It restricts options, actually.

I don't see any problem complaining about a potentially dangerous future for PC gaming. Just imagine if X Box fans didn't complain about MS's plan to impose the Orwellian always-online, Kinect-based, face-scanning DRM for the XBox One.

Games from competing platforms like Steam, Origin, Uplay and GOG can be played across all versions of Windows. This new UWP is locking new and future games to Windows 10 and X Box One.

There are quite a few alternatives to Steam.

GoG Galaxy, Uplay, Origin, Epic Games also has one now and this is to name just a few.

@Perjoss sure, i just mentioned steam as the main, if we had some competitors that equaled steam, that would be fantastic. More competition is better for the consumer

If that competition is good, sure who wouldn't want more of it?

MS though has the ability to write it directly into their OS, which does give them an unfair playing field. Probably not for the moderate or hardcore PC gamer, but the casual PC gamer, Windows store is likely to be the only place they know of other than browswer games to purchase stuff. These are the same people who buy CD's which just install Steam and download the game. Now they can just click on a pretty icon MS and it's hardware partners throw up on the screen that says "Play Games" or something like that. Kind of shades of the whole IE anti-trust case of many years ago really....although I doubt MS will restrict hardware partners from installing other competitive software like they did back then.

YOu might be right...don't care to research since I'm tired and headed to bed early. But I may have been confusing the FTC's investigation that happened before the DOJ trial that was the actual case...or maybe I'm thinking of the European anti-trust case that was brought against MS.

I recall there was a separate case where MS did try to prevent some hardware makers from including other systems on Windows machines(through dual boot mostly for business)...although as I recall, they were still allowed to release those machines as their own thing. Been a while since I talked about that case as well, so my details are probably fuzzy there as well.

yah , its hard to keep track, lots of cases like these with big targets like MS, Apple and Google. Thanks for the convo, hopefully we learn some more after /build.

These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse

Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.

They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.

If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.

It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie

Yeah with FSR 5 they should be able to offer a much cheaper version of Helix.

Series S is what has killed Xbox Series so... Will they dare?

The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.

Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.

Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.

LucasRuinedChildhood,

For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:

1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.

2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".