Why does Microsoft keep buying game studios if they don’t actually want to have a game studio?!
Gutting game studios doesn’t actually yield any returns - making and selling successful games does.
So what’s the point? If they don’t like having functioning game studios, they can just stop buying them.
Digital storefronts are fine. The actual problem is the lack of consumer protection in console (and mobile) ecosystems.
On PC, the classic mitigation is piracy.
But on consoles that seems to be not an option, so there is no way to fight back console company overreach.
As a consumer, just sticking to PC gaming is the obvious solution.
Valve is better than Sony because it can’t just prevent consumers from going somewhere else. Gabe Newell is just as much a greedy bastard as other big corp CEOs. But judges forced him to allow refunds (btw, GOG has a 30-days-no-questions-asked refund policy without being forced to). And he cleverly price-gauges the game devs with his massive cut rather than the consumers. Combined with the threat of delisting games that are available cheaper in other shops, he secured his quasi monopoly.
As usual, vote with your wallet - while you still can.
None because I don’t buy games with unbroken DRM (including the need for corporate-run servers) and therefore can always get 'em all back via piracy.
It was a school of some desert people far away. So it’s basically irrelevant to the citizen of The Great US Empire.
Just make sure, that you don’t buy anything with unbroken DRM. If you ever lose access, you can just get it back from the pirates.
Physical mediums aren’t gone - they are just all HDD and SSD now.
I switched from CDs to HDDs two decades ago. HDDs are still great as physical long-term storage.
Your digital is just HDDs and SSDs in someone else’s computers.
I am not able to use the tokens provided by a Claude Max account either.
But if someone tries to be clever and have 10 employees use a single Max account, they probably run into the limits often. And if the response is to let them just buy API-prized tokens instead of getting more accounts, that gets very expensive very fast. The single-user accounts are subsidized. The extra token prices are not.
Actual business accounts are prohibitively expensive. And at least Anthropic terminates subsidized accounts when they see extensive use.
Real token prices are insane. Most businesses couldn’t afford them. And eventually the VC capital will dry up. The cheap AI bubble will burst. And then the market is in for a real sticker shock.
Better be prepared to switch to local inference for as many use cases as possible.
Just buy a cheap Chinese phone.
This proves that making a product twice as expensive actually does decrease sales significantly if you aren’t Apple.