[tetris11]

I wonder what spanners Windows can throw into the works to slow them down at this point, or if they're so checked out of the Desktop market as they suckle down hard on that Azure teat, that they're more than happy to let Linux eat their lunch

[whywhywhywhy]

You are not gonna get promoted slowing down Linux gaming at MS today, the thing they want is Netflix of gaming where the platform doesn’t matter but everyone’s paying them $20 a month

[hypercube33]

That ship sailed when they let Xbox rot over the last 6 years. The platform feels pretty dead since about 2020 or 2019 and they didn't take advantage of making a cheap android based or Windows 10X based streaming stick with a controller to lock people into the cloud and leverage phones. Controller and keyboard support is still a hot mess on Cloud Pass.

[ThatMedicIsASpy]

while buying up gaming companies.

[account42]

Buying up gaming developers to let them rot has been shown to work very well by EA over the years.

[dpoloncsak]

I think this, as a business model, really relies on them also selling the licenses to the OS that you're using as well. Otherwise, gamepass would be on MacOS already, no?

[jordand]

Last I read, it really doesn't now. Less than 10% of Microsoft revenue is Windows with growth stagnant. It's all about subscriptions and recurring revenue now driving growth. They might as well bundle a Windows licence with all Game Pass subscriptions.

[Gigachad]

Their money all comes from Azure, Office, and now AI services. Windows is just a platform to sell their other stuff now. Which has been reflected in the state of windows over the last 10 years.

[dpoloncsak]

So the business model doesn't strictly rely on Windows Licenses, but they're still using it as an entry into their ecosystem

[basilikum]

Well, they are using Windows to sell people that subscription. Windows is Microsoft's bazaar where you can't move 10 meters without being pestered about using $service.

[charcircuit]

It already is.

[rounce]

You’d think that but Xbox game pass games still won’t natively run on Linux.

[jdubs1984]

Microsoft/Xbox is in the process of losing the living room permanently in the next gen if you ask me.

I don't know what they could do spanner tossing wise to really screw w/ Linux gaming at this point that wouldn't just drive more frustrated customers off their platform.

[Borealid]

Their strategy WAS GamePass - get a bunch of users accumulating huge collections of inexpensive-but-high-value games, paid for via a subscription (rented), that are only playable on Windows (enforced via Microsoft's own software and an account login). Use loss aversion to prevent the users from letting their subscriptions lapse.

They made a tactical mistake by trying to directly monetize the GamePass subscription instead of having it remain a purposefully-underpriced vendor lock-in mechanism. Whoops.

[neutronicus]

Hmm.

Me and all my dad friends are all signing up for XBox accounts so our kids can play Minecraft. So IDK about that.

[babypuncher]

Are they playing on Xboxes? Because that is Microsoft's living room product, and the part of the business that is struggling right now.

To give you an idea of how bad it is, they slowed console manufacturing to a trickle last year to try and juice their profit margins, and are now stuck in a situation where they can't spin manufacturing back up to cash in on the inevitable rush of demand for hardware when Grand Theft Auto comes out this fall.

[funimpoded]

That might make room for Apple to finally try. The AppleTV is already in a similar tier to modern consoles, as far as specs and benchmarks go. Most of what's missing is a first-party controller and a marketing push. Disk space is tight, too, I guess. Still, they're most of the way to having a horse in the race, if they want to.

I reckon a successful launch of the Steam box (or whatever they're calling it) with its enormous library could develop into something that really challenges what's left of Microsoft's piece of the console market (and threaten Sony a little, for that matter) though it's looking like the memory shortage is gonna kneecap that by forcing the price too high. Bad timing.

[koutakun]

>The AppleTV is already in a similar tier to modern consoles, as far as specs and benchmarks go

What benchmarks are you talking about? CPU-wise the A15 Bionic just barely beats the Ryzen 3700X in single-core and gets absolutely destroyed in multi-core (Geekbench). As for the GPU, the Radeon RX 7600 (closest thing I can find to a "modern console") does >10x the TFLOPS in FP32.

The only reason why they look like they're "in a similar tier" in ported games is because the A15 Bionic is usually tested on 5-6" screens that can be upscaled from 360p without any measurable loss in visual quality, with a massive downgrade in model and texture quality for the same reason. The only modern console the Apple TV "may be" similar to is the Switch 1

[kakacik]

I dont want a locked down living room, not from apple nor anybody else (but everybody else uses open standards so not really possible).

Simply no, thank you.

[funimpoded]

That’s… the game console market. Even the NES in the ‘80s tried to lock out unauthorized (by Nintendo) software. When the screen flashes over and over on boot, that’s the lockout chip not seeing what it expects (due to a poor connection, usually, if it’s a cartridge that should work). Though I hear the latest Xbox is notably more open than the norm, and of course a living-room PC from Valve would buck that trend entirely.

[SchemaLoad]

Apple is fundamentally incompatible with "serious" gaming. Games are largely not regular software platforms which receive endless updates and maintenance. Every few years Apple makes a breaking change and expects every app to update or break, which is fine for Photoshop and electron apps, but most games just end up unplayable. This happened when Apple killed 32 bit support and tons of games that used to work on Mac never worked again.

It doesn't seem like a market they have any interest in. The real money is in mobile slop games with micro transactions.

[criddell]

I use Steam Link on my AppleTV which lets me play games on my PC. It works great as long as the game works well with a PS5 controller (and lots of them do).

[babypuncher]

The Apple TV 4k is nowhere near a PS5 in performance

[12_throw_away]

> The AppleTV is already in a similar tier to modern consoles, as far as specs and benchmarks go

[citation needed]

[doublerabbit]

Lock future game developers in to a corner forcing them only to produce compatible for WSL, Windows for Linux releases. Restricting the license of use on GNU/Linux.

[weezing]

Their gaming marketshare is minuscule both on PCs and consoles already. It's a downward spiral for years already.

[onli]

Windows still has a huge gaming marketshare on PC, and Microsoft as publisher is still a big player. You mean something else?

[laughing_man]

That's not true. It's actually spiraling the other direction now. Consoles just don't have the value proposition they used to have. You can buy a general purpose PC for the same price as a console that has better performance and also allows you to do your taxes.

[chocochunks]

No you can't. Even at the raised prices. And if your argument includes used prices don't forget you can buy used consoles too.

[laughing_man]

Sure you can. Remember, we're not buying a normal gaming PC, just one that's better than a console.

[chocochunks]

I know. But iGPUs aren't there yet, and once you add a discrete GPU it becomes a lot more expensive. You can get a PS5 digital at GameStop for $400 new right now. A decent similar GPU like a Arc 580 or Radeon RX 7600 or 6600 is going to be $200-$300 new, leaving you $200 for a case, CPU, RAM and power supply.

[mvdtnz]

According to my google searching XBox has almost a quarter of the console gaming market share. Hardly miniscule.

[pinkmuffinere]

wow that's interesting. Where is the gaming share moving, if not pc and consoles? I guess hand-held devices (do those not count as consoles?) and phones?

[laughing_man]

Mobile is the 900 pound gorilla in the games space through sheer volume, but it really depends on what you're measuring. Revenue per user is console > PC > mobile, but total gaming revenue is more like mobile > console > PC.

But here we're putting Candy Crush in the same category as GTA V, so I'm not sure we're really comparing apples to apples.

[Narishma]

They're talking about Microsoft's gaming marketshare.

[MBCook]

Given how popular Steam Deck and fiends have gotten I wonder if companies would avoid it because it could noticeably hurt sales until it’s added to proton.

[sph]

My theory is that Microsoft is paying Adobe billions never to release their tools on Linux. It's Windows' last stronghold.

[baq]

They can’t, they’re selling backwards compatibility - but it matters less and less each year as more stuff moves to the browsers.

[WhiteDawn]

Really their best card is new and additional APIs, building incentives to develop against it.

WinRT (not to be confused with Windows RT, the early ARM version of windows), UWP, GDK, xgameruntime. All of these are relatively new and require virtualization and other security features.

Put pressure on devs by gateing xbox and gamepass behind this runtime and now you have a lever to make the situation more difficult for linux.

Kinda has the opposite effect on me however, as the only reason I'm not subscribed to gamepass right now is the games wont work on my steamdeck. But if MS can get enough killer apps as exclusive to that platform then that will certainly add some pressure.

[Night_Thastus]

MS does not care. At all. This doesn't affect anything that they make a profit on.