7 ms·

I normally respect Ars a lot for their reporting, but they also conveniently ignore Minecraft that not only continues to get support on other platforms but othe

• foobarian 4y ago
  I'm still bitter about FF leaving Nintendo after FF6.
  • nerdjon 4y ago
    I am just bitter about FF7 Remake and FF16. Every game that has exclusive content on Playstation Not because I don't have a PS5, I do. But I refuse to support those types of business decisions. Particularly when there is exclusive content. Edit: Fixing FF15 to FF16
    • rjzzleep 4y ago
      Aren't a lot of those Playstation exclusives time limited? I.e. for a year or two it's PS exclusive afterwards the company can release it for any platform they want.
      • nerdjon 4y ago
        I don't think we fully know what the actual situation is for that. The FF7 remake came out in 2020 and is still not on xbox and there is no indication it will. Now that did come out on PC though. Deathloop came out on Xbox but it is unclear if that would have happened had Xbox not bought Bethesda or if Sony would have tried to keep it exclusive. The annoying part is that we just simply don't know what that situation actually looks like.
      • AraceliHarker 4y ago
        Microsoft claims that FF7R, FF16 and Silent Hill 2 will never be released on Xbox due to their contract with Sony. https://www.thegamer.com/microsoft-sony-blocking-final-fantasy-7-remake-bloodborne-xbox/ https://www.thegamer.com/microsoft-sony-blocking-final-fanta...
  • swexbe 4y ago
    FF7 could never have worked on n64.
    • smoldesu 4y ago
      ...not without the Disk Drive and a can-do attitude! (you're right though, the sacrifices required for an N64 port would ruin the game)
  • manuelabeledo 4y ago
    You mean the Nintendo exclusive?
• Grumbledour 4y ago
  You mean the same Minecraft that Mojang sold me back in the day and that now requires a Microsoft account to play offline? Probably not a big problem for Sony, but as someone who bought the game I am kind of pissed about that. But I totally agree with you about Sony being hypocritical.
  • jeromegv 4y ago
    It’s an account. Has nothing to do with how many platforms can run the game. Which is what this Call of Duty promise is about.
  • nerdjon 4y ago
    While I don't love that particular trend, it isn't like that trend is really a new one in the industry. It seems like every company is trying to push their ecosystem and forcing you to login wherever they can. The only reason this particular case is weird is because its a Microsoft account on Playstation. Not saying it's a good practice, but I don't know if in that case I would solely attack Microsoft.
  • manojlds 4y ago
    I am on Switch and only needed Microsoft account to play online though? But either ways, it's not relevant to this situation. We are talking of game.being made available. Not about whether it has login to the parent company or not. Let's not forget that Sony was the last to allow cross platform multiplayer on Minecraft.
    • stametseater 4y ago
      PC players with old Mojang accounts were made to create and migrate to Microsoft accounts in order to continue playing. Either that or do what I did, and crack their launcher and only play on "offline mode" (no account verification) servers. Microsoft accounts ask for a lot of personal information that they simply don't need, and I feared that opting not to provide that personal information would likely put my account at risk for being capriciously banned by bureaucratic anti-botting systems in the future. Furthermore, should I ever need a Microsoft account for some more important reason, I would not want that connected to an account I game online with. Mixing work and play is a bad idea, and having two separate accounts seems like a likely setup for a capricious ban sometime in the future. So yeah, I once bought this game from Notch and had a legit account for it, but now I have to pirate it because Microsoft decided to get invasive and nosy.
• jeroenhd 4y ago
  I think the market has plenty of choice between Playstation, Switch, Xbox and PC. Xbox and Playstation are even basically the same consoles in a different box and with a chip sprinkled onto the motherboard here and there; it's not like the olden days of special PS2/PS3 chips that all need to be handled manually. The biggest problem in the video games industry is that all companies that have any kind of control abuse anti-consumer practices to keep their profits up. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are all terrible in their own unique ways. On PC there are some nice(r) players, but PC gaming is neither affordable nor accessible to people who are fine with their Chromebooks already and just want to play video games once in a while. Right now your choices are often "overpay for a prebuilt computer at your local store" or "find out what a PCIe lane is supposed to be and what the 5 in DDR5 even stands for". If you're not turning on your computer every day, you're definitely getting interrupted with updates from software you don't recognize, and that assumes you managed to set up the right driver (hint: not the one that auto-installed!) for your PC. I hope Valve's efforts take off, not just in the handheld space. The new Steam Big Picture works quite well and the Steam Deck rarely feels any different from a console. At the same time Linux game compatibility has changed drastically since the days of the Steam Box programme. This would open up the gaming market to new players and make PC gaming much easier to get into.
  • nerdjon 4y ago
    You are right about the hardware side of the Xbox and Playstation. Their differences are minimal at best. However I would not include PC and especially not Switch in this conversation. Since often what you hear is something like "I have a Switch and ..." and then your platform of choice. Some of that is price, the games Nintendo has, but ultimately Nintendo just doesn't compete in the same space. They don't have to. On the PC front (which you mention just adding some more context) I think many of us here need to be careful about actual expectations of the PC gaming market. Not only is it expensive but you need the space and in some cases the technical experience to deal with issues that come up. For a lot of people a console is a good option given you can buy the hardware and you will be able to run any new games for around 10 years, maybe even longer given how this generation transition is going. You can mostly just assume your game will work and won't have compatibility issues. You also likely already have a TV you can connect it too. That isn't to say that the PC market is small, not by any means. But there is a very real reason that consoles are a good option for many people. My point with mentioning that is more, it really is just Playstation vs Xbox for this conversation. PC is important but it's it isn't going to stop a console maker from making anti consumer decisions. I agree that all of the companies engage in bad practices, I just don't want an unchecked company. Just like I don't want Playstation to go out of business either. Maybe Steam could make a dent in that, but so far any of their attempts seem more complimentary to your existing setup vs a replacement. I know some people say they game solely on a steam deck but I don't fully get that.
• ecf 4y ago
  > I also still think that Sony is being incredibly hypocritical here with how they are responding considering their love of making exclusive contracts. Final Fantasy being a big example right now but it seems to be a trend that Square and Sony will continue. At the end of the day this is literally all that is needed to get this merger approved. Sony has exclusivity for one of the top MMOs and Microsoft wants a competing offering in World of Warcraft. It’s so beyond hypocritical for Sony to be taking this stance and I hope they are eventually laughed out of court.
• mort96 4y ago
  If you know someone who plays Minecraft on their Switch, or on their phone, or on their tablet, or on their Xbox, or if they play it on their Windows PC and were therefore railroaded into getting the Bedrock Edition, you can't play with them from Linux or macOS. You need a Windows PC with Bedrock Edition to play with them. Minecraft is a perfect example of Microsoft taking a cross platform game and using their power to turn previously well supported non-Microsoft platforms into second class citizens.
  • skhr0680 4y ago
    It’s infuriating because MS could literally press a button and make Bedrock available for Mac, since the Education edition (literally Bedrock) is already on Mac. To MS’ credit, they were fast (~10 minutes) processing my refund for the Mac edition, and they saved me $30 because the iPhone Bedrock is $10 and works perfectly at full frames with minimal input lag when mirrored to my Macbook Air M1. I use my Switch pro controller which “just works” when paired to my phone while my nephew plays on his Switch. I have an iPhone SE 2nd gen. /edit we have to play on a realm because P2P cross-platform multiplayer is hilariously broken on Switch and MS timeline for fixing it seems to be “hmmm never”
    • stametseater 4y ago
      TBQH "Mac edition" aka Java edition is the version most experienced gamers want, maybe unless all your friends are on bedrock already. Java edition has all the good mods, including mods that add content and mods which just provide QoL fixes to the vanilla experience. Bedrock players can join Java edition servers if the Java server is running the geyser mod, so if your server admin knows what he's about your bedrock edition friends can still play with everybody else (hence the above maybe.)
      • myko 4y ago
        Totally agree with this, though even with Geyser Bedrock players are second class citizens (some mods don't translate well to Bedrock clients, e.g., furniture mods). Java is the better way to play Minecraft generally, which is unfortunate because the performance is still really bad.
• thefz 4y ago
  > I normally respect Ars a lot for their reporting I used to, but anything not Apple is usually met with mockery, disdain, or a combination of the two.
• ajmurmann 4y ago
  > The price of the PS3, backwards compatibility Aren't those technical tradeoffs with backwards compatibility either limiting technical choices to change architecture or increasing price by adding additional hardware to remain compatible?
  • nerdjon 4y ago
    The PS3 had a bad history with backwards compatibility. The original model had hardware based compatibility, by adding in the additional components, which I will admit had a cost associated with it. But then they switched to software compatibility, which on its own is not a bad decision. But the issue was they removed the software backwards compatibility from later PS3 hardware without a good explanation. I think there is a very good reason that the ps4 was not backwards compatible with ps3 games, the architecture was very different. But at the same time they are pushing playstation now as a way to play those older games, and it appeared anti consumer. Why could you not just put in the game and it would start streaming it. On the flip side we had Xbox. Which a couple years after the launch of the Xbox one started their backwards compatibility initiative. Which allowed you to put in the disk for an older game and it would download a version of the game that would work on your new hardware. Now this was not for all games, but it was ultimately a free addition. Sony was also very wishy washy on PS5 backwards compatibility, which was very frustrating. It felt like working with ps4 games was an afterthought for them. Ultimately it turned out fine, but it caused a lot of confusion. Previously this was more of an issue than it was today. Since consoles are basically a PC now compatibility shouldn't be much of an issue, but previously it would have been a big issue.
    • goosedragons 4y ago
      Original release PS3s in North America and Japan had both the PS2 CPU and GPU on the board for full backwards compatibility. Later models and the European release units lacked the GPU and so that was emulated in software which caused a few issues. So it was a partial software emulator. Sony later removed the PS2 CPU from later PS3 Phat models and onwards. Later they released PS2 classics on PSN that use full software emulation. A lot of PS2 games don't seem to work well with that emulator from what we know from jailbroken PS3s. Games also needed specific tweaks to the emulator to work. Perhaps they could have done what Microsoft did with 360 and had but maybe they felt like that was too clunky?
• blankface 4y ago
  I actually logged in to write my verbal response after reading this "The Japs period, Nintendo has the same cocky attitude after success post-Wii, post-Switch"
  • yakubin 4y ago
    On Ars? I can’t see it anywhere.
• Hamuko 4y ago
  >To my knowledge Microsoft never made any commitment saying that Bethesda games would always come out on other platforms. I'm not sure if a "technically we didn't promise anything" is that good of an excuse when you tell the regulators that it wouldn't be beneficial to you to withhold games from other platforms.
• throw10920 4y ago
  > But on the flip side Sony [...] some very anti consumer decisions. Microsoft is one of the kings of anti-consumer decisions. Just recently we've had the Windows 11 TPM requirements, Windows 10 forced updates, Minecraft Bedrock Edition shenanigans, the trash fire that is Microsoft Teams, ads in Windows, telemetry in Windows, and Microsoft blackmailing me into giving them my PII by preventing me from accessing my legally purchased copy (from Mojang) of Minecraft until I did... ...and that's ignoring the stuff from the past few decades: "Secure Boot", Windows bundling with consumer devices, and Internet Explorer bundling with Windows, just off the top of my head. Wikipedia has a whole list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft