Battlestation 3 is all rigged for my next arc of livestreams, scheduled for Sunday February 19th through Tuesday the 21st. But a few weeks ago it did not look like Battlestation 3 would ever be used for livestreaming again. Or much of anything. I was having a massive heat problem in the box, which I had only discovered while chasing down a failed GPU. The heat problem left me wondering if I should build a new rig or if there was a cost-saving salvage op I could pull off, but that would be a low enough level of effort that it would feel worth it to save the elbow grease over building new. Too far above the critical path activities that a new build takes, and I would just want to start over. And most of the work surrounding swapping out a cooling system, which would include removing the cooler from the CPU and cleaning the lid of the proc, and then re-applying thermal paste and seating a new cooling block would be a lot of the heavy lifting that goes into a new build.

I felt that the CoolerMaster Heat Sink and Fan assembly that CyberPowerPC (the original builders of this particular unit) had used was underpowered. And the RGB fans that they’d used were failing, sometimes refusing to light up, or lighting dimly, and always failing to follow the inputs from the teeny remote they came with. That and I also had low confidence in the Power Supply; both the fans and the PSU were made by Apevia, and I’d had an Apevia PSU fail before. I decided that swapping these three parts out would be less than half the level-of effort of building a new box, so a salvage op got the green light.

After all of the change-outs (not really calling it an upgrade because CyberPowerPC should have sent me a proper box, but what they sent me was shoddy workmanship, including a poor thermal paste application that left half of the AMD Ryzen 5-56000X CPU uncovered), the PC is the quietest of the four builds I run in the studio. So quiet that I sometimes have to shine a flashlight in the small bottom window on the front panel where I can see the lower of the three fans of the front-mounted AIO to visually verify that the AIO fans are spinning.

And yet, despite all of that, I am at one of my lowest points of caring at all about the industry and the various games it is putting out. I mean, I still love to game. But I have fallen into one of my PvP Shooter phases, and am given little care to notice things like Hi-Fi Rush, Forspoken, Hogwarts, or, more importantly, the controversy surrounding them. Since leaving Twitter, I check in now and again just from the browser without logging in. Console wars. And more console wars. While I keep an eye on the Microsoft-Activision merger goings on, I do so out of a compelling need to keep up with current events, but not out of a desire to talk to anyone about it. What used to fuel me to discuss the business and finances of the industry has fallen low in my ladder of concerns. I just want to play competitive shooters.

It also keeps me focused on wresting every drop of ROI from my gaming PC builds. But it, to a certain extent, also keeps me from diving deep into flight sims, racing games, and from getting use out of my other hardware. It is something I continue to ruminate over, even as I try to make small wedges within my sessions of Call of Duty and Halo to play my Steam Deck and other things. But for now, I’ll just accept that I am going to be playing a lot of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. And reading all of the tips, and watching a healthy chunk of the videos. That will be my faith for now. My temple. At least that will keep me focused and righteous for now. Like the year I spent in exile reading and writing reviews out of the limelight, it is time for a cleanse from all of the nonsense.

Recent indications have come out that Microsoft knows full well that its Game Pass subscription service cannibalizes sales of new games. There are reasons why this is ok, and worrisome suspicions that gamers should have that it’s not. And reasons why the analysis of impact of this nature of business, now being admitted to by Microsoft, is consistent with things that I have said, and reasons why it may not. Neat, huh? How it is possible for two states of existence to be concurrently true? Let’s dive into both.

Conspiracy theory number 1: “OMG!!! This is proof that Microsoft is trying to drive the entire industry to a subscription model!”

I’m not ready to fall off the log and buy into that shark tale just yet. It does not sync up with the previous statements that Microsoft expects annual Game Pass revenue to be 10- 15% of its Gaming Division’s Content and Services revenue. “But GameLogIQ, that’s only if you accept that Microsoft is telling the truth and not lying.” Well, I do. Here, let’s draw a line between lying and being outright unethical, versus carefully couching a phrase to drive and influence the desired outcome that you are seeking. The latter to me is ok and is a natural and expected behavioral pattern in business. And so, while I believe Microsoft in the revenue proportion it has used in the past, I also accept that the caveat could be “…10-15%…for now”. Meaning it could shift over time, and that 5 – 10 years out, the balance may not be the same. And Microsoft may know, suspect, and be strategically planning around the resultant dynamic their subscription service will have on the market.

This is relevant because there are more older gamers on the market than younger. That will, of course, shift over time. But more importantly than the sheer demographic number, that older consumer forms a block of buying power, where it has much greater disposable income, than the younger demographic. And is more willing to spend it, as we have statistical proof that the younger generation includes a block of consumers that just won’t pay for games or content. And so the older block cannot be ignored within the addressable market. Microsoft could have a plan to further differentiate the perceived value of buy-versus-subscribe, so that it feels like you are getting a better deal by buying, whereas today you are forced to ask “why buy, when the exact same thing is available via sub?”. And so the market differentiation would have to make it so that the thing in the sub is not the exact same thing.

Why it’s consistent with my caution for the XBox community to pump the brakes on “We’ll win if we put CoD in Game Pass, and we’ll immediately sign on 50 million new Game Pass subscribers”: First of all, it’s wrong because it’s not “we”. Microsoft gains market share and maybe earns some more shekels of silver. Not you. You don’t get one red cent. Bupkis. In fact, you are probably more set up for a price increase in Game Pass once Microsoft does gain market share through following loss-leader strategies. SMH. (I swear, the console war psychology is right up there with Scientology). Where I mentioned before…that the older generation perceives value in a way that still makes buying titles viable and has more disposable income? Some of those consumers…some of those in large number…are over on PlayStation. And won’t see the value-add in flipping over to subscription. Some of those consumers only buy one or two titles a year. While some armchair “analysts” may think of them as casual gamers who would not be wedded to a platform, their findings are incorrect on thus impact on incorrect. What they are wedded to are two things: sunk cost, and the absence of change.

My for example continues to be Android vs iOS. People tend to settle into one and stay. I may flip back-and-forth each year; let’s be honest, I typically buy one of each. But let’s say as far as one of those being my primary daily driver. But I’m not the norm. And most consumers don’t do the same. Vendor lock-in is a thing. Proof can be taken by how many of you rode that red ring of death through multiple occurrences in gen 7 and stayed on the XBox platform, despite this breach in supplier-consumer good faith and good will. So no, there will not be a huge jump in legacy gamers if and when the deal is consummated, even with the ones that are fence-riders and platform ambivalent. There will be a slight bump, and then maybe another in gen 10 as people buy new, but again that will only be with the small subset that is ok with change.

Why it is also consistent with my statements that old gamers should stop with the “market analysis” that everyone wants what they want: OK, so we hold true with these lines of reasoning for the older gamer. But note that I have not addressed the new gamers coming into the market every day. These gamers will invoke on the market the result of a shifting baseline syndrome. What they experience will become the market norm. Kids growing up today know and are comfortable with the streaming content model, for example. Not the legacy cable tv model. That genie is not being put back in the bottle. We’re not going back. Regardless of whatever perceived difficulty NetFlix and Disney+ is experiencing or whatever streaming service of the week puts out some bad news. Let’s stop getting carried away with the exaggeration and lack of consistency that whatever happens to those businesses will happen to Game Pass. Although as an experience in a PlayStation bukkake Spaces recently showed me, some of the Jim Ryan faithful lose their grip on the comprehension of English grammar when I try to speak to them about how exaggeration, hyperbole, hypocrisy, and consistency all part of one topical continuum, and so this part of the thread may be lost on those with brick brains versus bubble gum. But the younger generation of newly onboarding consumers into the gaming space will be normalized for the subscription lifestyle. And so, over time, these cannibalizations of game sales versus people directing money towards subscriptions, people who do not have an innate, cultural bias to the perceived value of buying being a better value proposition than subscribing, will start tilting the market demand.

Does Microsoft know this? Their own statements revealed in the recent CMA document indicates so. Would it be natural for a corporation to see an impending shift in the market, one that they themselves are driving, and shrug their shoulders and do nothing to prepare for it? Unlikely. Companies adjust for cannibalizations the same as they do for product obsolescence. Apple is a great case study in managing this dynamic. They have recently lowered production targets for the iPhone 14 Plus, as the iPhone 14 Pro is cannibalizing sales of that lower SKU. There isn’t enough product differentiation between the two for people to worry about the small price differential. So they step up. As a result, Apple will also likely do one of two things for the iPhone 15: kill the notion of an iPhone 15 Plus in the product lineup, or increase the perceived capability and value gap between the 15 Plus and the 15 Pro. Apple also killed the iPod Touch when demand for the iPhone made it an unnecessary product. In times past, it has let the Mac Mini languish when the low-end iMac offering and MacBook Air crowded out the reasons for a person to buy a Mac Mini. So it is a guarantee that if Microsoft admits to seeing the data that a large-game offered on Game Pass not only crowds out demand for purchasing that title on its own platform, but also on other platforms, AND knocks against other games coming out in the same launch window, it is assured that they are not complacent. That they see it, acknowledge it, and are planning for it. I’ll hold position though on what exactly that might be until we see more of the case and the ensuing market dynamics comes to fruition.

It says that your gamble to put your game in Game Pass may not play out well if you go into Game Pass the same month or week that a big title launches there and sucks all of the air out of the room. And that Game Pass, as a market force, has the potential to move a majority of the market to only wanting a game that launches in Game Pass, even if it is available cross-platform, to be bartered for access via the subscription model rather than the buy-to-play model, reducing the get for sales for that title overall, but also being a lure from playing that game on another platform where it has to be bought.

The recent CMA document can be found here.

Companies do this all the time. The typical social media response is to call market positioning of a given product a “miss”, when the reality may be that the company didn’t make it for you. People said the RTX 4000-series was a miss. People who were already on 3000-series GPUs. The truth might be that nVidia knew exactly what they were doing, marked the risk down appropriately on the books, and moved ahead with the plan to upgrade their gaming GPU line to the next architecture. And while marketing position of the initial RTX 4000-series cards has experienced some challenge, I am not certain that you could call the entire product-line a miss. The truth may be that nVidia simply did not want the customers who were already on RTX 3000-series hardware as the primary return customers that they were catering to.

Such is the way with other consumer products. Companies that raise the bar on legacy products with a design refresh, and bump the specs, sometimes tend the move the product up-scale. Of course they know it will cause some negative impact and loss of customers. They’ve decided that that is an acceptable risk. And they’ve decided that there are some potential customers for that product category and price point that they no longer want.

Apple’s moves, both this one and its legacy penchant to do similar, are typical for the electronics giant. And it is less frequently that it is a matter of moving customers upscale in Apple’s case as moving customers along to a newer standard and spec, so that they can quickly no longer have to expend money, staff, manufacturing, and other operations capital, on the old and any baggage that it brings along with it. Earlier this week we talked about perception, image, and exposure. The problem is that these moves stand out and are stark in a much more exacerbating way than before. Because Microsoft, Google, and others, are focused on making their software and hardware as unilaterally compatible with multiple other products as they can. Apple’s products have long been seen as being stingy with regards to interoperability. But this instance of allegedly going out of its way to make a thing that the European Union forced them to make…out of the basis of it making iOS devices more compatible with the daily lives and households of Europeans…and taking action that will make it clearly less compatible with things outside of the Apple ecosystem. That is giving me pause to determine if this is a instance where Apple is telling me it does not want me as a customer. Yet again, reminding everyone that products within the Apple ecosystem are really made, and only have their maximum return on investment, for those who wrap themselves entirely in the veil of buying everything Apple. For everyone else, this tells people that Apple is not a company that looks to support those who want to integrate some Apple products into their lives based solely on specific use-cases. It is either All-Apple, or you are on your own.

I am often concerned that AMD treats its PC gamer customer-base like a hobby. Unconvinced that it takes said marker seriously, or just uses it as a test and demo population sample as an RDT&E field for its console parts. I ran Radeon cards for a bit over a year. Specifically the XFX AMD Radeon™ RX 5700 XT Triple Dissipation 8GB GDDR6, which I ran in two builds. And the AMD Radeon™ RX 6700 XT Challenger Pro 12GB OC, which I still run in my Linux gaming build.

In that time, to say that I found the driver’s to be lacking is an understatement. Even without my anecdotal evidence, it is needless to say that the optics on drivers for Radeon cards are not good amongst the PC gaming market. AMD needs to find a way to address this perception, image, and convert their PC gaming exposure to good. And recent events show that this is not it.

The drivers for the 7000-series line are not yet unified in the stack with the rest of the Radeon GPU products. The mainline driver package for Radeon cards has not been updated since early December. And while the LTS version of stable card drivers for Radeon has always iterated slower in recent years, with a beta version releasing first, this whole set of shenanigans seems obtuse. Presenting to customers that there is some technological nit that keeps AMD from unifying drivers amongst it’s product line would give me the wiggins if I were a prospective buyer.

Enough to shake me off for the lower price that AMD typically offers? If there were the typical cost savings that going AMD and avoiding the nVidia-tax usually brings, maybe not. But right now, AMD’s best card trails nVidia’s best by about 20.3% in performance, and is 33% cheaper. BUT…for 25% less than the price of AMDs best, you can get the #3 desktop part from nVidia which has the same performance as the #1 AMD part. In fact the new laptop nVidia part performs better than the top Radeon desktop card.

The dichotomy between the pursuit for performance that lies between AMD and nVidia is well-known and documented. AMDs place has always been value, price-to-performance, and drivers that iterate more slowly and are therefor more stable. If you take those things off the table, what is left to convince a buyer that they should go with AMD?

Now. If I’m an extreme bargain hunter looking to pick up a 6000-series card on the cheap, because the 7000-series cards seem all FUBAR’d, this presentation that there is something amiss within the systems engineering of AMDs product line might also give me pause and cause me to look at an nVidia option. Either current gen or last gen, depending on just how cash strapped I am.

It’s entirely possible that my past problems with Radeon card drivers…maybe this was me, not being able to strangle Windows 10 arbitrary updates enough, which sometimes seem to include hardware updates that monkey with the compatibility between AMDs drivers and its Adrenaline software. There was evidence of that; but the point is that AMD does not make this as self-managed as it should be and hasn’t worked closely enough with Microsoft to stop this from being a problem that is foisted on the user.

Even if it was a me problem, the fact of the matter remains that I never had this problem with nVidia, which seems to have everything needed for all SKUs in a given generation of cards within a single versioned instance of a driver update package. Whatever the root, it should not be the customer’s problem to sort it out, regardless of whatever I say about PC gamers needing to take on the responsibility of being their own sysadmin. At the end of the day, the result is that I continue to only recommend Radeon cards for Linux builds. Admittedly, it is a strong recommendation. I do not know why you’d suffer the expense and the imperfection of an nVidia GPU for a Linux build. But at least consumers do have the two options now, and with Steam Deck Verification being a real thing, the Linux option is actually viable. But AMD needs to either grow the Linux market base by partnering with Valve and Ubuntu to make ease-of-adoption Microsoft-simple. Or it need to be satisfied with its current meager market share and bank on server and consoles to be their real bread-winners, if they continue to have this misalignment and bad messaging.

“Why aren’t we setting trends instead of following them?” It makes for good internet travel. Makes the rounds. Serves as a battle cry for those who dance whenever the pot is stirred. We both know that the answer to that is simple. Because you work at one of the largest 3rd party publishers and those dev teams do not get to take wild risks with the company’s money. Some do; onsie-twosie. Few. Infrequent. And never in droves. One at a time please. Single-file. New ideas please get to the back of the line.

While much ado was made about the gossip-worthy soundbite that allegedly was said to Yves Guillemot in the after-math of his developer call-to-action, there really is very little ado about it at all. Set-trends? Developers get that opportunity maybe twice in a career. 3 times tops. Because most games will be a derivative of themes from the successful games that have gone before it. Teams that build a strong enough argument to get a green-light on something previously unheard of; that’s lightning in a bottle. Think Media Molecule and Dreams. Large publishers will roll those dice on 1 to 3 teams at a time max in a five year stretch. And those games will get marketing budgets that make it seem like those games won’t lose. And that is the corporation’s intent. That any gamble needs to go big to win big. And winning big with those games is the only thing that is acceptable.

And, by and large, those 3 templates are what the games industry has centered on over the past decade; with one or two additions.

That all being said, Ubisoft does have creative problems in its management of its production pipeline where it is dependent upon creatives. Because Ubisoft micromanages that creativity. And they became so full of their success, that they did not see early enough where they needed to make change. The classic Research In Motion (Blackberry) problem. But while that’s a chunk of their problem; maybe call that 50%… the other 50% is a problem that we like to call “just the games industry”. Activision and EA are not setting a trend other than throwing a bunch of money and people at annualized releases. Take Two is doing much of the same, and setting the “trend” of milking any IP that is making bank for as long as it possibly can; no point in making a sequel if the current game has the market stick-to-it-iveness of the Nintendo Switch. Sony isn’t setting trends. And Microsoft certainly isn’t.

If you want creative freedom, you need to look to indies, and any dev would need to work there. Or at least something at much lower scale than AAA. Anything that is trend-worthy in the games industry is going to be derivative; putting polish on an already worn idea and pumping the marketing up to make it sound as if it’s paving the way. When it is really just following a path that someone already cleared.

The European Union has a Lemony Snicket kind of case on its hands. One that it created of its own doing. One that is driven by the tendency towards techno-fear in the EU. But one that also has a valid cause for concern. They are just not going about it in a manner that presents a solvable problem. And have not since its inception.

As reported by TechCrunch this morning, both Meta and the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) are being sued by Data Rights Ireland (DRI). DRI is a consumer privacy protection advocacy group that engages corporations and regulators on behalf of private citizens. Last fall, the DPC found that an incident where Facebook leaked Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of the 100 million European Union users of Facebook did not require notifying those subscribers. It came to this conclusion that nothing was actively broken by FaceBook in the protection scheme of that information; ie no one made an active mistake that compromised the security of that information and led to it being accessed. That is because no real security of that information existed in the first place.

Or the architectural intent, for that matter. It is a case where, if tested, the implementation should pass verification, but not validation. The bug cannot simply be corrected in code. The requirements and design may need to be updated, the test may need to be revised. The architectural model may need revision. But a defect still exists.

And this is the problem that GDPR and its policing regulatory agencies do not address. If the company never implemented security properly in the first place, then nothing got broken, and therefore no remediation action needs to happen, and no one needs to get informed. Maybe it’s a defect, but it’s not a GDPR thing. Not my problem, man.

The age-old mistake was made of creating a compliance framework that did not have the teeth of being enforceable. And so the regime is generally useless. And consumers go on at the mercy of corporations who cannot be policed.

It would make sense for there to be an international consortium on privacy. There are some scattered thumb rules that exist, but none that have the international weight of law, and none that point to a tangible specification that measures compliance effectiveness for GDPR. And so a defect must be an operational manifestation to be valid. No look at root causes that pre-date operations are taken into account. It’s a path that allows for a lot of skating by, and allows corporations to hand-wave compliance without really doing the work. And, as TechCrunch indicates, it allows things like Cambridge Analytica to be scape-goated so that the corporate perpetrator that allowed it to happen can go unscathed. It is the difference between knowing tech and building a solid mouse-trap, versus fearing tech out of ignorance, leaving the cheese out, and hoping the mouse will just go away once it’s full.

I was a Google Stadia Founder. I jumped off at one point due to some bad customer service associated with the other Google services I use; I retuned later. But by and large I was always a fan of the service. It became my travel gaming solution. It kept me from having to lug a gaming laptop and its associated brick of a power supply. Especially on trips where I already had to bring a work laptop. For family trips, I always carry a tablet. Stadia prevented me from having to also pack my Nintendo Switch, and, there at the end, my Steam Deck in their rigid travel cases and with their associated accessories. It worked for me at home. It worked in a hotel. Tablets becoming compatible with XBox and PlayStation controllers were boons equivalent to the joy I’d felt using the nVIDIA SHIELD and its controller solutions once I was able to pair them with my Stadia experience. But, of course, it has all come to an end.

I set up this discussion about Xbox Cloud Gaming and Game Pass to thoroughly telegraph that Cloud Game Streaming for me is about moments of convenience. As part of my livestreaming, hardware reviewing, podcasting, and blogging, I run 5 gaming PCs and 4 consoles. I don’t need to light off a fire-breathing dragon every single night. And I certainly don’t need to carry one on travel when it is not absolutely necessary. The convenience of Stadia for me was the ability to pick up a mobile device or sit at a business or ultraportable laptop, my LINUX laptop, or some other low-end device, bring up Stadia, not worry about patches, System Updates, drivers, controller firmware updates, being assaulted with ads or whatever cockamamie thing Microsoft or Sony wanted me to pay attention to that day…and just game. It’s not about graphical fidelity or a high-end hardware experience. I have that in spades; enough to keep 9 gamers occupied. So I can make other choices.

It just works.

But…there is some interest I have in it for ROI. I also use a lot of high-end mobile gear. Hold-over behavior from when I was a mobile device reviewer. And I have more XBox controllers than I can shake a stick at. My yen for getting back to gaming on mobile was piqued throughout 2022 as my co-hosts on the Enough 2 Keep Going Weekly games podcast constantly talked about Marvel Snap and Retro Bowl. More over, hearing so many of my adult friends re-surface the discussion of the difficulty in finding time to game between house, kids, career, cars, and pets, I also thought last year about how mobile gaming became my primary gaming outlet during my second grad school degree. Offerings have gotten more complex these days, but I still wanted to get back to some small screen gaming in 2023, and some quiet nights without exhaust fans spinning in the game room with the boompse.

Once due to lack of interest and the big cancellations. The second time because in reviewing my consumption models in the fall, I was just buying those games anyway. While I have a new PC build underway…the most powerful beast I’ve put together…and a major studio re-arrangement in progress, things are almost getting back to normal. Now was a good time to get back to Game Pass and try out some XCG as it will let me build incrementally in the background, take a break while playing, and not get too deep into a 3 or 4 hour gaming session on a more powerful piece of metal. So hopefully I’ll get the build done without doing nothing but that for a day or two, and get some lightweight gaming done on the side. This is my second year with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 and it’s embarrassing to say that I have not used it much for gaming and absolutely should have. Ditto for my iPhone 13 Pro Max and Google Pixel 6 Pro. I’m looking forward to taking them for a spin with XCG, as well as my iPad Pro, which is due for an upgrade this fall. I also brought in a BACKBONE One for a slightly different controller experience. Good times.

And here lies yet another departure. The discussion of Game Pass swirls around this obtuse way of thinking about consumption as if someone signing up for Game Pass is making a lifetime commitment. As if people cannot dance in and dance out just like we do with video streaming services. Turn a thing on to consume what you want and then turn it off. I saw one narrow-minded analogy the other day, which was a bit idiotic, comparing Game Pass subscriptions to PlayStation console sales. Anyone actually educated in market analysis knows that these two products do not compete with each other. People are not down-selecting between a console and a subscription service. Hardware does not compete directly with service access. And hardware is a long-term, seven year (at least) commitment to an ecosystem. A subscription service is a flexible means of consumption that can be turned on and off like a water fountain. Only the unsophisticated get those twisted.

Gamers are a pretentious lot. In their discussion of anything new and innovative, they oppose anything that walks, talks, looks, and smells different than the exact way in which they game. It seems like XBox fans have grown slightly more amenable to Microsoft taking gaming in new vectors. I think that they get that that has become essential for the survival of the brand. PlayStation loyalists still seem fairly entrenched, though. When PlayStation games started coming to PC more regularly, they decried no longer feeling that were being treated “special”. Even when those games came to PC four years after initial release. When Hulst recently indicated that they would come to PC more regularly and suggested even less lag, the wailing and gnashing of teeth grew louder. And now that Sony is patenting methods for streaming its games on appliance-level IOT devices, I expect the outcries on Twitter Spaces to commence anew. As soon as everyone sobers up from New Years.

The PlayStation community has been the most vocal in its pushback on the notion of Cloud Game Streaming; no surprise, since XBox has been one of the primary proponents of this technological advance. Much in the way XBox fans were against $70 video games because Sony went down that path before Microsoft. Until, of course, Microsoft did the same, and then that camp’s pushback went remarkably silent. When it comes to Cloud Game Streaming, PlayStation fans tend to not believe it’s “a thing”. They tend to voice that “console gamers don’t want that experience”. All the while miraculously being oblivious to their own statement undoing the very rationale of their logic. It’s not about what experiences console gamers want. It’s about the experiences that customers in a different demographic of the addressable market want. Put more simply, it’s not for you.

Seven years before Google announced Stadia. For those who have been around the platforms and been paying attention to the industry and console evolutions, the expectation was always that Cloud Game Streaming would obtain some foothold, even as we watched OnLive go through its apogee and its sale to Sony. While we saw the service sunset, the outlook was that Sony would use the technology to merge as a cornerstone of its own platform foundation and put it to good use.

Whether or not Sony has done that is debatable. While I had interest in 2012 in its Cloud maneuvers, the launch of the PlayStation Network in 2006 and the compromise of said network in 2011 were persistent reminders that Sony was not a software, networks, or services company. It is an electronics and entertainment company, and that still holds true to this day. But it has been relatively quiet on the Eastern Front since Ryan said in 2019, five months after the announcement of Stadia, that

“We believe the streaming era is upon us and is about to begin a period of rapid growth.”

Ars Technica – https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/playstation-boss-we-believe-the-streaming-era-is-upon-us/

And that is the only place that its Cloud service is being delivered to. Not Linux PCs. Not Macs. Not iOS devices. Not Android. For Pete’s sake. The entire point of the Cloud is to be platform and hardware agnostic. And yet, here we see Sony still mired in a platform-centric modality of thinking; proof that in many ways, Sony is hampered by an inability to get out of its own way.

As well as that of its most vocal fanbase. But this ship may be slowly but surely changing course. The Activision merger is well-known to have caused Sony to avert its eyes from the stodgy but consistent strategies that got it to market dominance. And that’s a good thing. Fans never make good NFL head coaches. And in similar vein, PlayStation needs to grab its balls and forge forward into areas that it has previously avoided or only made tepid toe-dips into. While console gamers may be its core, the growth in that demographic is constrained. Because the number of people who are willing to play games, but are not interested in buying a $400 or $500 technology appliance is much larger than even its current install-base. As the mobile industry has been proving since 2007.

Cloud game streaming is here to stay. The vast majority of developers are engineering and tooling their production pipelines with Cloud game streaming as a primary future target. It’s part of the reason why nVidia deployed its GDN (Graphics Delivery Network); don’t let all of the AI/ML marketing-speak lead you to believe that that is its sole purpose. And don’t follow console “pundits” who insist that Cloud game streaming is “not a thing”. For over a decade now, its fruition has been unquestionable; a matter of “when” rather than “if”. Hopefully Sony’s patent indicates an intention to get there before that ship sails. Before it finds itself looking like Research in Motion (RIM), stodgily refusing to change before it is too late.

A couple of weeks ago, I made an alternative argument for Microsoft to fight the FTC on. One that showed a bit more humility than Brad Smith’s “We tried peace” (which, having spent several decades working with government agencies, runs the risk of catalyzing this issue along bipartisan lines and backfiring on MSFT). Out of due dilligence, it is necessary to entertain another notion, one that looks at the realistic argument that Microsoft has not been ‘good for gamers’ since the start of console generation 7, and therefore the acquisition by said entity cannot possibly be ‘good for gamers’ as an outcome.

Maybe MSFT should argue that if it weren't for them, there would only be two competitors on the gaming market, since Sega departed the platform space 21 years ago. That other companies tried and failed: 3DO, CD-i, Neo Geo, Turbo GrafX. That Atari folded before that. That there

— Red Reddington (@Hamp_LeeHampton) December 15, 2022

Let me first say, if you are fighting this fight on idealogical lines, as 99% of Gamer Twitter is, get out now. This post isn’t for you. If you are someone who has discounted Microsoft’s financial strength as an anti-competitive risk, because “money can’t buy you loyalty”, that’s what the definition of following loss-leader strategies is; using money and the ability to absorb a loss as a means to grow market share and thereby increase customer loyalty by offering cheap products. That’s how Game Pass got a foot-hold. If you then skate by the argument that Game Pass is not a value for everyone at $180 per year, deflecting that with “but Game Pass is $1”, obviously XBox has not gotten to nearly $3bn dollars of Game Pass revenue through customers buying Game Pass for $1. And as recent history has proven out, the economic scenario that once a company following loss-leader strategies gains market share, especially around lifestyle products that consumers deem “essential”, they can raise prices unobstructed. As has been the case with Amazon. Hulu. NetFlix. Gillete. and BMC. Let’s be honest; you are not interested in hearing an alternative line of reasoning if you have already entrenched. That being said, let’s proceed.

Generation 7: the Red Ring of Death. Microsoft started getting reports about XBox 360 failures as early as just after its launch in late 2005. Public admission, the extent of the problem, and the extension of the warranty was not done until mid-2007. And even then, XBox 360s that were already seeded in the user-base were all at risk. It was not until 2010 that the manufacturing problem was actually fully removed with the launch of the XBox 360 S or slim. Microsoft was able to proceed down this path because it could absorb taking the $1.15bn loss from extending the warranty. As well as the additional costs of re-design / re-engineering. We all make this out to be Microsoft did the right thing, and was a good guy. But in truth, they were under duress from class-action lawsuits, individual lawsuits, as well as a disc-scratching lawsuit that lingered through 2016/2017, and went all the way to the Supreme Court. These are additional legal costs that, again, would be difficult for a smaller outfit to shoulder, nor would it have the expert legal team required to fight some of these off. No one can argue that the RROD was ‘good for gamers’. More problematic, buy selling at a lower price than the PlayStation 3, the XBox was able to gain market share. So much so that it indoctrinated its customer base to accepting the shoddy worksmanship of the XBox 360 for several years until it solved the problem. A delaying tactic. Anecdotally, I had my own repaired multiple times and even then bought an XBox 360 Elite. Which also got a RRoD.

And indie developers, who had soured on developing for the XBox in the late 360-era due to strict guidelines that increased developer cost and the friction of administrivia, were baited by ID@Xbox, and then given the switch of the XBox Indie Parity Clause.

Microsoft has an equality clause for indie developers that makes it impossible for an indie dev to bring its game to Xbox One if it has already launched on Playstation 4. The only way Microsoft allows an indie game to hit both consoles is if [it] launches within the same window on Xbox One

Windows Central

The XBox One was outsold 2:1 by PlayStation 4, and by this point in the timeline, Microsoft’s focus for XBox was Game Pass and acquisitions, not games as a first-order. Again, tell me how a DRM-scheme that bit gamers in the ass even this year, a higher price, muddled leadership, and antagonizing indies, yielding fewer indie games on their platform for their gamers, while concurrently investing less in the development of exclusives was ‘good for gamers’?

Generation 9: Microsoft is one of the foremost companies in building and selling collaboration tools for development teams. They make Micrososft Teams. They own GitHub. They build tools that link development communications to office applications; office applications that they are the market leader in and own the vast majority of market-share in, so much so that it constitutes a natural monopoly. If any company should have been able to weather the impacts of COVID, move its teams remote, and transition to non-realtime collaboration, it should have been Microsoft, with only Google nearing any level of parity. And even Spencer is (finally) quoted as saying this year that using COVID as a reason for the low productivity of their development pipeline is an excuse. And yet the current output of their nextgen games is lower than PlayStation 5’s. To that, many will argue that PlayStation put out a lot of remasters and remakes in 2022. But it should be considered that Sony does not have the financial strength and warchest to engage in loss-leader strategies and take the routes Microsoft does. Sony could not take the potential loss of customer erosion by putting out no exclusives in a year. It only has $11bn cash on hand. Microsoft has $107bn. Let’s stop acting like Microsoft is the David to Sony’s Goliath. It is quite the opposite. Microsoft has delivered a nextgen console that ‘eats monsters for breakfast’, and it has pulled greater market share this gneration than last on the Game Pass offering, XBox All-Access, and only three or four exclusives of critical and commercial noteworthiness. All while impinging the industry’s legacy model by creating a low-cost alternative that grabs market share that other competitors cannot meet head-on, encouraging mass consolidation as evidenced by the moves from Tencent, Embracer, NetEase, and Sony. So how is mass industry consolidation, which actually leads to less choice for gamers in the long-term, not more, providing debt-coupled means of consumption in XBox All-Access, & following a business-model that is less-incentivized to produce AAA, critically acclaimed content due to the crutch of a subscription model ‘good for gamers’?

All of this is to say that only a company like MSFT could weather these three cataclysms, all created by its own doing, & still remain the number an operating platform holder and in the top ten of the industry players that make 65% of the gaming industry revenue. The arguments that I made before for them, their case, also work in reverse. 3DO, CD-i, Neo Geo, Turbo GrafX, Atari; none of them had the firm footholds in market adjacencies & capitalization base that would allow them a third do-over, additionally consuming smaller players along the way. Not even Sega, who made similar mis-steps across two generations, was able to hold on long enough to make a third go before it folded and went game-publisher only.

In making these arguments, my goal is only to say, there are two sides to this coin. It is not anywhere near an open-and-shut case, and it requires a lengthy period of due diligence and legal opinion. It is hilarious to me that the “anointed” of Gamer Twitter claim that any who make arguments opposing Microsoft’s case are not being open to other perspectives, when they themselves cannot hear their own intolerance in levying that accusation. That they would dismiss the concerns that many, many other gamers have on what the impact of this acquisition will be on the industry.

Should the acquisition go through, Activision will also have a different set of incentives that may not be beneficial to consumers. In the failure of Call of Duty: Vanguard, ATVI had a lot of pressure on Infinity Ward and the support studios to pull off a reversal. Activision is not as insulated against enduring multiple years of commercial slippage in its crown jewel. But under Microsoft, there will not be incentive to make good when a CoD is not as well received. CoD will be more places. It will be available to people at a reduced cost. Cloud-spend will no longer be a factor as part of Cost of Goods Sold to Activision. The pressure will be less. And with a wider-spread market share, and cheaper consumption models compared to Battlefield, competition will be inherently less. With greater resources to throw at CoD, the likelihood of a threat from an independent such as 1047 Games and Splitgate is unlikely. Who will want to play Escape from Tarkov when there are greater player numbers on CoD and it is available for cheap? Could a PUBG ever happen under that scenario? Almost absolutely not.

Let me also kick the legs out from underneath the table of the “regulators need to protect consumers, not competitors”. That’s bullshit. It is much easier to defend a “protect consumers” line of argument because in the argumentive distance from supplier to consumer, anti-competition lines of questioning become diluted. But even in that obfuscation (a great legal tactic, and great for consle warriors too), it does not upend the economic truth in a capitalist, competitve market: that the presence of more competitors eventually makes a better overall situation for consumers. Microsoft acquiring Activision is not expanding consumer choice. It is a reduction and consolidation of the total number of competitors in the upper echelon of revenue generating gaming industry players. It makes fewer gaming companies, not more. That simple math should be readily apparent even to the most STEM-challenged of the Twitter populace.

How it does not raise competitive barriers for other industry players now and any new competitors that seek to enter later. We already have a state where we have not seen another console competitor enter the market for 21 years. How does MSFT acquiring Activision increase the possibility that we will? The fact that we have not seen one yet does not invalidate anti-competitive concerns. In fact, the history of the last two decades shows that barriers to entry have already had impact that has not been good for consumers. And it is not the regulatory agency’s job to just shrug their shoulders and allow that vector to continue unmitigated just because it’s already bad now.

Should the merger/acquisition go through, other 3rd party publishers will have additional financial and competitve incentive to do the same; seek other competitors to merge with or seek sale to one of the other Big Tech 5, or another Entertainment congolomerate that can leverage adjacencies in similar ways to Microsoft. We’ve seen similar behavior in the video entertainment industry. NetFlix disrupted the legacy cable television model such that a flurry of M&A’s was kicked off to move to the new model. Disney moved to buy key properties. Warner Bros merged with Discovery. NBCUniversal bought Sky. All of these moves have yielded more and more content being moved behind paywalls. There is ZERO argument that that has been good for consumers. The problem when similar behavior starts gaining momentum in the gaming industry, which it will by letting this merger go through, is that there is no Fubo, TiVo, Roku, and Vizio to create a disruptive middle tier. In fact, everything that industry is showing us is that mass consolidation around the strongest financial players could result in NetFlix itself being acquired by…you guessed it…one of the Big Tech 5. These are valid concerns that consumers and agencies have that are easy to see. That is, if green lenses and console warring do not make you dismiss them outright and refuse to even take five minutes to say that they need to be weighed carefully.

Much ado is made about the Microsoft Activision-Blizzard merger and acquisition. That includes various noise made by yours truly. But the fact of the matter is that while it is a newsworthy headline in the here and now, by next console generation it will have been forgotten. One of the truisms that are a result of not only our society, but of the gaming community in particular in their inability to recall (or be bothered to do research on) the history of the gaming industry.

Nine years ago, Apple first went to jury trial, accusing Samsung of violating several US patents for the iPhone. I would spend months trying to find a person with both a smartphone in their hand and the ability to remember the name Lucy Koh, the presiding judge over the first trial. Or who could recall that that case went all the way to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts presiding. Gamers can barely be bothered to recall even current events, as evidenced by the XBox fans that cried out that their first-party games were going to PC…oblivious of the well-known and advertised fact that both XBox games and PC games share the DirectX APIs to address hardware. The same people who were of limited awareness then are no more enlightened today.

We’re going on the second year of people calling Arkane’s Death Loop less impressive in play than it was in its 2019 E3 showing and after its three delays; memories of Dishonored and Dishonored 2 are no bulwark against that. And of course much of the hardware that typified our gameplay in 2012 is gone, rarely given much thought to, and hardly considered relevant: the Vita. The 3DS XL. The Wii U. And I don’t even remember the Neo Geo X. The point being that gamers are a fickle crowd. With short memories.

Gamer Twitter would like to convince itself otherwise, however, like it always does. There are maybe 57 million Twitter users in the US. Of those, maybe 37 million at most are gamers, running a range from uber-casual to mainstream and a smaller wedge, still, of hardcore (hardcore meaning “those who usually buy more than ten games a year and play more than 20 hours [a week]”). Of the ~215 million gamers in the US, that’s 17%. And yet every week, Gamer Twitter lathers itself up, telling itself that it is representative of the mainstream gaming market.

But they are also often argued because someone voiced an opinion on the topic. Unfortunately, legal opinions are like opinions on the Bible. Many will voice them; voicing them does not make them right. In this country we allow the law to be interpreted. And one person’s view of the law can vary widely from the next. Especially when those people are judges, or corporate executives, or people with skin in the game on how the court case is decided. Which is the textbook definition of bias. Or those opinions are formulated by their own past experiences, which is anecdotal. And so regardless of domain expertise or position, every legal opinion rendered on this matter is just that…an opinion. And opinions are not fact. Name-dropping whose opinion it is does not change that. Only one opinion will have judicial weight and the ruling of law. That of the judge assigned to the case.

Every company is doing what it needs to do to influence the outcome that best serves its own needs. The notion that any corporate entity is on some altruistic crusade, trying to protect the hearts and minds of gamers everywhere, is laughable. Or that they are religiously charged to protect the rights of the small percentage of gaming industry employees who want to unionize. These companies pay millions of dollars every year to lobbyists, while incrementally increasing how much they charge consumers for product. Their intentions are math-based. Capitalist. And Game Pass is no different. It’s availability for cheap is to obtain one goal and that is market share. It’s not because Spencer was visited by three ghosts one Christmas and decided to change Microsoft’s ways.

The reality is that, given the ridiculous things that are happening, the Supreme Court is likely to have to get involved again. Microsoft’s argument that an agency that is 107 years old, and has been charged with participating and leading anti-competitive regulation in this country since inception, is now holding unconstitutional proceedings is a bit of a reach. A union-busting executive vomiting a Twitter thread in support of the merger is cringe. And 10 gamers who either struck it rich in crypto or convinced an ambulance chaser to work pro bono filing a lawsuit against Microsoft to stop the merger is just weirdo AF.

While this case has been interesting to follow, just as Apple-Samsung was, COMCAST-NBC-Universal, Disney-Fox, Oracle v Google, and Epic versus the world (yes, some of those were mergers, some of those were patents, some were anti-trust; point being…court…judge…legal), just like all the others, the nitpicking over the dry-bones and minutiae by the general public has gotten as droll as it always does. The case is going to a judge and is in the US legal system and however it comes out, I think that, in and of itself, is the best thing. That way, the gamers who have their egos symbiotically entwined with plastic boxes will have no recourse for their tears. In the meantime, gamers should still be playing games. And Microsoft and Sony both have work to do that should not be on pause. The former to get its production pipeline up to a velocity commensurate with the number of studios it already owns. The latter to round out a portfolio that has to-date almost solely been characterized by cinematic, narrative-driven near-linear wide-path game-design and architecture. 2023 should include work efforts by both beyond myopic focus on this one issue. And gamers should do the same.