Um, no. The HD "replacements" of DVD both very nearly died an early death due to the absurd format war (Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD), the HD audio discs died off from another format war (SACD vs DVD-Audio). Then there's been Laserdisc vs VideoCD, VHS vs Betamax, etc. In truth, DVD and UHD-BR were rare minority exceptions with everything else in the history of cinema being an unending stream of competing standards with half-baked compatibility bodges (eg, 2:3 pulldown vs 4% speedup for 24fps to 25 PAL vs 30 NTSC)...

In the context of the thread though, he's probably referring to the ongoing market fragmentation of streaming, ie, first there was Netflix then Amazon Prime / Hulu, and now we've got each studio (Disney, etc) planning their own platform with their own content on their own "walled garden" stores. Same thing is happening for AAA games, but that hardly translates to "more competition = better" when the end products are all exclusives locked behind paywalls, and someone who plays only a little of each, eg, 1-2x Ubisoft games, 1-2x EA games, 1-2x Valve games, 1-2x Epic Games, etc, then ends up significantly worse off being forced to "subscribe" to each platform's paywall. That's nothing remotely like "more competition is better" in the older retail disc sense of not having any games locked to store-fronts and the stores actually competing to sell the same games, not mere differences in exclusions.

I think the big picture in the end, here, is that there are advantages and disadvantages to centralization, as well as advantages and disadvantages of fragmentation. From the customer perspective, we're getting the worst of both worlds: everything's getting fragmented, but at the same time everyone's doing their own thing in exactly the same way. Kind of like how every single movie has 2 or 3 unskippable previews on DVD and blu-ray? Gotta log into x, y, and z platforms to watch a, b, and c, but in the end they're precisely the same and alot of them have overlap, and you're still paying for the overlap (to be fair, the prices aren't that bad, but there's my lack of vigilance showing). All these clients eat and hog RAM that could be used for the game (some more than others), all of them carry the threat of disabling a game if a dev wants to force you to upgrade to HD (fee or not, this can harm you if you don't upgrade your computer), all of them constantly update when you just got in the mood to play a game (and maybe your friends who already updated are sitting there bored waiting for your update to finish, so you can all play a game together), and the list goes on. Now we have to have a bunch of them, even if we only want one game from a particular company.

You know I fully expected that Bethesda would move away from Steam for its next release wave. Even so it's still surprising to hear. Sucks, too. I can understand why they all want to leave because Valve takes some money off of them and Steam keeps them honest and they don't want to be. Follow someone else's arbitrary rules that don't help your bottom line if you can help it? Not likely. If these other platforms end up getting more clout though and Steam ever did fall out of relevance, people would eventually realize what they lost in the monopoly of the small private company with no bosses.

If this has any kind of success then I think it's pretty much guaranteed that the next Elder Scrolls will be exclusive. Todd Howard's just gonna call up Tim Sweeney to get Roseanne to say she plays 76 and boom the fucking aliens all over the galaxy are playing 76.

A lot of people attribute Fornite's rise to various things and I'm not gonna rehash those but I think they've missed something. I think that there was some pick up on PUBG being culture. PUBG caught fire within videogames and I think it was loud enough that outside heard it. Problem is, PUBG wasn't console, and PUBG was a beast to run. You needed a decent PC. Decent PCs weren't exactly easy thanks to hardware's doings. There was a vacuum there and potential. Fortnite was like a conductor being introduced and suddenly there was a path there, suddenly there was a circuit open and boom the thing flashed.

And yet EA's Origin doing the refund policy guarantee is what drove Valve to introduce the same thing, so you're wrong about there being no effect. Yes the primary way EA is pushing Origin is as the place to play their in-house games, but the clients and companies can still better compete with each other if they're not all tied to the same platform. That's just my opinion on it and I guess we're not going to agree.


Streaming subscriptions are rental services basically, it's not the right comparison. If Disney pull all their movies from UHD Blu-ray and Movies Anywhere and only sell them on their streaming platform then you'll have an argument, but I really doubt that happens since they've enthusiastically supported Movies Anywhere and UHD Blu-ray so far.


I'm into movies more than games, so I know these things. However I'd argue both main format wars (VHS vs. Beta and BD vs. HD-DVD) were relatively brief, and had pretty obvious winners early on. Also mainstream adoption of both formats came after they were settled on pretty much. Also I was mostly talking in present tense, in reaction this idea that it's a thing studios are doing now and game companies are emulating.

Anyway yeah, he meant streaming subs, which as I argue above I think is a totally separate thing.

Because you say so? Streaming and VOD are the primary methods of digital video distribution and the comparison holds much more ground than your talks about retail distribution and comparing it to digital.

I think they just want a new UT game. :-P

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Only if you take agency from the consumer. The consumer has the right to pick up the walmart physical distribution instead of using streamed services. By saying it's not valid since the customer chooses streaming over the smarter choice of non-DRM is taking the agency away from the consumer, which then, in turn, justifies what's going on, so you're shooting yourself in the foot.

Because itch has an "anything goes" attitude. GOG really needs its strictly-DRM-free, can-use-Galaxy-features, but non-curated (or lesser-curated; doesn't show up in GOG store) side project to bridge the gap
It would be interesting for GOG to acquire (or sign exclusivity?) for, e.g., Chucklefish, or something of that caliber.

Epic is making more money and getting bigger than ever and they just leave THE COMMUNITY to finish this game... you see my problem ?

They're making money off UT and the community's work?

But, hey, how comes no one cares with Bethesda does that?

Then again, what's stopping the community from pulling together and making their own game with a different title? Are they not just playing it for the nostalgia goggles, or is there actually something unique there that they can reproduce and stick in their own open-source game? Where's the community's agency, or are we saying they're just sheeple and we need to stick up for their rights that they willingly surrender?

1. VOD is all centralized with Movies Anywhere. There's no fragmentation like you're saying there is.

2. Streaming Subscription is not comparable to buying a game. You could compare it to that Origin subscription service thing, but that's not what you're doing. Comparing buying games to buying movies, movies are all centralized today on one physical format or one digital site. Buying games is the opposite, you either get a Steam code, an Origin code, etc. etc...

Every gaming company has the right to sell their games as they please. If anything, this is against monopoly, which is only good.

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