What I think, is that your view of gaming is confined to a tiny GOG sized bubble.

Maybe I have not conveyed my thinking well. But more than 1 thing can be true simultaneously.
Valve can be important BOTH because it brought more games to PC (via Steam) AND because of Proton expanding those offerings to operating systems beyond just Windows.

Exactly. Big corporations tend to ruin things. The bigger they are, the worse it is, and aquisitions obviously make it worse because the purchased entity gets gobbled up, but in general it's the way a big corporation operates that's the problem. So will even more consolidation that will affect even more of the remaining big player make things worse? Yes. But that doesn't mean they're not already awful as they are.

This also means that what's good for the "industry" tends to be bad from where I'm standing.

For a long time, it's been the AA-level devs that released the most memorable titles. The problem is that a company doesn't tend to stay at that level long, they either try to stretch beyond their means and crumble or get gobbled up by someone bigger, with the consequences you pointed out. Or, in rare cases, they grow even further and become part of the problem (*ahem* as this case).

And then there's the entire indie scene. If back in the early days "two guys in a garage" could and often did create a good chunk of the important titles, today's tools make that possible once again, so the indie scene has never been more active, creative and successful, the problem being to discover the gems among the piles of manure out there.

What consolidation does is remove competition. When there is no competition there is no incentive to make a good product. You are the only game in town.

As is there really are only Nintendo, Sony, and Valve as competitors. It's virtually impossible for any new company to enter this space.

Were MS to buy Nintendo, Valve, or both, they would be so big that it would make little sense for anyone to get a PlayStation. Then they control it all and everyone will have to make games for their platform.

And MS does not want anyone to have a console. Those are a profit loss. They don't even want PCs. They want games to run on their cloud servers which they can right off and fully control and you just rent the games.

That's what you people are cheering on with MS buying up game companies.

Yeah you don't care...yet.

I'm not cheering, I'm always against a corporation getting even bigger and options being removed. But I'm saying that the big players purchasing each other probably won't make things that much worse overall. The bigger problem is when they gobble up the medium-level and more notable smaller ones.

Please re-read what I wrote. It will.

Riiight. The whole "if Columbus had not been to the Americas, nobody else would have dared" first mover complex. It's cute that you think that.

You think that once you have computers (and they are getting more and more powerful too), figuring that you can use it to create and play games (and iteratively improve on it) is such a genius inspired notion that nobody would have gone there without Nintendo? That's your position? (ok, technically, Nintendo weren't even the first movers in that space, but it felt like they were an early mover in the 16-bit era, so let's roll with that to demolish that argument).

Whenever your opinion is that digital gaming would crash and burn back into the dark ages without X, just stop. Unless X is a computer of course, then you are absolutely right.

Otherwise, short of a civilisational collapse, there will always be demand for gaming and some smart Alek will always figure out how to make it happen. Heck, they like to make games so much that many do it for free and others forgo a far more lucrative more laid back career to get into gaming. That's how much of a natural drive it is for people to make and play games.

Quality games have been made (and still are made) for Nintendo. But, they don't even have most of them. Even in Nintendo's haydays, PC gaming was going places.

I grew up with Nintendo, then got my first PC in the 90s... got treated to games like Ultima Underworld, Master of Orion, Warcraft, Doom, Syndicate, Populous, Wing Commander, Master of Magic, Simcity and others. I never got another console after that. I didn't really miss it honestly.

There are more quality games out there than I will ever have time to play (especially for someone as flexible as I am in their taste). Why would I waste time with games that are only released on drm-laden platforms I fundamentally disagree with.

The reality fanboys won't acknowledge is that gaming will just fine without their daddy of choice, be he named Steam, Microsoft, Nintendo or other.

But ok, I'll throw you a bone. If you only like games that cost 10s of millions dollars to make, you might be in a bit of a slump if the big players go (not just Nintendo, Steam, Microsoft and other single members of the big overweight gang, but all of them combined... poof, gone). But if you enjoy indie games, then it really doesn't matter. All those bigs companies are just layers of fat on top of the meat.

Why would I ever care?

I think the game industry is a wreck, and ironically I think the best things come out of it when corporations do stupid corpo stuff and rock the boat and some people fall off and start out on their own in a new direction outside the influence of said big corpos.

For me microshit acquiring shit AAA corpos is at worst going to do nothing, at best it'll make a bunch of people start something new and potentially interesting for me.

Just like unity screwing their customers and themselves will make some people start a new with different tech and a fresh look.

If you are fine with playing all future games of any worth via Microsoft Game Pass in the cloud then maybe you don't. But that's what's coming.

Sooner the AAA industry crashes the better IMO. I don't think it'll happen though. Unreal Engine 5 exists to make stupidly large and pretty games as easy to make as possible, and millions buy Assassin's Creed every year. It's a sustainable market, even if it requires you to take zero risks.

Is it clear yet what will happen to Valve after Gabe croaks, which will happen any day now?

His stepson will step in? Or is it some non-profit Christian organization that owns Valve nowadays, so it wouldn't matter even if a bus was hit by Gabe tomorrow (and not the other way around)?

Yes, I made a fat joke.

How paradoxical. A cloud-locked game that requires Microsoft Game Pass has zero worth at best. So that won't ever be a problem. Corporats only making worthless games would be just another year in the industry, nothing new.

A good game is a good game no matter where it is. You are confusing games with anti-consumer practices.

The anti-consumer practices are precisely what makes the game worthless for many of us. If that is how they insist on shipping them, I won't even give those games the time of day.

Like you, my wife also loves Nintendo. She played the last Zelda. She also wanted me to play and I thought about it and I told her I already had so many drm-free games in my backlog that I'd rather play that I didn't really have the time. This is really how I feel about it.

This is coming from someone who liked Zelda on the NES and loved Zelda on the SNES.

Then you do care. Because a large enough consolidation by a company like MS could prevent DRM free games from being profitable enough to bother making and they'd be exclusive to the MS cloud or risk the ire of MS. Nintendo used to wield this type of power over 3rd parties.