Microsoft can now go ahead and close its giant deal.
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This is a loss for consumers. Massive consolidation, lack of competition. Get ready for them to pull games from PlayStation as soon as they are contractually allowed to. Get ready for everything to be on Game Pass and possibly not on Steam. Worst case: they disable purchasing some games on Game Pass so you always need a subscription.
- They (both Microsoft and ActiBlizz) pulled games from Steam before, and they’re both back on Steam well ahead of this deal. I don’t see why that would change.
- We’ve now seen through court documents and transcripts what many of us suspected in that many of these games and studios that Microsoft purchased for exclusivity were Sony targets for exclusivity as well, so if we had to pick one, the company trailing in the market sounds like the better one to get them as exclusives.
- I can only see this as better for competition than Sony running away with the high-end console market, because then there’s realistically only one console to buy.
- All that said about the above, fuck exclusivity in general.
They (both Microsoft and ActiBlizz) pulled games from Steam before, and they’re both back on Steam well ahead of this deal. I don’t see why that would change.
There’s a lot of tangible reasons for Microsoft to pull the plug on Steam game sales.
- They want to focus Microsoft products as “Cloud-First” wherever possible, and selling copies on Steam hurts this initiative.
- They would probably prefer to not give Valve 30% revenue on every game sold for IPs that they own and have their own means of distribution (and even more now that they own Battle.Net) For all businesses, this is simply a case of maximizing profits.
- They aren’t happy that Valve are essentially letting people run native windows applications on non-windows platforms.
- They view the Steam Deck as a potential competitor to the Xbox or other mobile game initiatives they might have.
- They would still love it if we all used Windows Store for downloads wherever possible, which is why they have lately been streamlining the process of getting products on that storefront.
Those are reasons. I don’t know if they would actually follow through and there are reasons for them to not do it, but every decision is a case of weighing the negatives and the positives. It really depends on if Microsoft cares about the public perception of forcing people to use their own store or not. Currently, they do care about forcing people onto clients, but that might not always be the case forever.
