147
It's official, Microsoft now owns ABK
(news.xbox.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
147 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
30220 readers
159 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
What a sad day for gamers. Microsoft now has all it needs to extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on consoles, just as they do on PCs already, and the regulators will give them a wink and a nudge.
Big corpo is bad but Microsoft is far behind in the console space and in the gaming pc front. They won't extinguish playstation anytime soon.
Except they just got CoD. Playstation is about lose one the mega-franchise cross-platforms games that "everyone" buys.
IIRC they did sign the deal that let's the continue to get releases for a couple more years, but no way MS just keeps releasing their games on PS forever.
It is ten more years. If Sony isn't able to come up with a decent alternative in a decade, well, I won't exactly feel sorry for them.
More likely, they'll just buy Ubisoft or EA.
We want lots of smaller corps competing, not just a couple giants. Every merger is one fewer of the former, regardless whether it forces one of the existing big corps to step up their game.
Not that ABK was small, and for once I'm split because holy hell did it need new management.
problem with this is the size of these companies, sony is not a megacorp in same tier as MS and they likely wouldnt be able to allocate funding for large gaming acquisitions such as EA
Being the market leader, Sony will have a much harder time making larger acquisitions than MS did, and this ABV merger didn't exactly breeze through.
There's kinda a precedent for that already though in Minecraft, the other mega-franchise cross-platforms game that “everyone” buys.
With Minecraft, the Java edition was & still is available on many different platforms, but the later Minecraft games that were made after the Microsoft takeover have, for the most part, only come out for Microsoft platforms. Minecraft Dungeons, for instance, never came out on GNU or macOS.
The Bedrock edition was ported to PlayStation, but for how much longer will it be available, I wonder…
Today I've learned that the Nintendo Switch and PS4/5 are Microsoft platforms. Pretty much every console Minecraft game has made its way onto these systems.
Works just fine on Linux using Proton (they could totally prevent that if they wanted to) and Apple is pretty hostile to macOS gaming anyway.
That's not true at all. Minecraft Bedrock Edition, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends are all available on both Playstation and Nintendo Switch. Bedrock Edition is available for Chromebooks. Dungeons and Legends are both on Steam and will run through Proton.
Bedrock Edition is not on Steam and unavailable on Linux and Mac. Dungeons and Legends aren't available on Mac. In a strange twist, Education Edition, which is just Bedrock Edition with classroom oriented features, is available for Mac though.
Thankfully Minecraft Dungeons does work via Proton, though I'm not super familiar with macOS so I'm not sure if Proton works for macOS given that Apple's platforms use Metal rather than Vulkan (though I hear a translation layer is being worked on for Vulkan->Metal).
Apple has their own Proton, called the Game Porting Toolkit, and it works well for games that don't need a launcher & are mainly played with a keyboard and mouse, but I've found that game controllers don't work very well with it.
There's also MoltenVK, which is Vulkan for macOS, and DXVK, a DirectX-to-Vulkan-to-Metal layer that was used to play some Windows games on macOS before the GPTK came out.