This is a glimpse at our future under Techno-Feudalism, by the way. Five companies own all the entertainment and charge you extortionate rates to rent it. Please enjoy these last few years of Steam allowing indie games to be published with $20.00 or lower prices - once Gabe Newell goes away, inide devs are going to get “Spotified” out of existence by whatever venture capitalist buys up Steam.
While I don’t support the merger obviously I don’t think this particular price hike has anything to do with the acquisition. Game Pass was in my view operating at a loss to corner a market (the Uber method) and the pricing structure was inherently unsustainable because of that. This hike was gonna happen one way or another regardless of the merger. Microsoft is a such a preposterous company that they have tried everything to make money from gaming except making good games. It wasn’t ever gonna pay off.
This is also more directly a result of Microsoft squeezing every department for more cash to keep the AI bubble inflated. There’s no doubt that the overarching success model for GamePass was based on the potential for market monopolisation, but it’s the demand for every more cash to go all in on AI that has called time early on that plan.
AI crazy preponed this particular price increase but it was inevitable one way or another. Their Xbox Series consoles turned out to be massive flops. On PC people still prefer using Steam over any other platform. They were just stacking Ls.
Fuck Microsoft.
About this but also in general.
Game Pass was reportedly “profitable even when factoring in lost sales for first-party studios” as of 3 months ago. I agree with your overall point regarding the merger though
I am having difficulty believing that. Without accounting tricks I don’t see that happening. The guy cites anonymous sources from Microsoft so I can’t take that at face value. Later down in the replies he says this:
So yes, dev costs/spend does not come under Game Pass P&L. Because obviously dev costs can also be recouped via microtransactions, premium sales, DLC etc…
I don’t know enough to tease out the implications of this but for me it’s a sign that they are being disingenuous with their accounting.
Jez Corden, who’s considered generally reliable in the gaming leaks and rumors community, is pretty confident that game pass is profitable.
And I think separating dev costs from game pass P&L is the more reasonable way to look at it, as Corden explains:
What Microsoft doesn’t do is factor in Game Pass cannibalization at the point of funding the game outright. Given that games are being built for a variety of endpoints and business models, sources argued that it wouldn’t make sense to put the entire dev costs of titles like Call of Duty or DOOM: The Dark Ages on top of Game Pass — unless the game was going to be fully exclusive to Xbox Game Pass as its only mode of sale and access. Microsoft performs the calculations after seeing how the title performed in the marketplace.
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There are endless options for cheap or even free gaming entertainment. If you can’t figure out how not to spend hundreds of dollars on games every month, then it really is just a skill issue.
I think raising prices by 50% to chase profits is bad and should not happen regardless of if there exist cheaper alternatives
This, I mean how hard is it to fire up L33Tx.to and download a FitGirl torrent?
Most people don’t bother with torrenting anymore, either because they’re not tech savvy or they’re bootlickers who consider it stealing. I don’t understand it either, but that’s the way it is these days. Also, there’s only one weird transphobe out there cracking Denuvo games.
Which is funny because it’s faster and easier than ever
Downloaded the fitgirl repack for Silent Hill f yesterday, didn’t even have to use a torrent because they had another download option that was even faster. It took like half an hour, and worked with no fiddling.
7·6 days agoThey’ve might also have been told by their parents that it’s unsafe and it’s how you get viruses.
That was probably a lot more true back when downloading random .exe files on KaZaa or LimeWire was the thing to do.
I mainly downloaded rips that were divided into 20 different parts of a .rar file. Sure, they were always missing some features, but at least I got my games, dammit.
Or worries of being caught, and the safer alternative of paying for a VPN just to avoid paying for copyrighted creative works can feel a bit hypocritical and exploitative.
And where did that bring you? Back to Dwarf Fortress.
yay, the game that can’t fix the invisible magma cart bug even after ten years
Techno-feudalism is just monopoly capitalism. 🤷♀️
Techno-feudalism highlights an interesting point which is basically that, what occurred during the historical dispossession of the commons, is now re-occurring with regards to the “digital commons”( i.e. whatever form of P2P “free” internet humanity managed to foment); anything that cannot be annexed into a private, rent-seeking “Platform” will be increasingly subject to sabotage via legalese and economic plunder.
While this first occurred during the rise of global capitalism, it is also a regular practice which reinforces capitalism. I guess they struggled to achieve this in online spaces for a good while - but that is no longer the case.
Honestly, techno-feudalism is just a bad name for this - as you point out it implies a shift away from capitalism rather than a process of capitalist encroachment/renewal and it also just plainly doesn’t have that much to do with feudalism (except the erosion of it). Varoufakis’ main gripe as far as I understand is how rent via ‘Platform’ is becoming a hegemonic force in the digital market domain - but, his title almost seems to imply that rent-seeking is foreign to capitalism and only occurs in feudalism which is misleading and idealistic (i.e liberalism).
Yeah I didn’t like his book. Varoufakis thinks that we were seeing the defeat of capitalist profit seeking and a return to feudal rent seeking. Capitalism reverts to mercantilism, capitalist firms reduced to merchants within feudal markets controlled by feudal fiefdoms like Amazon, and the working class eradicated by gig work and turned back into serfs.
I think he’s overestimating the durability of this new market paradigm, and basically ignores that monopolies in the late 19th-early 20th centuries were exactly the same. This is what the railroad barrons did, plop themselves on the new tech and collect rents from capitalist firms.
I think what’s happening has more in common with enclosure and the transition away from peasantry into proletarianization. It’s just more capitalism
Maybe you filthy pinkos will actually read your theory if all the slop entertainment is out of reach. Lol.
No, of course not, we’ll all just waste more time on Hexbear.
Yeah I read theory
There’s gotta be a reaction at some point where people just revert en masse to retro and free/super cheap video games (if not board games or fuckin charades). There’s got to be a ton of fun games that are freely available, offline, and fit on a flash drive. There’s got to be diminishing returns where people stop caring about realism and just want to play the game. Heck, in many games it’s best to set graphics to minimum detail and maximum contrast because it provides a tactical advantage.
But the “high end” video games offered by M$ aren’t really about playing per se, but escapism. Nobody can afford to do anything cool. The planet is dying and we’re working all the time anyway. Hence people want max realism, at least for now… when you make that unaffordable, something is gonna give.
Are we not at that point already? Balatro has sold five million copies.
I mean, I got to that point years ago and don’t really play any video games anymore. I assumed it’s still going strong but maybe my finger isn’t on the pulse anymore
It’s probably just subjective, but it definitely doesn’t feel like anyone’s excited for new AAA games anymore, and nobody’s really clamoring to pay ridiculous amounts of money for a PS5 Pro either. Sure, the Switch 2 is selling well, but Nintendo still has appeal beyond
s.The Steam Deck doing relatively well is probably related too, it was marketed as being capable of AAA gaming and sure, there are some people endlessly tweaking configs to make Hogpoopballs Legacy run at 40 FPS or whatever, but it’s really goated for emulators and indie games.
critical support to the bourgeoisie in their war against g*mer scum
Lena define enshittification
Stop saying gamers when you mean consumers, grossgrossgross
Maybe I’m just silly, but I think having a mild churn of free or dirt-cheap indie games that are worth playing would probably be good for the platform as it keeps people using Steam and looking at the store page.
Well having a lot of smaller musicians be able to support themselves through their music would make the music industry healthier. That does not stop streaming services and concert vendors from extorting bands for every single penny.
Would it be impossible or impractical to establish a non-profit trust to buy out Valve and be established with a simple clear charter: to sell games at a price pegged to a metric which at least modestly trailed inflation, and have that trust purchase, own, and act as a board of directors for Steam and Valve? The trust would be set up to have legal requirements to forever explicitly be operated for the benefit of independent developers and their customers. Valve would maintain its present flatter hierarchy.
Is this not a possibility? I presume it would require some sort of benevolent wealth contributions. (Are there not at least a handful of very wealthy people who lean anti-capitalist or at least pro- co-operative enterprise remaining in the US, or elsewhere on the planet? Ideally such persons would also share a love for computer games, but maybe that’s a unicorn stretch too far).
Could not also such a venture be funded at least in part by crowd funding from successful indie developers and well-off customers? I mean, isn’t SC funded to the tune of $500 million in this way? If an arguable scam company can be funded in such a way, why could not an organization with charter-codified explicit community benefits be carved out of this cesspool of a so-called marketplace?
buy out Valve
You would need about $10 billion to do that. That’s four entire years worth of Doctors Without Borders funding. IMO, not a good use of limited resources…
Agree.
But then again, Capitalism itself is not a good use of limited resources. Yet here we are.
In a world where people can collectively raise and spend $500 million for a group of software developers to build and release a game like Star Citizen, perhaps game developers and people who enjoy playing computer games could have a chance at carving out something sustainable for themselves.
But yeah, I get it’s a pretty dumb idea. :(
Gamers should be executed
:this:
