It is price fixing, nothing else

Says a lot about the state of affairs in California

It's like when SEA starts to distance itself from US's grip, we suddenly hear about North Korea doing missile tests

1. is no longer a threat for the US

2. no longer has (perhaps never had), the lead

3. was forced to bow down because has no leverage

The US still chooses what customers China has access to

And the less their input is valued, the less that pool of smart individual will want to participate

So powerful institutions will end up relying more and more on having to trust these automated systems that they can't fully understand

It'll lead to a inevitable catastrophe, call it apocalypse if you will

That's not what happened, Sony's decision is more about the poor saels of its single player titles on Steam, they are now focusing their PC releases for online multiplayer games instead

Microsoft sells less consoles each month than the previous gen Nintendo Switch sells today

A lot of publishers are skipping Xbox, citing not enough players/sales

They have nothing to worry about Xbox

https://i.imgur.com/TrI3q6e.png

That's something most game frameworks don't provide as a first class, gameplay oriented systems

-2013 DRM/always online drama (reversed pre launch)

-2023 shutdown of its physical release division, which is what triggered shift to digital only titles we are seeing now

Different year, different mechanism, different reception and different press coverage

It's the same with gaming

When Microsoft is killing physical in 2023 to push for Gamepass and digital only, it's labeled as "progress and infrastructure planning", when it's Sony that does it, it's labeled as "greed and anti consumerism"

Hopefully more people get attentive to how the industry & the media works, and how US Big Tech manages to kill any form of alternative

"has arrived"

Did working condition worsen over time? if yes, then maybe

If not, then COVID proved that we are past the idea of a theoretical biowar, it is already happening

This acquisition should be blocked (and never will sadly), they now have both the incentive and the ability to influence a platform that's supposed to be hardware agnostic (and built trust over that) toward CUDA stack

Microsoft did the exact same with github, acquired stack agnostic platform, and turned it into a copilot/azure one

Always like that with Microsoft apologists

What could go wrong

This is what i hate about modern entrepreneurship, everything is always built for a short term plan

Family businesses where tradition, trust, values and reputation are kept and transmitted across generations don't exist in tech and it's just sad

It's just build fast, milk users, cash out, and move on

No loyalty, no pride in the work, and zero respect for the people who actually supported you

And actually, it's a defensive move from Stripe, because OpenRouter was quietly becoming the way AI agents pay each other in USDC via x402, and Stripe probably saw this as a threat, specially with OpenAI already moving away from Stripe

They'll nerf you, to protect themselves, they'll make you dependent on their merchant system for the juicy fees

TaxJar, acquired by Stripe, they ended up doubling the price

Rebilly, same story

Lemon Squeezy, same story

Bridge, same story