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Competition oversight?

Probably dead since Regan? After they stopped controlling AT&T the UNIX-Wars happened, impcompatiblity, lawsuits, closed-source has become a normal thing and proprietary software locked users in and competitors out.

What platform will Microsoft support? Likely not:

  * Linux
  * BSD
  * MacOS
  * Nintendo
  * Sony
Does anyone miss id Software? Native ports on Linux, incredible source-code and impressive games? I use this opportunity to thank Gabe Newell and Valve and the people there for their work :)



> Does anyone miss id Software? Native ports on Linux, incredible source-code and impressive games?

I don't miss id software, because they're still here, continuing to make amazing games. The last two Doom games were excellent.

...incidentally, Microsoft also owns them now.


I honestly think behind climate change, the current state of anti-trust enforcement is one of the biggest issues facing Americans right now. It's disappointing that it's not even expected for anti-trust action to happen anymore.


A guy named Matt Stoller focuses on this sort of thing. He's been saying that the right people have been appointed to the FTC, but it remains to be seen if this will produce any real, consumer-felt fruit. This is him, just 2 hours ago, at the time of this writing:

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/148348691488801996...

He is reporting that the chair of the FTC is begging for public comment on merger activity.

UPDATE

And just a few minutes ago, questioning whether this whole Microsoft/Activision will be stopped.

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/148353211536295117...


This is not a new danger. Americans had to deal with that by the end of the 19th century. The elites were able to run back the clock and remove or control any anti-trust structure that has been created to avoid their crazy accumulation of money and power.


I think America might want to tackle health care, drug addiction, inequality, racism, sexism before worrying about anti-trust


I think having a handful of corporations owning everything makes all of those issues worse


Extending off what the other commenter said, consolidation within the medical market is a big reason for the opiod epidemic. It's not something that just came out of nowhere, its directly because a large company intentionally pushed for highly addictive drugs to be given to as many people as possible

It's also a big reason for the fact that americans spend far far more on healthcare than other countries. For reference, the US government spends 28% of your tax on healthcare. The UK government spends 18.8%, which is arounge average among western nations. And ON TOP of that, americans pay huge medical fees and insurance.

Inequality is partly caused by the two above issues, combined with the fact that its really damn hard to make much of a company for yourself when a vastly more powerful company is intentionally suppressing or if you're one of the lucky few buying out all of its competition.

Racism and Sexism are at least partly caused by ineqality, but another big part of it comes from the consolidation in mass media. Shock stories on the national news about the actions of ten or fifteen people can cause and deepen ingrained biases about millions.


Need to tackle corruption before we can solve any of those.


I think US have motivation not to do anti-trust enforcement. Dominated US companies dominates worldwide market and earn money for US, but also hurts US market.


Blizzard's (not sure about Activision games) ongoing support for most of those platforms has been pretty crap recently anyway. Diablo2 Resurrected removed mac support but they did add consoles.

OW only support Windows.

I guess SC2 and D3 had support for many platforms, but not Linux.

It's a crap situation that I don't think is being improved or worsened here.


What platform does Nintendo support ? It has always been like that.


iOS and Android, they have some gacha games there

https://www.nintendo.com/sg/games/smartphone/index.html


I wouldn't exactly call super mario run a gacha game. (I don't argue with the others, though)


Microsoft seems likely to support at least Nintendo. With Game Pass and Minecraft, they've leaned more towards gaming as a platform. Some Switch games have full MS support including Achievements, which was surprising.


I will miss Starcraft on macos, but I guess I already gave that up with my M1 purchase. Couldn't give two shits about any of their other games.


I'm sorry. does gabe produce games anymore?


Pretty sure they were referring to the amount of resources Valve puts in to keeping the PC platform open, including the vast amounts of ooen source software they create and the ones they contribute to, primarily for Linux. Hiring devs to work on FOSS, contracting out to FOSS companies like Collabora and Sourcehut, these are great things to do. Valve does plenty bad, like any big company, but one thing they don't do is use their marketshare monopoly with Steam to create an actual monopoly, lockin, etc. Even their hardware isn't locked down.


half life alyx is pretty good i hear.


What does this have to do with competition?

Console platforms have not competed for games to be on their platforms for.... ever.




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