It's the end of an era as Microsoft has nerfed the XBL Gold to Game Pass Ultimate conversion, which however still remains the cheapest way.
May 7 (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected a legal challenge by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to Microsoft's (MSFT.O), opens new tab $69 billion purchase of “Call of Duty” maker Activision Blizzard.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower judge's order that said the FTC was not entitled to a preliminary injunction blocking the deal, which closed in 2023.
Final nail in FTC´s coffin!
It was a lost cause from the start and a waste of taxpayers money!
That's not at all how this works. Sony made deals Microsoft, the trillion dollar company couldn't? You think that's what won them this case?
This wasn't seen as a act of attempting to monopolize the industry. Plain and simple.
"Indeed. When sony got exposed with some of their deals it was pretty much game over."
And now that MS is releasing all of its Xbox games for all platforms, Phil is free to buy whatever studio or publisher he wants and FTC won´t have a case to say sh!t.
Like I said; It´s final nail in their coffin!
"exposed with some of their deals"
Says the company who said their plan was to "spend Sony out of business", you know a year before they bought Zenimax.
It was a lost cause once ms went multiplat, they cant be anti competitive if they release on everything......
No bud this is an appeal, they already failed the first go and the FTC seeked to block the deal way before MS showed any signs of making their games multiplatform. Like most of the courts rulings, it just wasn't seen as the monopoly.
Right. And they stated from the beginning that their intent was not to keep games off of plastation. Microsoft served subpoenas on Sony to produce documents and testimony related to the lawsuit, and the FTC ordered Sony to disclose information about its third-party exclusivity deals. And it exposed their dealings with other publishers to keep games off xbox and Gamepass. That is what helped them most in securing the deal.
lol, celebrating consolidation. Good thing this is the deal that broke Microsoft’s back and made them go the 3rd party route on every platform.
No. FTC has multiple appeals since then. It was very unlikely they would win any, but they still had them. People claiming it was over with the first judge ruling don't understand how the law works and what avenues the FTC had available to them even though appeals are quite normal.
This FTC case provided fascinating insight into gamers' views on economics/politics. It's very common for gamers to blame capitalism for many of the negative trends in the industry, but as soon as the U.S. government started exercising one of the most recognized limitations on capitalism (monopoly regulation), most gamers turned into libertarians and starting spouting Republican talking points (or at least pre-Trump era Republican talking points, lol) on "government staying out of the way of private businesses."
I remember when certain people here were saying they weren't going third party, guessing to recoup that 69 billion they are doing just that.
@TriniOutsider
MLB The Show. But arguably that is a special case. The seemingly accepted story behind that is that MLB told Sony they had to start making the game multiplatform to keep the MLB license. I haven't ever read definitive proof that happened, but assuming that (or something like it) is true, that isn't really indicative of a multiplatform trend in the same way that MS's recent launches on PS5 are.
The only PlayStation owned games on XB is Destiny 2 which was already multiplatform & MLB The Show & that's because it's licensed by the MLB & wanted the game multiplatform. XB first party legendary exclusives are going multiplatform as well as the new games that were supposed to be exclusive to the XB gaming console. It looks though the XB gaming console will have minimal timed exclusives to no exclusives at all.
@TriniOutsider
Get those gloves ready my boy. Gonna need em to move those goal posts. Think with your brain not your gamer heart. You think sony sees ms making all this money and says.. ok get that without us. Help me out here my guy! Sony charged you for psn, then they put their games on pc. What do you think is going to happen next?
To be honest as a long time ps gamer, this deal initially made me panic.
but if I had known that it make MS u-turn on exclusive strategy, I would have happily joined xbox fans supporting the acquisition.
They never made a u-turn. Initially Microsoft offered sony a 10 year deal but they turned it down but eventually they agreed. They've always said they wouldn't keep games away from playstation. But that is something Sony was doing to them.
That's the thing. They said they did not aim to take games away from the competition with the acquisitions and that they weren't taking games away from PlayStation. But then they try to get Sony to sign a 10 year deal just to show to a court that they aren't keeping games away. Sony saw this as a tactic to make their acquisitions look like good faith but in reality they don't need to sign that 10 year contract. They just gotta keep developing games for the console. Then they still excluded games from Sony anyways which is what they wanted while saying they didn't. They are only now going third party because they couldn't monopolize the hardware side of things and they ruined their software sales by trying to make everything a service and now we see them continuously bumping the price and changing policies to stop losing money.
Yes they did. I mean I was worried about Elder Scrolls series leaving playstation those days, but now I can play Forza horizon and Gears of War on ps5… this is a crazy turn of events
@Reaper22
You are 💯 correct however we also have to consider these companies lie all the time. Or make plans and change them
In an interview with Lex Fridman, Epic Games' Tim Sweeney shared the first details about the next version of Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 6.
It’s going to come packed with a bunch of flashy, buzzword-filled features that no one will actually be able to use without tanking performance. And just like every iteration of that engine before it, the excuse won’t be that it’s poorly optimized, no, it’s "forward-thinking" and the hardware just isn’t ready to keep up.
But since it saves studios from having to invest in developing their own internal engines, it’ll still end up being widely adopted across the industry.
What cracks me up, is a lot of games utilize Unreal 5 and yet gaming has become more expensive. So all that BS that they shoveled out the last big reveal hasn’t translated into savings and if it has, then the industry is just plain ol’ lying.
You mean like “going digital will bring down costs for customer dramatically. Because there will be no packaging/distribution.” Or maybe the “games going forward, will be cross-buy so you buy it once and will be able to access it across all platforms you own.” Or even the “if we increase the rrp it will mean we can get rid of micro transactions altogether.”
… I could be here all day quoting the lies from this industry.
Scope of games are way bigger than even just 10 years ago. Also keep in mind that Epic charges 5% for using their engine, Steam charges 30% just like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft's stores. That's 35% of your revenue gone. Steam infuriates me because they don't have nearly the overhead console manufacturers have but they know people are unlikely to migrate to Epic Games Store (which charges 15% instead but has a shit storefront compared to steam). I love UE5 (for the most part) and it has pushed the envelope in ways that would be too long to list here. I think UE6 will push things further and make it possible for devs who don't have Rockstar resources to make amazing games even further. Time will tell.
I find this odd. How am I expected to be excited with future promises when mired by the current legacy of UE5 and its myriad of technical shortcomings that have yet to be solved, even years after release.
Of course they should be working towards the future, but talking about it while UE5 still has many unsolved issues years after it has been the de facto standard? An engine used by so many, after so many years, with the backing of a company as grossly cash-rich as Epic shouldn't have so many problems still.
And the optics - even if not the truth of the matter - is you're putting time & resources into UE6 at the expense of UE5; your current product still needs quite a lot of attention. Unless the message is "we're abandoning UE5 because it's issues are systemic, and we hope UE6 can address that mess by moving on as quickly as possible".
I was attempting to reframe my comment as I watched more of the video, but the edit timed out. So here is a nearly completely different comment lol:
The number forks/fragmentations of UE5 feels like - from a laymen's perspective - a plausible explanation for why the engine, 3 years post release, has continued to have the same problems today as it did from day 1. Sounding as if they can't really find a way to cleanly coalesce each of the seven disparate variants, it seems hopes lie with being able to do so in the years leading up to the launch of UE6.
That said, if they have so many specific versions, then it does still kind of boggle the mind why issues, like compilation stutter, are still so pervasive. Seems in this specific scenario, the fragmentation could potentially be useful for at least helping to narrow down platform specific issues/solutions.
Clearly not the case, so hopefully they can make UE6 more unified to allow for more focused, streamline engine development.
Compilation stutter hasn't really been much of an issue for a couple years now if the devs know what they're doing. The problem is not all the devs know what they're doing in that regard. The real problem is traversal stutter. That is nearly universal.
I sort of ended up mentally putting both of those under the category of compilation stutter, which is surely too reductive. I should have just said "stuttering/fametime issues in all their incarnations". Because while there are improvements to comp stutter, even games that force you through long, even 30 minutes shader compilation stages before playing haven't managed to fully solve that issue. Heck, even consoles, with fixed hardware that can ship with pre-compiled shaders can't even seem to fully escape it.
Traversal stutter is definitely its own issue, though, and has only been exacerbated thanks to older cards being held onto longer, and companies - primarily Nvidia - opting to put 8GB VRAM buffers into cards for way the eff too long. If you don't have the top of the line CPU and high-end, overclocked RAM kits - most of the PC playing population - to help shuffle that info between system memory and the GPU, you're more screwed than most. And Nvidia could help the issue as well, if they could improve their years-long issue with high driver overhead. Freeing up any extra CPU usage, especially for those with weaker CPUs, would really benefit.
I really hope these things can have some kind of solution found for them sooner than later. As it is, it just feels like games are taking two steps forwards and two steps back a lot of the time. Improved pixel quality (world detail, lighting, etc), at the expense of degraded image clarity (softer image, heavy reliance on upscaling, increased artificing) and smoothness/performance (stuttering/poor frametimes).
And the fact this stuff occurs, when dev times are longer than they've ever been, with budgets creeping ever higher, it's that much worse to feel like a lot of experiences just aren't wins across the board. Especially as deep into this generation as we are, and with as much time as devs & engine makers have had to iron out issues. It feels like we may need to pump the brakes on the pace of research into graphics tech and rebalance towards optimization. Image clarity (native res, especially) continuing to fall further, with poor frametimes for a myriad of reasons, as the generation goes on doesn't feel the best.
I'm not just talking about shader compilation stages. There are games like Expedition 33 that barely have any pre-compilation stages (in the background on the main menu) and have almost zero comp stutter. It has to do with the way you use shaders and make your materials. It still has some small traversal stutter though.
It feels too soon to talk about UE6. It feels like UE5 barely got tapped, only a handfull of games really showed its potential.
Sony has bought out their distribution business partner in China and will be renaming it to Wanzhanpiwu Cultural Entertainment Development.
Maybe they'll be able to keep Playstation console prices stable as a result. One can dream.
I doubt. Only reason PS console prices hasn't change is because Sony stock piled in anticipation of tariffs. 6-12 months at best until they announce their own increases.
Pretty much as we all predicted. After a while, they’re gonna bring it back.
MS is obviously digging into the couch for loose change to try to make Xbox profitable... It's a sure sign of a company division losing money when they start nickel and diming, raising prices, etc.
After a soon to be 70 billions purchase of AKB they need to be make money.
Hopefully the £1 a month offer is like it was in past let sub expire give it a day or two and a new £1 a month or 3 is offered.
Not had new subscription total users since January 2022, I'm guessing it's still around the 25m mark hense no new number update since the £1 offer stopped ? I wonder WHY.