such a lens is folly, see: the inexplicable limitations on Fallout/Skyrim modding. "less technical people" with Xboxes enjoy modding Fallout and Skyrim, but Sony chose to severely limit that on their platform and the reasons they gave never made any rational business sense.
Sony is best understood as an irrational animal with a history of biting people without apparent provocation. Sony leadership does not understand many if not most of the businesses Sony is involved in, so they self-sabotage often.
I used to, but anything not Apple is usually met with mockery, disdain, or a combination of the two.
Aren't those technical tradeoffs with backwards compatibility either limiting technical choices to change architecture or increasing price by adding additional hardware to remain compatible?
But then they switched to software compatibility, which on its own is not a bad decision. But the issue was they removed the software backwards compatibility from later PS3 hardware without a good explanation.
I think there is a very good reason that the ps4 was not backwards compatible with ps3 games, the architecture was very different. But at the same time they are pushing playstation now as a way to play those older games, and it appeared anti consumer. Why could you not just put in the game and it would start streaming it.
On the flip side we had Xbox. Which a couple years after the launch of the Xbox one started their backwards compatibility initiative. Which allowed you to put in the disk for an older game and it would download a version of the game that would work on your new hardware. Now this was not for all games, but it was ultimately a free addition.
Sony was also very wishy washy on PS5 backwards compatibility, which was very frustrating. It felt like working with ps4 games was an afterthought for them. Ultimately it turned out fine, but it caused a lot of confusion.
Previously this was more of an issue than it was today. Since consoles are basically a PC now compatibility shouldn't be much of an issue, but previously it would have been a big issue.
Later they released PS2 classics on PSN that use full software emulation. A lot of PS2 games don't seem to work well with that emulator from what we know from jailbroken PS3s. Games also needed specific tweaks to the emulator to work. Perhaps they could have done what Microsoft did with 360 and had but maybe they felt like that was too clunky?
But I thought it was fully software emulation in later hardware but it was partial? Well I guess that would at least give an explanation.
I knew it was buggy, but it always felt odd to remove it since even a buggy option would have been better than no option. But if it did still have some hardware component that would explain it.
"The Japs period, Nintendo has the same cocky attitude after success post-Wii, post-Switch"
I'm not sure if a "technically we didn't promise anything" is that good of an excuse when you tell the regulators that it wouldn't be beneficial to you to withhold games from other platforms.
Microsoft is one of the kings of anti-consumer decisions. Just recently we've had the Windows 11 TPM requirements, Windows 10 forced updates, Minecraft Bedrock Edition shenanigans, the trash fire that is Microsoft Teams, ads in Windows, telemetry in Windows, and Microsoft blackmailing me into giving them my PII by preventing me from accessing my legally purchased copy (from Mojang) of Minecraft until I did...
...and that's ignoring the stuff from the past few decades: "Secure Boot", Windows bundling with consumer devices, and Internet Explorer bundling with Windows, just off the top of my head.
Wikipedia has a whole list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
On their gaming branch they managed to repaint themselves as saint to community but the way they have been stacking major studio and distributors acquisitions is quite worrying. Once the Activision one is finished they will definitely have monopoly over several types of games (but probably not if you look at it as a whole).
Bethesda had a deal with Sony to keep Deathloop as a timed PlayStation exclusive. After Microsoft bought Bethesda they honored that deal and released the game excusively on the competing platform.
They never offered to release Starfield on PlayStation just like Sony never offered to release Spiderman on Xbox when they bought Insomniac.
This is an absurd angle for one comical reason:
Spiderman...is Sony property. Like Sony Entertainment Corporate. They bought the rights in the 90s. That's why Spiderman only recently joined the MCU. This is Nintendo letting Valve make a Mario game..but requiring it to be on Nintendo platforms. That all checks out.
Sony's fair complaint here is that Microsoft made public statements (without contracts) that they wouldn't do what they did and then did it anyways. Their angle is that MS will find ways around the COD problem by releasing new IP or spinoffs based on it.
Except they never did that. What Microsoft said is that they would keep existing games supported on whatever platform they are on and honour any existing contract. They have done both.
Also the paragraph after the being quoted goes.
> Elsewhere in the interview, Howard admits that the parties haven't fully discussed the details of multiplatform publishing as part of the purchase deal.
Also the quote was about the next elder scrolls but starfield.
The older versions will keep working for other platforms, Microsoft is investing in the development of new versions, it will take the same kind of money, and probably even more than developing any of the previous versions.
Sony started this exclusive game shitshow. They can't complain when it is lead to their ultimate logical consequences.
If MS doesn't buy Activision, that continue can move along perfectly fine and be an extremely profitable company serving two platforms. They have always done this and one could say they produce a "commodity" game. MS is trying to monopolize it and Sony doesn't trust MS that they will continue to keep it a "commodity" product. They could technically honor any commitment by creating a bad "lite" game and have a really good full game only on Xbox for example.
Sony pretty much developed their own IP to make it part of the PS package. They needed more reason for people to buy so they invested heavily and took risks making exclusive games. Some of them panned out and some didn't, but the ones that did help sell the PS. Why should they sell that to XBox? It's considered a feature of the PS.
It's like saying since Tesla didn't sell their battery to other EV manufacturers (making it exclusive to Tesla), Toyota should be allowed to buy the largest drivetrain manufacturer in the world because they started this whole exclusive shitshow.
We actually don't know this. It's not a guarantee that an extremely profitable company doesn't want to exit the market and will exist "as is" in perpetuity. The fact that they've put themselves into a position to be bought out is its own strong signal they are considering exit strategies.
Activision's own history is full of being the bucket other huge publishers (messily) exited into. (Vivendi, being a huge example, and itself carrying the combined exited weight of Sierra, Davidson, and Knowledge Associates. Blizzard being another strange example.)
Companies generally have very strong "will to live" certainly, but boards get tired and investors get cranky, and sometimes companies "need" to make an exit.
It's possible Activision remains a large publisher if the Microsoft buy out fails. It is also just as possible that vultures see what is left of Activision as a dead man walking and start to pick at it immediately and strip mine it for parts. (Atari, Infogrames, THQ, …) It is also just as possible that Activision will be between a rock and a hard place and forced to take the next best offered deal. (Would you be just as upset if Activision became Sony exclusive? Or if Activision became just another branch of EA?)
The alternatives right now include a lot more than just the binary of "Microsoft buys Activision" and "Activision remains in its current state", especially because "Activision tries to sell to Microsoft" is a strong signal that the current state either isn't sustainable or isn't as strongly as interest to the board/investors as people might think.
"Activision continues to exist as-is" is a bad reason to block the purchase. Activision may not survive either way. ("Activision may not survive either way" of course isn't a good reason to be pro-buyout, of course, either. I'd think that goes without saying, but sometimes here on HN the obvious needs to also be reminded in conversations full of polarized opinions. I'm not explicitly pro- or anti-buyout here, I'm just reminding everyone that companies sometimes die and there's no "natural state" here to argue about.)
(I don't have much to add to the speculation about exclusives and will they/won't they Microsoft keeping their bargain on cross-platform initiatives. I think that debate is going to keep going in circles.)
This is 100% not true. Companies don't have to put themselves in a position to be bought to have offers thrown at them. There are literally 100s of examples of this. Every company can be bought for a price. That's primarily the mismatch. This is the reason Instagram and Whatsapp sold for the prices they did at the time they did. When they were bought, everyone was shocked at the obscene sum of money for such a small team. In hindsight amazing purchase, but at that time Zuck had to throw an obscene sum at them to get them to say yes.
Also public companies have a fiduciary duty consider *all* offers and see if its valuable for shareholders. At a certain price, it will become a, no brainer, extremely valuable offer. The only other hurdle is getting the ok from regulators which is where they are stuck now.
The rest of your response hinges of the fact that we don't know the unknown variables and therefore the decision is not simple. But this argument could be made for literally every decision in life and we would all be stuck doing nothing. We have to make decisions based on what we know and accept that there will be a margin of error. Ideally we also know all the risk factors but that's literally impossible.
We're past the stage where offers have been thrown at them. We're at the stage where wedding vows have started to be exchanged "pending regulatory approval". Companies do have to put a lot of work into those parts of the M&A stages (they've done multiple rounds of fit vetting and offer/contract approvals and investor handshakes, etc). At the waiting for regulatory approval stage they've already gone above and beyond any "fiduciary duty" they are expected to perform to already seeing the M&A as the "foregone conclusion". They've agreed to be bought and have put tons of work into being bought. A lot of companies don't come back from that when the regulatory agencies disapprove and shut the whole thing down. At the very least it is a morale blow for all the of the hard work of the M&A process up to that point and boards/investors often seem to become more certain that the next step is an exit, especially after the pain of a failed exit.
> The rest of your response hinges of the fact that we don't know the unknown variables and therefore the decision is not simple. But this argument could be made for literally every decision in life and we would all be stuck doing nothing. We have to make decisions based on what we know and accept that there will be a margin of error. Ideally we also know all the risk factors but that's literally impossible.
We aren't making any decisions here. Other than I guess picking sides in "anti-buyout" and "pro-buyout". I admitted I'm not feeling like my opinions weight to either side, I'm just pointing out the possible real world fallout of "anti-buyout". That's nothing to do with decisions at all. I am just pointing out all the unknowns because people are assuming that supporting "anti-buyout" means supporting the status quo and that's absolutely not the same thing.
Consoles these days are nothing but glorified mid-to-low tier PCs at a good price (usually costs the company money), that end up causing PC ports to be horrible messes as well as delay improvements in the industry due to the hardware. Not to mention, they're walled gardens.