Microsoft wanted to buy Nintendo and Valve before. It was in the leaked documents. And I’m sure Microsoft makes suggestions all the time, we just don’t hear about it usually. We mostly hear about deals that happen.

Besides that, I can’t imagine that a competitor could buy a competitor. That would be illegal in most cuntries. Unlike Activision, which was not a competitor to Microsoft.

Yeah, I think all indications have been that Microsoft is getting out of the video game business. Or, if they were planning on staying in, why would they close a bunch of studios, including successful ones like Hi-Fi Rush’s Tango games.

Also wouldn’t that pull in major antitrust violation cases especially in the EU?

I’ts not about integrity, it’s about clicks. It doesn’t matter if you read the headline, only if you clicked.

Looking at the sales estimates, the numbers appear pretty modest compared to the other gaming devices. They’re probably under 5m units sold since early 2022.

Even if it was real, pretty sure Gaben would just laugh in their faces

Oh thank miscellaneous diety. For fucks sake everything Microsoft touches turns to shit, especially when it comes to game platforms.

Tinfoil Hat Time:

Linux Gaming, while increasingly viable, isn’t currently a threat to MS. There are enough reasons people will stick with Windows. But Valve are doing a good job of showing that it’s possible, that Microsoft’s hold on PC gaming isn’t absolute and that an increasing number of games are playable on Linux too (with the right tools). Wine and co. have been around for a while, but they never enjoyed the spotlight of a major videogame platform investing time and manpower into developing a dedicated gaming compatibility engine.

I don’t think MS would intentionally run it into the ground. They’d probably try to squeeze it for money, which might end up doing so anyway.

I also don’t think they’re really worried about Linux gaming. But I also doubt they’d leave Proton untouched entirely. Whether they’d kneecap it, whether they’d enshittify it, whether they’d work on interfacing it with their proprietary stuff in an attempt to put it ahead of any competition and tip potential Linux Gaming developments in favour of using their engine to more easily target both platforms at once, I doubt they could resist doing something to squeeze money from it.

Maybe the very idea that they’re challenging Microsoft’s supremacy is unpleasant to them. Maybe their analytics show enough of a trend to concern them. Maybe they just want to make sure they have a piece of the pie if it ever becomes worth something.

Or maybe the whole thing is baseless bullshit made up for attention and site traffic.

Plus they are bleeding money from all the acquisitions and haven’t seen the return they expected in game pass subs. The cost cutting isn’t done and it would be very surprising for them to try to dump more money into new storefronts when they are still trying to make their own business model profitable (to their expectations).

It’s an AI generated “article”, on a site that exclusively feeds headlines into AI to write “articles”.

So even if the original headline was - in the now-unknown wording - something rooted in reality, the generative shitcode has now turned both the headline and the content into utter derangement.

Gabe used to work for Microsoft, I can’t imagine he’s eager to repeat.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabe_Newell

“He attended Harvard University in the early 1980s but dropped out to join Microsoft, where he helped create the first versions of the Windows operating system. He and another employee, Mike Harrington, left Microsoft in 1996 to found Valve, and funded the development of their first game, Half-Life (1998). Harrington left in 2000.”