Okay your first two paragraphs are just ad hominen attacks at this point. You aren’t refuting anything by just claiming I’m backpedalling on… Something? And just assuming the other people didn’t read the article when in fact it seems they did and are also making great points that you’re also just refusing to talk about. Like… Why did you even post this if you didn’t want to actually talk about points, methodology, potential explanations, etc?

Xbox is just plain doing badly. They’ve tried a lot of different approaches to change that over the years: leaning hard into alternative control schemes with Kinect, trying to push Xbox as a general multimedia machine rather than just a videogame console, pushing hard to develop small indie studios, then pushing for mega-acquisitions of publishers and developers. I’m not even sure which “old model” you’re talking about because they are constantly, desperately pivoting to something else. They seem to be terrible at predictjng what consumers want or how markets will react to their decisions. So I’m still waiting for you to explain why copying them is a good idea. As I said earlier: they have always had less focus on exclusivity because their hardware sells at a loss, and they haven’t changed that.

Nintendo is coming off the 3rd best-selling console of all time, the best-selling console in 2 decades. The Switch 2 not only had the best 1st week on history, but the best 1st month too. I suppose it is still early and totally fair if you want to wait for the first full year to make a judgement, but it seems to me like Nintendo produce a unique and innovative product that people want back in 2017 and are continuing that success now. That product is in a very different market than the Xbox, and uses a very different business model where the hardware itself is profitable. They’re the only one of the 3 that hasn’t shut down studios or laid off employees lately. So, once again, the idea that thinks he knows better than them seems pretty far-fetched right now.

There’s something else that’s been bothering me…

He’s done this job for a long time, and people trust and respect his work

I’ve been following the videogame industry for decades and I’ve never heard of this guy. Which is not all that outlandish on its own. But I also have never heard of The Game Business- it seems like a new website just created this year. And you seem to be incredibly defensive of this guy- completely ignoring any discussion of the industry and binging your entire argument here on his credibility. Are you Mat Piscatella himself on a burner account?

I didn’t backpedal on anything at all so I’m not sure why you think that. My initial statement was that he did not provide enough data to reach his conclusion and seems to be drastically oversimplifying the problem to reach his conclusion, by focusing on the unit sales of singular pieces of software in a vacuum and assuming that games are fungible. I pointed out how different videogame companies operate with different business models that are more or less condusive to exclusive 1st party titles. None of that has changed, and the only thing you’ve said to try to dispute any of it is “this consultant said in an interview that he thinks exclusives are bad”. No attempt at discerning causation or explaining it, no attempt at even refuting the arguments I present, just “you should trust this guy, who also happens to be selling a product”. If I wasn’t bored killing time at work I wouldn’t even bother responding because this isn’t really a conversation, you just keep going “nu uh”.

Not just me: You’ve spent this whole thread arguing with myself and everyone else who are pointing out the obvious and glaring holes in what he’s saying.

One of my favorites is this one. Xbox has failed to make a profit throughout the entire history of the company. They’ve spent the last few years shutting down studios and laying people off, which has led to a lot of industry speculation. Insiders have reported rumors that Spencer might get pushed to resign or even fired. There’s been speculation that Xbox might be considering exiting the hardware side of things entirely, in part because of their own marketing campaigns. I am not saying I believe that, but these are strong signs that Xbox is doing badly.

Nintendo, by contrast, just had the single best launch week 1 in the history of videogame consoles. Pretty much every way you look at the Switch 2 sales numbers they are breaking records. And this guy saying that Nintendo should copy what Xbox is doing. That is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence for me to take seriously.

And while anecdotes are pretty useless, I agree with you that many publishers have trended towards multiplatform releases and I said that earlier. I’m not disputing that: I’m disputing his comments about 1st party publishers.

If he was lying about any of this, competing firms or their business partners would call him out.

Well first of all, this interview was published today so the only people who have had a chance to really respond to this are the general public on the internet. Beyond that, it is not safe to assume that any of their competitors would have any reason to respond to this publicly at all. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, and maybe that decision has more to do with wanting to either keep up with Circana or differentiate from Circana than anything related to the truth. That’s kind of the problem with dealing with bias in sampling like this.

People have been saying this exact same thing for decades and it hasn’t happened yet.

And I’m all in favor of the end of exclusivity. Exclusivity is harmful to consumers, and to society as a whole from the perspective of preserving culture and history. But just because I want something to be true doesn’t mean I’m going to believe some consultant casually speculating while promoting his company.

If he provided data and outlined the methodology of projection they used them we could at least have an interesting conversation about this. But right now he’s just about as credible as the 3rd grader at recess whose uncle works for Nintendo and says the next Halo is coming to Switch.

That still doesn’t include most of the data necessary to reach this conclusion, and furthermore the bigger issue is that THE ARTICLE ITSELF DOES NOT CONTAIN ANY. It is an unbacked claim that we cannot verify. If he can’t share the data because ris propriety, he shouldn’t be making the claim publicly.

He’s looking at software sales in a vacuum, and he is probably correct that any singular piece of software would sell more units if it were released on more platforms. That’s not new or interesting: that’s obvious.

What he’s missing, even in the screenshot of claimed data he has, is everything else.

Consultants like this are not trustworthy sources. They’re trying to sell their own product.

Does he have access to the proprietary sales data of Nintendo, Xbox, Sony, Valve, and Google?

I’d be shocked if he did, because those companies are all big enough to have their own in-house departments for that. He’s trying to sell consulting services to smaller publishers. Consults don’t get paid for saying "well I don’t really have enough information to say that for sure*, they get paid for making executives feel smart.

He’s backing it up by misusing data. He’s lumping games together and assuming that they all would hypothetically have the same market characteristics, then extrapolating that to other games.

As an example he brings up how the Pokemon Company has released basically the same software on both Switch and mobile platforms. Which is true, but that does not mean it makes sense for Nintendo to release Tears of the Kingdom on mobile. We can already see that Nintendo knows this because they maintain Mario Kart Tour separately from the console versions. They’re entirely different business models, control schemes, and experiences.

I would argue that a more complicated analysis is required than just saying “multiplatforms are better than exclusives”.

He also just briefly glosses over what is the main BENEFIT to manufacturers: the profits made on hardware sales. There is not a lot of publicly available information, but we do know what each company tends to do. Nintendo prices their hardware above cost, so for them the additional hardware sales could offset the reduced software sales. Xbox prices their hardware at a loss, which explains why they valued exclusivity the least and have finished last in hardware units sold every generation since the original Xbox. Sony usually sells PlayStations at a loss to start the generation, but through hardware revisions and scaling ends up turning them profitable after a few years- a more balanced approach. And we see this reflected in their approaches to exclusivity: Nintendo is super-exclusive, Xbox is loose, and Sony is somewhere in the middle.

You also need to factor in how exclusives impact the ecosystem. The marketing budget for Mario Kart World Tour is not merely helping them to sell the game, but also to sell consoles. And not just consoles, but controllers and cases and branded SD cards and the USB camera and extra docks. It also encourages more software sales: the same person buying Mario Kart World and a Switch 2 might also buy other Switch 2 (or Switch 1) games. Even if they buy 3rd party games, Nintendo is still getting licensing fees. So if they release these big games on other platforms they might gain some revenue, but they lose out on a lot, plus they have to pay licensing fees to Sony/Xbox/Google/Apple/Valve to sell on those platforms.

If we were just discussing software sales in a vaccun then this would be accurate. Any 3rd party publisher has a much easier equation to determine which platforms to release on. Will the additional costs (development of a port plus the fees and asded marketing) be less than the revenue from additional units? It’s a bit complicated because some consumers have multiple platforms and will choose just one to buy the game on. This also helps explain why Sony delays the PC releases: they want to sell as many units overall as possible, but they also want anyone choosing between PS5 or Steam to be pushed to PS5 where their margins are higher.

The author doesn’t have anywhere near the data required to do any of this analysis, so he’s reaching a fundamentally flawed conclusion.

This may just be me, but I see delayed exclusives as basically being equivalent to multiplatform releases. Especially for single-player games.

1. As someone else already commented, NVIDIA does a lot more than make GPU’s. In fact, they don’t even make GPU’s, but rather design the chips. The chip manufacturing, and usually the board built around the chip, are outsourced. Chip manufacturing monopoly is a separate issue.

2. You can still break them up. I never said it would be easy. You could spend semesters in law/business school studying the process, but basically the FTC and/or DOJ would open an investigation into NVIDIA and do market analysis to determine the best solution. It would probably take a few years and smmillions of dollars to have all sorts of experts involved. I could pull some idea out of my ass for you here, but it would be just as worthless as anything else random person on Lemmy would propose.

3. Government subsidies have failed pretty spectacularly and cause more messes than they solve. Look at the dairy industry- it led to overproduction of milk, environmental devastation, the government spending billions of dollars, and contributed heavily to obesity in the US today. Or the oil industry, which is just a huge mess now (also in part because so many of the child companies of Standard Oil that WERE broken up were later allowed to re-merge). They could still be explored as part of a comprehensive solution, but I’d be skeptical of their effectiveness. Even a market with 2, or even 3 competitors if you add Intel, would probably not be sufficient. For consumers, for strategic redundancy, for employees, for board partners, for manufacturing partners, and every other business partner.

So you’re clearly just arguing in bad faith. Falling for regulatory bodies to do their jobs, including a thorough investigation and evaluation of possible solutions, is nowhere close to saying “I dunno, do something”. So I have to wonder why you’re arguing in bad faith. Do you own NVIDIA stock perhaps?

What “plenty of alternatives” in the GPU market are you referring to? NVIDIA has a 92% share of the market. This may be a surprise if you slept through your history class on trust busting, but you do not, in fact, need to have 100% market share in order to be deemed to have monopolistic power under US law. The rule of thumb for most courts is 50%, though that is not statutory and can vary from case-to-case.

Also, what Trump HAS been doing is exactly what you suggest: sitting on his hands and allowing NVIDIA to exercise it’s monopoly. He hasn’t done anything at all yet, just like he has not yet deported Musk or cancelled the contracts for any of his companies. It’s all theater, and until I see any actual action I’m just going to assume he is shaking them down for more campaign contributions. Or maybe engaging in some good ol’ stock manipulation.

They’ve tried for years to “encourage competition” and that’s exactly what got us to this point.

Maybe you’re the one who should educate yourself before jumping into this conversation. The history of US anti-trust action is the history of repeated success stories where they are able to introduce competition by breaking up companies like Standard Oil or Bell Telephone, and it’s worked every time… Until future administrations allow those child companies to merge back together again, which is why we once again see these huge corporations once again obtain monopolistic, or at least oligopolistic, power.

Do I need to explain why “idk actually taking any action or enforcing any of the laws that have existed for over a century seems really hard. We should just allow the megacorporation to continue with their 92% market share” is an even worse idea?

And you alluded to another issue with this. “The backbone of many industries around the globe”. GPU supply isn’t just a matter of allowing privileged people to play their vidyagames. They are a key strategic resource used in a ton of industries, including strategic military functions. The US has already been slowly pushing for more domestic chip production under both Trump and Biden, encouraging TSMC to build their fabrication plant in Arizona for example.

Also it’s really ridiculous to expect some random person on Lemmy to have a solution to such a complicated and nuanced thing that is so dependent on proprietary information to get right. I’m not claiming to have the solution, but it’s obviously a problem and functioning governments have solved this repeatedly throughout history. Even if I did want to propose a more detailed solution you could, rightfully, point out that it’s not possible to do such a thing without inside information about NVIDIA’s operations.

That’s for the FTC to figure out. I could speculate baselessly here based on what I know as a member of the general public, but really it would have to start with an FTC investigation and evaluation. Potential breakup plans would be evaluated alongside alternatives: fines, additional regulations, additional monitoring. I don’t think the FTC (or their equivalents in other countries) would have the balls to consider nationalization, but in my opinion that option should always be on the table for consideration at least.

Very carefully.

Seriously though that’s a job for the FTC and their peers on other countries. It would start with an evaluation to confirm that NVIDIA does indeed have monopolistic power (they reportedly have 92% of the GPU market, which is waaaay over the thresholds of most courts for determining that), which would lead to an investigation and discovery process. I’m not naive enough to think breaking them up would be simple or easy. There isn’t enough publicly available information to do anything more than speculate on what a breakup would look like.

There are other remedies available too. On the extreme side there is nationalization, while on the more moderate side there’s fines or additional regulations.

Honestly breaking up NVIDIA would probably be great for all 3 of those groups of done right. They’re effectively a monopoly that has been leveraging their position to price gouge their customers for years.

I don’t trust Trump to actually do that though. He’s probably just using this as a threat for bribe money.

Shame. He was far too old.

Ah I didn’t realize she was also the prosecutor for the Sean Combs trial. As juicy as it is to think her firing is related to Epstein, it might also be because the prosecution failed against Diddy.

He was found guilty of a couple of minor charges, but not guilty to the major sex trafficking and racketering charges. Kind of a big and public embarrassment for the DOJ.

Whose lawyer would be arguing that?

They already charged and convicted Maxwell. Espstein is dead. Prince Andrew has been shrugging off lawsuits since 2004.

There is no trial for anyone left. There will not be justice. The best we can hope for is that the historical legacies of these people are stained for the rest of tjne.

No I mean: is any kind of trial going to happen at all?

It’s been almost 6 years since Epstein didn’t kill himself, and there’s no sign of any further prosecutions coming from it. What gives you the impression anything is going to happen here?

Is a fair trial possible if they aren’t published?

“No touchscreen” is a really great selling point imo