Microsoft interested in buying Warner Bros' gaming unit | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft interested in buying Warner Bros' gaming unit

reuters.com

43 pointsdsavant37 comments

I don't trust Microsoft much at all, privacy-wise, Windows-wise or otherwise not-being-evil-wise, but in my view, Warner Bros Interactive is the combination of the bad elements of the film industry with the depressing mediocrity of a second tier game developer/publisher.

But they bought and hollowed out the maker of the favorite online game of my childhood, turning it into a mobile game developer, renegged on releasing the server so the community could keep it going, and refused negotiations to sell the IP, which is pretty worthless AFAICT.

So I may be biased. If this goes through, I need to figure out who to talk to to see if we can recover it from whatever basement it's bit rotting in.

It wouldn't be the first time Microsoft was involved with Asheron's Call, they originally published it after all. Microsoft has a bad/unlucky track record with MMO development/sales, but one of the better with handling the consequences. Turbine was allowed to move on, to keep their IP, to continue to be Turbine, when they exited their Microsoft partnership. The MMO Allegiance was open sourced by Microsoft and given to its community. I can't tell you that Microsoft would 100% do the right thing if they bought WB Games Boston and managed to get the Asheron's Call license with it (and that's a weird if, because who knows what WB's deal with Standing Stone was; WB might not even remember the way some of their licenses get lost), but I can tell you there's a lot more hope than AT&T (WB) continuing to sit on it (if they are the ones sitting on it).

One can only hope Microsoft would do a good thing. The saddest thing would be if it was all just lost. I hadn't heard of Allegiance; that's interesting.

[Aside: I do wonder where all the relevant artifacts would be kept. Do they have a vault with floor to ceiling shelving with all sorts of old stuff? Or is it all in the "cloud"?]

If it is kept somewhere, it is likely still tape backups, which might indeed just be in a nice library room collecting dust on shelves. Though these days it might be "cloud" tape backups. (Most of the cloud providers offer "cold storage" that is slow and expensive to retrieve when you need it back, as that cold storage is just as likely to be tape backups and it takes time to retrieve a tape from a shelf, unspool that tape, and read from it.)

WB's gaming unit makes okay games that become successful due to the weight of the media franchises in which they are based. You take Batman away from the Arkham City games and you end up with a game not many people want to play. For example, the Mad Max game was their best open world entry, but it failed to reach sales expectations due to the lack of appeal of the media property.

I have no idea of what it takes to run a massive game studio like the one Microsoft has, but I can judge their games output, and outside of Halo and Forza, there is nothing for me there. I don't have much faith in them, and this seems like the kind of bad opportunity they'd pursue.

I'm not sure I agree on the Batman Arkham series assessment. Those games received very favorable reviews (Arkham Asylum was named Game of the Year, GOTY). The style influenced another incredible series: Middle Earth, Shadow of Mordor (another GOTY). Mad Max is awesome, I agree.

Disagree on the Arkham games. Arkham Asylum and Arkham City were fantastic games with or without the Batman theme.

The free-flowing combat in Arkham Asylum inspired countless other games including Shadow of Mordor.

I hate this as a potential acquisition because I hate the trend towards more platform exclusives and this is definitely a move towards XBox/XCloud exclusivity.

Microsoft has been pretty clear on their direction of unified Xbox/PC gaming, so in general I haven't been remotely as concerned about the exclusivity problem. It would obviously be nice if it could also show up on PlayStation and Switch, but I'm personally happy that Xbox games that would previously have been console exclusives have been releasing as Xbox/PC games.

Microsoft hasn't entirely been as clear about it, but there is a sense that Microsoft sees Xbox as a services platform/cloud provider for all consoles more than a single console today (and Microsoft themselves are emphasizing that with Series X it is definitely not a single console anymore and more of a console family).

xCloud is likely to support every device that will have them. The current focus is on Android, but Microsoft has been working hard to convince Apple to let them have a first class XCloud experience on iOS, and there's rumors that Microsoft is trying to sweeten the pot with strong macOS support by xCloud.

A bunch of Microsoft's Xbox "Exclusives" have quietly made their way to Switch over the last few years, complete with Xbox Account signin, and lots of rumors have been that Microsoft wants to heavily push Xbox as a cross-platform multiplayer stack on Switch, to point where the craziest rumors have been that Microsoft was even trying to sweet talk Nintendo themselves in letting them take over the gaming account system on Switch and leave Nintendo to core competencies. (With the recent Nintendo Account hijacking issues, that may even be a wise plan. Nintendo seem like they'd rather not be stewards of a complicated account system if they could get away with it.)

In fears over Google's Stadia and nVidia's Cloud Gaming, Sony and Microsoft even announced a shared xCloud infrastructure plan, with xCloud going to take over some of PS Now's backend. That opens the possibility, as wild as it sounds, at this point that we might see more "Xbox Exclusive" games on PlayStation at least via xCloud on PS, given that announcement. (And Microsoft does have non-"Xbox Exclusive" games on PlayStation today, though that mostly just means Minecraft right now.)

Again, almost all of that is scuttlebutt, rumors and rumors upon rumors, so it is definitely not "clear" what if anything Microsoft is thinking here, but "Xbox Exclusive" seems a lot more "flexible" than any of the other console platforms, because Microsoft's idea of a platform has shifted a lot with Azure.

Arkham Asylum was a great game independent of the Batman license. For some reason the sequels just didn't capture that magic, despite being superficially similar.

The sequels stress me out. Too much to do, too many things available that you can't do yet but can't tell whether you don't have the thing you need or just haven't figured out the trick. Random events happening constantly demanding attention. The original is sedate by comparison. Something about the combination of Metroidvania tool accumulation and more-open-world lots-of-stuff-available-at-once GTA-type world damn near gave me a panic attack. I like both those things, but not at the same time.

Totally. I get why Arkham City got great reviews. If it was my job to play it, I'd probably have gotten into it and enjoyed it. But as someone playing games for fun, it just seemed like too much work. Overwhelming right at the start.

Seems a common issue with open world games. Rockstar, Bethesda, and Ubi's open world efforts often get amazing reviews, and I know plenty of people that love those experiences outside of reviewers too, but often I look at a map the first time outside of the tutorial/opening missions, decide there are too many options and simply choose none of them (go off to play something else).

(Though it's stranger for me in that I will have less trouble with the MMO version of that experience. Don't know why it it irritates me more in single player games. Something to do with having more people to show off my grind status to, and maybe more acceptance that an MMO treadmill will "never" end so I don't have to 100% it, but a single player game does have a 100% completion to try for.)

It is an interesting open question if, should the deal go through, Microsoft would maintain a strong content licensing deal with AT&T for WB, DC, and other brands to go with the sale.

I have a pretty bad impression that AT&T, and WB especially, doesn't have a good enough handle on its IP licenses to make a strong IP deal with Microsoft. (Such as the number of IPs that its own videogame companies once created but WB has no ideas if it owns the rights to them is fascinating. For instance, it's likely WB's fault that there will never be a re-release of No One Lives Forever. They have no idea if they have the rights to it, despite owning what's left of Monolith that developed it.)

> For example, the Mad Max game was their best open world entry, but it failed to reach sales expectations due to the lack of appeal of the media property.

Mad Max is pretty well regarded brand. My impression was that WB didn't know how to market the game, badly timed its release, and accidentally gave the first impression it was a direct "movie tie-in game" which has decades of game history of bad "movie tie-in games" against it. By the time reviews came it it was tough to overcome that first bad impression.

So far Microsoft doesn't seem to have similar marketing blunders in their games division.

> but I can judge their games output, and outside of Halo and Forza, there is nothing for me there

You might be surprised, They've bought a lot of development companies in the last two years and have been expanding back out from just Halo/Forza/Gears/Minecraft (and don't forget Rare!), after the late Xbox 360 sale/collapse/divestment of studios when they decided to focus more on publishing than first party development (Lionhead RIP, Bungie, Ensemble RIP, etc). Among others, Microsoft has lately picked up Double Fine, Obsidian, inXile, and created three or four development houses that haven't made major announcements yet other than logos and game developers leading them.

It'll be a few years before all the M&A/Development work bears fruit, changes their image beyond their "safe" mega-franchises.

Much of WB Interactive's studios have rich and interesting pedigrees and on paper it seems like the kind of risky opportunities they have been taking in their M&A strategy to beef up their first party development assuming they manage to untangle access to as much of the IP rights as they could from AT&T/WB. Especially if they got the Lego videogame license with the sale of WB's TT Games, that would create a huge force at Microsoft given they already own Mojang (Minecraft).

I would think if you where buying the studio the big thing you would be buying it for would be the licences. Also one of the studios that Microsoft owns is Monjang the studio that makes Minecraft.

Yeah, I mentioned Mojang in the last paragraph. (I didn't mention Mojang in recent purchases, because that was an older deal.) I wouldn't even be surprised if Microsoft's interest was primarily TT Games and that especially that Lego license for how well it would snap in with Minecraft, and Rocksteady/NeverRealm/the ghost of Monolith past/the gutted remains of Turbine/etc all simply a bonus.

First they paid an overwhelming fortune with minecraft after the userbase had surely peaked, now warner after the DC universe and superhero genres in general have become overheated to the point of consumer exhaustion.

Perhaps someone smarter than me can elaborate, but why is microsoft buying up IP thats arguably crested by around four years?

Microsoft more than made their money back on Minecraft

The user base of Minecraft has skyrocketed to 126M monthly active players (https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/05/18/minecraft-connecting-...) so no, absolutely not.

200 million copies of Minecraft sold to date, with 126 million active players each month? That seems almost impossible. It seems like that would mean that even most of the people who bought the game years ago are still playing every month.

One explanation: Nostalgic value in 5+ years.

Minecraft was an absolute steal, theyve almost certainly made back their money. The rest of your statement is pretty agreeable, but MC is booming and will continue to be a fixture of gaming for at least 5+ more years imo. Despite all the clones theres still no successor on the horizon.

Oh good, Microsoft can spit out faster Halo and Gears of War spinoffs.

#rekt

Maybe they can resurrect Midway from whatever circle of hell it is where you have to skin decades-old games with the latest branded content from your Hollywood/demon overlords

My impression is that is what NetherRealm already is (and why their name is an allusion to the hell described in their own games).

Only on Xbox Series X:

Mortal Kombat: Nuts & Bolts

Mortal Kombat as an Xbox exclusive would kill the franchise for me :(

Any remember Mixer?

Seriously...

As a fan of Halo, I want them to support the Xbox forever, but as an investor, I wish they'd stop.

Why? Xbox is profitable. It wasn't 3 years ago, but it is now. Xbox Live is important to Microsoft's cloud vision.

That division’s revenue is declining YoY, and they are about to incur research costs for the new hardware, and perhaps subsidies. It just seems hard to believe for me that the opportunity cost is there, at least with their approach.

I'm amazed they don't use the development costs to make a desktop Surface like the Mac Mini out of the Xbox Series X internals - may as well order more chips and spread the cost.

Xbox Devices is supposed to roll up to Panos Panay now too, so anything is possible. It would not be a surprise if continued future alignment between Xbox and Surface is already in the plans.

looks like Microsoft will be developing hitman game if this deal clears

Nooooooo

Microsoft cares so much about racism they going to be installing games by default in their proprietary OS but won't include quality educational content.

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