Specifically Xbox Games.
Is there a word for something that isn’t necessarily a conspiracy, but involves the unspoken collusion of mutual parties whose interests are aligned?
Tacit Collusion: a type of collusive behavior where firms coordinate their actions without explicitly communicating or reaching an agreement. Instead, firms may signal their intentions through various actions, such as pricing behavior or output levels, in order to coordinate their behavior and achieve higher profits.
In Canada, when one of the three cellphone carriers raise their prices, the other two raise theirs immediately.
Gas stations are a big one here in the US. Why would one keep their price lower when the one across the street is charging 15 cents more per gallon?
i love the crtc
what a wonderful institution
collusive radio and telecommunications council
I think fornal “business” schooling has led to this. If everyone has the same playbook, it’s easy to make the same plays without it being collusion
It would still be collusion with that example of yours. Especially if it’s a method that is being taught.
If that were the case, companies would go down left right and center. What do you think the gas stations are doing? Landlords? Companies hiring devs? Everything is becoming lockstepped and thats why we are losing.
We need to break up businesses above 999 mil in assets (including other companies) and break up entry barriers for new businesses. Amend the laws to exclude large companies from any securities so it is actually too risky to become this big.
Its not really hard to do but people need to stop working for a day every month to push this. Take to the streets and unionize en masse.
Everyone who is not part of a union is part of the problem at this point.
Conspiracies are a real thing, you can just say conspiracy.
Conspiracy theories are often bogus.
A conspiracy requires collusion.
I’m talking about a kind of coordinated action where there is not a direct link of communication.
No recorded direct link of communication. The CEOs and half the board will individually go to company paid lunches with competition, members of the board are straight up members of a competing board. Or even lobbyists and lawyers of competing companies going to events together that happens daily.
“But I pinky promise we don’t talk about our competing business plans while we eat lunch and golf together”
I think most conspiracy theories are bullshit. Especially things that require mass government, academic, and/or inter-industry coordination just cannot happen easily due to the fact that large scale coordination of people is very very difficult.
But in a market with 2-4 long-standing players in an oligopoly with offices right by each other, you bet your ass there is in-person collusion… it has been caught many times and likely the extreme vast majority of cases are not caught. Price adjustment is extremely easy to collude on and has mountains of excuses of plausible deniability and “just following the market” bs. So far, there has yet to be a market that has remained competitive and hasn’t turned into an oligopoly. Monopoly is the steady state of a capitalist system without strict anti-competitive regulations.
Ahh, that’s a systemic issue; a system where an undesired outcome is inadvertently incentivized. Aka an emergent phenomenon.
Is there a word for something that isn’t necessarily a conspiracy, but involves the unspoken collusion of mutual parties whose interests are aligned?
[Modern] Capitalism?
We told everyone no good would come from GamePass and here we are… You will own nothing and be happy.
I feel like the endgame of this is that eventually all Microsoft exclusives will only be available on GamePass.
And piracy sites.
Then game streaming becomes the norm :/
That’s an actual nightmare
Then I enjoy my backlog.
I think a lot of the hating on Gamepass is justified, but I’ve just gotta say as a partially blind gamer it has been a godsend for me.
I used to struggle with whether or not to buy a game every single time because in most cases there is no way from descriptions and reviews for me to know how any given game will work with my vision and fine/gross motor impairment.
With gamepass I can try things and if I can’t play it? I move on and try something else.
Kinda sad that we can’t find some middle ground between making games accessible for disabled folks without bankrupting developers and ultimately hurting consumers.
Most ‘physical’ releases have been downloads for at least a decade now anyhow, long before game pass was ever a thing.
I wish people would stop parroting this. For the vast, vast majority of games it isn’t true.
Really? Anything above Nintendo it has been true for me.
Most games have a day one patch, but the game on the disc is usually playable without it.
Save you all the read, games won’t be discounted or even sold for that matter. They are just being removed from shelves.
" An internal memo has surfaced online stating that all copies will be reduced to 3 cents and sales will be blocked by the store’s system and then removed from the store. As of right now, it appears this is only for Xbox games, but this move was reported last October and it seems to be coming to fruition. It was noted that Microsoft is funding this move for Walmart in the memo, suggesting it may be Microsoft’s decision and not Walmart’s. "
“Can’t have people playing games forever for a reduced price. Into the landfill with all the plastic!”
Far more interesting for that to be Microsoft’s decision than Walmart’s
Ubisoft *** said the quiet part out loud and Microsoft decided just to speed run it. I do love all the one piece memes of a great pirate era beginning though.
Ubisoft*
woops thank you
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It doesn’t necessarily have to be.
It could be that Walmart was planning to start winding down physical game sales and made that clear to Microsoft, but Microsoft made a deal to foot the bill for extra inventory to keep supply available during the holidays. Even with packaging and distribution, the actual cost per game to Microsoft isn’t really that high.
This might mean it’s true that the upcoming Xbox Series X refresh won’t have a hard drive. Microsoft wouldn’t want Xbox games to be on store shelves when they’re no longer selling consoles that can play them.
Do you mean no disk drive?
Yes lol
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I am stocking up on physical media… I am getting tired of not owning shit.
Like quit raping me world I just want to spend money and own things so I can give them to someone else or sell/trade them later.
right after they put in locking display cabinets for all the game discs here…
I don’t own an Xbox but I can take those copies off your hands at 3cents, Walmart.
What a big waste of plastic if they get thrown out.
So Amazon it is for physical copies?
So for 1 cent you can buy 33 disks and still say “keep the change”.
Did you stop reading right at what you copied? The next sentence says all sales will be blocked. So you won’t be able to buy it.
Sounds like the price reduction will be only in Walmart accounting system, so they can justify throwing them all away and write off the lost sales. I doubt they will actually sell all of those games.
Walmart is selling through the website or their partners website. The stuff is kept in storage until the item is deemed useless.
Per the article, Microsoft is paying them not to sell any of the physical games and take them off the shelves. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that they end up buried in a landfill next to ET.
I was only joking about the “0.03 cents”. I’m on PS5, buy all games digital and find Microsoft disgusting so I wouldn’t buy it even for 0.03 cents.
