Tag: microsoft

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video games

On Microsoft’s Activi-isition

There’s a lot to be said about Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard for the past months and today a Microsoft communications person, Frank X. Shaw, said this on Mastodon:

I hear Sony is briefing people in Brussels claiming Microsoft is unwilling to offer them parity for Call of Duty if we acquire Activision.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

We’ve been clear we’ve offered Sony a 10 year deal to give them parity on timing, content, features, quality, playability, and any other aspect of the game.

[…]

We’ve also said we’re happy to make this enforceable through a contract, regulatory agreements, or other means. ?Sony is the console market leader and it would defy business logic for us to exclude PlayStation gamers from the Call of Duty ecosystem. ?Our goal is to bring Call of Duty and other games – as we did with Minecraft – to more people around the world so they can play them where and how they want.

None of what Shaw says is necessarily false, but taking the words that come out of any giant corporation (Sony, Microsoft, etc) at face value would be a mistake. We do not know what exactly Microsoft has offered unless we see the contracts. Similarly, this kind of compression and acquisition while not entirely bad — more games on a subscription seems great! why pay $70 a year for Call of Duty when you can pay $15/month and get access to every Call of Duty and hundreds of other games, right? — is definitely awful for both the workers at these companies and people who play games, let’s go over the ways.

  • From a labor perspective, a larger Microsoft could be a more difficult target for labor unions to organize post-acquisution. Despite Microsoft’s claims that they are friendly to labor, they are anything but and that is clear to anyone who is familiar with Microsoft’s practices with Xbox quality assurance and certification. While it’s great that workers were able to unionize in a few circumstances, recently, Microsoft has long outsourced that labor group to VMC/Volt (I worked for Microsoft through VMC/Volt in the early 2000’s) so as to offload the liability of their abuse of these workers.
  • From a player perspective, a larger Microsoft that owns more games is able to dictate and influence the terms of how we have access to games. Microsoft seems like it is friendly now, when their games are coming to Steam and other platforms in addition to Microsoft’s Xbox platforms, but the bigger any of these companies get the more they can dictate every method of access and even preservation. Game Pass seems like a great deal for players, but it has the opportunity to fully control both development of games and their distribution.
  • Microsoft may pay lip service to preservation, but a Microsoft that locks down control of Call of Duty (and other Activision Blizzard games) can go where it wants and make the only option for playing their games a subscription streaming service that cannot be preserved.
  • A stronger Microsoft, especially in a world where Xbox/PC Game Pass and their streaming services (Xbox Cloud Gaming) become dominant, can ruin first and third party game development studios just like Netflix and the corporate entity known as Warner Bros. Discovery that is boxing up shows and movies just to resolve tax liabilities and cut developers out of the money they could have earned.
  • People will drag out the Minecraft example, but Minecraft was from a different time and we have no idea what the publishing agreements for it look like on different platforms. Each one is negotiated separately and…
  • Microsoft may attempt to negotiate a contract for Call of Duty to be on PlayStation platforms that is particularly onerous for Sony, speculation has pointed towards Microsoft requiring Sony to have some version of Xbox Game Pass/Xbox Cloud Gaming, but even if that isn’t true today, it may be something Microsoft wants in the future.
  • The price of these services that Microsoft is moving towards can and will change as they become more powerful. Today’s $10 or $15 a month can easily turn into $50-$150 or more just like a cable television bill.

Sony can do much of the same, and is attempting to do so with similar services and acquisitions, even if they don’t appear to be as successful.

None of these acquisitions are good for anyone in the end, besides the billionaires and millionaires at the top of these companies who stand to profit if they’re successful at achieving their maximum control of video games.

Categories
video games

Quake 1’s Re-Release on Modern Platforms

At QuakeCon 2021, Bethesda and id software re-released Quake 1 for Windows, and put it out for the first time on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox One & Series S/X. The Windows version is free to anyone who already owned it on Bethesda’s launcher or Steam.

The re-release embeds the original game inside of Nightdive Studios’ KEX engine, which does make it a little different but there are some possible benefits to the update. Steam and Bethesda Launcher users can still choose to launch the original game.

One of the benefits of this re-release are slightly updated features to support things like achievements and modern widescreen graphics resolutions and play at them out of the box. Quake 1 also gets split-screen and cross-platform multiplayer but it requires a Bethesda login.

Currently the versions on the latest Sony and Microsoft consoles run via backwards compatibility, a native version is coming to those platforms “soon” according to a FAQ on Bethesda’s website.

That same FAQ notes that the original Nine Inch Nails soundtrack is included for Quake 1. The original expansion packs are also included, as well as a new pack from Machine Games who made the recent Wolfenstein games.

Quake 64 is also downloadable in-game, more free add-ons are promised to come later.

This re-release is interesting because it really cements how commercial releases of games are matched to the point in time they’re released in. There’s a few ways to think about it.

The first is the obvious business realities that have changed in the decades since Quake was released. id software was an independent company then, and now they’re a subsidiary of Bethesda and Microsoft.

Then there are the technical perspectives. With all of id’s updated versions of games in the past, they’ve released the source code. Quake 1‘s source code has been out for decades now. There is a healthy community of developers for it. Those developers will continue working on the open-source versions but the this new re-release of Quake 1 is not open-source and may not ever come to Linux or macOS or whatever platform you’d like to run Quake 1 on. That may not seem like much, but we’ve seen so many platform changes over the years that rendered the original releases of not just id’s games, but all games on computers obsolete and difficult to run.

Valve’s Proton does let you play this new re-release of Quake 1 on Linux through Windows emulation or “API Compatibility”, but that seems like a bad way to go about it when the original game has been ported to Linux both by id software and been maintained by the community for decades.

As a multiplayer game, there will be security issues for people playing Quake 1, though this version doesn’t support dedicated servers it does still communicate over the network.

The one good thing I can think about this Proton availability under Linux is that it may make it easier to download the files for Quake 1 and then use them in another version of the engine. That’s how it worked with the newly available Windows Store version of Quake 3.

It makes me wonder what the value is to the community for working on the open-source versions of these games. Providing free labor for a big company like Microsoft or Bethesda is exploitative and wrong, but it is even odder when the companies involved are just going to ignore all of the work the community does and put out another point-in-time release that will stop working in another few years.

From what I’ve played, there is nothing wrong with this version of Quake for the platforms it is on, it is just very clearly not from the id software that cared about open-source and almost nobody from that era is still with the subsidiary of a subsidiary. It is not at all surprising that this version of Quake was released without the code, it is just disappointing.

Categories
video games

Ars Notices The Forza Delisting Process

Sam Machkovech with an article for Ars Technica titled “How one game’s delisting pokes a hole in the Xbox Game Pass promise”:

Microsoft has long boasted about the backward compatibility of its Xbox consoles, letting you play hundreds of past-gen games on newer systems like the Series X/S. But the game publisher and console maker is quieter about taking older games down from its digital storefronts—and this week’s latest casualty, in the form of a popular first-party game, presents problems for Xbox’s recent sales pitches.

On paper, the basic announcement may look humdrum to savvy modern-gaming fans. Starting September 15, 2021, the sim racing game Forza Motorsport 7 will no longer be available on Xbox’s digital download shops. That date marks roughly four years past the game’s 2017 launch on Xbox One consoles, and “four years” is key. Since the Xbox Live download store has been in operation, other Forza games, both in the Motorsport and Horizon camps, have been delisted at a nearly identical cadence. This suggests that the game’s car licenses factor into the cutoff dates.

I’ve been pointing this out for a few years, and I’m glad that others are noticing. it’s not just Microsoft’s Game Pass that’s broken, it’s the whole backward compatibility and “love of preservation” that Microsoft pretends to care about. As Machkovech goes on to note, this particular delisting is even odder because there isn’t a newer Forza Motorsport game on the horizon. Although, there is a new Forza Horizon game on the way. Of course the versions on disc will continue to function, but it is exceptionally odd that beloved games like the Forza series can just up and disappear from Microsoft’s digital store. It is kind of nice that Microsoft heavily discounts these games before they’re delisted, the “ultimate” version of Forza Motorsport 7 is only $20 right now, but it’d be better if they didn’t get delisted. If Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Valve, and all the other companies selling games digitally want us to buy games from them digitally, they should make sure someone who loved an earlier version of the game and wants to go back is able to.

Notably, when Microsoft returned to Steam with their games, Forza Motorsport 7 wasn’t on that list. Only the Forza Horizon games are on Steam.

I love the Forza Horizon series and the first Forza Motorsport was the last game I worked on at Microsoft, it makes me sad that these games aren’t better preserved for anyone who wants to play them and watch them evolve over time. The last few versions of the Horizon games have been particularly interesting with their different open worlds to play in, they’re not just replicating famous race tracks, they even have tie-ins to various fun toy lines like Hot Wheels and Lego.

Categories
politics technology war

Microsoft Outfits Soldiers for AR Murder With Hololens

Lucas Matney writing for Tech Crunch:

Today, Microsoft announced that it has received a contract to outfit the United States Army with tens of thousands of augmented reality headsets based on the company’s HoloLens tech. This contract could be worth as much as $21.88 billion over 10 years, the company says.

Microsoft will be fulfilling an order for 120,000 AR headsets for the Army based on their Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) design. The modified design upgrades the capabilities of the HoloLens 2 for the needs of soldiers in the field.

Microsoft has a long history of working with the government to help murder people and their GitHub unit famously contracts with ICE and helps to cage children.

Categories
video games

Microsoft Shitcans Xbox Backwards Compatibility for Xbox One in Favor of Project Scarlett

One of the problems with putting backwards compatibility in the hands of publishers and developers to pick and choose which games get brought forward is that they go out of business and can’t make a decision, make bad choices based on financial decisions, or in this case Microsoft has decided that they’ve done enough and will stop updating the Xbox 360 and original Xbox compatibility lists for the Xbox One.

Microsoft’s Jason Ronald:

We’ve listened closely to community feedback and respect the game libraries you’ve built throughout the last 18 years. That’s why we’re taking our work a step further and announced this week that thousands of games from all four generations will be playable on Project Scarlett. As such, we have now shifted our focus to help make the games you love playing on Xbox One compatible with future Xbox hardware. After this week, we have no plans to add additional Original Xbox or Xbox 360 titles to the catalog on Xbox One, but we’re excited to continue our work on Xbox compatibility across platforms and devices, which remains a top priority.

Microsoft have released a final update with eight more games from the original Xbox and sixteen Xbox 360 games brought forward (Too Human is free for some reason?), and it’s good that it can be assumed that these backwards compatible games were actually tested, but the backward compatibility story isn’t great unless a generic method is released to support every older game. Not just the ones that Microsoft receives approval to support.

Unique games like Steel Battalion, licensed games like Spider-Man 2, some of the best Burnout games, sorta-interesting war games like Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, classic stompy stompy games like Mechassault, Chronicles of Riddick, Project Gotham Racing. There aren’t as many as we lost when the PlayStation 2 backwards compatibility died off on the PlayStation 3, but Microsoft had the chance to make every Xbox and Xbox 360 game playable on hardware they still sell and support, and blew it.