No one is having issues understanding the scale of the acquisition—a $70 billion dollar price tag kinda makes that obvious to everyone.
The question that myself and others in the thread have been asking without getting a clear answer is how could this acquisition make Microsoft a monopoly in the gaming space?
Even with the scale there doesn’t seem to be any legitimate path to Microsoft becoming a monopoly: video games is a $200b a year industry. Activision Blizzard’s 2022 revenue was $7.5b and combining that with Xbox’s $15b revenue still doesn’t even surpass PlayStation’s $24b. Is that a monopoly? I don’t see it.
You must be an LLM with no concept of aesthetics since most people agree the PS5 is an ugly monstrosity. Unless you are living in a dorm, it looks out of place in most adult living rooms. Meanwhile the Xbox is a simple, modern black box, literally the exact opposite of how you’re trying to paint their hardware and trust me, I’m no Microsoft fan. Give me a break.
That's a new kind of insult LOL. In my case, the slimmer side of PS5 barely fits my setup in a small room. Maybe my case is uncommon, but Xbox Series X won't fit my setup.
Maybe stop and think if you’d react the same way to someone critiquing the product market fit of a workplace chat product. If not, then ask yourself why is a preference for a video game console a core part of your identity to the point where you feel under attack when someone doesn’t like what you like.
Also I never once mentioned PlayStation - this is HN, not an IGN comment section. We talk about technology from the POV of the people who make it, not “gamers” or whatever.
All I’m saying is if you feel that way about a black box then I’m curious what you’d say about the PlayStation since that is clearly more fitting to your original comment. My identity isn’t under attack either, couldn’t care less what you stick under your tv or what you think of what’s under mine.
“People I disagree with are LLMs” is a terrible stance and awful way to continue a discussion. People can have different opinions to you.
Having said that I do personally agree that physically the Xbox looks better. The software experience of the Xboxes I’ve used, however, really do remind me I’m using a Microsoft device.
I've always found the original Xbox/Xbox one controllers horribly oversized and heavy compared to the PlayStation 2 ones. The early PS1 controllers without analog sticks were a bit small but personally they've always seemed to have the best balance of weight, size, shape, stiffness, and quality.
Forza Horizon 5 is the highest rated racing game of all time on Opencritic. Sony has no open world racing game at all so it loses by default in this space.
Forza (any Forza game) is either blatantly arcade (Horizon) or toxic online experience (Motorsport).
Gran Turismo although has its own issues is miles ahead over anything Xbox has to offer.
Horizon is as racing games as GTA Online for that matter
They don't really need it. There's 3rd party options like Need for Speed.
There's lots of first party titles MS has no one to one answer for either. They don't have a big mascot 3rd person shooter platform game like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart.
I like gaming on the couch. All my friends are on either Xbox or PC and, seeing as I don’t want to game on a PC, Xbox is perfect. Quick resume, SSD, and enhanced backwards compatibility make the Series X the best console I’ve ever had. This definitely reads like an ad lol but figure I’d give you some insight into why people still buy Xbox.
Haha this is funny as it reads exactly like the checklist of why I bought a PS5 after playing PC games for the longest. Which like, we’re adults here and I don’t care what console you have, more power to you. I think we’re both comparing to PC more than anything here.
The first game I played after getting my PS5 was… Bloodborne. I’d tried it on PS4 then sold the PS4 as it offended my eyes how ugly the game was back in December 2020. Two years later when the PS5 finally became available where I could just walk into my local store and buy it, it looked very pretty on the new PS5 hardware once the market calmed down. Such a delightfully weird and creepy game.
Not all-out warfare but there can be inter-pod skirmishes. They also hunt in groups and communicate the movement of their prey to co-ordinate their attacks together.
The lack of mouse acceleration in Windows is what make it feel, to me, clunky and slow. I know it’s a function of what you grew up with/are used to but it’s interesting to see. Personally I like being able to flick my mouse across the screen without having to pick up my mouse—enables faster work.
> The lack of mouse acceleration in Windows is what make it feel, to m
Windows has had built-in acceleration since Windows XP (maybe 2000?) - it's the "Enhance pointer precision" option in the (classic) Mouse control panel.
There's also an acceleration curve you can customize, but there's no built-in GUI editor, but the data's all in the HKCU\Control Panel\Mouse registry keys.
I've had my touchpad randomly stop working. Sometimes a restart fixed it, sometimes it required a deep dive into driver land. Something so basic that should just work.
Windows (without additional utilities) allows you to disable mouse acceleration, change scrolling direction, change scrolling speed, and even invert buttons.
Sure MacOS' stock behavior might be fine for you, but that's a different conversation, we're talking about giving the user choice without resorting to hacks here.
> Windows allows you to…change scrolling direction
Within the last 5 years this wasn’t always the case since that’s when I last setup a Windows machine and this definitely was not a setting and I had to edit the registry. Trust me that was not my first choice—I would have much rather used a setting like you can on macOS for scroll direction.
Of course that’s not to say macOS is perfect either. Sounds like they are just now getting around to adding a setting for mouse acceleration. Now, this has always been possible with a “simple” (when compared to the multiple registry edits I had to do on Windows) terminal command—no need to resort to a an additional utility as you imply. Obviously both of these “hacks” as you say are not anything regular consumers are going to be able to do.
With all that said, macOS is closer aligned to how I would do an OS “out of the box”.
Linux too. None of the DEs are all that close to what I'm looking for, and of course building my own desktop from scratch with a window manager, bars, takes as much work as adjusting a DE and then a bunch more.
As someone who came from a self-taught backend background (Python), Svelte is way easier to learn, read and write than React (to me) due to requiring was less boilerplate. The example in the “Developer Experience” section of this article was all I needed to see to ditch my attempts at learning React and go all-in on Svelte.
The question that myself and others in the thread have been asking without getting a clear answer is how could this acquisition make Microsoft a monopoly in the gaming space?
Even with the scale there doesn’t seem to be any legitimate path to Microsoft becoming a monopoly: video games is a $200b a year industry. Activision Blizzard’s 2022 revenue was $7.5b and combining that with Xbox’s $15b revenue still doesn’t even surpass PlayStation’s $24b. Is that a monopoly? I don’t see it.