Jiggling TBD.

Temporarily acknowledging the game you actually bought. It’s allowed to exist, for a FOMO-appropriate period of time. Then it gets yanked away from you, again.

Never give Nintendo money.

Bastards all.

… is there any existing infrastructure or ownership they can erase, this time?

“We propose an alliance.”

“Kneel.”

Everything has to look better up-close.

VR lets you get reeeal close.

This entire business model is criminal.

For anyone going “Atari still exists?” - it’s complicated. And stupid. It is equal parts complicated and stupid.

Atari was purchased by Warner in 1976 when they were still “that Pong company.” The home-gizmo division was sold to Jack Tramiel shortly after the crash of '83.

The remaining arcade division took a journey. Tramiel had bought the name Atari, and also most of the staff and facilities and licensing rights, so Warner was left with a generic video-game husk which they spun off as AT Games, AKA Tengen. For some reason Namco owned most of it. Uuuntil Time Warner bought them back, and renamed them Time Warner Interactive, and then very shortly sold them to Midway, under Bally. Under Williams. That pinball conglomerate situation restored the proper Atari Games name, and then very shortly rebranded everything as Midway. This Atari did pretty well as Midway West until arcades stopped existing and they went bankrupt. And then Warner bought them again. They still own them, even though all Warner wanted was the Mortal Kombat IP.

Meanwhile.

The home division released a fascinating variety of consoles and microcomputers that do not matter in the slightest. Everything after the 2600 was a complete footnote. Their final lineup of the Lynx, the Falcon, and the Jaguar are only interesting to engineering ultranerds. Obviously they went bankrupt. Hasbro bought their remains, then spun them off into Mattel Interactive, which also went bankrupt. Hard drive manufacturer JTS bought their remains (for some reason?) and did the smartest thing anyone has ever done with Atari: nothing.

Infogrames screwed that up by buying JTS simply the acquire the Atari brand, which they proceeded to wear like a dead skin mask. They made a few admirable titles like Gauntlet Legends before entering a death spiral of hocking classic IP to stay solvent. It didn’t work. They went bankrupt. Some oil-adjacent venture-capital robot bought their remains, spent a decade hawking vaporware, released a weird PC nobody bought, and then also went bankrupt. A different clique of venture capitalists gave them more money, for some reason, and started reacquiring old franchises from all eras. They’re the Atari that re-released the 2600 last year, as if it’d be a big deal instead of a curiosity. I have obvious predictions for where this all goes, and yet, I cannot imagine that’s where it ends.

That logo is like a cursed artifact in a horror movie. Sensible companies see it laying there, and talk themselves into putting it on, and oh no everything went wrong somehow.

This game will be less preserved than the one on Ngage.

Other chip companies abound, they just cannot make x86. That’s been a duopoly for nearly thirty years. VIA was an asterisk on that until they got bought by some Chinese company. Cyrix tried faking their way around it via what we’d now call microcode, and it went poorly.

x86 would become like ARM… which admittedly could be devastating toward RISC-V.

Cram them under AMD and make it not-a-monopoly by ending all x86 patents.

Almost certainly. Current hardware is still for ultranerds ready to recompile everything from source each time Youtube updates. The very near future will see cheapo consumer hardware featuring all the fixes those people figured out. Applications will creep upward after that - like any disruptive technology.

But it’s already real enough that the latest Raspberry Pi has two RISC-V cores, just because it can.

Yeesh on both counts.

‘Andromeda who?’

Obligatory Mike Montiero talk: Fuck You, Pay Me.

“They have a monopoly” doesn’t mean they’re the asshole.

But they still have a monopoly.

People get so fucking weird trying to deny this. They insist there’s good reasons none of their competitors matter, when the question was, do their competitors matter. They proudly state they never consider buying from anywhere else… end of thought. No amount of explanation for why they’re the PC gaming store will change that they are the PC gaming store. But the label doesn’t mean it’s their fault. The label means, it is so.

“Because” doesn’t change what we’re talking about. You said: “no one is competing on PC”. That’s a monopoly. That’s you, calling Steam a monopoly. Do you understand that? Saying ‘Steam is a monopoly because…’ would not change that.

I gave you those reasons already.

In response to a comment reading: “Reasons do not change how it is plainly a monopoly.”

Their market share is what make them a monopoly. That’s what the word means.

You literally said “no one is competing on PC.”

If you’re not arguing against calling that a monopoly, I’m pretty fuckin’ sure everyone else missed it.