See, Bethesda, parent company Zenimax who’s parent company is now Microsoft, inked a deal with AMD. Well, it didn’t exactly happen in that way with the recently released space epic Starfield, but a specific graphical feature within the game did. Could Nvidia pay for a popular game to run only on their hardware? GPU exclusives would ruin this idea, in some ways. The whole idea of pc gaming is to have choice, to have control over your machine. I despise the idea of selling hardware with exclusives: I think hardware should stand on it’s own merits. What prevents something like this from happening with GPUs? After the GPP thing, I think it is pretty clear Nvidia is willing to do almost anything to control the market. The latest squabble on r/gaming between console owners over exclusive games has got me thinking. One Reddit thread I uncovered from several years ago even noticed this and began wondering out loud if hardware exclusives in PC gaming would ever become a thing. And, yes, certainly there is some of this, particularly with those who want to play games on MacOS or Linux systems, but it’s generally been at a much smaller scale. Sure, some titles are console exclusives and that sucks, but there hasn’t been much in the way of PC gamers having to pay attention to the base hardware and software they have to play games.
The PC gaming community has had to put up with less of this sort of thing, generally. You need only look at the all of the convoluted fights Microsoft engaged in with regulators after gobbling up a bunch of large game studios to see the vascular reach exclusivity has in the industry.
And exclusivity deals tend to taint many other aspects of the industry. I understand why they’re a thing, I just think they shouldn’t be. The idea that any title, but in particular third-party titles, could be exclusive to certain platforms, such as Xbox or PlayStation, is anathema to how art and culture distribution is meant to work. Of all the things in the gaming industry that annoy me, exclusivity deals have to rank near the very top. Wed, Sep 6th 2023 08:13pm - Timothy Geigner
0 kommentar(er)
