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.

The best part is knowing how, once we figure out what the hell is going on below the level we’re seeing, the explanation’s going to be even fucking weirder than what we’re seeing. If it made sense we’d have got it by now.

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.

‘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.

Hard glance at Frank Miller.

“Who’s a victim of moral luck? Who’s a coerced actor? Is it you? It is! It is you!”

Yeah, that guy’s not joking.

It’s not some kayfabe act. He is sincere in all of that posturing assholery.

Block and move on.

“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.

Upvoting ‘no competitors means it’s not a monopoly’ is tribalism. Y’all don’t care about the words. You are performing loyalty. Comments defending the ingroup must be good and smart and right… even if they’re repeating the initial criticism.

‘Steam’s competition doesn’t matter.’ ‘Wrong! They have no competition.’ That’s worse. You know that’s worse, right?

If they dont even challenge then how are they competition?

That’s equivocating two definitions of “competition.”

no one is competing on PC

… that’s admitting they have a monopoly. That’s the monopoly we’re talking about. You’re not disagreeing with me, you’re just picking unrelated definitions and talking about something else.

Steam’s competitors, on PC, are services like GOG and EGS. Their teensy market share doesn’t disqualify them as competitors. They are in the exact same market. That’s why they have a “market share.” And Steam’s market share is so overwhelming that you’re treating their would-be rivals like they do not exist.

Steam didn’t need to change because none of their competitors challenge their de facto monopoly. Reasons do not change how it is plainly a monopoly. They have a supermajority market share, and people glibly admit, they don’t even consider buying games except on Steam.

So more-efficient competitors emerged against the supermajority market leader and didn’t impact that company’s market share.

Hmm.

At the end of the day, all value is made-up, especially with digital licenses. I may value a cosmetic skin a lot more highly than you do, but that doesn’t mean I was defrauded, it just means I find more value in it than you.

Flashbacks to god-botherers insisting atheists must have faith in something.

I am explicitly distinguishing incompatible meanings of the word value. So are you, by the way, if you even hold an internally consistent view of what scams are. Otherwise, nooo, selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge is legit, because isn’t all value made-up?

The kind of value money represents cannot be the kind of value you see in scoring a goal in soccer, or you could fucking buy them.

But you also have to understand that the value in paying for a ton of MTX in those games is often less about those incremental dopamine hits and more about showing off to friends/randoms online

That’s the same thing. Peacocking for other pl-- I already fucking said this! Do you read things before responding?

Right, these are casual games, where you can pay to appear successful.

Yep, no ranked competitive games have this, stop fucking lying to me. Don’t make up excuses you cannot possibly believe.