GHG
Gold Member
It doesn't make it worse either, small startups don't have a chance in hell now, they don't have chance if this goes through or not. They can't afford to pay what the big boys can for 3rd party content. Just wait for amazon to setup luna through twitch so you just click a play this game now button on a stream and it launches you into luna all covered by your amazon prime sub.
Well that's the crux of the issue we face. The big corporations that dominate most industries have been allowed to get so outsized that it's now very difficult for them to be reigned in and to make matters worse it's impossible to compete with them.
If you're a business and it looks like you've got something with a fighting chance of being able to upset them they will just buy you out by offering far more money then you are worth and could ever be worth for a very long time. That's why people sell, not because they don't care about the work they were doing and the business they were building, we are talking about offers you can't refuse. And then once that acquisition is complete, the business gets mothballed or sunsetted. Job done, potential competitor extinguished, business as usual.
Even in the relatively short period of time cloud gaming has been around we've seen several examples of that very thing happening.
Sometimes there are industries who needs big companies to promote them, VR without Facebook would be regarded as an ultra niche laggy growth because it would be too expensive to have an entry point, Quest and Quest 2 represented the bulk of sales share because they were by far the cheapest option that ran on PC and standalone, and fast foward, here we are, a struggling to grow market, too expensive to keep footing the bill, and too expensive to put the costs into customers.
Cloud gaming has been here for more than 10 years, with Onlive, Gaikai and PS Now for PS4, none of them did catch traction because of several issues not only to the internet, but how you're supposed to get into it. PS Now was not well marketed, didn't have a mass availability and the PS3 rental titles were expensive like 3-5 dollars for a few hours. Stadia which had a great quality was marred down by poor marketing and Google known's poor effort and almost zero spending policy when they had deep pockets for that. Microsoft managed to snag because it is a technically freebie for Game Pass Ultimate with a library that got bigger with the time, all it took was someone with the pockets to do... an effort.
There is no industry that need a big company to promote them. The flow of money in economies is constant. If there are enough smaller companies making noise then the overall voice is just as loud as if there is just one large player with an outsized marketing budget. But like I said above, it's all a bit too late because those companies with the outsized budgets can do whats necessary do to defend their position, even if that means resorting to underhand tactics.