FTC makes console market without Switch
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The FTC really wants to justify stopping the MS/Actiblizz merger, doesn't it?
It would be a sad unholy abomination honestly. I want Tony Hawk 3 remake, and I doubt MS will allow it.
Really curious why you think Activision would be more likely to allow Pro Skater games to be made or remastered than MS would. It's been a decade since anything new has been done on the series by Activision (ignoring a disastrous, rushed attempt at a cash grab right before license renewal), and Tony claimed that plans were in place to remake 3 and 4 until Vicarious Visions (who did the 1+2 remaster) was bought out and turned into Blizzard Albany.
I miss VV. They made the best ports to DS, and even beat the console versions with sk8land. Now it's just CoD company 3....
MS destroyed Rare far worse though.
That does have a point. WA would be in charge. At what cost though?
Sounds about like an argument made up by someone on a gaming Reddit who constantly goes on about FPS and nothing else no matter what the hell the game is. So, I guess when it's convenient the definition of gaming is nothing but graphics performance. Then when they need to say that women make up most of the gaming market to justify their bad design choices, they count old ladies playing Wordle.
There have been comments that the switch is doesn't have the frame rate and graphical abilities as the newer consoles for a while now. None of those actually matters, because most of the games don't need that.
I've seen a lot of complaints about the newest Pokemon having bugs by game reviewers, and it being ignored by fans.
Pokemon fans are sycophants who would gladly accept getting served trash in a box as the new Pokemon game and defend it, though. So that might not be the best example.
The Switch is technically a "generation" behind the other two, but because its selling so well and came out later in the gen than them anyway they aren't in some rush to push out the Gen 9. Especially given PS4 is still getting games made for it because no one cares or wants a PS5.
Also the new Pokemon is in a weird place where its probably one of the best games they ever made, but its performance is so bad its painful. So surface level reviews will spend all their time talking about that, whereas people who'd play it anyway get more conflicted. However, that's entirely a Gamefreak problem as games like Xenoblade 3 came out this same year with zero of those performance issues, still having a massive open world and having full voice acting on top of it.
If only the game's issues stopped at bugs.
This is bigger than it seems. Videogames tend to have stuff happen before anyone else. So a big popular political party that is showing everyone up may be ignored by all the news stations because "it's not actually a party".
Also, PS4 consoles are the most blatant money laundering scheme in recent years. It fits the narrative, so people ran with it, but the numbers make no sense compared to game sales.
It's definitely big, but I'm not in-the-know enough to do more than blindly speculate about why this is happening, at whose behest, and what it means for the future.
Creating a 'high performance console' market basically turns Nintendo into a total monopoly of whatever is beneath that. Could be a way to force Nintendo to play nicer with third parties?
Also 'High Performance' pricks my climate change faggotry detectors. The powers that be could potentially decide 'high performance' consoles need to pay carbon taxes to offset their higher energy demands.
There's a litany of potential effects of this, but I just don't know which effects we can expect.
Nintendo has already been accused of not being green enough, so they made sure to point out the power consumption of their console. This was during the Wii and then the switch.
What is this about the PS4 and money laundering?
Sony has been doing it for a while. Look at the top game sales, and then consoles sold. It doesn't match up.
Honestly, just the numbers in the linked article makes a solid case for not opposing the merger even without considering Nintendo.
There are almost 2.5 times as many Playstation consoles as XBox. How could merging with just one publisher possibly catapult the Xbox past the PlayStation to the point where it creates "an uncompetitive environment"? If anything, I'm seeing that Sony is dominant despite Microsoft's best efforts, and anything that can bring them closer to parity can only increase competition.
Honestly, compare the amount of console exclusives on Playstation with those on Xbox. If Calll of Duty becoming an XBox exclusive will unbalance the market, is the FTC prepared to tell Sony, who already has a dominant position, that they can't keep making console exclusives?
this honestly does make sense. Nintendo has been monopolizing its own niche of the market since the Wii.
It's official: Nintendos are toys for babies and not real games ;)
Nintendoomed has always been a way to deal with the company's winning streaks.
Ninendo's evolution would make a fascinating study in business school. I would love to see internal documents and the decision making behind their pivot to their current incarnation.
They were clearly the market leader in hardware power at the time of introduction of the NES and SNES. Choosing to go with a cartridge-based N64 instead of fallowing through on their partnership with Sony was a huge mistake in hindsight. Then even though the GameCube fell between PS2 and Xbox power wise, the choice to use smaller discs and not have DVD playback capability set them apart from Sony and Microsoft, and they were already starting to be seen as "not a gamer's console". This was also the last console they released that directly competed with Sony and Microsoft and shared most of the same games.
With the Wii, and their focus on handhelds, Nintendo seemed to abandon any pretense of competing with Sony and Microsoft and chose to carve out a niche as the fun/family/kids console maker. It sounds like it's working out for them profit-wise, but as someone who grew up with the NES and SNES, seeing Nintendo drop out of the top tier console market has always been weird to me.
I know some stuff. They went to cartridges out of fear of Sony. It's completely unknown what it was, but Nintendo ran as hard as they could from the company as they could. Even at bad negotiations Nintendo will leave and come back. They'll even work with military contractors and the mob. This time, they stayed away. Whatever Sony was doing was too much. Even historians who know the truth stear clear of the subject.
Also, the sales numbers for PS1 when compared to game sales show it was more evenly matched with the 64. The hundred million ps1s don't make sense compared to the top selling game being at 12 million.
I saw a show on the history of video games that said Sony and Nintendo were pretty far along and they're negotiations to release the PlayStation as a Nintendo console. They had pictures of the early versions which were basically a PlayStation with an SNES controller attached.
According to the show, the way Nintendo backed out of the deal was to let Sony believe that they were going to publicly announce the partnership at E3, and then they got on the stage and snubbed them. Regardless of how bad Sony maybe is, that sounds like bad form to me. After that Sony negotiated with Sega who also showed interest but later backed out, without the public humiliation aspect.
So, Sony released the console themselves, and the rest is history.
I've actually played the early form, it was a super Nintendo with a CD player.
I don't think it was bad form. I think Nintendo stumbled onto something that made them realize a lot was in danger. I actually work with those kind of historians and there is a lot of speculation on what it could be. This is especially after interviewing Nintendo employees who were scared to even talk about it.
I don't think backing out of the deal was bad form. Sega did the same math and came to the same conclusion apparently. I just did a little bit of research, and it was about royalties for the games put on the discs. I guess Sony wanted too much.
I take issue with how they did it. Telling Sony you're going to make an announcement about your partnership and unveil your new console at CES (not E3, which apparently didn't exist yet), and then instead announcing a partnership with their competitor Phillips is unprofessional.
That's the official statement, but not the reason why they did what they did.