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Comment on 'Xbox Hardware Is Dead,' Says Founding Team Member, 'It Looks Like Xbox Has No Desire — Or Literally Can't — Ship Hardware Anymore' - IGN

Buelldozer@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

With the rise of game streaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna I predict that the console market is basically over. I honestly don’t expect Microsoft to release another console and if Sony does it’s almost certain to be the last. Nintendo may stick with it longer since they just released the Switch2 but they seem to be prepping for it with the digital key thing.

It sucks for the players but it makes fiscal sense for the Publishers and Console Makers (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) if there is an industry wide pivot to game streaming where players are required to pay every month. I know that some games don’t lend themselves well to this, yet, but it’s blatantly obvious (at least to me) that this is where the industry is headed.

We’ve already reached the end of “Console Exclusive” games and I think what comes next is “Streaming Platform Exclusive” games. I think what comes after that is the Publishers establishing their own Streaming Platforms for their own games.

This is precisely what has happened with the rest of the entertainment industry and there’s no reason I can see for gaming, which is a subset of that same industry, to do anything else now that the streaming technology exists.

Steam and GOG will end up pushed out of the market or they will also become Streaming Platforms, just ones that cater to a different set of players.

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ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Streaming has plateaued, and I don’t see anyone overcoming that plateau. The console market is coming to an end, but the transition is to PC gaming, not streaming, and we can measure that.

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- TwinTitans@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  “Console gaming is coming to an end”
  
  Yeah, if your XBOX.
  
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pivot_root@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Steam will end up pushed out of the market

This has been explicitly attempted 3 times already, and that really didn’t work out well for anybody who tried it.

Epic Games Store still resorts to bribing people with free games to keep their monthly active user numbers up, hemorrhaging money to attract users who are rarely interested in anything more than freebies.

EA and Ubisoft tried to forgo Steam releases in favor of their own stores and launchers in an attempt to keep 100% of the revenue. They eventually relented, releasing their games on Steam again. Even Blizzard joined in, adding Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 to Steam.

And Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone Steam by releasing games through the Windows app store just ended up with Valve funneling considerable resources into helping Linux and WINE become a viable alternative to Windows for gaming.

Unless Valve enshittifies or legal shenanigans ensue, they’re pretty unlikely to be pushed out of the market. No single game or game series is good enough to capture the entire market of Steam users and permanently drive them to alternative platforms. On top of that, Steam has a huge following of users who are loyal to the company, which is both insane and insanely hard to compete against.

or they will also become Streaming Platforms

Maybe, maybe not. I don’t see it happening, though. Valve makes money hand over fist from digital sales alone, and they have more to lose in pissing off their customers by selling subscriptions than they have to gain by selling subscriptions.

I am concerned about GOG and PC hardware prices, though.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  What about GOG concerns you?
  
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  - pivot_root@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    GOG being pushed out of the market. They’re the only store that actually gives you ownership of your games, and they don’t have the same established foothold that Steam does.
    
    It would be all too easy for Microsoft to strangle one of their key markets by taking a loss on sales and offering publishers 150% sales price in exchange for exclusive distribution of 90s and 2000s era PC games.
    
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    ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    The good thing about GOG is that you don’t have to trust them, since there’s no ecosystem lock-in like other stores have. If you continue to shop there, it’s only in your favor, and they’ve got a better shot at sticking around. They’re currently leaning into the concerns that more and more of us have about preservation, so that appears to be a market worth money, and hopefully they’re right. Microsoft is not in the business of loss leading right now, so I’m not super concerned about that kind of threat, and if they were going to try to squeeze out a competitor, they’d be going after Steam, not GOG.
    
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echodot@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I can’t see streaming games being anything other than a niche market. It puts the burden onto the streamer, in order to be competitive they look after constantly be upgrading their offering, they will have to have multiple server centres around the world, they will always be beholden to crappy ISPs who just don’t upgrade their infrastructure.

With local hardware you shortcut all of that, upgrading of your hardware is done by the user so they’re not going to complain if it’s out of date, you don’t have to have any server centres, and the ISP issues either don’t matter for single player games that were massively reduced for multiplayer games, now they don’t actually have to send video over the connection. .

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