"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...
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.