Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
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My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
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The regulatory bodies of several nations really dropped the ball by allowing the Zenimax and Activision-Blizzard acquisitions.
This isn't the result of a market being "overextended", and it isn't about finding efficiencies. It's about Microsoft doing what it's always done- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
They should extinguish Bethesda then so the people there maybe get to work on something good again.
So they can go work for EA? Or Ubisoft? Or one of Take-Two's dev teams? Or something owned by Tencent or Embracer or Epic?
This isn't just "Microsoft bad". It's "Microsoft is one of many giant mega corporations that are ruining the entire industry".
Maybe some of these people could join or found smaller indie studios, but there are reasons why they didn't do that already.
I was being sassy. It‘s a harsh business where people are getting exploited and being held in precarious situations for wanting to work their dream job.
Microsoft still has a good reputation?
MS reputation when it comes to gaming ain’t that bad. They scored some wins over the last two years with lots of decent titles available day 1 on GamePass while Sony is stuck doing remaster after remaster. Nintendo isn’t doing all that hot either reputation-wise. So maybe not great but the bar is set low.
Honestly it’s freaking weird how bad XSX is doing compared to PS5 - both are about the same performance-wise unlike previous generation, games are cheaper thanks to GP and there’s such an overabundance of games that lack of exclusives doesn’t hurt that much. I guess that’s just inertia from previous gen but even then Xbox is a budget conscious pick so you’d imagine they’d sell better.
Nintendo isn’t doing all that hot either reputation-wise.
Outside of Lemmy and certain circles, it certainly feels that Nintendo is doing fine. I can't say for sure but anecdotally I've hardly seen ant criticism of Nintendo whereas Sony and Microsoft get quite a lot of it. I know that may not really count for much but it's hard to get a proper gauge of these things.
They are constantly yo-yoing over making games or just providing cloud services, they’ve closed the only studio that made them a highly rated exclusive in recent years, released all decent exclusives to competitors, stopped the backwards compatibility program, increased GP pricing, stopped making physical games, haven’t done anything with any popular ip they’ve bought since early 2000s, pioneered paid multiplayer and ads on the dashboard, and I have a lot more complaints. And I’ve had both xbox one and series x, and they were fine as game systems, but I’m not getting the next thing they make.
Sony hasn’t been that much better, but at least they are actually making games, and these games are well made, even if we saw fewer releases this gen.
Steam Deck is the only sustainable option it seems, considering where the industry is these days.
Its crazy to me that even after all these years, gaming media is still using Xbox/Microsoft as a punching bag. I guarantee that this opinion piece wouldnt have been written if Nintendo or Sony were doing the same levels of layoffs. Instead just a few softball articles would be made before going back to the regular clickbait slop basically all of the media giants create.
if Nintendo or Sony were doing the same levels of layoffs
But they're not. Well, Sony did layoff 900 people last year and took deserved flak for it. But you're right, it's not even close to the level of Microsoft the last 2 years.
As for Nintendo,
“If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.”