Comment on Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody"
altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks agoI’d say I’m not a fan of their main monopoly getting bigger. Hardware lock or not, I want MS competing on par with PS, Nintendo, even though I cringe at buying a console for a game. This field got a bit leveled due to Sony giving up on some past exclusives (with a tasty price, nonetheless), but I just don’t trust a personal PC monopolist to be the one to dismantle the current dumbness and taking the higher ground from the very start.
Btw, I now recall some future Rouge Alley handheld version on Windows got announced as xbox-branded, with a probable verification status. It’s not a bad decision at their part, but I feel like that’s not only sneaking into another niche-move, but also a move to bite Valve, still-irrelevant on general console market, before they take some ground with their, ugh, Leenix or something.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
We obviously can only infer based on PR and past actions, but I don’t consider the ASUS whatever the fucks to be a threat to Valve.
Valve are not XBOX. They are Windows. They have their own branded hardware that sets a baseline but it is very much not in their interests to be the only source for that hardware. We have already see the Steam Deck take a very niche market (that was basically just Win GPD and Aya Neo) and turn it into one where you have a wide range of specs and very standardized interfaces and capabilities.
And, much like how Microsoft gets money from running Windows on a Surface or a Thinkpad, so too does Valve get money from buying Steam games on a Steam Deck or an Aya Neo or a MSI Claw or whatever.
But yes. As consumers, I am deeply worried about what happens when Sony has no actual competition other than “you can build your own PC but that is so very very hard so just give us money instead”. Especially since people can never stop glazing Nintendo and insisting they “aren’t competing with anyone” even as the exact same games run at significantly lower resolution and frame rate (and even their first party games run like trash).