Why are you excited at the prospect of less competition in the gaming space?
You don’t have to like Microsoft at all, don’t buy their stuff, but they’re still a major competitor to Sony, Nintendo and Valve - and losing them would do more harm than good. Losing any of them would.
This only effects playing on Windows, which in turn only hurts Windows, which is pretty much a monopoly, so not much of an issue there.
Personally I don’t care too much about Windows, just happy that Linux is finally getting some foothold. Nothing wrong with having both Window and SteamOS/Linux gaming systems.
Microsoft ain’t no competitor, they don’t play fair at all. Not like the others do. But they don’t even make good games. They just buy random stuff and hope windows stays the only platform where gamers go. Which should change with steam. Microsoft won’t die, I don’t think so, but they’ll have to work a bit more than what they did the last decade.
Microsoft inventions that made the gaming space a better competitive environment:
Always online single player: GFWL
Pay to play online: Ace
Pay to play console online up till last year: MW
Pay to play F2P console online: for over a decade
And that’s just from the top of my head. The closest thing in the known universe to the behaviour of Microsoft is a tumour. It sends metastases to other organisations and then it assimilates and deletes any identity the original organisation had.
Microsoft needs to be broken from Xbox, it already has a monopoly on the gaming sphere by controlling the OS of the majority, now it wants to metastasise to other platforms to begin assimilation. The future of core gaming is bleak.
Legitimately though, along with Games For Windows Live was the Games For Windows initiative, which did standardize controller support on PC. It standardized it in a way that benefited themselves, but it was an important step toward arriving where we are today, where there’s no longer some weird distinction between “PC games” and “console games”.
nieceandtows@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You should have asked this question to Microsoft before proton when they actively tried to kill Linux in so many different ways. If they had succeeded, then there would be absolutely zero competitors to them on PC handheld arena. Even now in their royally fucked status, they command over 80% market share in PC gaming (conservative estimate), so don’t worry they’re not going anywhere so soon.