Comment on SteamOS massively beats Windows on the Legion Go S
Jhex@lemmy.world 2 days agoI learnt most of the story from this book Renegades of the Empire
The story is summarized here: gist.github.com/kirkegaard/1055336
It’s all about how DirectX/Direct3D was launching and competing with OpenGL (the open standard).
In a nutshell, MS literally ported games for free to Windows (Doom95 being the flagship example) and/or subsidized the development of games for Direct3D so there would be no appetite for OpenGL.
This is equivalent to Amazon or Walmart selling their stuff at a loss until all competitors go bankrupt
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Well, the truth of that is quite a bit different than how you put it, and it’s also more carrot than stick. There were efforts to make Linux versions of games after this adoption of DirectX, and they didn’t take; I have a Linux disc for Unreal Tournament 2004 that came in the same box as the Windows one. What Microsoft did surely sucked for everyone, but fortunately, we live in a world where their recent efforts to do similar things aren’t working. They didn’t manage to siphon PC gaming over the Windows Store, and Windows handhelds are demonstrably worse and sell worse than the Linux ones. Consoles’ walled gardens are slowly crumbling from natural market forces to the openness of PC, and that includes a PC where almost all of those games work on Linux.
Microsoft does not have a position of strength here right now, and they know it, so they instead pivoted to just being an enormous publisher with a subscription service that’s lucrative but has already plateaued.
Jhex@lemmy.world 2 days ago
True, I misremembered… however, this is anti-competitive practice 101 anyway
But the fact they keep trying these anti-competitive strategies and have no consequences for them is a problem. We cannot rely on “it didn’t work for them this time” as if that is a solution because next time it would work for them and then we are all fucked for another few decades