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Yeah no shit. I don’t even need to click this link to agree.
MS is a $3tn company and has one of the worst track records on earth for anti-competitive practices.
Shit, in the Xbox FTC leaks, Phil Spencer was openly saying he didn’t just want Bethesda and Activision, his dream is to do hostile takeovers of Nintendo and Valve.
And yet I still see people online acting like they’re on our side. Utterly laughable.
It actually floors me that people don’t understand this. It’s the tried and tested subscription model business plan.
Create a compelling service > gain market share > crush competition > ramp up prices and introduce anti-consumer policies
And contrary to popular belief, GamePass isn’t making money. There’s a reason MS are very tight-lipped about saying whether it’s profitable or not, and why they hide GamePass within another segment in their financials.
Shit, look at the FTC leaks where Phil Spencer says nowhere near enough people have subscribed to GamePass to make it viable (no wonder they want it on more platforms!). Microsoft will up prices.
And people here will say “yeah but then I’ll cancel, I already have a large game library” - yeah, you do. But a kid in 10 years that has no games library, only GamePass? He won’t say “man, another GamePass price hike? I’m gonna cancel”, because his choice is between another, say, £18 per month (I just went with what I was paying for Netflix, idk what it’ll be), and having to drop several hundred/possibly over £1k just to get all the games he wants back. Games he will probably have to buy across 3+ different launchers.
Microsoft is in it for the long haul. Subscription Office software, GamePass, rumours of subscription options in Win12. MS doesn’t want your money now, they want money from you continuously and from any family you build (remember: if you have kids, they’ll use this stuff too, and you’ll be paying for it… until they’re an adult, then they’ll be hooked on it and probably pay for it thereafter).
You’ll be paying until the day you die and your children will pay from being 18 until they die.
That’s the plan. It’s sinister.
It’s also because they want to advance gaming on Linux specifically.
When Windows 8 released, Microsoft was pushing their app store, ARM devices that could only access the Windows store, and Windows Phones. Valve became scared - Microsoft clearly wanted their future to be installing software through the Microsoft store.
They also added an “Xbox” app to windows - a clear indication that MS wanted to bring that business to PC, and have an unfair advantage by having their services pre-installed.
Gabe Newell has worked for Microsoft before and he knows just how ruthless and anti-competitive Microsoft can be. He knew that while Valve was 100% dependent on Windows, Valve was at risk.
So they brought out the Linux client and released Steam Machines, which as we all remember were a flop due to limited game compatibility and poor performance.
So Valve got to work on adapting WINE to create Proton, a Windows compatibility layer integrated into Steam. They put money into Linux development, then, when Proton was good enough, they released the Steam Deck.
Make no mistake, the Steam Deck is ultimately a part of Valve’s overarching plan to reduce dependency on a hostile competitor that controls the entire platform that they operate on.
I think that’s more to do with them not wanting to provide support and not deal with the headache of people installing steamOS on Nvidia hardware, which doesn’t always play nice with Linux (insert that pic of Linus Torvalds).
I mean the new steam deck UI-inspired big picture mode got delayed months (for everyone) purely down to quirks with Nvidia. Imagine a whole OS, with everyone going online and blaming Valve for it or calling Linux junk.
Windows has its strengths, but my god, handheld devices aren’t one of them. I’ve not seen a single one of these windows handhelds that don’t have weird janky software problems with the overlays and quick settings menus they have, suspend/resume, etc.
Linux is just the natural pairing for devices like these, and I’m pretty sure Valve would be very open to allowing SteamOS or a fork of it on MSI’s devices.
The entire reason Valve tried Steam Machines and is now doing the Deck is to try to get out from MS’s grasp. The more devices running Linux the better from Valve’s perspective.
I disagree.
The drivers are much improved, yes, but in the meantime we’ve had the Arc cards performing like shit and being unstable for a year, and that’s after they already released far later than the competition. Even now the drivers are still much worse than AMD or Nvidia and run into issues.
Their power usage is a joke, their die size is more similar to a card 2 tiers above the performance of what the cards achieve.
The price wasn’t good either. Yeah they beat Nvidia by a bit, but they cost more than AMD for a far inferior product.
Arc was a failure. That’s why Intel shut down their AXG division. You don’t do that to a division that’s performing well.
I understand people want a third player in the GPU space, I do too, but the truth is, Arc was bad. I don’t think we should call them good just because they have a blue badge instead of a green or red one.
I said pointing to the Google antitrust case and equating them is misleading, not that it’s impossible for Valve to engage in any anti-competitive behaviour.
And the reason why I said that is because they’re completely different and not even in the same stratosphere in terms of shady ongoings. Nor are they doing the same thing. The Google case has zero bearing on this one.
As for the 30% cut, that’s been deemed fine. See the Apple case and the Google case. Even in Google’s case, where Google lost, it wasn’t down to pricing.
And Valve would have an easier time justifying it too. They could point to their service being much more bandwidth intensive, and including things like friend systems, a messenger, voice chat, streaming, cloud saves, Linux compatibility layers, compatibility for controllers that the OS doesn’t natively support, matchmaking APIs, Steam overlay, custom control options for when the game doesn’t officially support it, etc.
Wowww this is crazy misleading.
The difference is that Google’s software is forced onto OEMs without them having any real choice. That Google makes them sign contracts forbidding other default app stores. That Google has secret back room deals with some app developers and not others waiving the store fee, giving them an unfair advantage.
Valve does none of that. Can you point me to valve forcing, say, Dell or HP to pre-install Steam and no other game stores? Or them not taking a cut for some games?
Quillnote is a cool, simple, FOSS notes/to-do list app similar in functionality to Keep.
Only problem is that syncing is currently an experimental feature and currently only supports Nextcloud. You can create backups though.
I’ve been repeatedly downvoted on here and on Reddit for pointing out that Microsoft clearly just wants to capture the market and wield their disproportionate amount of power (their money, pretty much monopolistic OS position, ever-growing IP, and strength to push DirectX over other standards, etc) as a weapon.
People really love Microsoft and won’t hear criticism of them.
People look at gamepass and think ooooh that’s great, such a good price. I’m sure they won’t ever jack up prices once they capture the market!
I’m sure it’s fine that MS has sole control over the graphics API pretty much all games use!
It’s fine that MS is spending dozens to hundreds of billions on buying publishers, because Sony bought one too (that’s a 15th the size)! And it’s fine that they’re making that stuff exclusive to their platforms!
It’s fine that Microsoft hurts open standards!
Etc.
I’m so damn tired of people carrying water for multi billion trillion dollar companies with immense history of anticompetitive and illegal behaviour.
It’s not a crazy what if, it’s a tried and tested, proven business strategy.
Currently Microsoft is losing money on gamepass. That’s why they lump it in with other services in their financials, so you can’t see the losses. The pricing as it stands is nowhere near sustainable
I never said it’s not currently a good deal. Those are words that you’re trying to shove into my mouth.
It’s a good deal now because they’re having the price low while they capture the market.
And what about when Microsoft ups the price on their subscription, which is clearly their strategy as gamepass doesn’t appear to be profitable?
At least if you’d spent that 120€ on 2-3 games you’d be able to keep them forever.
That 120€ subscription could easily become 200€, 250€, or more. Something people may feel compelled to pay for if MS continues buying up the industry and decides to make games exclusive, which is something they’re already doing to some extent.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think giving MS a disproportionate amount of power over the market is a good thing.
I didn’t say people wouldn’t be able to buy any games. Please don’t strawman.
What I said was that plenty of people won’t own games (due to gamepass being sold cheaply initially), then when MS massively jacks up prices, people will have to choose between swallowing that and buying all their games again at whatever the retail price happens to be.
It’s a trap designed to extort people in the long run.
The other thing I said was that some games will be exclusive.
Please address things that I’ve actually said, not things that you’ve imagined I’ve said.
People also seem to genuinely believe MS won’t just massively inflate prices once they’ve cornered the market lmao
The current gamepass pricing is unsustainable. There’s a reason why MS refuses to say how much money they make from it (if any) and they lump it in with other stuff in their financials.
I can easily envision a future where gamepass is £30 a month or something, but because MS has bought a lot of studios and people don’t own their games, people have to choose between continually paying that price, or starting all over again with zero games, and not being able to buy a decent amount of the big games, because they’re only on gamepass.
Either that or it ends up like TV streaming where we have to have 5 different subscriptions to access all the games we want access to.
Fuck that. We shouldn’t let either of those things happen.
DLSS 3 is far worse than DLSS 2 IMO.
There’s basically zero disadvantage to turning on DLSS 2. Most of the time you cannot or can barely tell the difference.
DLSS 3 introduces lots of artifacting, some frames straight up look like DALL-E image, it adds input lag, and it needs you to already have a high framerate to start with to make it bearable, text in particular gets mangled by it.
Fast paced games and games that rely on quick reactions are a no-go for DLSS 3. It’s suitable for games like MS flight sim where adding input lag doesn’t really matter and there’s not rapid movement.
Mate, look at the username. Their whole existence on Lemmy is solely to be a troll spreading hate. Insulting people through a layer of anonymity gets his dick hard.