the game pass domination strategy was always going to fail in a world where Steam exists
it must be very frustrating for Microsoft
their usual tactic of buying out the competition isn't an option because Gabe Newell is already a billionare (and a gamer), who won't sell for any price
and their backup strategy of tightening the screws of their competition on Windows can't work either, because he's funded a credible (almost) replacement for Windows
Yeah, Valve understood MS' position/power a long time ago and worked to mitigate that risk. I remember them shopping around nearly 15 years ago to find a partner to help them work on Linux and improve Steam's abilities there, which resulted in SteamOS[0]. Indeed the plan worked, and now you can even buy a dedicated gaming console[1] that runs ~all the Windows games but completely without reliance on MS.
Their plan did get off to a rough start, initially they wanted game devs to provide native Linux builds despite there being near-zero upside to doing so at the time, which unsurprisingly went nowhere and led to the first generation Steam Machines dying on the vine. Thankfully they realized their mistake and shifted focus to Windows binary compatibility, which has been far more successful. It took a long time and the success of the first-party Steam Deck to convince third-party manufacturers to give Valve another shot after their early SteamOS partners got burned though.
the risk mitigation hasn't played out yet. if that's what it is. we need to wait until microsoft tries to squeeze Steam out of windows. we have yet to see whether it works to keep valve alive against microsoft. the attack hasn't happened yet. and judging by microsofts actions it looks like they are cancelling themselves. for now at least. the war is not over.
of course as a linux user i am not complaining about linux support, but for now it still looks like valve supports linux from the goodness of their heart, and not as a way to make money. lets hope that this changes.
> we need to wait until microsoft tries to squeeze Steam out of windows.
Steam Machines were a direct result of that: Microsoft announced plans to block non-Microsoft app stores on Windows 8. This was a credible existential threat to Valve, which got off to a rocky start, and they wisely persisted despite Windows 8 (and yhe threat) flopping. Microsoft os no longer in a position to try and squeeze Steam, thanks to Valve's diligence, and Microsoft going half-cocked the first time.
Some mainstream gaming channels on youtube are already half recommending linux except for online games. Really doubt microsoft would have the balls to try something like that now
curious, i wonder why not online games? i play a few online games on linux just fine. they are not the newest ones, but that's the thing, any older games work, online or not, and only some of the newest don't, and that's only because wine/codeweaver/valve didn't get around to implement the fixes for wine for those games yet.
microsoft doesn't need courage, they just need a few leaders dumb enough to try again.
of course. my point is that we don't know if it will be enough. and i am not saying linux is a risky bet, because there are no safer bets to make. (other than gabe taking his earnings and keeping them for himself)
if microsoft shuts out Steam, then valve will lose more than 90% of its current revenue. despite the insurance policy that just might kill the company outright.
and, the more revenue valve gets from linux, the more of a threat it becomes to microsoft, which makes microsoft trying to shut out Steam even more likely.
our only hope is that regulators prevent microsoft from even trying...
> he's funded a credible (almost) replacement for Windows
Proton on Steam Deck is indistinguishable from Windows.
I've loaded Win64 Unity builds on the machine to test and they run perfectly every time. I actually dont see the reason I would bother with a native Linux build at this point. The machine doesn't even get hot despite my fear that it would doing something like this.
The only part of the SD experience that felt like "linux" was the OOBE wherein I had to arbitrarily restart the first time setup process 3-4 times before it finally worked.
I am at a point where I almost prefer to game on the linux handheld over my windows desktop. It really is a superior package in many ways. Games like Elden Ring, Arkham Knight, Euro Truck Simulator 2, etc., are so much better to play on a machine like this. On keyboard+mouse I struggled to enjoy these titles. I realize I could always connect a controller to my PC, but it never felt right to me in that form factor. Playing ETS2 on the couch is a completely different dimension of relaxation. I'd never touch this game on my PC.
> I actually dont see the reason I would bother with a native Linux build at this point.
I would have agreed, having played the windows build Baldurs Gate III on the Deck. But a week ago the developer put out a native Deck build that outperforms the windows build, which is very helpful in the later parts of the game.
Steam is great, in no small part because Valve isn't beholden to quarterly earnings numbers. But I'm worried what will happen when Gabe Newell retires. Valve has been a pretty good (though at times imperfect) steward for PC gaming and it'll be sad if a change in leadership decides to extract value from 20+ years of goodwill.
I think the biggest problem with Steam is that when you buy a game on Steam, it's tied to your Steam account forever. In theory, Gabe could croak and they get bought by a VC firm that decides that a Steam account costs $45/month. At that point, you either give up all the games you purchased on Steam, or pay the $45/month.
I don't know why anyone would prefer their games tied to a service in that way. Especially when we've seen other digital stores go belly up, resulting in inaccessible collections.
Steam was the OG online store, it grandfathered itself in before a time people started to think that having their gaming library behind such a service might offer some downsides.
Nowadays I mostly buy PC games on GoG for that reason, but I have plenty on Steam. I do worry about it a little.
One of the things that drives me a little crazy about Steam is that there was actually an earlier digital game store (run by Stardock IIRC) that made the launcher and other tie-ins optional. That one didn't take off, though. Steam required a tie-in to the launcher, and it took off.
I would've much rather had the launcher and all that be optional, but I'm guessing that requiring Steam for games like Half-life 2 probably was the smarter move (from a profit perspective) than having it be optional, so that's the way the market went.
This recent price increase notwithstanding, Game Pass has been, in my opinion, and those of almost every gamer I know, incredibly good value for the money. I suppose it's probably like Netflix at the beginning though, and we'll start seeing more things like this price hike and plan differentiation
It's a good deal if you're really really using it, or I guess if you're a blizzard sub (not even sure if this is still a thing).
If you're just playing Silk Song now and then, you can buy it for $20 from Steam. I get you don't fully own it with steam, but it a hell of a lot closer to owning it than having temporary access via GamePass.
IMO the real issues for the more casual gamer (who is not a mobile gamer), is having either a decent console or cloud gaming. There's not a ton of options besides GEForce Now and XBox Cloud, and the Steam consoles are kinda crap and outdated at the moment. Also XBox cloud kinda sucks last I checked and had restrictions on multiplayer etc.
If XBox cloud gets as good as nVidia's cloud AND you get GamePass library access AND you can use a pretty dumbed down / cheap console for cloud gaming... then this might be a win for at least a subset. I think this is where they are headed? Even with all that, it's hard to beat Steam + GEForce Now which is the direct competitor.
I dream of a world where Windows is no longer the dominant OS for gaming.
Agreed; it has been an incredible deal, especially with the redemption loopholes they originally left open. I think I got nearly three years for less than $150 originally. But it's pretty obvious now that they've been nearly giving it away so they can capture the market and then raise the price.
If you’re in high school/college (hell your 20’s) and can game 10+ hours a week it was an unbelievable deal. Even $30 isn’t that crazy if you’re really using it. But a lot of people can’t get that kind of value out of it and it doesn’t help that Microsoft keeps cancelling every interesting game and/or lets their best studios languish.
I think it's still a good deal even for more casual gamers - I imagine it would feel worse to spend $80 on a game that you may put an hour or two into, if you ever launch it at all. I imagine most casual gamers will simply not buy many games; whereas on Game Pass you can browse, pick up a game (that would otherwise cost you an arm and a leg) for the few hours you've got for gaming.
But like another commenter points out, if you're playing games like Silk Song or other similarly-priced games, it makes more sense to buy the game.
But yeah, you're absolutely right: lots of flaws with it, and I expect it will just get worse, much like Netflix.
Gamepass has a lot more than AAA’s (Silk Song for instance) and if you haven’t been sticking with consoles in particular over the last 10-15 years the back catalog of tentpole titles is actually pretty impressive.
I’ve had many conversations with people in their 30s who have not touched video games since the 360/PS3 era. Gamepass, even if just for a few months, makes a ton of sense for them if they have the time.
I say this as somebody who absolutely does not think people should be paying $30 for gamepass generally speaking and I think Microsoft/Xbox is incredibly weak right now. But there are certainly cases where it makes a ton of sense and Sony isn’t exactly offering a better alternative unless you want a Final Fantasy machine that’s library is dominated by PS3/PS4 remasters (which in many ways mimics the value prop of gamepass for those who have not been gaming for years).
And on the console world, Playstation exists, with plenty of exclusives. Also Nintendo exists. Sony and Nintendo are not exactly companies they can buy (would almost certainly trigger anti monopoly cases everywhere, even if they could pay God knows how much money for one of those).
And honestly, this is great. I shudder to think of a world where fucking Microsoft has a dominant position on gaming.
I'm struggling to see why anyone would root for Steam.
I've paid $10/month for a library of hundreds of games I can play on both PC and Xbox. We all knew that price was too good to be true but I've paid it happily for 5 years. We were waiting for the other shoe to drop and now it has. I've loaded up 2.5 years on my account at $20/month (the current retail price for Ultimate is $60 for 3-month cards.)
I've played countless indie games that I never otherwise would have taken a chance on. Even if I only played day one AAA games, the same $70 would get me one game on Steam for 2.3 months of the entire Game Pass library at the $30 price point or 3.5 months at the still-available $20/month price point. The game can't be resold on either platform.
Microsoft created a new business model that changed how I play games for the better. I can't see how the service isn't worth $30/month for 500+ games. (For a regular and not casual gamer.) This isn't shovelware like the Netflix library. There's a ton of high-quality games in there.
And I don't see how their price increase, which was inevitable and the timing of which was hastened by tariffs, has anything but a specious like to the merger.
Steam has done nothing but contrive a rent-seeker position for itself on an otherwise open platform. Maybe it's just because I'm old enough to remember a time when I could buy from the publisher without that middleman and click setup.exe for myself. And still retain the rights to resell and play offline without a middleman.
GamePass is the worst thing to happen to gaming in the last two decades. It's an unsustainable race-to-the-bottom business model that devalues games and incentives shoveling out crap instead of producing quality titles. Worse yet, it conditions players to dismiss challenging, innovative, or unusual game mechanics due to the siren song of a functionally infinite catalog tempting them to just load up another title at the first sign of struggle.
I don’t like subscribing to things, let me just buy it for some amount of money.
I really really doubt many people on this site have any problems paying fair amount of money to buy their entertainment. Real cost is when the platform tries cutting some part of service or you have a problem renewing the subscription or you move to another country and it causes problems etc.
It is just better to actually own it and steam is really well trusted compared to a company like Microsoft which is bottom of the barrel. GoG model is better though like some other people wrote already.
> I'm struggling to see why anyone would root for Steam.
> I've played countless indie games that I never otherwise would have taken a chance on.
My very uneducated guess is that 90% of Game Pass subscribers don't play nearly that many indie games. They probably don't even play 1 new title per month.
But tou don't have to pick one, you can have both. I pay for gamepass and most of the games I play I'm fine not owning them ever. But when any is worth it, I purchase is on steam and can have it forever. And I really don't mind "paying twice" because the game is worth it.
> I'm struggling to see why anyone would root for Steam.
Because no way in hell I would support any Microsoft initiative in gaming? Or anywhere else for that matter.
Say what you will of Steam, but they made gaming on Linux not only viable, but in many ways better than on Microsoft. For thatbI will forever be grateful.
The bias that these kinds of analysis always have is: We'll never truly know what the world would have looked like if the merger wasn't allowed to happen. Like, it's easy and correct to say "the ABK acquisition resulted in bad outcomes for gamers, employees at ABK, and Microsoft itself" (in fact, the only winners were probably ABK investors). But it's impossible to say "these outcomes are worse than those that would have happened had ABK been left alone", because we cannot know.
One could also use your reasoning to claim that no statements can ever be made about the impact of economic policies, because once they're in place, we can't compare with a world where they wouldn't have been adopted.
Best we can do is keep a set of statistics and try to correct for multivariate bias. Doesn't mean we're navigating all of this completely blind.
Consolidation around Unity and Unreal has probably been good for everyone, yeah. Even Godot benefits from consolidation, they rely on good APIs for middlewares that were made for Unity and Unreal.
Some parts of Steam consolidation have been good. It forces kids to have stakes (their whole account) that they lose if they hack / cheat in multiplayer games. Objectively good. But having one store I don’t know: you pay both 30% and you are sourcing users for CSGO and DOTA2.
Anyway I don’t really know what consolidation means to you.
Hard disagree on Unreal Engine. Just knowing a game was made with Unreal 5 is enough to give me pause when considering playing a game because of just having the same problems in almost every game. Unstable frame rates, shader compilation stutters, over reliance on frame generation just to hit 60 fps (which should be a reasonable target WITHOUT framegen), assets in different games all looking very similar because it’s all just the same stuff bought from marketplace.
Meta Gear Delta and Borderlands 4 being the most recent disasters I thankfully avoide simply because I decided to hold off because Inknew they were made with Unreal.
Those games had performance issues, but calling them "disasters" is disingenuous to the truth of the situation. Did you play Expedition 33? That was UE5 too.
The primate brain loves pattern-matching, so your primate brain has pattern-matched "engine game uses" to "performance of game". Reality is more nuanced than that.
To be fair, my only criticism of expedition 33 are the game poor performances. I understand in this case it's warranted, as the art also tells the story, but i had to buy a new GPU to play an AA game, which I usually never do.
I am really not sure about Unreal 5 anymore. It seems that it has lot of cool stuff in it. But at same time lot of that allows developers to be incredibly lazy and just get fidelity out of it and not performance. And then when you use something to get performance well fidelity gets smudgy...
So the story of the modern software development. Developer time and effort is minimised, and performance visible to user suffers...
> Consolidation around Unity and Unreal has probably been good for everyone,
Strongly disagree here. It worked out well for the businesses that can standardize on these engines and not spend resources making custom bespoke engines for sure, but as a gamer I remember the days when each game or company had their own engine which brought their own feel to the game. They could specialize it for exactly the type of game they were making.
In addition, Unreal Engine 5 in particular runs like absolute trash on many PCs (including my very high end machines). Its reliance on frame generation (fake frames) and super resolution (fake pixels) has predictably led to developers ignoring optimization even further - "just turn on DLSS 4x Frame Gen and DLSS Ultra Performance!" - see Randy Pitchford's recent rants on Twitter.
> Consolidation around Unity and Unreal has probably been good for everyone, yeah.
I don't know about that. Unreal 5 games seem to have some real issues with clarity, ghosting, and dithering. There's plenty of analysis on the subject[1], and I'm not sure whether it's Unreal 5 or DLSS/TAA more to blame but I'm already longing for the days of more engine variety.
Isn't that an issue with the studio pushing for more detail than the hardware can put out? Surely you could turn off graphical features like TAA without replacing a million lines of engine code. Or you could run the same engine with a custom renderer
Consolidation (mergers and acquisitions generally) aren't necessarily bad universally.
It is hard to argue that Silicon and Synapse being acquired by Davidson and Associates to form Blizzard Entertainment was not good for gaming consumers for a long stretch of time.
But there is certainly a tipping point where this sort of consolidation really becomes a problem when it results in large entities with a lot of market power, or one side of the deal is already a large entity with a lot of market power. And the larger the consolidation, the worse it gets for everyone (except perhaps shareholders, though even this being arguably positive can often just be a temporary situation).
Unfortunately the only really viable exit strategy for a lot of VCs is to offload their startups to Alphabet or Meta sized entities which is immediately concerning from an anti-trust perspective because those companies are already so overly large (and a lot of their M&A is clearly just to kill would-be competitors, which is at the heart of anti-trust).
So the techbros were instrumental in making sure Lina Khan got the boot, despite the fact that she's been right about everything.
IMO: it's a complicated situation. Activision-Blizzard-King has been in a pretty icky spot for many years now, dating back further than just the MSFT acquisition. I'd put the probabilities at like 90%+ that we'd see headlines very similar or worse to these if MSFT had not been allowed to buy them; more micro-transactions, layoffs, flops, weird exclusivity deals, etc. We need to cool it with the revisionist history; ABK sucked before MSFT bought them, they'd suck whether or not MSFT bought them, and you'd have to go back to like 2011 before you'd find a version of that company that's generally positive vibes.
The party that got screwed by that acquisition was, ironically, Microsoft. To be clear, this isn't a new discovery or idea; everyone was saying this during the acquisition, but Microsoft's corporate story is best summarized as "makes the worst possible decision at every turn yet still somehow does ok". If there's any reason the ABK acquisition should have been blocked, it might have been to protect Microsoft from itself, much akin to how parents have to keep babies from touching the stove.
ABK is a sinking ship that MSFT paid luxury yacht prices for. ABK should be renamed "King & Call of Duty Inc", but they're saddled with dozens of other properties and business divisions, including all of Blizzard, that make zero or negative money. This tethers a sinking ship, ABK, to a second sinking ship, Xbox, which similar to ABK has been sinking since, like, 2015, and hopes that the two sinking ships together might float.
There's a world where maybe Xbox leadership gets more involved, cuts fat, takes direct management of key laggard properties, maybe selling some off to focus up on what's driving revenue. But, again; Microsoft sucks. Their direct management buried Halo and Gears below the ground, from industry titans to totally irrelevant. The very real situation is that their leadership has totally lost confidence even in themselves, their failures are obvious and written across the sky, and that's led them to take a hands-off approach with ABK. But, again; ABK sucked. Eventually things get so bad that someone has to step in and make the really bad tactical decisions; raising prices and layoffs.
By 2030, Xbox will stagger on as an umbrella brand for a few zombie game studios + "gaming services on Windows". But, the hardware will be dead, and we'll see them begin to offload laggard studios/IPs/brands, either selling them off to other companies or spinning them off into independent companies which Microsoft holds a minority stake in.
“… FTC when it challenged Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a convoluted process that didn't formally end until May of 2025—almost two years after the deal closed.”
This process needs to be faster for these types of challenges to be more successful - both in the market and in consumer opinion. Markets move too fast, and the answer can’t be “FTC needs more of my money to hire more people.”
Game pass was never viable at its original price: it was always going to increase in price, just like subscription services that didn’t has big acquisitions (Netflix) have.
I don’t think this acquisition helped gamers, I think it just didn’t matter. Microsoft is welcome to waste their own money.
Yeah I don't see what the acquisition has to do here. Both Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard were pretty predatory before the deal. I can't imagine what they would have done differently being separate from each other. The biggest "concern" I can remember of was Call of Duty coming to Game Pass or leaving PlayStation but I don't know what came off that. I am guessing it didn't come to pass seeing how the console department at Xbox has imploded.
I’m going to sell my series X. Thought of keeping it for the odd moment of family time to play Overcooked but at $30, might as well go for a buffet lunch.
call me naive, but I thought game pass was going to be used as sort of a loss leader and gives them the avenue to build out other things like in the azure side of their business or cloud gaming etc
Doesn't Games Pass also include cloud gaming as a feature? I have to imagine the hardware and data center costs for hosting games have risen a lot since 2022 (in a way the operating costs for e.g. Netflix haven't).
It does include cloud gaming but the wide impression I get is that most users don't really use this feature. If you use everything game pass offers you, it's still a killer deal. The problem is the vast majority of subscribers don't use all the benefits and / or play nearly enough games to justify the price.
Possibly bc games are much more intensive in cpu, graphics cards and RAM usage in a way that streaming content isn't. And that usage is per user since you don't see the same video game frames as everyone else. By comparison, you don't need to compute every frame of a netflix series. It's static, you just serve it up.
In fairness, they did just increase the price of all of their consoles due to tariff effects on hardware production. Same with playstation. It's pretty much the first generation in history consoles have gotten more expensive after release.
I doubt this is driving the game pass price increase though.
In case of any service, the user needs to be able to move on. To me, that is the ultimate antidote to most of the ails services afflict, like lock-in, altering the offer, raising the price above a reasonable limit, and so on. If the user cannot, or can hardly move on, the pain is big. If the user is willing to adapt, services are an actual good deal. They can be enjoyed while they last, and the world is full of other wonders ready to discover, when they fail.
I strongly believe that there is an important role for government actions in many areas (e.g. pollution), but I can't see any good reason for the government to intervene here. If it sucks for consumers, they'll do something else with their time and money.
I'd much rather the government do more to bring competition to Internet service providers where the regulatory/infrastructure barriers are much higher.
I think there's some causation vs correlation here - AFAIK Microsoft didn't lead the hike in game prices, it was probably Nintendo? Either way given the strong inflation it seems likely this would have happened acquisition or not.
The layoffs seem more damning but we would need a crystal ball to know if Activision could have skipped them if independent, or bought by another company.
Still it seems hardly clear cut and more story-crafting after the fact by a beurauceat rather than a proper analysis.
AAA games are just tired. Is anyone excited about what comes out of these companies? It just all feels like a shrinking, tired approach to making games. The corporate bloatware of games.
I think it's pretty easy to argue it would have been overreach by a regulatory body to block the deal.
It's difficult to guess, with reasonable certainty, if the deal will kill all competition. Difficult given the competition that is out there on all fronts (Steam, Playstation, Nintendo, Epic).
So if it's not totally clear the deal is bad, it's overreach to block it. Layoffs and increased pricing isn't indicative of monopoly power. Lina's mandate wasn't to prevent layoffs, it's anti-trust. It's also too early to conclude anything from the deal that was closed so recently.
Don't know about Activision or King, but Blizzard has been a dumpster fire that has not produced anything up to par for a decade. Microsoft was never the party that would clear out the muck from that stable.
Hmm, on the other hand, I could sit around and knowing nothing, predict “prices for legacy cultural products will rise, sometimes significantly” and I’d be right, no?
I like Lina Khan but predicting layoffs and price raises doesn’t really have to do with competition in the gaming sector. In fact it is pretty much everyone’s opinion that there are way too many games and way too many developers. That she is talking about price hikes and layoffs because that’s what you need for anti trust actions according to the case law should tell you: the problem is the courts.
I feel like the fundamental disconnect between the goals of private enterprise and government in these matters is a never ending source of frustration. I don't know what that solution is but it feels like we have to do something to reward companies for doing "what we want" which is providing stable gainful employment for as many Americans as possible and providing goods to consumers at the lowest price possible. These have to be balanced but the point is that generating profit for shareholders isn't the north star for a successful company at the expense of everyone else.
What is good for the FTC is typically opposed to what is good for profits and we get standoffs like this.
> In fact it is pretty much everyone’s opinion that there are way too many games and way too many developers.
What are you talking about? It's awesome having so many options, with so many great indy titles. One of the things that makes Steam so great in comparison to consoles. Who are these people asking for less choice?
As good a place as any to reflect on Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, who said [0] the new post-Lina Kahn DOJ and FTC would stand up "for the little guys", in one of the most bizarre comments from a tech CEO I can recall.
People gave Brendan Eich grief for political stances as a tech CEO but, say what you will, I think his actions were never based on a catastrophic misdiagnosis of which parties stand for what.
I think Yen was at least right that there were important anti-trust efforts that unfolded during Trump's first term, but they appeared to be politically selective, and at a completely different order of magnitude than what Kahn achieved afterward. Perhaps most head-spinning of all was when he claimed that none of his commentary was "intended to be political."
the game pass domination strategy was always going to fail in a world where Steam exists
it must be very frustrating for Microsoft
their usual tactic of buying out the competition isn't an option because Gabe Newell is already a billionare (and a gamer), who won't sell for any price
and their backup strategy of tightening the screws of their competition on Windows can't work either, because he's funded a credible (almost) replacement for Windows
so for once they have to compete on fair terms
and when they do that: they lose
Yeah, Valve understood MS' position/power a long time ago and worked to mitigate that risk. I remember them shopping around nearly 15 years ago to find a partner to help them work on Linux and improve Steam's abilities there, which resulted in SteamOS[0]. Indeed the plan worked, and now you can even buy a dedicated gaming console[1] that runs ~all the Windows games but completely without reliance on MS.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Deck
Their plan did get off to a rough start, initially they wanted game devs to provide native Linux builds despite there being near-zero upside to doing so at the time, which unsurprisingly went nowhere and led to the first generation Steam Machines dying on the vine. Thankfully they realized their mistake and shifted focus to Windows binary compatibility, which has been far more successful. It took a long time and the success of the first-party Steam Deck to convince third-party manufacturers to give Valve another shot after their early SteamOS partners got burned though.
Of course Newell literally was a Microsoft employee prior to founding Valve.
the risk mitigation hasn't played out yet. if that's what it is. we need to wait until microsoft tries to squeeze Steam out of windows. we have yet to see whether it works to keep valve alive against microsoft. the attack hasn't happened yet. and judging by microsofts actions it looks like they are cancelling themselves. for now at least. the war is not over.
of course as a linux user i am not complaining about linux support, but for now it still looks like valve supports linux from the goodness of their heart, and not as a way to make money. lets hope that this changes.
> we need to wait until microsoft tries to squeeze Steam out of windows.
Steam Machines were a direct result of that: Microsoft announced plans to block non-Microsoft app stores on Windows 8. This was a credible existential threat to Valve, which got off to a rocky start, and they wisely persisted despite Windows 8 (and yhe threat) flopping. Microsoft os no longer in a position to try and squeeze Steam, thanks to Valve's diligence, and Microsoft going half-cocked the first time.
interesting. i was not aware of that. and i would not be surprised if microsoft tries that again, so the threat remains.
Some mainstream gaming channels on youtube are already half recommending linux except for online games. Really doubt microsoft would have the balls to try something like that now
curious, i wonder why not online games? i play a few online games on linux just fine. they are not the newest ones, but that's the thing, any older games work, online or not, and only some of the newest don't, and that's only because wine/codeweaver/valve didn't get around to implement the fixes for wine for those games yet.
microsoft doesn't need courage, they just need a few leaders dumb enough to try again.
Probably various flavours of anti-cheat still being very much hit or miss at the moment.
(Still annoyed that Rockstar added BattlEye to GTA Online one day out of the blue, _and_ refuses to set the flag to allow it to work in Linux)
ok, good point. anti cheat only makes sense for multiplayer, so only online games. didn't think of that.
Not goodness, it's an insurance policy. It takes many years to achieve anything like this, so groundwork needs to be laid early.
of course. my point is that we don't know if it will be enough. and i am not saying linux is a risky bet, because there are no safer bets to make. (other than gabe taking his earnings and keeping them for himself)
if microsoft shuts out Steam, then valve will lose more than 90% of its current revenue. despite the insurance policy that just might kill the company outright.
and, the more revenue valve gets from linux, the more of a threat it becomes to microsoft, which makes microsoft trying to shut out Steam even more likely.
our only hope is that regulators prevent microsoft from even trying...
> he's funded a credible (almost) replacement for Windows
Proton on Steam Deck is indistinguishable from Windows.
I've loaded Win64 Unity builds on the machine to test and they run perfectly every time. I actually dont see the reason I would bother with a native Linux build at this point. The machine doesn't even get hot despite my fear that it would doing something like this.
The only part of the SD experience that felt like "linux" was the OOBE wherein I had to arbitrarily restart the first time setup process 3-4 times before it finally worked.
I am at a point where I almost prefer to game on the linux handheld over my windows desktop. It really is a superior package in many ways. Games like Elden Ring, Arkham Knight, Euro Truck Simulator 2, etc., are so much better to play on a machine like this. On keyboard+mouse I struggled to enjoy these titles. I realize I could always connect a controller to my PC, but it never felt right to me in that form factor. Playing ETS2 on the couch is a completely different dimension of relaxation. I'd never touch this game on my PC.
> I actually dont see the reason I would bother with a native Linux build at this point.
I would have agreed, having played the windows build Baldurs Gate III on the Deck. But a week ago the developer put out a native Deck build that outperforms the windows build, which is very helpful in the later parts of the game.
Be real: Proton is very good, but it is not indistinguishable.
IME it's indistinguishable. Often the performance is slightly better, which is shocking considering it's a translation layer.
> Proton on Steam Deck is indistinguishable from Windows.
Really? I haven’t used it, but I’ve mostly heard good things. It really has ads everywhere and needs regular reinstalls and malware scrubbing?
You aren't funny or clever, just juvenile
I thought it was funny :/
Surely not warranting a response like this.
Skill issue on your end. I can’t remember the last time I had to scrub malware or perform a regular reinstall for any of my four windows machines.
Steam is great, in no small part because Valve isn't beholden to quarterly earnings numbers. But I'm worried what will happen when Gabe Newell retires. Valve has been a pretty good (though at times imperfect) steward for PC gaming and it'll be sad if a change in leadership decides to extract value from 20+ years of goodwill.
I think the biggest problem with Steam is that when you buy a game on Steam, it's tied to your Steam account forever. In theory, Gabe could croak and they get bought by a VC firm that decides that a Steam account costs $45/month. At that point, you either give up all the games you purchased on Steam, or pay the $45/month.
I don't know why anyone would prefer their games tied to a service in that way. Especially when we've seen other digital stores go belly up, resulting in inaccessible collections.
Steam was the OG online store, it grandfathered itself in before a time people started to think that having their gaming library behind such a service might offer some downsides.
Nowadays I mostly buy PC games on GoG for that reason, but I have plenty on Steam. I do worry about it a little.
One of the things that drives me a little crazy about Steam is that there was actually an earlier digital game store (run by Stardock IIRC) that made the launcher and other tie-ins optional. That one didn't take off, though. Steam required a tie-in to the launcher, and it took off.
I would've much rather had the launcher and all that be optional, but I'm guessing that requiring Steam for games like Half-life 2 probably was the smarter move (from a profit perspective) than having it be optional, so that's the way the market went.
This recent price increase notwithstanding, Game Pass has been, in my opinion, and those of almost every gamer I know, incredibly good value for the money. I suppose it's probably like Netflix at the beginning though, and we'll start seeing more things like this price hike and plan differentiation
It's a good deal if you're really really using it, or I guess if you're a blizzard sub (not even sure if this is still a thing).
If you're just playing Silk Song now and then, you can buy it for $20 from Steam. I get you don't fully own it with steam, but it a hell of a lot closer to owning it than having temporary access via GamePass.
IMO the real issues for the more casual gamer (who is not a mobile gamer), is having either a decent console or cloud gaming. There's not a ton of options besides GEForce Now and XBox Cloud, and the Steam consoles are kinda crap and outdated at the moment. Also XBox cloud kinda sucks last I checked and had restrictions on multiplayer etc.
If XBox cloud gets as good as nVidia's cloud AND you get GamePass library access AND you can use a pretty dumbed down / cheap console for cloud gaming... then this might be a win for at least a subset. I think this is where they are headed? Even with all that, it's hard to beat Steam + GEForce Now which is the direct competitor.
I dream of a world where Windows is no longer the dominant OS for gaming.
much to my disappointment, GamePass doesn't give a sub to World of Warcraft.
> Game Pass has been, in my opinion, and those of almost every gamer I know, incredibly good value for the money.
it's a subsidised introductory price to capture market share and kill off the competition with the hope of creating a monopoly ("predatory pricing")
Apparently it was profitable (not subsidized), not sure if true.
https://www.gamesradar.com/platforms/xbox-series-x/xbox-pres...
depends entirely how you attribute the game revenue
this price rise was driven by them fearing cannibalisation of game sale revenues for the imminent new call of duty release
last year just on CoD they gave up $300 million (due to gamepass)
https://archive.is/ic79u
That's specifically Game Pass being profitable. It conveniently leaves out the long-term viability of whole supply chain profitability.
Whether the developers lose money as a result of the deal is extraordinarily hard to calculate and Microsoft doesn't disclose.
You happen to know many gamers who do spend a lot of time playing (different) games.
But that's not necessarily the user base of Game Pass, especially when it was cheap. Many don't even play 1 new title per month.
Agreed; it has been an incredible deal, especially with the redemption loopholes they originally left open. I think I got nearly three years for less than $150 originally. But it's pretty obvious now that they've been nearly giving it away so they can capture the market and then raise the price.
If you’re in high school/college (hell your 20’s) and can game 10+ hours a week it was an unbelievable deal. Even $30 isn’t that crazy if you’re really using it. But a lot of people can’t get that kind of value out of it and it doesn’t help that Microsoft keeps cancelling every interesting game and/or lets their best studios languish.
I think it's still a good deal even for more casual gamers - I imagine it would feel worse to spend $80 on a game that you may put an hour or two into, if you ever launch it at all. I imagine most casual gamers will simply not buy many games; whereas on Game Pass you can browse, pick up a game (that would otherwise cost you an arm and a leg) for the few hours you've got for gaming.
But like another commenter points out, if you're playing games like Silk Song or other similarly-priced games, it makes more sense to buy the game.
But yeah, you're absolutely right: lots of flaws with it, and I expect it will just get worse, much like Netflix.
Long live Steam, which I still use and love :)
$30 would be 6 AAA titles per year. There are barely that many descent games released in a decade.
> There are barely that many descent games released in a decade.
There were three in the 90s that I know of. Have I missed some since?
At least the two Descent: FreeSpace titles...
Skyrim, GTA V, Minecraft
I think it was either a joke or a comment on the "descent" spelling of decent, referring to the Descent (sci-fi space sims) games.
Gamepass has a lot more than AAA’s (Silk Song for instance) and if you haven’t been sticking with consoles in particular over the last 10-15 years the back catalog of tentpole titles is actually pretty impressive.
I’ve had many conversations with people in their 30s who have not touched video games since the 360/PS3 era. Gamepass, even if just for a few months, makes a ton of sense for them if they have the time.
I say this as somebody who absolutely does not think people should be paying $30 for gamepass generally speaking and I think Microsoft/Xbox is incredibly weak right now. But there are certainly cases where it makes a ton of sense and Sony isn’t exactly offering a better alternative unless you want a Final Fantasy machine that’s library is dominated by PS3/PS4 remasters (which in many ways mimics the value prop of gamepass for those who have not been gaming for years).
And on the console world, Playstation exists, with plenty of exclusives. Also Nintendo exists. Sony and Nintendo are not exactly companies they can buy (would almost certainly trigger anti monopoly cases everywhere, even if they could pay God knows how much money for one of those).
And honestly, this is great. I shudder to think of a world where fucking Microsoft has a dominant position on gaming.
I'm struggling to see why anyone would root for Steam.
I've paid $10/month for a library of hundreds of games I can play on both PC and Xbox. We all knew that price was too good to be true but I've paid it happily for 5 years. We were waiting for the other shoe to drop and now it has. I've loaded up 2.5 years on my account at $20/month (the current retail price for Ultimate is $60 for 3-month cards.)
I've played countless indie games that I never otherwise would have taken a chance on. Even if I only played day one AAA games, the same $70 would get me one game on Steam for 2.3 months of the entire Game Pass library at the $30 price point or 3.5 months at the still-available $20/month price point. The game can't be resold on either platform.
Microsoft created a new business model that changed how I play games for the better. I can't see how the service isn't worth $30/month for 500+ games. (For a regular and not casual gamer.) This isn't shovelware like the Netflix library. There's a ton of high-quality games in there.
And I don't see how their price increase, which was inevitable and the timing of which was hastened by tariffs, has anything but a specious like to the merger.
Steam has done nothing but contrive a rent-seeker position for itself on an otherwise open platform. Maybe it's just because I'm old enough to remember a time when I could buy from the publisher without that middleman and click setup.exe for myself. And still retain the rights to resell and play offline without a middleman.
GamePass is the worst thing to happen to gaming in the last two decades. It's an unsustainable race-to-the-bottom business model that devalues games and incentives shoveling out crap instead of producing quality titles. Worse yet, it conditions players to dismiss challenging, innovative, or unusual game mechanics due to the siren song of a functionally infinite catalog tempting them to just load up another title at the first sign of struggle.
Wow, there's a lot to unpack here.
I don’t like subscribing to things, let me just buy it for some amount of money.
I really really doubt many people on this site have any problems paying fair amount of money to buy their entertainment. Real cost is when the platform tries cutting some part of service or you have a problem renewing the subscription or you move to another country and it causes problems etc.
It is just better to actually own it and steam is really well trusted compared to a company like Microsoft which is bottom of the barrel. GoG model is better though like some other people wrote already.
> I'm struggling to see why anyone would root for Steam.
> I've played countless indie games that I never otherwise would have taken a chance on.
My very uneducated guess is that 90% of Game Pass subscribers don't play nearly that many indie games. They probably don't even play 1 new title per month.
When you finish paying Steam, you have a games library. When you finish paying for Gamepass, you have nothing. That's why some people root for Steam.
But tou don't have to pick one, you can have both. I pay for gamepass and most of the games I play I'm fine not owning them ever. But when any is worth it, I purchase is on steam and can have it forever. And I really don't mind "paying twice" because the game is worth it.
There was also a time where no videogames were available on pc because publishers didn't want to sell there anymore.
I think proton is such a huge thing,given what's happening with all OSes, that Valve should be considered great.
Also, we never had a portable pc gaming device ever,until now.
Because steam provides the best UX
> I'm struggling to see why anyone would root for Steam.
Because no way in hell I would support any Microsoft initiative in gaming? Or anywhere else for that matter.
Say what you will of Steam, but they made gaming on Linux not only viable, but in many ways better than on Microsoft. For thatbI will forever be grateful.
Has anything objectively good happened to the consumers from consolidation in the gaming space, ever?
The bias that these kinds of analysis always have is: We'll never truly know what the world would have looked like if the merger wasn't allowed to happen. Like, it's easy and correct to say "the ABK acquisition resulted in bad outcomes for gamers, employees at ABK, and Microsoft itself" (in fact, the only winners were probably ABK investors). But it's impossible to say "these outcomes are worse than those that would have happened had ABK been left alone", because we cannot know.
One could also use your reasoning to claim that no statements can ever be made about the impact of economic policies, because once they're in place, we can't compare with a world where they wouldn't have been adopted.
Best we can do is keep a set of statistics and try to correct for multivariate bias. Doesn't mean we're navigating all of this completely blind.
Consolidation around Unity and Unreal has probably been good for everyone, yeah. Even Godot benefits from consolidation, they rely on good APIs for middlewares that were made for Unity and Unreal.
Some parts of Steam consolidation have been good. It forces kids to have stakes (their whole account) that they lose if they hack / cheat in multiplayer games. Objectively good. But having one store I don’t know: you pay both 30% and you are sourcing users for CSGO and DOTA2.
Anyway I don’t really know what consolidation means to you.
Hard disagree on Unreal Engine. Just knowing a game was made with Unreal 5 is enough to give me pause when considering playing a game because of just having the same problems in almost every game. Unstable frame rates, shader compilation stutters, over reliance on frame generation just to hit 60 fps (which should be a reasonable target WITHOUT framegen), assets in different games all looking very similar because it’s all just the same stuff bought from marketplace.
Meta Gear Delta and Borderlands 4 being the most recent disasters I thankfully avoide simply because I decided to hold off because Inknew they were made with Unreal.
While true, more fragmentation of the gaming engine market wouldn't make you more certain of what performance you can expect from a game.
Those games had performance issues, but calling them "disasters" is disingenuous to the truth of the situation. Did you play Expedition 33? That was UE5 too.
The primate brain loves pattern-matching, so your primate brain has pattern-matched "engine game uses" to "performance of game". Reality is more nuanced than that.
To be fair, my only criticism of expedition 33 are the game poor performances. I understand in this case it's warranted, as the art also tells the story, but i had to buy a new GPU to play an AA game, which I usually never do.
I am really not sure about Unreal 5 anymore. It seems that it has lot of cool stuff in it. But at same time lot of that allows developers to be incredibly lazy and just get fidelity out of it and not performance. And then when you use something to get performance well fidelity gets smudgy...
So the story of the modern software development. Developer time and effort is minimised, and performance visible to user suffers...
> Consolidation around Unity and Unreal has probably been good for everyone,
Strongly disagree here. It worked out well for the businesses that can standardize on these engines and not spend resources making custom bespoke engines for sure, but as a gamer I remember the days when each game or company had their own engine which brought their own feel to the game. They could specialize it for exactly the type of game they were making.
In addition, Unreal Engine 5 in particular runs like absolute trash on many PCs (including my very high end machines). Its reliance on frame generation (fake frames) and super resolution (fake pixels) has predictably led to developers ignoring optimization even further - "just turn on DLSS 4x Frame Gen and DLSS Ultra Performance!" - see Randy Pitchford's recent rants on Twitter.
Consolidation of a whole industry around two closed source or private technologies is not good at all
What if I told you that a Unity source code license is a mere $5,000, and Unreal is source available for free? Does this change anything for you?
Unity has been pulling all sorts of shady things around their pricing and Unreal is getting press for being incredibly slow.
I don't think this is good for anyone.
Steam is an example of competition; without them MS (and even Sony/Nintendo) would have even more power over the industry.
> Consolidation around Unity and Unreal has probably been good for everyone, yeah.
I don't know about that. Unreal 5 games seem to have some real issues with clarity, ghosting, and dithering. There's plenty of analysis on the subject[1], and I'm not sure whether it's Unreal 5 or DLSS/TAA more to blame but I'm already longing for the days of more engine variety.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJu_DgCHfx4
Isn't that an issue with the studio pushing for more detail than the hardware can put out? Surely you could turn off graphical features like TAA without replacing a million lines of engine code. Or you could run the same engine with a custom renderer
Consolidation (mergers and acquisitions generally) aren't necessarily bad universally.
It is hard to argue that Silicon and Synapse being acquired by Davidson and Associates to form Blizzard Entertainment was not good for gaming consumers for a long stretch of time.
But there is certainly a tipping point where this sort of consolidation really becomes a problem when it results in large entities with a lot of market power, or one side of the deal is already a large entity with a lot of market power. And the larger the consolidation, the worse it gets for everyone (except perhaps shareholders, though even this being arguably positive can often just be a temporary situation).
Unfortunately the only really viable exit strategy for a lot of VCs is to offload their startups to Alphabet or Meta sized entities which is immediately concerning from an anti-trust perspective because those companies are already so overly large (and a lot of their M&A is clearly just to kill would-be competitors, which is at the heart of anti-trust).
So the techbros were instrumental in making sure Lina Khan got the boot, despite the fact that she's been right about everything.
IMO: it's a complicated situation. Activision-Blizzard-King has been in a pretty icky spot for many years now, dating back further than just the MSFT acquisition. I'd put the probabilities at like 90%+ that we'd see headlines very similar or worse to these if MSFT had not been allowed to buy them; more micro-transactions, layoffs, flops, weird exclusivity deals, etc. We need to cool it with the revisionist history; ABK sucked before MSFT bought them, they'd suck whether or not MSFT bought them, and you'd have to go back to like 2011 before you'd find a version of that company that's generally positive vibes.
The party that got screwed by that acquisition was, ironically, Microsoft. To be clear, this isn't a new discovery or idea; everyone was saying this during the acquisition, but Microsoft's corporate story is best summarized as "makes the worst possible decision at every turn yet still somehow does ok". If there's any reason the ABK acquisition should have been blocked, it might have been to protect Microsoft from itself, much akin to how parents have to keep babies from touching the stove.
ABK is a sinking ship that MSFT paid luxury yacht prices for. ABK should be renamed "King & Call of Duty Inc", but they're saddled with dozens of other properties and business divisions, including all of Blizzard, that make zero or negative money. This tethers a sinking ship, ABK, to a second sinking ship, Xbox, which similar to ABK has been sinking since, like, 2015, and hopes that the two sinking ships together might float.
There's a world where maybe Xbox leadership gets more involved, cuts fat, takes direct management of key laggard properties, maybe selling some off to focus up on what's driving revenue. But, again; Microsoft sucks. Their direct management buried Halo and Gears below the ground, from industry titans to totally irrelevant. The very real situation is that their leadership has totally lost confidence even in themselves, their failures are obvious and written across the sky, and that's led them to take a hands-off approach with ABK. But, again; ABK sucked. Eventually things get so bad that someone has to step in and make the really bad tactical decisions; raising prices and layoffs.
By 2030, Xbox will stagger on as an umbrella brand for a few zombie game studios + "gaming services on Windows". But, the hardware will be dead, and we'll see them begin to offload laggard studios/IPs/brands, either selling them off to other companies or spinning them off into independent companies which Microsoft holds a minority stake in.
“… FTC when it challenged Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a convoluted process that didn't formally end until May of 2025—almost two years after the deal closed.”
This process needs to be faster for these types of challenges to be more successful - both in the market and in consumer opinion. Markets move too fast, and the answer can’t be “FTC needs more of my money to hire more people.”
> and the answer can’t be
Why can’t it be that?
I’m not familiar with the inner workings of the FTC, so this is a genuine question.
Game pass was never viable at its original price: it was always going to increase in price, just like subscription services that didn’t has big acquisitions (Netflix) have.
I don’t think this acquisition helped gamers, I think it just didn’t matter. Microsoft is welcome to waste their own money.
Yeah I don't see what the acquisition has to do here. Both Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard were pretty predatory before the deal. I can't imagine what they would have done differently being separate from each other. The biggest "concern" I can remember of was Call of Duty coming to Game Pass or leaving PlayStation but I don't know what came off that. I am guessing it didn't come to pass seeing how the console department at Xbox has imploded.
I’m going to sell my series X. Thought of keeping it for the odd moment of family time to play Overcooked but at $30, might as well go for a buffet lunch.
If you enjoy playing old retro games, I think Xbox can run Retroarch pretty well.
I may buy a used one later on for that reason, specifically.
call me naive, but I thought game pass was going to be used as sort of a loss leader and gives them the avenue to build out other things like in the azure side of their business or cloud gaming etc
Doesn't Games Pass also include cloud gaming as a feature? I have to imagine the hardware and data center costs for hosting games have risen a lot since 2022 (in a way the operating costs for e.g. Netflix haven't).
It does include cloud gaming but the wide impression I get is that most users don't really use this feature. If you use everything game pass offers you, it's still a killer deal. The problem is the vast majority of subscribers don't use all the benefits and / or play nearly enough games to justify the price.
If only 3 people are using it, does that even matter?
Why would you think that out of interest?
Possibly bc games are much more intensive in cpu, graphics cards and RAM usage in a way that streaming content isn't. And that usage is per user since you don't see the same video game frames as everyone else. By comparison, you don't need to compute every frame of a netflix series. It's static, you just serve it up.
Xbox streaming uses Xbox Series X hardware in server blades. That hardware hasn't changed since the XSX released.
In fairness, they did just increase the price of all of their consoles due to tariff effects on hardware production. Same with playstation. It's pretty much the first generation in history consoles have gotten more expensive after release.
I doubt this is driving the game pass price increase though.
MARRY ME LINA KHAN
(I would have posted Lina Khan for president, but I recently learned she was born in the UK, so I'll take what I can get)
The headline has the wrong name. It is Lina Khan.
In case of any service, the user needs to be able to move on. To me, that is the ultimate antidote to most of the ails services afflict, like lock-in, altering the offer, raising the price above a reasonable limit, and so on. If the user cannot, or can hardly move on, the pain is big. If the user is willing to adapt, services are an actual good deal. They can be enjoyed while they last, and the world is full of other wonders ready to discover, when they fail.
I strongly believe that there is an important role for government actions in many areas (e.g. pollution), but I can't see any good reason for the government to intervene here. If it sucks for consumers, they'll do something else with their time and money.
I'd much rather the government do more to bring competition to Internet service providers where the regulatory/infrastructure barriers are much higher.
I think there's some causation vs correlation here - AFAIK Microsoft didn't lead the hike in game prices, it was probably Nintendo? Either way given the strong inflation it seems likely this would have happened acquisition or not.
The layoffs seem more damning but we would need a crystal ball to know if Activision could have skipped them if independent, or bought by another company.
Still it seems hardly clear cut and more story-crafting after the fact by a beurauceat rather than a proper analysis.
AAA games are just tired. Is anyone excited about what comes out of these companies? It just all feels like a shrinking, tired approach to making games. The corporate bloatware of games.
I think it's pretty easy to argue it would have been overreach by a regulatory body to block the deal.
It's difficult to guess, with reasonable certainty, if the deal will kill all competition. Difficult given the competition that is out there on all fronts (Steam, Playstation, Nintendo, Epic).
So if it's not totally clear the deal is bad, it's overreach to block it. Layoffs and increased pricing isn't indicative of monopoly power. Lina's mandate wasn't to prevent layoffs, it's anti-trust. It's also too early to conclude anything from the deal that was closed so recently.
What games do activision-blizzard even make/sell these days? How are people not just steam-saling thru way through games anyway?
Well, its the end-game - there will no be monopoly break-ups because the companies will be the government
it ironically also harms the Xbox division... it should never have been approved
Don't know about Activision or King, but Blizzard has been a dumpster fire that has not produced anything up to par for a decade. Microsoft was never the party that would clear out the muck from that stable.
Hmm, on the other hand, I could sit around and knowing nothing, predict “prices for legacy cultural products will rise, sometimes significantly” and I’d be right, no?
I like Lina Khan but predicting layoffs and price raises doesn’t really have to do with competition in the gaming sector. In fact it is pretty much everyone’s opinion that there are way too many games and way too many developers. That she is talking about price hikes and layoffs because that’s what you need for anti trust actions according to the case law should tell you: the problem is the courts.
I feel like the fundamental disconnect between the goals of private enterprise and government in these matters is a never ending source of frustration. I don't know what that solution is but it feels like we have to do something to reward companies for doing "what we want" which is providing stable gainful employment for as many Americans as possible and providing goods to consumers at the lowest price possible. These have to be balanced but the point is that generating profit for shareholders isn't the north star for a successful company at the expense of everyone else.
What is good for the FTC is typically opposed to what is good for profits and we get standoffs like this.
> In fact it is pretty much everyone’s opinion that there are way too many games and way too many developers.
What are you talking about? It's awesome having so many options, with so many great indy titles. One of the things that makes Steam so great in comparison to consoles. Who are these people asking for less choice?
As good a place as any to reflect on Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, who said [0] the new post-Lina Kahn DOJ and FTC would stand up "for the little guys", in one of the most bizarre comments from a tech CEO I can recall.
People gave Brendan Eich grief for political stances as a tech CEO but, say what you will, I think his actions were never based on a catastrophic misdiagnosis of which parties stand for what.
I think Yen was at least right that there were important anti-trust efforts that unfolded during Trump's first term, but they appeared to be politically selective, and at a completely different order of magnitude than what Kahn achieved afterward. Perhaps most head-spinning of all was when he claimed that none of his commentary was "intended to be political."
0. Screenshotted statement here: https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/654f16fa-d3ca-4304-bb2a-41c...