Apple is no doubt considering moving more heavily into the gaming space. They're looking for more revenue streams to keep feeding the corporate fantasy of perpetual growth, and there are only so many sweat shop laborers they can exploit. Wouldn't surprise me at all for them to buy a publisher like EA and create some steam competitor (or just leverage the Mac app store).
This is what MS are gearing up to fight with their acquisitions and infrastructure. If you can buy a game on iTunes and it works across your Mac, AppleTV, iPhone, etc, then they need to have the same in the Xbox brand across console, PC, cloud, etc. Sony are only now putting games on PC years late and that business model is looking tired already, multi device is the future.
It's a compelling proposition, and not one Microsoft can compete with. At least not in the mobile/tablet space. Cloud gaming is all well and good, but native hardware will always be superior. Microsoft is crazy not to be considering a 1st party handheld like the steam deck. Or at least a gaming-centric UI for small screen devices. Even just integrating something like the Xbox UI would be an improvement.
I think they're banking on the handheld PC market picking up for that. Obviously Steamdeck was a non-starter for native as it uses Linux, but they threw their weight behind the ROG Ally and packaged that with several months of Gamepass.
Apple is no doubt considering moving more heavily into the gaming space. They're looking for more revenue streams to keep feeding the corporate fantasy of perpetual growth, and there are only so many sweat shop laborers they can exploit. Wouldn't surprise me at all for them to buy a publisher like EA and create some steam competitor (or just leverage the Mac app store).
This is what MS are gearing up to fight with their acquisitions and infrastructure. If you can buy a game on iTunes and it works across your Mac, AppleTV, iPhone, etc, then they need to have the same in the Xbox brand across console, PC, cloud, etc. Sony are only now putting games on PC years late and that business model is looking tired already, multi device is the future.
It's a compelling proposition, and not one Microsoft can compete with. At least not in the mobile/tablet space. Cloud gaming is all well and good, but native hardware will always be superior. Microsoft is crazy not to be considering a 1st party handheld like the steam deck. Or at least a gaming-centric UI for small screen devices. Even just integrating something like the Xbox UI would be an improvement.
I think they're banking on the handheld PC market picking up for that. Obviously Steamdeck was a non-starter for native as it uses Linux, but they threw their weight behind the ROG Ally and packaged that with several months of Gamepass.