"Sony's desire to impede such growth has prevented Microsoft from expanding Game Pass. To stop content creators from adding to Game Pass and other rival subscription services, Sony pays for 'blocking rights.'"
"These kinds of platform agreements are common in the games industry, and in documents made public as part of the Epic vs. Apple lawsuit last year, PlayStation was even mentioned as blocking the appearance of third-party games on Game Pass."
Yes, they do violate antitrust. But there are two problems with enforcement:
1. The arrangement in question relates to trade of copyrighted works; which means that any antitrust lawsuit has to jump over the hurdle of not restraining the copyright monopoly. Separability of copyright and exclusive licensing are also considered to be well-established components of the copyright monopoly.
2. The consumer welfare standard is so high a bar to antitrust enforcement that a lot of clearly illegal behavior is never prosecuted.
That last one deserves more explanation. In the 1980s a bunch of federal judges decided to repeal US antitrust law from the bench. They argued - with scant evidence - that antitrust action had to prove that consumers were harmed by monopolistic action. This is the exact same argument Apple and console vendors use to justify locking down their products; that it actually benefits consumers to have to buy their software from sources authorized by the hardware manufacturer.
In practice, there is no monopoly that does not improve consumer welfare. Monopolies are the most stable business arrangement and can bully the rest of the economy into doing what the customer wants. The whole point of antitrust is that we don't want to live under privately-owned government, not that avocados could be 2 cents cheaper.
Are they really a violation of antitrust? They're not really different from exclusive supplier relationships or exclusivity deals in other industries.
As you point out, it's pretty accepted in the copyright industry to have exclusivity deals. If I want to get Katy Perry's album, then I buy the Capitol records one, I can't get it from Sony. Or I can only stream on services where that artist is available, so if it's not on Tidal, then tough luck for users of that service.
Exclusivity and Blocking is not the same. Paying you to put the content only on my platform isn’t nearly as anti trust as paying you to not put your content on a specific platform
Excluding only one is a more minor restrain of trade than excluding all others? I can't agree, though I admit that excluding one looks nastier if only 'cause it's novel. Logically and economically, re competition, blocking seems less nasty, even if targeted.
But that doesn't mean the courts will side with me and not you. Strict logical coherence isn't always adhered to. It's even been called "the hobgoblin of little minds" - so perhaps Emerson would take your side on this.
Imagine you own a mattress store. There is another rival mattress store in your city, and you both compete for customers.
You don't make the mattresses yourselves, you purchase from a manufacturer and sell in your storefront. There are only a few different mattress manufacturers.
Your rival, instead of adjusting prices or organizing better marketing, simply plays the manufacturers not to sell to your store for six months.
Unless you can rapidly find a brand new source of mattresses or have a very healthy rainy day fund, you will likely go under fairly quickly after selling your remaining stock.
This leaves only one store in town, and they can set the price to whatever they want. Now that they are the only established incumbent they can easily recreate this scenario with any new mattress stores that want to open in your city.
Now the people of your city have only one store for mattresses, and have to pay whatever is asked for. This is not because the business did anything especially well to win more customers, or because you did anything wrong. They simply destroyed the competition through anti-competitive behavior and have negatively affected everyone else in your area.
We agree on all this. But my point is, to make the whole world trek to just your store is not better for competition than to make just those in your city come to your store, logically.
As well, although this may not contradict what you intended to say: patents, for example, precisely grant "the right to exclude." Exclusive territories are a frequent way to do this. So in that case, it isn't necessarily illegal.
Surely they aren't foolish enough to explicitly say in the contract they can't bring the game to Microsoft's platforms? It would just say "no alternate platforms allowed between the dates of ..." or similar?
Music is a little different because you don’t need proprietary hardware in order to listen to music. Everything plays an MP3. A CD is a CD and all CD players play CD’s.
With console video games, you can’t just pop the game disc into any disc tray that plays games. You can’t run your downloaded Xbox game on the PlayStation. The thing you licensed (since we don’t own them technically) is tied to proprietary hardware.
Imagine if you had to own a Mac in order to listen to your music you bought on iTunes/Apple Music
Not from the consumer, just the manufacturers. As a consumer you bought a piece of hardware that could read the format and it worked across-the-board. With Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, you buy the game and not only is it linked to the format, but it’s actually linked to their proprietary hardware. You can’t buy an Xbox game, which is exactly the same as the PlayStation version, and play it on the PlayStation. But I can buy a song online on my Mac and play it on VLC on a Windows machine.
Imagine if any music I buy on bandcamp could only be played via a bandcamp app or software on bandcamp’s proprietary hardware.
Or buying Activision/Blizzard or Bethesda. Game pass is bad news for the industry at large. The price floor will drop and quality will suffer.
Sure, its great for 'consumers', but it won't be long term. Will Xbox require mandatory three year game pass or onstar when you buy it? Would that be an antitrust violation?
I wonder if it is good for consumers though. Everyone I know that has it seems to just dabble puddle deep in game after game now and lose interest. Each person has a very expensive Xbox that they don’t play now. Maybe there is something to purchasing a game that makes you assign it worth. For me, the joy of games is getting deep into them, learning everything about them and finishing them. I have 500 hours in Elden Ring haha. I wonder if the fact that a game is almost free makes people subconsciously think it is worthless.
So, this is a fair take, but also, the actual statute that drives antitrust law right now is still insane, and that has enabled lots of unnecessary judge-made interpretation.
The sherman act starts by saying "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal. "
Couple things:
1. Because it's a federal statute, it has to be within congress's powers, which is why it only applies to interstate trade/commerce, rather than purely intrastate.
2. All contracts are a restraint of trade of some form.
So this was a bad codification of common law.
This immediately led to judges adding words (IE finding only contracts that "unduly" restrain trade are void).
It has only gotten worse in the past century.
So when you say "in the 80's they decided to repeal it from the bench", this is right, but it would also be fair to say "judges were forced to try to interpret this thing for a century because it was badly written, and some eventually decided the earlier interpretations were wrong".
That seems... wrong? Say Google offers you 2 TB of storage space for 1 year for $100. You're saying that's preventing you from simultaneously paying Microsoft $100 for > 2 TB of storage storage? Or that that's preventing Google from giving someone else 2 TB of storage space for > $100? What exactly prevents both parties from doing this with multiple counterparties?
If you have lots of X, sure. But instead of something incredibly fungible like storage space, suppose I had instead agreed to sell you the Empire State building.
This is incorrect. They may violate anti-trust but usually don't.
exclusive contracts between manufacturers and suppliers, or between manufacturers and dealers, are generally lawful because they improve competition among the brands of different manufacturers
IANAL: Love the comment, 'twas the (US) judges with the butterknife in the belfry that done the deed, it really was. And yes, in the Apple ebookprice case it was firmly established that publishers with legit monopoly (copyright) rights could, nonetheless, not collude (cooperate) with a vendor re their individual rights, through a third party. I presume this also applies to collusion with each other, too.
So, as a copyright holder you have the "right to exclude" granted by law - but not to coordinate with other rights holders to distort the market when exercising that right.
"Blocking rights" or "negative options" would therefore seem to be illegal, in line with this decision. [Edit: no wait; there's no coordinate between more than two parties here, as there was with Apple negotiating with all copyright holders at once to coordinate a higher price. Changed my mind]
The judicial idea that suddenly took hold forty years ago (after the xerox prosecution that killed xerox dead in the seventies) that consumers have to be harmed immediately not merely by reducing competition which would harm them in time, was very "motivated thinking" in my view. Japan was soaring, so suddenly our monopolists might be thugs but they were our thugs.
BTW, the historical rubric for such law is "restraint of trade." This was common law in Britain and its colonies long before the Sherman Act (which reduced the penalies for it and at least reduced the chance of tort remedies. Sherman's brother - a general - was also a civic railway executive.)
by acting as a collective mechanism to pursue interests of individual consumers. Trivial example, Apple shutting down Facebook's ad tracking, which is almost certainly an interest of Apple users they could not individually pursue.
In fact the government is nothing else but a very large version of this, a big monopolist who solves a collective action problem.
But a monopolist could do anything they want, and often do, that is not in the benefit of the consumer. For example, Standard Oil. Or Microsoft bundling a browser and killing Netscape. Or even Apple, that now is looking into running their own ad business after killing their competitors. Some of these may look good for consumers in the short term, but make no mistake, monopolies are not good for consumers.
they can't do anything they want because they still face the risk of replacement. Monopolistic competition is the dominant form of activity in innovative economies, temporarily outsized profits scale enable innovation and long term planning. (which benefits consumers)
MySpace in 2007 had 80% of social network traffic, turns out it could not do what it wanted. Advanced tech economies generally consist of monopolists replacing each other, not bazaar economies.
MySpace isn't a good example because it was early in a growing and changing space. Better example are Windows, duopoly of iOS and Android.
It may still be possible to beat a monopoly by being extremely good and aggressive right on time when your competitor is napping. e.g. Firefox and Chrome vs IE. If IE team hadn't been dismantled and added tabs and other UI features, worked on performance and security improvement, we may have been using IE 25.
> they can't do anything they want because they still face the risk of replacement
Not necessarily, especially if the switching cost is too high. For example, if Microsoft does something monopolistic, which they had done, people aren't going to switch to Linux. Therefore the government had to step in.
Except there is no guarantee they use that collective power for the customer's benefit. See: basically any actual monopoly (Apply isn't), including power and internet monopolies.
Aaaaand that's the reason why monopoly law actually exists. There's no democratic control over corporations so they should not wield power like governments do.
I gonna disagree with everybody, by agreeing with everybody: Rockefeller's Standard Oil benefited consumers by providing much safer oil at a higher price; the previous race to the bottom delivered low prices - too low, only highly volatile fuel with an unpredictable mix could be produced for such low prices. But Standard Oil also harmed consumers with high prices, particularly over time, compared to government oversight; say by regulation or cerification of refinerys. So it was broken up, eventually.
In the videogames industry, it’s fundamentally the same category of competition (or stifling thereof) as an acquisition.
When Sony or Microsoft acquire game studios or publishers, both the goal and method is the same - giving their platform an advantage by paying a lump sum for control over the target platforms and storefronts of one or more games.
So it’s presumably also a case-by-case thing, like other big acquisitions / cumulative patterns of acquisitions.
So far, the industry seems to be “healthy enough” in spite of these sorts of deals. The big storefront/console competitors that are attacking each other are all huge and evenly matched, so none of them can exert this sort of control over anywhere near a majority of the market.
>How are "blocking rights" legal? Don't they violate anti-trust / competition laws?
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like it. It's not uncommon in the pharmaceutical industry either: When a drug patent expires the company will sometimes pay generic manufacturers to not manufacture the drug for a period of time.
> Don't they violate anti-trust / competition laws?
You can't say "yes" or "no" to this question.
Exclusive deals do not automatically violate anti-trust / competition laws. If one of the companies involved has been found to have a monopoly then it is more likely they will.
From the Justice Dept on the Sherman Act:
Exclusive dealing is frequently pro-competitive, as when it enables manufacturers and retailers to overcome free-rider issues misaligning the incentives for these vertically-related firms to satisfy the demands of consumers most efficiently. For example, a manufacturer may be unwilling to train its distributors optimally if distributors can take that training and use it to sell products of the manufacturer's rivals. Other benefits can occur as well, as when an exclusivity arrangement assures a customer of a steady stream of a necessary input.
But exclusive dealing also can be anticompetitive in some circumstances. For example, exclusive dealing may allow one manufacturer, in effect, to monopolize efficient distribution services and thereby prevent its rivals from competing effectively.
As discussed in the Fact Sheets on Dealings in the Supply Chain, exclusive contracts between manufacturers and suppliers, or between manufacturers and dealers, are generally lawful because they improve competition among the brands of different manufacturers (interbrand competition). However, when the firm using exclusive contracts is a monopolist, the focus shifts to whether those contracts impede efforts of new firms to break into the market or of smaller existing firms to expand their presence. The monopolist might try to impede the entry or expansion of new competitors because that competition would erode its market position. The antitrust laws condemn certain actions of a monopolist that keep rivals out of the market or prevent new products from reaching consumers.
Sony has never been found to have a monopoly on gaming (and no a "monopoly on Playstation gaming is not the same thing").
Monopolist does not mean actual monopoly though. Also from the FTC:
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
Amazon does it for their K&P / Kindle Unlimited offering to authors. If you want your book to be available in this program (and you do want it because it accounts for a huge chunk of your income on Amazon, depending on genre) you need to agree to not have your book be available anywhere else. Not on Apple, not in Barnes and Noble, nowhere.
This is strictly illegal, but as in so many other cases in which Amazon has used its market power to that extend market power (that's the illegal part); they've never been prosecuted. Merely preventing authors from offering their ebooks at a low price (but still far higher than the cost of delivery) is strictly illegal (given that the kindle has immense ebook market power.) But Amazon does it. Welcome to Bezos-World.
I think the exclusivity only applies to the eBook versions. I know Will Wight is able to sell hardcover copies of his books on Kickstarter, but mentioned he couldn't give eBook versions because of his Kindle Unlimited deal.
Assuming Sony is paying the publisher some fairly negotiated compensation for what they’d have otherwise project earning from GamePass presence, what’s the anti-competitive element?
Just that the game is available through some channels and not others? Because that’s normal in retail. There are exclusivity deals everywhere.
Or is there some reason to believe Sony is somehow pressuring publishers to take an unfair deal? It’s possible, but I haven’t read about that yet.
I don't see a problem with Sony (or MS/Nintendo/Apple/etc) paying game developers to keep their games exclusive to a platform. Game creators make decisions on where to put their games and how to monetize.
Epic Games is notorious for giving "free games" where consumers get the game for free, but EG is paying the publisher/developer behind the scenes. So the game creators are getting paid.
Yes, laws do matter. Were it otherwise civil courts would have lots of free time.
The legal system isn't known for being the corruption oasis that movies make it out to be.
> Were it otherwise civil courts would have lots of free time.
Laws don't have to matter for you to waste a court's time. In fact dragging out court cases is a common legal tactic.
> The legal system isn't known for being the corruption oasis that movies make it out to be.
Your experience differs from mine. It also differs from most lawyers I know. Lawyers aren't famous for drinking heavily because they think they're making the world a better place.
Why do you think the court system works? What country do you live in?
Exactly! I find if funny that Microsoft is complaining about Sony buying "blocking rights" when Microsoft is doing effectively the same thing. It just costs them more money.
I’d much prefer Microsoft buying a studio right now than Sony. When Sony buys a studio, I’m required to buy a $500 box and pay $70 to play future games from them.
Microsoft lets me play it on PC or stream it for $10 or $15 a month. The lower barrier to entry has let me try out and discover a bunch of new titles I actually enjoy.
Only because the PlayStation is artificially locked down. There is no technical reason why the PlayStation (or XBOX) can't "dual boot" as a full blown PC into Windows, or Linux (it could run SteamOS like the Steam Deck)
How about Macs , you can't really do anything to fix a MacBook Air if it just doesn't want to turn on the next day.
Same thing with gaming laptops. Do we really need to have a true Scotsman argument, is real PC gaming only done on a tower desktop PC that you built yourself. And for the HN crowd of course this needs to be running a customized installation of Arch Linux.
Yeah, but this is the reason why PlayStation is the most popular console.
Console gaming is more popular than PC gaming.
Since Sony is known for having high quality exclusives more people are going to buy a PlayStation than an Xbox because they don't want to miss out on possible exclusive.
This is literally the reason why you are seeing Microsoft buying up some of the most loved game franchises like Skyrim and making them Xbox/Windows exclusives.
It's costing them massive amounts of money compared to what Sony has spent on buying some of the best game studios in the world.
I wouldn't. Sony has a track record of fostering creative excellence with their studio purchases. Microsoft can barely get their studios to release anything within a reasonable timeframe, and most releases tend to be good-but-not-great. Something about the Redmond management just doesn't deliver here despite the exorbitant budgets.
Of course, my perspective is a bit different because I own both consoles.
You know Sony has also been purchasing studios left right and centre for… well, literally forever? And each one of their exclusive games from other studios has money behind the scenes to convince them too? Microsoft absolutely does the same shit, of course. None of these companies are our friends lol
"Sony's desire to impede such growth has prevented Microsoft from expanding Game Pass. To stop content creators from adding to Game Pass and other rival subscription services, Sony pays for 'blocking rights.'"
Or: Sony pays a part of the development-cost for the right to be involved on how/where the final product goes on sale.
Without further evidence from Microsoft to back this malicious framing of the matter, this sounds very reasonable to me.
Exclusivity is the big sticking point. I have a first hand contact who was offered funds during game development by Microsoft to be on Xbox on day one. Not to be exclusive to Xbox, but just to avoid exclusivity deals which would preclude a day one Xbox launch.
I'd far rather see that model of investment than one which says "I give you money, I decide where you can't sell your game."
>It's painful to think of how much they own these days, weird they haven't faced Meta level anti-trust yet despite being way more of a monopoly imo.
Because Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on Gaming.
Nintendo and Sony hold huge shares. Steam owns a large percentage of games sales on PCs.
And iOS and Android gaming combined are bigger than PC and console gaming.
Other businesses besides gaming, I don't know. I know Microsoft does not have a monopoly on gaming.
However, I do think that them buying up large game studios will ultimately be bad for consumers. They're swinging money left and right to try to become a monopoly.
Maybe it's just me but I don't remember ever seeing lawmakers and politics perceiving gaming as a serious economy like other forms of entertainment.
It seems it's still all fun and games made by individuals in some basement.
Until the content of a specific game is offending someone, then it's suddenly a political issue until that one game is gone.
Would be good to have a serious political discussion not only about the dopamine machine social media, but also about the millions of "cow clicker" games and how also those may impact on youth and the nation as a whole...
It's not just gaming, entertainment in general. I hope no other industries would have been allowed to consolidate, vertically and horizontally, as much. Having a very limited number of content producers that also handle their exclusive distribution (and in the case of gaming, exclusive hardware) isn't great for the consumer.
well, they're making a shortcut to produce in-house content like Nintendo and Sony does.
Instead of discovering talented studios, (more or less) carefully curate and support them until the eventual point of acquisition (like Sony does IMO), or focusing on finding talented individuals to scale your in-house R&D (like Nintendo does IMO), Microsoft's strategy is to buy entire machines which create games proven to be commercially successful.
The downside to this is that those large studios Microsoft buys are currently complementing the in-house portfolio of all console-makers.
If those studios at one point stop serving all platforms for some strategic reasons of their parent company, many of the games they offer today might not be economic anymore and would end up not being developed.
I wonder how such a move would impact the variety of games available today...
Linux builds are nice, but they are a ton of work. It basically doubles the workload testing for PC, which is already complex due to the thousands of hardware configurations out there. It's one of a few reasons why Nvidia GeForce Now has more games than Google Stadia - Stadia requires porting the game to Linux (and they are an "easier" target since devs only have to support Google's hardware configurations). Valve gave up on convincing studios to port their games to Linux and just forked Wine to make Proton.
> It basically doubles the workload testing for PC, which is already complex due to the thousands of hardware configurations out there.
This is only true if your engine is abstracting nothing away and there wasn't any common denominator in APIs across systems.
Given that neither is the case for popular game engines, the statement is wrong. You also don't have to test gameplay related things on both systems, only technical aspects, and only a small subset of them.
The current reality is that it really does increase the testing surface area by a substantial amount. Even if it's only +10-20%, the addressable market on Linux is nowhere near that size, so it is really difficult to make a good business case for supporting Linux natively. Large studios could certainly do it, though it'd basically be getting "subsidized" by other target platforms; small studios though, not so much, the math just simply doesn't make sense currently.
The engine abstractions only do so much for you - at the end of the day, it's another thing you have to test and provide support for, with the latter being the most troublesome and resource-intensive, in my experience.
At the same time though, building a game that is easy to port is good engineering in the first place. Even if you only release on mainstream platforms, writing platform-agnostic code can save you so many headaches down the line when you want to release on console/mobile etc.
You're not wrong and I generally agree. In my experience, the issue that comes into play most often is performance optimization. Usually "generic" optimization (read: CPU side) is fine and testing the game on other target platforms (not just Linux) is often beneficial and commonly brings about changes that have positive impacts for the game across platforms.
Where it rapidly can get dicey is optimizations related to rendering, and that's also commonly a massive "unknown" up-front. This includes "GPU" optimization itself (ie shading) and also optimizing for CPU=>GPU pipeline/bandwidth -- both of which are difficult to abstract and/or the abstractions that exist tend to leak a lot.
The latter is the area where I've personally experienced the most pain and those situations are often full of unknowns & full days of developer time spent working on/debugging platform-specific issues from an actual Linux test machine. Having to devote full days of developer time to Linux-specific GPU-related debugging is painful -- specifically because it rarely generalizes or improves experience on other platforms. For a small/indie team, it's extremely expensive because of the big "unknowns" that exist (ie lack of familiarity & uncertainty of outcome, etc), and especially because of the opportunity cost/the time spent is likely to benefit <2% of customers, at best, which is a very difficult pill to swallow unless you've got a really big pie to begin with!
I'll end the same way that I began: Proton very good, great even! =D
I have been playing games on native glibc/linux for a decade, and unfortunately I have to agree. But the main culprits are not who we think they are. With my system development skills, I did peak deep into this issue.
There is no ABI stability, except linux kernel syscalls and the alsa-lib (for how long?), on glibc/linux based OS.
And we are talking really short time frames. For instance with glibc gnu symbol versioning, game binaries compiled on a recent glibc will break all distros older than 1 year and a half. Game devs must be careful to compile against a VERY old glibc (like a decade?), what a pain. It is not that dark: cross-platform 3D engine devs are aware about this and are carefull about this (usually).
Game binaries are also destroyed by the accutely toxic c++/libgcc_s ABIs (did happen again very recently). Hopefully, compilers have -static-libgcc and -static-libstdc++ options, but it does solve only partially the issue. Many games are using c++ (I have an extremely negative opinion about this language), and the static libstdc++ is not libdl-ing any of its dependencies from the system, then those dependencies end up in the static loading list of the ELF binaries... often with nasty gnu symbol versions. To fix properly this, it would require a fork of gcc(clang?) static libstdc++ which does have a libdl mode, namely does libdl everything from the system.
To say the least, the main culprits are... gcc and glibc devs (IBM? MIT?). It is so accute, I started to think conspiracy: microsoft pulling the strings in the shadows, or those devs trying to blackmail valve/game studios with planned obsolescence (are laws already setup against this type of accutely toxic scam?).
Since the game binaries should libdl everything from the system, they must be simple and pure ELF64 binaries. Namely, using a minimal set of relocation types, no c/c++ main(), and have to manage system TLS variables (for instance errno) with the sysv ABI __tls_get_addr() (this may require a bit of ELF header parsing... if there is an clean ABI way to reach the ones from the libdl-ed ones).
Game binaries would statically load only libdl (not even libc) to dynamically load the video game core libs: xcb libs, libxkbcommon(wayland/x11), wayland code is static into the binaries, libasound (pulseaudio/pipewire/jack/etc are hidden behind the alsa-lib API), libgl, vulkan, and even the libc if requiring anything from it (name resolution?).
About 3D programing, vulkan would have to be used very conservatively, nothing fancy.
proton is a massive amount of literaly and fairly, garbage, software, microsoft grade. It is a money sink hole for valve, not to mention if I recall properly, it does include straight copies of closed source windoz components, that to make things even worse. I manage to build a lean wine win64/vulkan/dx12->vulkan(at least avoid that thing which is dxvk) with a C compiler, but I know that nearly no doz game will content themselve from that to actually run.
A couple of decades ago I was in a business that competed directly with one of Sony's divisions (not gaming). Our products were doing extremely well. It's the old story of a small, underfunded, highly motivated team being able to run circles around a large competitor with lots of inertia and, shall we say, more bodies and less talent.
Anyhow, one day I got word from one of our partner companies that they were witness to Sony making an arrangement with a major reseller in that industry segment to not feature our products at the most important tradeshows in the industry in exchange for discounts and other compensation. They must have done that with multiple vendors because that year we went from being featured in dozens of booths to almost not having any product on the show floor.
I was absolutely incensed. The problem is, when you have asymmetry of financial and legal power of that magnitude the laws almost don't matter. When spending $250K on a retainer just so that a law firm will take your case puts you in financial peril, well, you have to choose your battles. They caused massive damage to us using such techniques.
Anyone who doesn't believe business is a bloody contact sport isn't in touch with reality. It can get brutally ugly. I have the scars to prove it.
This is all a race to the bottom and we're all going to be worse off for it. These subscription services started off innocuous enough by recycling old content, injecting life and cash into nearly dead (but good!) titles. And the subscriptions ate and ate and ate. And now they sign deals with studios before the game is even off the ground. Don't even get me started on all the acquisitions.
In the modern world of the internet, providing both a platform and a service ultimately stifles competition which ultimately harms consumers.
It's great that small studios are reaping the wild cash injections due to Game Pass, or PS+ or Apple's thing. It can be a life changing amount of funding. I'm happy for them. But it can't continue indefinitely without extinguishing the entire industry.
It's getting harder and more expensive to publish, whether bootstrapped or otherwise. And the publishers are rapidly conglomerating.
The early 21st century was ripe with rampant piracy and unbundling. And now we're practically worse than where we started. We own less, nothing is portable, we are slaves to the recurring subscription, and we must sell ourselves to the platform to put food on the table.
Companies paying for exclusives so customers will pay to access exclusives feels like bad economics. It's reduces the number of people something can be sold to. My best explanation is that it's developers and content creators selling potential upside in return for reducing their risk - Microsoft can diversify between multiple games.
I suppose it's a bit like advertising a platform that makes money via advertising, which hasn't collapsed yet.
I haven't bought a new game since 2021. At this point, I'm prepared to give up on video games completely. Once the multiplayer servers of the 2-3 games I still play[1] are shut down.
Now I'm growing my book collection instead. No subscriptions, DLC or microtransactions for those at least.
[1] Star Wars Battlefront II (2017), Ace Combat 7, and Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Technically, 150 years ago novels were actually born out of subscriptions - to the magazines and newspapers that would publish their serialised chapters, effectively funding production of a book at later stage.
"block fees" or "blocking rights"? You can't just rename "paid exclusives" and make it the new scary. Consoles have had this sort of thing since at least the original Nintendo Entertainment System was released in 1985.
So Microsoft should be allowed to buy out all independent game studios and make their games unavailable for playstation. But Sony is not allowed to pay independent studios to keep their games off Xbox.
Look I love Game Pass as much as anyone but it's a true act of cuntery for Microsoft to do things as heinous as making Elder Scrolls 6 a Microsoft platform exclusive and then cry foul when Sony does the same. "Cries out as he strikes you" indeed.
The article suggests that Microsoft is attempting to defend against a lawsuit by Sony attempting to block an acquisition here, in which Sony is suggesting it would be anticompetitive because it would make a popular franchise platform-exclusive. This doesn't look to me like Microsoft is "crying foul" at all - instead, they're "crying fair", arguing that they should be allowed to do it because Sony is doing something similar.
Isn’t it the other way around? Sony pushes hard for platform exclusivity and deals that work against Xbox and now Gamepass. It’s only natural that Microsoft will want to compete and get leverage.
Everyone has been doing this since forever. Halo was originally supposed to be released on MacOS (!!); then Microsoft bought up Bungie and made it an Xbox exclusive. Sony paid Call of Duty / Activision millions to get exclusive content (like maps, cosmetics, marketing, etc) on PlayStation; before Microsoft bought up Activision. Epic is infamous for their massive spend to gain exclusive distribution of PC games; in only one example, it was revealed that they paid ~$10M USD for one year of exclusive distribution of Control (the game's budget was only ~$36M USD, if that's any indication of how insane these deals are, but oftentimes they're structured in-part as a pre-payment of sales, not just a big free check).
All of this is shitty, but its like two pigs arguing who is more covered in mud.
Bungie used to make games for macOS. The predecessor Marathon Trilogy was originally released on macOS (and only Marathon 2 was ported to Windows). Halo was supposed to be originally released on macOS too, and then Microsoft bought the studio and turned it into an Xbox game, leaving all of the existing macOS userbase out in the cold.
Their purchase of Bungie also screwed up the IP rights to Oni. Wikipedia says that when Microsoft acquired Bungie, negotiations with Take-Two Interactive (which owned a share of Bungie) left Take-Two with the rights to Oni, and the sequel was eventually canceled. I don't have a citation on this but from what I understand, nobody is willing to touch Oni again (not even for an HD remake) because something about the IP rights is so messy that nobody wants to (or maybe nobody is even able to) untangle it. Which really sucks because it was a great game.
Right yeah, that's my mistake; it was showcased for release on both OSX and Windows at a MacWorld conference in the late 90s; Microsoft purchased Bungie in like 2000, and after that acquisition they added on an Xbox release.
Halo was an xbox exclusive for ages. I mean, not even available on Windows. They eventually released it for other platforms but it was years after and it felt dated and boring already.
Realistically, didn't most of this start when MS paid massive amounts for time exclusive DLC in the 360 era for some of the biggest games like Skyrim[0] or COD (5 years in a row)[1], or flat out exclusive content in GTA IV[2]? To me this seems like MS is crying that Sony stole their playbook and is doing it better. Granted either of them doing it is bad for consumers in general.
No, Sony has always had exclusive agreements with certain studios properties (and then purchased those studios later on) going back to the late 90s, before Microsoft ever entered the console market.
This sort of behaviour was well established in the industry.
I think Microsoft is claiming that Sony is paying for third parties not to go to Game pass, while Microsoft bought Bethesda, so now it will be first party.
The complaint is against paying 3rd parties though, not owning your own first party and doing it. I guess it would be like if Apple paid Uber, Whatsapp etc to only make their apps for the AppStore and not Android. I don't know if that's a good argument though because music streamers do it all the time.
I remember a small studio/individual developer who had their iOS update stuck in review hell after they publicized an Android port.
The app had been previously featured in the app store, and had no feature changes when the review process screetcyed to a halt. I'm hoping someone on HN remembers the details, but I'll try to Google and update this comment if I find the article. In the mean time, take it wirh a pinch of salt as I may be misremembering.
As a big PlayStation fanboy who pretty much hates Microsoft… Sony aren’t saints either. The stuff Microsoft attempted with the Xbox One being online only, Kinect only was really bad though
Should work just fine on Proton, previous-gen Creation Engine games worked fine with Wine and DXVK. A few games even have Linux-exclusive patches to prevent crashing on alt-tab, as well as a few performance improvements under the hood.
It really depends on much more locked down the engine will become with ES6. Fallout 4 was notoriously hard to mod for and the modding community suffered for it.
Of course modding difficulty doesn't translate directly to how well Proton will run it, but I fear it will make it difficult for it to be optimized.
“You see, your honor, it would foster more competition if we owned the developers/publishers outright and decided their distribution platforms unilaterally, instead of having to price our distribution platform to compete with other company’s exclusivity deals”
Legal slap fights aside, it’s interesting to hear about these “block fees” that target this specific subset of Microsoft’s platform. Since it isn’t involved in the big launch sales, and feels more common among smaller budget / indie games, it may be much cheaper for Sony to offer this deal to many prospective Games Pass games.
(Though the laissez-faire answer to Microsoft’s frustrations remains “well Microsoft’s publishing platform should pay more than a figment of Sony’s marketing budget if it’s actually a profitable/sustainable business unit”)
Shhh, don't point fingers at their anti-competitive acquisitions and mergers. It's clearly the people paying fair wages in a free market who are at fault. /s
Microsoft's list of faults would make this comment several megabytes. Sony is not without fault either: they're already selling a PlayStation with no game slot for a disk or cartridge, it's download only. They're killing the secondhand market, and probably the long-term availability of many titles, which in the future will not be playable (since they'll be lost), only watchable on YouTube.
In the game industry specifically though, Microsoft has many faults:
Microsoft made Halo an Xbox exclusive when people were waiting for it on PC, so how can they complain about anyone blocking anything? This wasn't the only time:
Halo 2 was a Windows 7 exclusive because they soft-locked it to some version of DirectX they wouldn't release on XP, and it took the pirates 5 minutes to make it work on XP, clearly that was artificial.
Microsoft promised that Rare's upcoming game Kameo would be on the Xbox, but they converted it to a 360 exclusive to try to drum up sales for 360.
They started charging people to use their own internet connections with Xbox live, so we all played on VLANs with the games on LAN mode, now every game company charges to play online.
Anyway, Microsoft is a terrible company, always has been, always will be.
They also invented Pluton, put ads in the start menu, blah. Don't give them money.
This push to move to subscription may ruin gaming as an artform, and the more these companies fight and fuck that up, the better. Hopefully if they bicker enough it'll ruin the whole concept of a subscription.
> Microsoft's list of faults would make this comment several megabytes. Sony is not without fault either: they're already selling a PlayStation with no game slot for a disk or cartridge, it's download only. They're killing the secondhand market, and probably the long-term availability of many titles, which in the future will not be playable (since they'll be lost), only watchable on YouTube.
You lost me here. The solution is to improve library portability and backwards compatibility, not clinging to increasingly-obsolete physical formats.
Imagine putting a cartridge in your phone for every app. Insanity.
It's more like "imagine having an SD card slot on a smartphone".
I can continue buying SD cards and putting them in my smartphone far after my smartphone vendor, OS vendor, or other developers stop supporting it. On an old enough digital-only console, there may or will be no way to use software that has been purchased for it. There are currently not ways to use software that could be purchased secondhand on consoles because there is no individual market or transfer option for it.
That's right, it wrecks future playability; it also kills any chance kids have of getting $5-10 secondhand games.
Game consoles used to mean plug and play instantly and it works every time, but now it means subscriptions and mandatory updates and installation processes and different hardware levels (pro, regular; series x, series s), it's become a bad deal.
So companies move to PC, and now every company has a "client" to try to walled-garden their own games (blizzard, epic, steam, ubisoft, whatever bethesda formerly had, microsoft store, etc).
Games should be games; not work, not con jobs, not contractual obligations.
I like phones with SD slots but I don't think that analogy fits very well. Those consoles still support USB drives for game archival, right? And having an SD card on your phone doesn't help you move apps around.
We need laws that fix the ability to resell digital-only games and programs and media. Whether or not storage is removable.
Edit: Just wanted to add that I wholeheartedly agree with your take on legal protection for consumer ownership rights.
The analogy isn't about backing up and exporting games you already own, it's about continuing the use of hardware you own beyond the vendor's support.
Sideloading APKs allows management of software independent of a vendor app store. Do USB drives for game archival allow you to install any game, whether or not you bought it from the console store?
You don't need an SD card to sideload though, which is why I don't think the comparison works very well. Both SD card and external drive mainly give you extra space but don't add other features.
I recommend that you read the article. Sony is trying to block the activision merger on grounds that Microsoft could block Sony from having access to Call of Duty on their platform. Microsoft is countering by submitting evidence that Sony actively employs the very same strategy of blocking games from being played on rival systems that they're claiming is anticompetitive, demonstrating the hypocrisy of their claim.
Sony needs to be broken up.
They are trying become a an ultra mega corp on anime, videogames, streaming, etc
Everything they touch goes to shit with censorship.
Nintendo is the only winner, and i suspect Apple in the coming years will be the only one competing with Nintendo, since Sony abandoned the handheld market, and Microsoft has no interests in the mobile market
GamePass is the bastardisation of gaming, that'll end up killing gaming as we know it, and the Xbox brand, it is not even profitable for game studios, it's just an attempt for Microsoft to pump a meaningless number, and it doesn't even help their earning reports
EU is moving to force Apple/Google to open up their ecosystem for 3rd party stores, Sony/Microsoft have 0 presence there, if steam doesn't try, then it's game over for all 3 of them
I suspect in the mid-long term, Apple, Google, Epic will be the 3 main actors of the gaming industry
Microsoft will give up and focus on their cloud gaming infrastructure
Looking at console and game sales, it is clear that Microsoft is not a strong gaming brand; even when their competitors are struggling with supply chain issues, they fail to capitalize on that
https://www.vgchartz.com/ a great website to gain some precious knowledge about their individual performance
> I suspect in the mid-long term, Apple, Google, Epic will be the 3 main actors of the gaming industry
- Apple - the perennial "also-ran" name in gaming fundamentally don't get gaming. Never had, never will.
- Google - Stadia will die within the next 2 years. Wager my house on that.
- Epic - Yeah they will be around.
I don't want to sound offensive but you sound like you know close to nothing about the game industry. You've not even mentioned Valve and you discount the fact that Microsoft have bought up multiple huge gaming studios in the past few years - deals worth multiple billions. Anyone with even a brief interest in the market would likely find your prediction nothing short of delusional.
I did mention Valve (well.. Steam, but it's the same)
Valve have 0 presence on mobile
The mobile gaming market is growing, while the PC market is on the decline [1]
And as i said, the EU is making moves to force both Apple/Google to open up their ecosystem for more stores
Epic has a presence with Fortnite and is known with their fights against Google/Apple
Smartphones are getting more and more powerful and are able to play demanding games (Genshin Impact, and recently Diablo Immortal)
We see more and more games that released both on mobile and desktop at the same time (Tower Fantasy is the latest one), but also indie titles that you see on Steam (Dead Cells for example)
> and you discount the fact that Microsoft have bought up multiple huge gaming studios in the past few years - deals worth multiple billions
They bought Desktop/Console studios, that market is on the decline, so it is not a smart investment for them
If they make games for both desktop/mobile, then yeah i'd agree with you, but that's not the case
There is still some hope they change that with Activision purchase
It's like with demography, the effect will be seen in the mid-long term
You are thinking about games the way Apple and Meta think about games - purely about the $$$.
It's this exact reason why they can't crack the market despite a large number of attempts.
"Cracking the market" for an art form like video-games isn't a matter of revenue, think of it more like tv, film or books.
The best games are made by the most talented developers, alongside the best game designers and directors targeting the most powerful consoles. These are the factors of making the best experience you can make in the video-game world.
You can't - I'd wager won't ever - find something like the Last of Us on a mobile, yet anyone who knows anything about gaming knows that is a game that will sell millions of consoles.
You play crap games on your phone for 5 minutes at a time because you can, but you go out and buy a console because you want to be immersed in the latest the art form has to offer because you want to.
A simple framing question; do you want to watch the new Top Gun on your 5 inch screen iPhone screen?
> Mobile gaming proves to be a gold mine as it racked in more money in 2021 than PC and console gaming combined
Mobile games are timewasters filled with microtransactions for every little thing. (Don't want to wait a week for this task to complete? $5 makes it happen in seconds.) Having one platform out-earn another doesn't mean the others are dying. PC gaming was dying/dead 15 years ago, but it didn't go anywhere.
The Steam Deck-- at least among PC gamers-- is an extremely attractive option over Nintendo. Bring your existing game library with you, play much more demanding games, benefit from deep discounts on PC games that almost never make it to Nintendo versions.
I bought a switch to play portable versions of PC indie games but since I got the Deck I haven't touched it.
Production of units has picked up so the order bottleneck is easing up, which is part for the course with Nintendo as well: I couldn't find on OLED model anywhere for months & months after it's release for my kid.
The downside of course is significant bulk. Battery is less of an issue, despite what some people say. If I'm playing a demanding game away from a power source I just tweak the power settings, sometimes lower the resolution and let FSR (which works great) help improve the visuals, and getting 2-3 hours on even the most demanding games is then not an issue. 4-5 hours on less demanding games. And carry a battery pack that will supply an extra charge. But yeah, definitely it doesn't work so well if you have to have something that will fit in a pocket.
I think you're right that Game Pass is a terrible idea.
It reminds me of what happened to cable TV. Back in the 1980s cable channels all had definite brands to uphold. The cable bundle meant, however, that you had to take them all or leave them all. You couldn't pick your favorite news channel, you had to get all of them. Like the Discovery Channel? You pay for the Hallmark Channel.
Cable channels thus don't have any motivation to be any good. They get paid whether or not you like them, whether or not you watch them. So why bother?
The cable industry "thrived" for many years by simply jacking up the price, something that people tolerated for a while but each time they increase the price they lose a few subscribers, every time there is a funeral a cable TV subscriber is gone and they don't get replaced by anyone new.
It irks me that young people who didn't live through this think anything is going to be different with GAME PASS. Each time I see that logo on my Xbox it makes my blood boil -- I am thinking about getting rid of it since it doesn't play music well, doesn't play HEVC videos at all, and there aren't that many games I want to play on it. I still keep it though because it plays Blu-Ray.
You pay a monthly subscription fee in order to watch your Blu-Ray movies? You know you can pickup a used Blu-Ray player at goodwill and friends for like $20?
I don't pay a subscription to watch Blu-Ray movies, it is just Microsoft advertises GAME PASS so hard it's like they are trying to shove that logo up my nostrils. (Microsoft has a long history of killing products by selling them too hard; for instance everybody thinks that "OneNote has to be awful because Microsoft shoved three links to OneNote in the taskbar" whereas if you'd actually tried OneNote you might have liked it.)
For a while my main use for the XBox has been as a media client for Jellyfin but it's pretty annoying because it doesn't play HEVC files. Microsoft changed something about its music player and it doesn't work with Jellyfin anymore.
I haven't played games on the XBox for a while. It's not like I might not play games on it again but I still have a Nintendo 3DS, Steam, both of which have a considerable backlog for me.
This doesn't make any sense. Almost all major games available on gamepass are still available for purchase the normal way. You could just buy the game normally.
Well except advertising dollars did flow to viewer eyeballs, and it’s cable advertising, not subscription fees, that came to dominate the revenue model.
> Nintendo is the only winner, and i suspect Apple in the coming years will be the only one competing with Nintendo, since Sony abandoned the handheld market, and Microsoft has no interests in the mobile market
Valve? MS will compete that way indirectly. I snagged a SteamDeck - I haven't played games this much in a long time. Since getting it I've played through a bunch of triple A games (God of War, replayed the mass effect trilogy, etc), and a whole host of Nintendo exclusives via emulation.
The fact that Nintendo lawyers are working overtime taking down youtube SteamDeck videos that barely even mention emulation feels like an admission that they know the steamdeck is a threat. They sure didn't seem to work as hard to take down videos showing emulation for other platforms like the Aya Neo.
The mobile market is growing at an insane pace while the desktop gaming is in the down side (including console)
Valve have 0 presence on the mobile market, Steam Deck is an attempt, but it still is desktop titles
They made a mistake imo by going with X86 CPUs, they should have went with ARM and a translation layer for X86 (hw accelerated)
This way they could support Android ecosystem natively, release their store on Android, and start to publish/sell android games as well as universal mobile/desktop titles
That's why i mention Epic, i suspect that'll be their plan, they'll become a store on Android (probably also iOS) and publish premium mobile games
> The fact that Nintendo lawyers are working overtime taking down youtube SteamDeck videos that barely even mention emulation feels like an admission that they know the steamdeck is a threat
Nintendo has strong IPs, they will sell no matter what, wich gives them a strong advantage at selling a lot of devices consistently, every generations
"Sony's desire to impede such growth has prevented Microsoft from expanding Game Pass. To stop content creators from adding to Game Pass and other rival subscription services, Sony pays for 'blocking rights.'"
"These kinds of platform agreements are common in the games industry, and in documents made public as part of the Epic vs. Apple lawsuit last year, PlayStation was even mentioned as blocking the appearance of third-party games on Game Pass."
How are "blocking rights" legal?
Don't they violate anti-trust / competition laws?
Yes, they do violate antitrust. But there are two problems with enforcement:
1. The arrangement in question relates to trade of copyrighted works; which means that any antitrust lawsuit has to jump over the hurdle of not restraining the copyright monopoly. Separability of copyright and exclusive licensing are also considered to be well-established components of the copyright monopoly.
2. The consumer welfare standard is so high a bar to antitrust enforcement that a lot of clearly illegal behavior is never prosecuted.
That last one deserves more explanation. In the 1980s a bunch of federal judges decided to repeal US antitrust law from the bench. They argued - with scant evidence - that antitrust action had to prove that consumers were harmed by monopolistic action. This is the exact same argument Apple and console vendors use to justify locking down their products; that it actually benefits consumers to have to buy their software from sources authorized by the hardware manufacturer.
In practice, there is no monopoly that does not improve consumer welfare. Monopolies are the most stable business arrangement and can bully the rest of the economy into doing what the customer wants. The whole point of antitrust is that we don't want to live under privately-owned government, not that avocados could be 2 cents cheaper.
Are they really a violation of antitrust? They're not really different from exclusive supplier relationships or exclusivity deals in other industries.
As you point out, it's pretty accepted in the copyright industry to have exclusivity deals. If I want to get Katy Perry's album, then I buy the Capitol records one, I can't get it from Sony. Or I can only stream on services where that artist is available, so if it's not on Tidal, then tough luck for users of that service.
Exclusivity and Blocking is not the same. Paying you to put the content only on my platform isn’t nearly as anti trust as paying you to not put your content on a specific platform
Excluding only one is a more minor restrain of trade than excluding all others? I can't agree, though I admit that excluding one looks nastier if only 'cause it's novel. Logically and economically, re competition, blocking seems less nasty, even if targeted.
But that doesn't mean the courts will side with me and not you. Strict logical coherence isn't always adhered to. It's even been called "the hobgoblin of little minds" - so perhaps Emerson would take your side on this.
Imagine you own a mattress store. There is another rival mattress store in your city, and you both compete for customers.
You don't make the mattresses yourselves, you purchase from a manufacturer and sell in your storefront. There are only a few different mattress manufacturers.
Your rival, instead of adjusting prices or organizing better marketing, simply plays the manufacturers not to sell to your store for six months.
Unless you can rapidly find a brand new source of mattresses or have a very healthy rainy day fund, you will likely go under fairly quickly after selling your remaining stock.
This leaves only one store in town, and they can set the price to whatever they want. Now that they are the only established incumbent they can easily recreate this scenario with any new mattress stores that want to open in your city.
Now the people of your city have only one store for mattresses, and have to pay whatever is asked for. This is not because the business did anything especially well to win more customers, or because you did anything wrong. They simply destroyed the competition through anti-competitive behavior and have negatively affected everyone else in your area.
This is why it is illegal.
We agree on all this. But my point is, to make the whole world trek to just your store is not better for competition than to make just those in your city come to your store, logically.
As well, although this may not contradict what you intended to say: patents, for example, precisely grant "the right to exclude." Exclusive territories are a frequent way to do this. So in that case, it isn't necessarily illegal.
Surely they aren't foolish enough to explicitly say in the contract they can't bring the game to Microsoft's platforms? It would just say "no alternate platforms allowed between the dates of ..." or similar?
That would be an exclusivity clause.
Music is a little different because you don’t need proprietary hardware in order to listen to music. Everything plays an MP3. A CD is a CD and all CD players play CD’s.
With console video games, you can’t just pop the game disc into any disc tray that plays games. You can’t run your downloaded Xbox game on the PlayStation. The thing you licensed (since we don’t own them technically) is tied to proprietary hardware.
Imagine if you had to own a Mac in order to listen to your music you bought on iTunes/Apple Music
Microsoft tried that with Zune.[1] It was unpopular.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/support-for-rights...
Man I remember that. Great device if you wanted to tinker, terrible music store.
Both of those formats require(d) licensing didn't they?
Not from the consumer, just the manufacturers. As a consumer you bought a piece of hardware that could read the format and it worked across-the-board. With Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, you buy the game and not only is it linked to the format, but it’s actually linked to their proprietary hardware. You can’t buy an Xbox game, which is exactly the same as the PlayStation version, and play it on the PlayStation. But I can buy a song online on my Mac and play it on VLC on a Windows machine.
Imagine if any music I buy on bandcamp could only be played via a bandcamp app or software on bandcamp’s proprietary hardware.
Or buying Activision/Blizzard or Bethesda. Game pass is bad news for the industry at large. The price floor will drop and quality will suffer.
Sure, its great for 'consumers', but it won't be long term. Will Xbox require mandatory three year game pass or onstar when you buy it? Would that be an antitrust violation?
I wonder if it is good for consumers though. Everyone I know that has it seems to just dabble puddle deep in game after game now and lose interest. Each person has a very expensive Xbox that they don’t play now. Maybe there is something to purchasing a game that makes you assign it worth. For me, the joy of games is getting deep into them, learning everything about them and finishing them. I have 500 hours in Elden Ring haha. I wonder if the fact that a game is almost free makes people subconsciously think it is worthless.
It's the paradox of choice. The more options you have, the less satisfied you are with any of them, or overall in general.
This breaks down for music because of mandatory licensing
So, this is a fair take, but also, the actual statute that drives antitrust law right now is still insane, and that has enabled lots of unnecessary judge-made interpretation.
The sherman act starts by saying "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal. "
Couple things:
1. Because it's a federal statute, it has to be within congress's powers, which is why it only applies to interstate trade/commerce, rather than purely intrastate.
2. All contracts are a restraint of trade of some form. So this was a bad codification of common law.
This immediately led to judges adding words (IE finding only contracts that "unduly" restrain trade are void).
It has only gotten worse in the past century.
So when you say "in the 80's they decided to repeal it from the bench", this is right, but it would also be fair to say "judges were forced to try to interpret this thing for a century because it was badly written, and some eventually decided the earlier interpretations were wrong".
Congress could have fixed all this at any point.
> All contracts are a restraint of trade of some form.
I don't follow... how is this true? "I will give you X and you will give me Y" is a contract right? What is it restraining either party from doing?
If I buy all of object X, no object X can be sold in Montana.
Giving X to someone else who offers me more for it.
That seems... wrong? Say Google offers you 2 TB of storage space for 1 year for $100. You're saying that's preventing you from simultaneously paying Microsoft $100 for > 2 TB of storage storage? Or that that's preventing Google from giving someone else 2 TB of storage space for > $100? What exactly prevents both parties from doing this with multiple counterparties?
If you have lots of X, sure. But instead of something incredibly fungible like storage space, suppose I had instead agreed to sell you the Empire State building.
I thought the claim was "all contracts are a restraint", not "there exists a contract that is a restraint"?
> Yes, they do violate antitrust.
This is incorrect. They may violate anti-trust but usually don't.
exclusive contracts between manufacturers and suppliers, or between manufacturers and dealers, are generally lawful because they improve competition among the brands of different manufacturers
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
IANAL: Love the comment, 'twas the (US) judges with the butterknife in the belfry that done the deed, it really was. And yes, in the Apple ebookprice case it was firmly established that publishers with legit monopoly (copyright) rights could, nonetheless, not collude (cooperate) with a vendor re their individual rights, through a third party. I presume this also applies to collusion with each other, too.
So, as a copyright holder you have the "right to exclude" granted by law - but not to coordinate with other rights holders to distort the market when exercising that right.
"Blocking rights" or "negative options" would therefore seem to be illegal, in line with this decision. [Edit: no wait; there's no coordinate between more than two parties here, as there was with Apple negotiating with all copyright holders at once to coordinate a higher price. Changed my mind]
The judicial idea that suddenly took hold forty years ago (after the xerox prosecution that killed xerox dead in the seventies) that consumers have to be harmed immediately not merely by reducing competition which would harm them in time, was very "motivated thinking" in my view. Japan was soaring, so suddenly our monopolists might be thugs but they were our thugs.
BTW, the historical rubric for such law is "restraint of trade." This was common law in Britain and its colonies long before the Sherman Act (which reduced the penalies for it and at least reduced the chance of tort remedies. Sherman's brother - a general - was also a civic railway executive.)
> In practice, there is no monopoly that does not improve consumer welfare.
What? How do monopolies help the consumer?
by acting as a collective mechanism to pursue interests of individual consumers. Trivial example, Apple shutting down Facebook's ad tracking, which is almost certainly an interest of Apple users they could not individually pursue.
In fact the government is nothing else but a very large version of this, a big monopolist who solves a collective action problem.
But a monopolist could do anything they want, and often do, that is not in the benefit of the consumer. For example, Standard Oil. Or Microsoft bundling a browser and killing Netscape. Or even Apple, that now is looking into running their own ad business after killing their competitors. Some of these may look good for consumers in the short term, but make no mistake, monopolies are not good for consumers.
they can't do anything they want because they still face the risk of replacement. Monopolistic competition is the dominant form of activity in innovative economies, temporarily outsized profits scale enable innovation and long term planning. (which benefits consumers)
MySpace in 2007 had 80% of social network traffic, turns out it could not do what it wanted. Advanced tech economies generally consist of monopolists replacing each other, not bazaar economies.
MySpace isn't a good example because it was early in a growing and changing space. Better example are Windows, duopoly of iOS and Android.
It may still be possible to beat a monopoly by being extremely good and aggressive right on time when your competitor is napping. e.g. Firefox and Chrome vs IE. If IE team hadn't been dismantled and added tabs and other UI features, worked on performance and security improvement, we may have been using IE 25.
> they can't do anything they want because they still face the risk of replacement
Less risk than if they weren't monopolies, which is the entire point.
> they can't do anything they want because they still face the risk of replacement
Not necessarily, especially if the switching cost is too high. For example, if Microsoft does something monopolistic, which they had done, people aren't going to switch to Linux. Therefore the government had to step in.
Except there is no guarantee they use that collective power for the customer's benefit. See: basically any actual monopoly (Apply isn't), including power and internet monopolies.
Aaaaand that's the reason why monopoly law actually exists. There's no democratic control over corporations so they should not wield power like governments do.
Shareholder democracy does not count.
I gonna disagree with everybody, by agreeing with everybody: Rockefeller's Standard Oil benefited consumers by providing much safer oil at a higher price; the previous race to the bottom delivered low prices - too low, only highly volatile fuel with an unpredictable mix could be produced for such low prices. But Standard Oil also harmed consumers with high prices, particularly over time, compared to government oversight; say by regulation or cerification of refinerys. So it was broken up, eventually.
I would cede "there is no monopoly that can't be argued to improve consumer welfare in some way (even if it's actually terrible for consumers)"
In the videogames industry, it’s fundamentally the same category of competition (or stifling thereof) as an acquisition.
When Sony or Microsoft acquire game studios or publishers, both the goal and method is the same - giving their platform an advantage by paying a lump sum for control over the target platforms and storefronts of one or more games.
So it’s presumably also a case-by-case thing, like other big acquisitions / cumulative patterns of acquisitions.
So far, the industry seems to be “healthy enough” in spite of these sorts of deals. The big storefront/console competitors that are attacking each other are all huge and evenly matched, so none of them can exert this sort of control over anywhere near a majority of the market.
>How are "blocking rights" legal? Don't they violate anti-trust / competition laws?
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like it. It's not uncommon in the pharmaceutical industry either: When a drug patent expires the company will sometimes pay generic manufacturers to not manufacture the drug for a period of time.
> When a drug patent expires the company will sometimes pay generic manufacturers to not manufacture the drug for a period of time.
Which seems like a clear and direct consumer harm. So isn't that illegal, even under the strictest definition?
Yes, they often are found illegal by courts:
>Since 2001, the FTC has filed a number of lawsuits to stop these deals, and it supports legislation to end such “pay-for-delay” settlements.[1]
The FTC lists 4 cases since 2019, but there seems to have been a bunch more prior to 2019 that only have press releases[2]
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforceme...
[2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/terms/935
Welcome to reality: many corporations break a lot of laws, few are prosecuted.
Actually lots are prosecuted: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/terms/935?pag...
> Don't they violate anti-trust / competition laws?
You can't say "yes" or "no" to this question.
Exclusive deals do not automatically violate anti-trust / competition laws. If one of the companies involved has been found to have a monopoly then it is more likely they will.
From the Justice Dept on the Sherman Act:
Exclusive dealing is frequently pro-competitive, as when it enables manufacturers and retailers to overcome free-rider issues misaligning the incentives for these vertically-related firms to satisfy the demands of consumers most efficiently. For example, a manufacturer may be unwilling to train its distributors optimally if distributors can take that training and use it to sell products of the manufacturer's rivals. Other benefits can occur as well, as when an exclusivity arrangement assures a customer of a steady stream of a necessary input.
But exclusive dealing also can be anticompetitive in some circumstances. For example, exclusive dealing may allow one manufacturer, in effect, to monopolize efficient distribution services and thereby prevent its rivals from competing effectively.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopol...
The FTC says this:
As discussed in the Fact Sheets on Dealings in the Supply Chain, exclusive contracts between manufacturers and suppliers, or between manufacturers and dealers, are generally lawful because they improve competition among the brands of different manufacturers (interbrand competition). However, when the firm using exclusive contracts is a monopolist, the focus shifts to whether those contracts impede efforts of new firms to break into the market or of smaller existing firms to expand their presence. The monopolist might try to impede the entry or expansion of new competitors because that competition would erode its market position. The antitrust laws condemn certain actions of a monopolist that keep rivals out of the market or prevent new products from reaching consumers.
Sony has never been found to have a monopoly on gaming (and no a "monopoly on Playstation gaming is not the same thing").
Monopolist does not mean actual monopoly though. Also from the FTC:
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Indeed, the relevant term-in-law is "market power."
Yes, this is true.
I this Microsoft is going to struggle to persuade courts that Sony has the market power to exclude them from the computer gaming market though.
I don't think it is per se. Exclusive dealing is a common practice in many sectors.
Circumstances can make it illegal, however.
Amazon does it for their K&P / Kindle Unlimited offering to authors. If you want your book to be available in this program (and you do want it because it accounts for a huge chunk of your income on Amazon, depending on genre) you need to agree to not have your book be available anywhere else. Not on Apple, not in Barnes and Noble, nowhere.
This is strictly illegal, but as in so many other cases in which Amazon has used its market power to that extend market power (that's the illegal part); they've never been prosecuted. Merely preventing authors from offering their ebooks at a low price (but still far higher than the cost of delivery) is strictly illegal (given that the kindle has immense ebook market power.) But Amazon does it. Welcome to Bezos-World.
I think the exclusivity only applies to the eBook versions. I know Will Wight is able to sell hardcover copies of his books on Kickstarter, but mentioned he couldn't give eBook versions because of his Kindle Unlimited deal.
Assuming Sony is paying the publisher some fairly negotiated compensation for what they’d have otherwise project earning from GamePass presence, what’s the anti-competitive element?
Just that the game is available through some channels and not others? Because that’s normal in retail. There are exclusivity deals everywhere.
Or is there some reason to believe Sony is somehow pressuring publishers to take an unfair deal? It’s possible, but I haven’t read about that yet.
I don't see a problem with Sony (or MS/Nintendo/Apple/etc) paying game developers to keep their games exclusive to a platform. Game creators make decisions on where to put their games and how to monetize.
Epic Games is notorious for giving "free games" where consumers get the game for free, but EG is paying the publisher/developer behind the scenes. So the game creators are getting paid.
Probably, but do laws actually matter in white-collar America? As long as the right groups get the right cut, the system will continue.
Yes, laws do matter. Were it otherwise civil courts would have lots of free time. The legal system isn't known for being the corruption oasis that movies make it out to be.
> Were it otherwise civil courts would have lots of free time.
Laws don't have to matter for you to waste a court's time. In fact dragging out court cases is a common legal tactic.
> The legal system isn't known for being the corruption oasis that movies make it out to be.
Your experience differs from mine. It also differs from most lawyers I know. Lawyers aren't famous for drinking heavily because they think they're making the world a better place.
Why do you think the court system works? What country do you live in?
> How are "blocking rights" legal?
Probably aren't. Gamedev is the wild west of software.
Not really. Contracts and agreements are a big thing for valuable IPs.
At least Microsoft has good grace to buy the entire studio...
Exactly! I find if funny that Microsoft is complaining about Sony buying "blocking rights" when Microsoft is doing effectively the same thing. It just costs them more money.
I’d much prefer Microsoft buying a studio right now than Sony. When Sony buys a studio, I’m required to buy a $500 box and pay $70 to play future games from them.
Microsoft lets me play it on PC or stream it for $10 or $15 a month. The lower barrier to entry has let me try out and discover a bunch of new titles I actually enjoy.
Someone with a PlayStation but not a PC would probably prefer Sony to buy the studio.
Only because the PlayStation is artificially locked down. There is no technical reason why the PlayStation (or XBOX) can't "dual boot" as a full blown PC into Windows, or Linux (it could run SteamOS like the Steam Deck)
Different strokes for different folks.
The console experience is still much easier. My Xbox Series S controller won't even sync to my PC right now.
I even brought the USB controller adapter since Bluetooth wasn't working. I have to find my old Xbox One controller.
On my PS4 I turn the controller on. Select the game, I'm done
It just works.
I prefer PC gaming , but lately I just want to chill on my coach, playing Crash 4.
I guess it's possible via unholy levels of customization to get a PC to wake on input via gamepad. And then open a GUI with full gamepad support.
* BUT STEAM DECK*
Great, PC gaming without Gamepass or official support for anything not on Steam.
A quick search indicates this not to be true. Playstations are just hardware you can't fix yourself when they break.
For example: https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/how-to-fix-bricking-on-ps5-17...
That's not what we're talking about . I'm taking about UX.
You said "the console experience". Surely that covers all aspects of using a console, not just the ones you find satisfying?
What are we even talking about here?
How about Macs , you can't really do anything to fix a MacBook Air if it just doesn't want to turn on the next day.
Same thing with gaming laptops. Do we really need to have a true Scotsman argument, is real PC gaming only done on a tower desktop PC that you built yourself. And for the HN crowd of course this needs to be running a customized installation of Arch Linux.
Yeah, but this is the reason why PlayStation is the most popular console.
Console gaming is more popular than PC gaming.
Since Sony is known for having high quality exclusives more people are going to buy a PlayStation than an Xbox because they don't want to miss out on possible exclusive.
This is literally the reason why you are seeing Microsoft buying up some of the most loved game franchises like Skyrim and making them Xbox/Windows exclusives.
It's costing them massive amounts of money compared to what Sony has spent on buying some of the best game studios in the world.
I wouldn't. Sony has a track record of fostering creative excellence with their studio purchases. Microsoft can barely get their studios to release anything within a reasonable timeframe, and most releases tend to be good-but-not-great. Something about the Redmond management just doesn't deliver here despite the exorbitant budgets.
Of course, my perspective is a bit different because I own both consoles.
Sony has been doing PC releases recently of many former exclusives from studios they own, like with Horizon: Zero Dawn and God of War.
That comes with 3+ year delay, which is definitely a bummer.
Plus a full price tag
You know Sony has also been purchasing studios left right and centre for… well, literally forever? And each one of their exclusive games from other studios has money behind the scenes to convince them too? Microsoft absolutely does the same shit, of course. None of these companies are our friends lol
The entire publisher even.
"Sony's desire to impede such growth has prevented Microsoft from expanding Game Pass. To stop content creators from adding to Game Pass and other rival subscription services, Sony pays for 'blocking rights.'"
Or: Sony pays a part of the development-cost for the right to be involved on how/where the final product goes on sale.
Without further evidence from Microsoft to back this malicious framing of the matter, this sounds very reasonable to me.
Exclusivity is the big sticking point. I have a first hand contact who was offered funds during game development by Microsoft to be on Xbox on day one. Not to be exclusive to Xbox, but just to avoid exclusivity deals which would preclude a day one Xbox launch.
I'd far rather see that model of investment than one which says "I give you money, I decide where you can't sell your game."
Sounds good, but Microsoft is also just buying up studios to make them exclusive instead.
I have more problem with Epic doing exclusives via payments for games that are already released.
I'm not saying it can't possibly happen, but what games have been Xbox exclusives since their studios were bought by MS?
Microsoft's repeated acquisition of big development studios is the real problem. They're the ones actually behaving like a monopoly.
It's painful to think of how much they own these days, weird they haven't faced Meta level anti-trust yet despite being way more of a monopoly imo.
>It's painful to think of how much they own these days, weird they haven't faced Meta level anti-trust yet despite being way more of a monopoly imo.
Because Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on Gaming.
Nintendo and Sony hold huge shares. Steam owns a large percentage of games sales on PCs.
And iOS and Android gaming combined are bigger than PC and console gaming.
Other businesses besides gaming, I don't know. I know Microsoft does not have a monopoly on gaming.
However, I do think that them buying up large game studios will ultimately be bad for consumers. They're swinging money left and right to try to become a monopoly.
Maybe it's just me but I don't remember ever seeing lawmakers and politics perceiving gaming as a serious economy like other forms of entertainment.
It seems it's still all fun and games made by individuals in some basement.
Until the content of a specific game is offending someone, then it's suddenly a political issue until that one game is gone.
Would be good to have a serious political discussion not only about the dopamine machine social media, but also about the millions of "cow clicker" games and how also those may impact on youth and the nation as a whole...
It's not just gaming, entertainment in general. I hope no other industries would have been allowed to consolidate, vertically and horizontally, as much. Having a very limited number of content producers that also handle their exclusive distribution (and in the case of gaming, exclusive hardware) isn't great for the consumer.
well, they're making a shortcut to produce in-house content like Nintendo and Sony does.
Instead of discovering talented studios, (more or less) carefully curate and support them until the eventual point of acquisition (like Sony does IMO), or focusing on finding talented individuals to scale your in-house R&D (like Nintendo does IMO), Microsoft's strategy is to buy entire machines which create games proven to be commercially successful.
The downside to this is that those large studios Microsoft buys are currently complementing the in-house portfolio of all console-makers.
If those studios at one point stop serving all platforms for some strategic reasons of their parent company, many of the games they offer today might not be economic anymore and would end up not being developed.
I wonder how such a move would impact the variety of games available today...
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
where are the glibc/linux native builds of the games from the studios microsoft owns?
Linux builds are nice, but they are a ton of work. It basically doubles the workload testing for PC, which is already complex due to the thousands of hardware configurations out there. It's one of a few reasons why Nvidia GeForce Now has more games than Google Stadia - Stadia requires porting the game to Linux (and they are an "easier" target since devs only have to support Google's hardware configurations). Valve gave up on convincing studios to port their games to Linux and just forked Wine to make Proton.
> It basically doubles the workload testing for PC, which is already complex due to the thousands of hardware configurations out there.
This is only true if your engine is abstracting nothing away and there wasn't any common denominator in APIs across systems.
Given that neither is the case for popular game engines, the statement is wrong. You also don't have to test gameplay related things on both systems, only technical aspects, and only a small subset of them.
Proton is very good.
The current reality is that it really does increase the testing surface area by a substantial amount. Even if it's only +10-20%, the addressable market on Linux is nowhere near that size, so it is really difficult to make a good business case for supporting Linux natively. Large studios could certainly do it, though it'd basically be getting "subsidized" by other target platforms; small studios though, not so much, the math just simply doesn't make sense currently.
The engine abstractions only do so much for you - at the end of the day, it's another thing you have to test and provide support for, with the latter being the most troublesome and resource-intensive, in my experience.
At the same time though, building a game that is easy to port is good engineering in the first place. Even if you only release on mainstream platforms, writing platform-agnostic code can save you so many headaches down the line when you want to release on console/mobile etc.
You're not wrong and I generally agree. In my experience, the issue that comes into play most often is performance optimization. Usually "generic" optimization (read: CPU side) is fine and testing the game on other target platforms (not just Linux) is often beneficial and commonly brings about changes that have positive impacts for the game across platforms.
Where it rapidly can get dicey is optimizations related to rendering, and that's also commonly a massive "unknown" up-front. This includes "GPU" optimization itself (ie shading) and also optimizing for CPU=>GPU pipeline/bandwidth -- both of which are difficult to abstract and/or the abstractions that exist tend to leak a lot.
The latter is the area where I've personally experienced the most pain and those situations are often full of unknowns & full days of developer time spent working on/debugging platform-specific issues from an actual Linux test machine. Having to devote full days of developer time to Linux-specific GPU-related debugging is painful -- specifically because it rarely generalizes or improves experience on other platforms. For a small/indie team, it's extremely expensive because of the big "unknowns" that exist (ie lack of familiarity & uncertainty of outcome, etc), and especially because of the opportunity cost/the time spent is likely to benefit <2% of customers, at best, which is a very difficult pill to swallow unless you've got a really big pie to begin with!
I'll end the same way that I began: Proton very good, great even! =D
This is completely wrong and doing the bare minimum of research will show you the nightmare native linux support has been for some games
The most high profile case I recall is Rust, but there've been others
I have been playing games on native glibc/linux for a decade, and unfortunately I have to agree. But the main culprits are not who we think they are. With my system development skills, I did peak deep into this issue.
There is no ABI stability, except linux kernel syscalls and the alsa-lib (for how long?), on glibc/linux based OS.
And we are talking really short time frames. For instance with glibc gnu symbol versioning, game binaries compiled on a recent glibc will break all distros older than 1 year and a half. Game devs must be careful to compile against a VERY old glibc (like a decade?), what a pain. It is not that dark: cross-platform 3D engine devs are aware about this and are carefull about this (usually).
Game binaries are also destroyed by the accutely toxic c++/libgcc_s ABIs (did happen again very recently). Hopefully, compilers have -static-libgcc and -static-libstdc++ options, but it does solve only partially the issue. Many games are using c++ (I have an extremely negative opinion about this language), and the static libstdc++ is not libdl-ing any of its dependencies from the system, then those dependencies end up in the static loading list of the ELF binaries... often with nasty gnu symbol versions. To fix properly this, it would require a fork of gcc(clang?) static libstdc++ which does have a libdl mode, namely does libdl everything from the system.
To say the least, the main culprits are... gcc and glibc devs (IBM? MIT?). It is so accute, I started to think conspiracy: microsoft pulling the strings in the shadows, or those devs trying to blackmail valve/game studios with planned obsolescence (are laws already setup against this type of accutely toxic scam?).
Since the game binaries should libdl everything from the system, they must be simple and pure ELF64 binaries. Namely, using a minimal set of relocation types, no c/c++ main(), and have to manage system TLS variables (for instance errno) with the sysv ABI __tls_get_addr() (this may require a bit of ELF header parsing... if there is an clean ABI way to reach the ones from the libdl-ed ones).
Game binaries would statically load only libdl (not even libc) to dynamically load the video game core libs: xcb libs, libxkbcommon(wayland/x11), wayland code is static into the binaries, libasound (pulseaudio/pipewire/jack/etc are hidden behind the alsa-lib API), libgl, vulkan, and even the libc if requiring anything from it (name resolution?).
About 3D programing, vulkan would have to be used very conservatively, nothing fancy.
proton is a massive amount of literaly and fairly, garbage, software, microsoft grade. It is a money sink hole for valve, not to mention if I recall properly, it does include straight copies of closed source windoz components, that to make things even worse. I manage to build a lean wine win64/vulkan/dx12->vulkan(at least avoid that thing which is dxvk) with a C compiler, but I know that nearly no doz game will content themselve from that to actually run.
A recompile doesn't mean it works. You have to test the result.
Proton (and SteamOS) are the bootstraps that will lift native Linux gaming ever higher.
Yes, I've metaphorically had my face stepped on over and over for this thought, but I do see some winds of change blowing.
Steam Deck is an inflection point.
A lot of double fine games are on Linux. Hopefully Linux support continues for games funded post MS purchase.
https://www.doublefine.com/news/mac-and-linux-baby
A couple of decades ago I was in a business that competed directly with one of Sony's divisions (not gaming). Our products were doing extremely well. It's the old story of a small, underfunded, highly motivated team being able to run circles around a large competitor with lots of inertia and, shall we say, more bodies and less talent.
Anyhow, one day I got word from one of our partner companies that they were witness to Sony making an arrangement with a major reseller in that industry segment to not feature our products at the most important tradeshows in the industry in exchange for discounts and other compensation. They must have done that with multiple vendors because that year we went from being featured in dozens of booths to almost not having any product on the show floor.
I was absolutely incensed. The problem is, when you have asymmetry of financial and legal power of that magnitude the laws almost don't matter. When spending $250K on a retainer just so that a law firm will take your case puts you in financial peril, well, you have to choose your battles. They caused massive damage to us using such techniques.
Anyone who doesn't believe business is a bloody contact sport isn't in touch with reality. It can get brutally ugly. I have the scars to prove it.
This is all a race to the bottom and we're all going to be worse off for it. These subscription services started off innocuous enough by recycling old content, injecting life and cash into nearly dead (but good!) titles. And the subscriptions ate and ate and ate. And now they sign deals with studios before the game is even off the ground. Don't even get me started on all the acquisitions.
In the modern world of the internet, providing both a platform and a service ultimately stifles competition which ultimately harms consumers.
It's great that small studios are reaping the wild cash injections due to Game Pass, or PS+ or Apple's thing. It can be a life changing amount of funding. I'm happy for them. But it can't continue indefinitely without extinguishing the entire industry.
It's getting harder and more expensive to publish, whether bootstrapped or otherwise. And the publishers are rapidly conglomerating.
The early 21st century was ripe with rampant piracy and unbundling. And now we're practically worse than where we started. We own less, nothing is portable, we are slaves to the recurring subscription, and we must sell ourselves to the platform to put food on the table.
It's all so depressing.
Companies paying for exclusives so customers will pay to access exclusives feels like bad economics. It's reduces the number of people something can be sold to. My best explanation is that it's developers and content creators selling potential upside in return for reducing their risk - Microsoft can diversify between multiple games.
I suppose it's a bit like advertising a platform that makes money via advertising, which hasn't collapsed yet.
I haven't bought a new game since 2021. At this point, I'm prepared to give up on video games completely. Once the multiplayer servers of the 2-3 games I still play[1] are shut down.
Now I'm growing my book collection instead. No subscriptions, DLC or microtransactions for those at least.
[1] Star Wars Battlefront II (2017), Ace Combat 7, and Mass Effect Legendary Edition
> Now I'm growing my book collection instead. No subscriptions, DLC or microtransactions for those at least
No subscriptions, DLC, or microtransactions... yet.
> > Now I'm growing my book collection instead. No subscriptions, DLC or microtransactions for those at least
> No subscriptions, DLC, or microtransactions... yet.
Hopefully not the future: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
Technically, 150 years ago novels were actually born out of subscriptions - to the magazines and newspapers that would publish their serialised chapters, effectively funding production of a book at later stage.
There are still great games that aren't riddled with microttansactiona coming out. Death Stranding DX, Bugsnax, etc.
> I'm happy for them. But it can't continue indefinitely without extinguishing the entire industry.
Studios are free to not publish on those subscription services if they don't want to.
It seems odd to complain that consumers are able to get a wealth of content for cheap.
If the business model doesn't work, don't put the game on gamepass.
Microsoft on the wrong end of anticompetitive practices? Here, let me play a violin.
> Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense
lmao, you had me up until here.
"block fees" or "blocking rights"? You can't just rename "paid exclusives" and make it the new scary. Consoles have had this sort of thing since at least the original Nintendo Entertainment System was released in 1985.
So Microsoft should be allowed to buy out all independent game studios and make their games unavailable for playstation. But Sony is not allowed to pay independent studios to keep their games off Xbox.
microsoft just bought bethesda games, it would be ashamed if STARFIELD would not be available on ps4
Look I love Game Pass as much as anyone but it's a true act of cuntery for Microsoft to do things as heinous as making Elder Scrolls 6 a Microsoft platform exclusive and then cry foul when Sony does the same. "Cries out as he strikes you" indeed.
The article suggests that Microsoft is attempting to defend against a lawsuit by Sony attempting to block an acquisition here, in which Sony is suggesting it would be anticompetitive because it would make a popular franchise platform-exclusive. This doesn't look to me like Microsoft is "crying foul" at all - instead, they're "crying fair", arguing that they should be allowed to do it because Sony is doing something similar.
Isn’t it the other way around? Sony pushes hard for platform exclusivity and deals that work against Xbox and now Gamepass. It’s only natural that Microsoft will want to compete and get leverage.
Everyone has been doing this since forever. Halo was originally supposed to be released on MacOS (!!); then Microsoft bought up Bungie and made it an Xbox exclusive. Sony paid Call of Duty / Activision millions to get exclusive content (like maps, cosmetics, marketing, etc) on PlayStation; before Microsoft bought up Activision. Epic is infamous for their massive spend to gain exclusive distribution of PC games; in only one example, it was revealed that they paid ~$10M USD for one year of exclusive distribution of Control (the game's budget was only ~$36M USD, if that's any indication of how insane these deals are, but oftentimes they're structured in-part as a pre-payment of sales, not just a big free check).
All of this is shitty, but its like two pigs arguing who is more covered in mud.
Halo was released on Mac OS X though. I have the game on dvd.
2 years later though.
Bungie used to make games for macOS. The predecessor Marathon Trilogy was originally released on macOS (and only Marathon 2 was ported to Windows). Halo was supposed to be originally released on macOS too, and then Microsoft bought the studio and turned it into an Xbox game, leaving all of the existing macOS userbase out in the cold.
Their purchase of Bungie also screwed up the IP rights to Oni. Wikipedia says that when Microsoft acquired Bungie, negotiations with Take-Two Interactive (which owned a share of Bungie) left Take-Two with the rights to Oni, and the sequel was eventually canceled. I don't have a citation on this but from what I understand, nobody is willing to touch Oni again (not even for an HD remake) because something about the IP rights is so messy that nobody wants to (or maybe nobody is even able to) untangle it. Which really sucks because it was a great game.
Right yeah, that's my mistake; it was showcased for release on both OSX and Windows at a MacWorld conference in the late 90s; Microsoft purchased Bungie in like 2000, and after that acquisition they added on an Xbox release.
Halo was an xbox exclusive for ages. I mean, not even available on Windows. They eventually released it for other platforms but it was years after and it felt dated and boring already.
Realistically, didn't most of this start when MS paid massive amounts for time exclusive DLC in the 360 era for some of the biggest games like Skyrim[0] or COD (5 years in a row)[1], or flat out exclusive content in GTA IV[2]? To me this seems like MS is crying that Sony stole their playbook and is doing it better. Granted either of them doing it is bad for consumers in general.
[0]: https://www.eurogamer.net/skyrim-dlc-timed-xbox-360-exclusiv...
[1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/after-five-years-of-xbox-exclusivi...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2007/06/gta-iv-downloadable-c...
No, Sony has always had exclusive agreements with certain studios properties (and then purchased those studios later on) going back to the late 90s, before Microsoft ever entered the console market.
This sort of behaviour was well established in the industry.
I think Microsoft is claiming that Sony is paying for third parties not to go to Game pass, while Microsoft bought Bethesda, so now it will be first party.
The complaint is against paying 3rd parties though, not owning your own first party and doing it. I guess it would be like if Apple paid Uber, Whatsapp etc to only make their apps for the AppStore and not Android. I don't know if that's a good argument though because music streamers do it all the time.
Do you believe that Apple does not participate in this sort of behavior? Because they do.
That's a bold claim. Not that I doubt you, but do you have references to Apple doing this sort of thing?
I remember a small studio/individual developer who had their iOS update stuck in review hell after they publicized an Android port.
The app had been previously featured in the app store, and had no feature changes when the review process screetcyed to a halt. I'm hoping someone on HN remembers the details, but I'll try to Google and update this comment if I find the article. In the mean time, take it wirh a pinch of salt as I may be misremembering.
Apple explicitly does this with Apple Arcade, Apple TV, has done so with podcasts and albums in its music store.
I've personally been involved in one business discussion involving folks from Apple about platform exclusivity for an app.
As a big PlayStation fanboy who pretty much hates Microsoft… Sony aren’t saints either. The stuff Microsoft attempted with the Xbox One being online only, Kinect only was really bad though
It is "exclusive" to Xbox and PC.
PC/Windows? or PC/Linux?
Unless they only distribute it on the Microsoft store does it matter? I play a lot of Windows "exclusives" on my Linux desktop.
Should work just fine on Proton, previous-gen Creation Engine games worked fine with Wine and DXVK. A few games even have Linux-exclusive patches to prevent crashing on alt-tab, as well as a few performance improvements under the hood.
It really depends on much more locked down the engine will become with ES6. Fallout 4 was notoriously hard to mod for and the modding community suffered for it.
Of course modding difficulty doesn't translate directly to how well Proton will run it, but I fear it will make it difficult for it to be optimized.
“You see, your honor, it would foster more competition if we owned the developers/publishers outright and decided their distribution platforms unilaterally, instead of having to price our distribution platform to compete with other company’s exclusivity deals”
Legal slap fights aside, it’s interesting to hear about these “block fees” that target this specific subset of Microsoft’s platform. Since it isn’t involved in the big launch sales, and feels more common among smaller budget / indie games, it may be much cheaper for Sony to offer this deal to many prospective Games Pass games.
(Though the laissez-faire answer to Microsoft’s frustrations remains “well Microsoft’s publishing platform should pay more than a figment of Sony’s marketing budget if it’s actually a profitable/sustainable business unit”)
Shhh, don't point fingers at their anti-competitive acquisitions and mergers. It's clearly the people paying fair wages in a free market who are at fault. /s
Microsoft's list of faults would make this comment several megabytes. Sony is not without fault either: they're already selling a PlayStation with no game slot for a disk or cartridge, it's download only. They're killing the secondhand market, and probably the long-term availability of many titles, which in the future will not be playable (since they'll be lost), only watchable on YouTube.
In the game industry specifically though, Microsoft has many faults:
Microsoft made Halo an Xbox exclusive when people were waiting for it on PC, so how can they complain about anyone blocking anything? This wasn't the only time:
Halo 2 was a Windows 7 exclusive because they soft-locked it to some version of DirectX they wouldn't release on XP, and it took the pirates 5 minutes to make it work on XP, clearly that was artificial.
Microsoft promised that Rare's upcoming game Kameo would be on the Xbox, but they converted it to a 360 exclusive to try to drum up sales for 360.
They started charging people to use their own internet connections with Xbox live, so we all played on VLANs with the games on LAN mode, now every game company charges to play online.
Anyway, Microsoft is a terrible company, always has been, always will be.
They also invented Pluton, put ads in the start menu, blah. Don't give them money.
This push to move to subscription may ruin gaming as an artform, and the more these companies fight and fuck that up, the better. Hopefully if they bicker enough it'll ruin the whole concept of a subscription.
> Microsoft's list of faults would make this comment several megabytes. Sony is not without fault either: they're already selling a PlayStation with no game slot for a disk or cartridge, it's download only. They're killing the secondhand market, and probably the long-term availability of many titles, which in the future will not be playable (since they'll be lost), only watchable on YouTube.
You lost me here. The solution is to improve library portability and backwards compatibility, not clinging to increasingly-obsolete physical formats.
Imagine putting a cartridge in your phone for every app. Insanity.
Those Blu-rays and cartridges on my shelf are most likely going to outlast any digital storefront that these platforms have.
(Luckily none of them are for the Xbox, since Xbox doesn't give a shit about game preservation even if you have the physical media.)
It's more like "imagine having an SD card slot on a smartphone".
I can continue buying SD cards and putting them in my smartphone far after my smartphone vendor, OS vendor, or other developers stop supporting it. On an old enough digital-only console, there may or will be no way to use software that has been purchased for it. There are currently not ways to use software that could be purchased secondhand on consoles because there is no individual market or transfer option for it.
It's a scam.
That's right, it wrecks future playability; it also kills any chance kids have of getting $5-10 secondhand games.
Game consoles used to mean plug and play instantly and it works every time, but now it means subscriptions and mandatory updates and installation processes and different hardware levels (pro, regular; series x, series s), it's become a bad deal.
So companies move to PC, and now every company has a "client" to try to walled-garden their own games (blizzard, epic, steam, ubisoft, whatever bethesda formerly had, microsoft store, etc).
Games should be games; not work, not con jobs, not contractual obligations.
I like phones with SD slots but I don't think that analogy fits very well. Those consoles still support USB drives for game archival, right? And having an SD card on your phone doesn't help you move apps around.
We need laws that fix the ability to resell digital-only games and programs and media. Whether or not storage is removable.
Edit: Just wanted to add that I wholeheartedly agree with your take on legal protection for consumer ownership rights.
The analogy isn't about backing up and exporting games you already own, it's about continuing the use of hardware you own beyond the vendor's support.
Sideloading APKs allows management of software independent of a vendor app store. Do USB drives for game archival allow you to install any game, whether or not you bought it from the console store?
You don't need an SD card to sideload though, which is why I don't think the comparison works very well. Both SD card and external drive mainly give you extra space but don't add other features.
Did Xbox spin-off from Microsoft?
No, but acts like it has. Xbox is Phil's own little fiefdom inside Microsoft, since it's business is rather unique from the rest of the company.
When it suits them: "exclusive deal"
When it doesn't: "IT'S A BLOCK FEE"
I recommend that you read the article. Sony is trying to block the activision merger on grounds that Microsoft could block Sony from having access to Call of Duty on their platform. Microsoft is countering by submitting evidence that Sony actively employs the very same strategy of blocking games from being played on rival systems that they're claiming is anticompetitive, demonstrating the hypocrisy of their claim.
Posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32418130
These make sense when there's discussion to read at the previous post and there isn't in that one.
Sony needs to be broken up. They are trying become a an ultra mega corp on anime, videogames, streaming, etc Everything they touch goes to shit with censorship.
Microsoft is choosing the wrong enemy to fight
Nintendo is the only winner, and i suspect Apple in the coming years will be the only one competing with Nintendo, since Sony abandoned the handheld market, and Microsoft has no interests in the mobile market
GamePass is the bastardisation of gaming, that'll end up killing gaming as we know it, and the Xbox brand, it is not even profitable for game studios, it's just an attempt for Microsoft to pump a meaningless number, and it doesn't even help their earning reports
EU is moving to force Apple/Google to open up their ecosystem for 3rd party stores, Sony/Microsoft have 0 presence there, if steam doesn't try, then it's game over for all 3 of them
I suspect in the mid-long term, Apple, Google, Epic will be the 3 main actors of the gaming industry
Microsoft will give up and focus on their cloud gaming infrastructure
Looking at console and game sales, it is clear that Microsoft is not a strong gaming brand; even when their competitors are struggling with supply chain issues, they fail to capitalize on that
https://www.vgchartz.com/ a great website to gain some precious knowledge about their individual performance
> I suspect in the mid-long term, Apple, Google, Epic will be the 3 main actors of the gaming industry
- Apple - the perennial "also-ran" name in gaming fundamentally don't get gaming. Never had, never will.
- Google - Stadia will die within the next 2 years. Wager my house on that.
- Epic - Yeah they will be around.
I don't want to sound offensive but you sound like you know close to nothing about the game industry. You've not even mentioned Valve and you discount the fact that Microsoft have bought up multiple huge gaming studios in the past few years - deals worth multiple billions. Anyone with even a brief interest in the market would likely find your prediction nothing short of delusional.
> You've not even mentioned Valve
I did mention Valve (well.. Steam, but it's the same)
Valve have 0 presence on mobile
The mobile gaming market is growing, while the PC market is on the decline [1]
And as i said, the EU is making moves to force both Apple/Google to open up their ecosystem for more stores
Epic has a presence with Fortnite and is known with their fights against Google/Apple
Smartphones are getting more and more powerful and are able to play demanding games (Genshin Impact, and recently Diablo Immortal)
We see more and more games that released both on mobile and desktop at the same time (Tower Fantasy is the latest one), but also indie titles that you see on Steam (Dead Cells for example)
> and you discount the fact that Microsoft have bought up multiple huge gaming studios in the past few years - deals worth multiple billions
They bought Desktop/Console studios, that market is on the decline, so it is not a smart investment for them
If they make games for both desktop/mobile, then yeah i'd agree with you, but that's not the case
There is still some hope they change that with Activision purchase
It's like with demography, the effect will be seen in the mid-long term
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-gaming-proves-to-be-a-g...
You are thinking about games the way Apple and Meta think about games - purely about the $$$.
It's this exact reason why they can't crack the market despite a large number of attempts.
"Cracking the market" for an art form like video-games isn't a matter of revenue, think of it more like tv, film or books.
The best games are made by the most talented developers, alongside the best game designers and directors targeting the most powerful consoles. These are the factors of making the best experience you can make in the video-game world.
You can't - I'd wager won't ever - find something like the Last of Us on a mobile, yet anyone who knows anything about gaming knows that is a game that will sell millions of consoles.
You play crap games on your phone for 5 minutes at a time because you can, but you go out and buy a console because you want to be immersed in the latest the art form has to offer because you want to.
A simple framing question; do you want to watch the new Top Gun on your 5 inch screen iPhone screen?
> Mobile gaming proves to be a gold mine as it racked in more money in 2021 than PC and console gaming combined
Mobile games are timewasters filled with microtransactions for every little thing. (Don't want to wait a week for this task to complete? $5 makes it happen in seconds.) Having one platform out-earn another doesn't mean the others are dying. PC gaming was dying/dead 15 years ago, but it didn't go anywhere.
The Steam Deck-- at least among PC gamers-- is an extremely attractive option over Nintendo. Bring your existing game library with you, play much more demanding games, benefit from deep discounts on PC games that almost never make it to Nintendo versions.
I bought a switch to play portable versions of PC indie games but since I got the Deck I haven't touched it.
Production of units has picked up so the order bottleneck is easing up, which is part for the course with Nintendo as well: I couldn't find on OLED model anywhere for months & months after it's release for my kid.
The downside of course is significant bulk. Battery is less of an issue, despite what some people say. If I'm playing a demanding game away from a power source I just tweak the power settings, sometimes lower the resolution and let FSR (which works great) help improve the visuals, and getting 2-3 hours on even the most demanding games is then not an issue. 4-5 hours on less demanding games. And carry a battery pack that will supply an extra charge. But yeah, definitely it doesn't work so well if you have to have something that will fit in a pocket.
I think you're right that Game Pass is a terrible idea.
It reminds me of what happened to cable TV. Back in the 1980s cable channels all had definite brands to uphold. The cable bundle meant, however, that you had to take them all or leave them all. You couldn't pick your favorite news channel, you had to get all of them. Like the Discovery Channel? You pay for the Hallmark Channel.
Cable channels thus don't have any motivation to be any good. They get paid whether or not you like them, whether or not you watch them. So why bother?
The cable industry "thrived" for many years by simply jacking up the price, something that people tolerated for a while but each time they increase the price they lose a few subscribers, every time there is a funeral a cable TV subscriber is gone and they don't get replaced by anyone new.
It irks me that young people who didn't live through this think anything is going to be different with GAME PASS. Each time I see that logo on my Xbox it makes my blood boil -- I am thinking about getting rid of it since it doesn't play music well, doesn't play HEVC videos at all, and there aren't that many games I want to play on it. I still keep it though because it plays Blu-Ray.
> still keep it though because it plays Blu-Ray
You pay a monthly subscription fee in order to watch your Blu-Ray movies? You know you can pickup a used Blu-Ray player at goodwill and friends for like $20?
I don't pay a subscription to watch Blu-Ray movies, it is just Microsoft advertises GAME PASS so hard it's like they are trying to shove that logo up my nostrils. (Microsoft has a long history of killing products by selling them too hard; for instance everybody thinks that "OneNote has to be awful because Microsoft shoved three links to OneNote in the taskbar" whereas if you'd actually tried OneNote you might have liked it.)
For a while my main use for the XBox has been as a media client for Jellyfin but it's pretty annoying because it doesn't play HEVC files. Microsoft changed something about its music player and it doesn't work with Jellyfin anymore.
I haven't played games on the XBox for a while. It's not like I might not play games on it again but I still have a Nintendo 3DS, Steam, both of which have a considerable backlog for me.
This doesn't make any sense. Almost all major games available on gamepass are still available for purchase the normal way. You could just buy the game normally.
Not almost, all. There is not a single exclusive
Well except advertising dollars did flow to viewer eyeballs, and it’s cable advertising, not subscription fees, that came to dominate the revenue model.
> Nintendo is the only winner, and i suspect Apple in the coming years will be the only one competing with Nintendo, since Sony abandoned the handheld market, and Microsoft has no interests in the mobile market
Valve? MS will compete that way indirectly. I snagged a SteamDeck - I haven't played games this much in a long time. Since getting it I've played through a bunch of triple A games (God of War, replayed the mass effect trilogy, etc), and a whole host of Nintendo exclusives via emulation.
The fact that Nintendo lawyers are working overtime taking down youtube SteamDeck videos that barely even mention emulation feels like an admission that they know the steamdeck is a threat. They sure didn't seem to work as hard to take down videos showing emulation for other platforms like the Aya Neo.
The mobile market is growing at an insane pace while the desktop gaming is in the down side (including console)
Valve have 0 presence on the mobile market, Steam Deck is an attempt, but it still is desktop titles
They made a mistake imo by going with X86 CPUs, they should have went with ARM and a translation layer for X86 (hw accelerated)
This way they could support Android ecosystem natively, release their store on Android, and start to publish/sell android games as well as universal mobile/desktop titles
That's why i mention Epic, i suspect that'll be their plan, they'll become a store on Android (probably also iOS) and publish premium mobile games
> The fact that Nintendo lawyers are working overtime taking down youtube SteamDeck videos that barely even mention emulation feels like an admission that they know the steamdeck is a threat
Nintendo has strong IPs, they will sell no matter what, wich gives them a strong advantage at selling a lot of devices consistently, every generations
you are forgetting the largest gaming company is tencent.
Those aren't games. Gambling/grinding apps maybe?