this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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You are nearly 40 years late.
As someone who's been a Blizzard customer for 30 years roughly. Selling to Activision was a bad move from a customer perspective. Selling all that to Microsoft is utter bobbins. I 100% think Microsoft games division is currently less horrible than Bobby Kotik. It's a real; real low bar. But I know for a fact that as a customer I'd be much more satisfied if Blizzard was independent again and able to develop at their own pace and schedule. And not that of some distant detached greedy CEO focused on quarterly profits, and what they can cancel in the short term to boost them.
Also I have this controversial statement. There should be no locked down consoles or console exclusives for the last 20 years or so. They've all been one of 3 more or less common PC microarchitectures. Intel, PPC, and ARM. Hell before that they were largely Z80 or 6502 based. Those at least ran bare metal with fairly specialized configurations and timings. All the modern stuff largely runs on otherwise largely common commodity hardware with well-known APIs and back ends. Just artificially locked down.
We're not talking about the sale that started Blizzard into this mess though.
There's also a fair few consoles that have come out over the years and are not locked down. Steam Machines are a perfect example - and no one remembers them because they were too expensive. Why were they too expensive? Because they weren't being financed by exclusive products that drove people to the platform to cycle sales.
Even Steam basically made its inroads via exclusivity. When Half-Life 2 came out, it felt like a terrible forced piece of software that Valve was pushing. It's never been technical capability or CPU architecture that encouraged exclusivity - hell, half of Microsoft's good exclusives are made in Unity or Unreal, and some of them ended up getting easy Switch ports.
Actually, everyone is in love with steam machines currently. It took Valve a bit to find the right form factor and application. But they did get there. Have you heard of the steam deck? There have been other hand held PC systems before. But Valve released the definitive gaming one. And the software is there for other hardware manufacturers to use if they like.
And you're having some heavy misremembering of history there. Halflife 2 had Physical releases outside steam. The only console it was never on was Nintendo's. Having releases for PS2/3, OG Xbox and 360. As well as physical releases for Windows and Mac. Correct me if I'm wrong but steam has only ever been avalible for Windows Mac and Linux. So no, Valve didn't play exclusivity games.
If I were forced under duress to pick a gaming corporation as being the good one. Good and corporation are two words that generally don't go together. But Valve would be one of the closest. A generally flat socialist like company heirarchy. Largely platform agnostic. And has done more than any other company to reduce lockin. Their contributions to Wine and Proton are pivotal.
Who? Are you talking about the steam deck? That thing won't even sell 10% of the amount of consoles that the last placed xbox sells this generation. It probably won't even sell half as many consoles as the xbox will sell in its worst year.
People don't care about steam machines, they just like steam the digital distribution game platform.
Lol.
Great response! I see your point!
Tell me how steam machine sales are going?
No one knows because Valve hasn't released sales numbers and I'm not sure what number you would expect me to say that would satisfy whatever you arbitrarily consider a successful product.
It could have sold better than the PS2 and they would still be angry.
I'm not the one that said:
with nothing to back it up. You're defending what that person said also with nothing to back it up.
Okay.