Microsoft have already erased everyone’s library once before when they shut down the original Games for Windows store. They already have a track record of showing they’re perfectly willing to yank everyone’s licenses and shut everything down until they decide they actually they do want to be in the games space again.
Game Pass is already their second attempt at this, and there are a lot of people who don’t trust them not to rug pull again.
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If they do a print to order thing, I could see it maybe working out as a cool side business. Or it could be a chance for them to go really harder into the vintage games market if they can get some publishers on board or get the rights to some older stuff. Doesn’t seem like a winning market though on a mass market front, more just a form of advertising or a specialty service for physical collectors.
Unless you’re worried that Steam Machine actually going to be a viable competitor to Xbox and Sony now that they’ve both also raised prices and dropped physical distribution. They lost two more big draws to their ecosystems and neither Sony or Microsoft have nearly as good a reputation for managing online stores.
Helps to push the angle that steam machines are “unreliable”. We’ll see if more of them turn up or not though. Difference between random hardware failure that happens everywhere and systemic production issue ala the 360 Ring of Death.
It’s the ultimate push to turn everything into the perfect Capitalist (not market-oriented) business solution: Getting paid for nothing
If your goal is to accumulate capital, and there are not outside forces regulating your worst impulses, you ultimately will create a class of legal-protected thieves, since the absolutely best and most risk free way to accumulate capital is to be given it in exchange for quite literally nothing.
Gambling is about as close to the platonic ideal as you can, but conquest by military force of political capture is also a very, viable route. Use the law to force people to buy your nothing and be protected for it, rather than being lynched when you steal someone’s products.
I’ll disagree very slightly.
It’s not that buggy games didn’t exist in the past. It’s the buggy games failed a lot harder in the past. There was tons and tons of garbage. Lots of people ended up with a piece of shovelware that grandma bought from the bargain bin at the local game store for Christmas. It’s just that back that the scam was more stealing out of the pockets of publishers than the general audiences, since those types of games were typically sold to the publisher outright back in the day, rather than having a dev split.
He does very much need to have the corporate veil pierced for his actions with regards to Meta and some actual investigations done of his own personal behavior, because dude is very clearly endorsing some behavior that he realistically might be thrown in prison for.