Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
news.microsoft.com
news.microsoft.com
They now own the distribution (Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Game Pass), the games (Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft + what they owned before), the OS (Windows, Xbox), the hardware (Xbox, many PCs), and the back end compute (Azure). The only thing they're missing, the network bandwidth, is mostly a commodity anyway.
That's a heck of a moat.
GPUs aren't commodities in the traditional sense, it's more of a figure of speech to convey how interchangeable and standardized GPUs are nowadays.
I think if MS embraced ad blocking and made edge (both mobile and desktop) support extensions including ublock origin they could really eat into that platform. At the moment you can run Firefox with ublock origin on Android ( which I do ) but quite a few extensions don't work ( like violent monkey). To me, being able to run ublock origin (and other addons) on Android is a massive competitive advantage, but Firefox can't seem to convert it to users in the mobile space, basically they have no real platform/marketing leverage.
Just like privacy, security, and the intense amounts of FB/Meta hatred, these issues aren’t the same for the populous at large.
May not be best for consumer - really great for business. (especially, if courts hold that Apple/Google cannot outright ban apps from their stores)
"Nokia will retain its patent portfolio and will grant Microsoft a 10-year license to its patents at the time of the closing. Microsoft will grant Nokia reciprocal rights to use Microsoft patents in its HERE services. In addition, Nokia will grant Microsoft an option to extend this mutual patent agreement in perpetuity."
https://news.microsoft.com/2013/09/03/microsoft-to-acquire-n...
The huge competition where both charge 30% of gross sales, far higher than even the federal corporate tax rate, which is only charged on the net.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-duo-2/9408kgxp4xjl...
Overall the best experience was with Mobian, this is actually pretty close to being a daily driver and if only performance was a bit better it could be OK (the new PinePhone Pro will be faster so I'm waiting to try Mobian with that).
Ubuntu Touch was the smoothest in terms of performance. The main disadvantage is I could not find some of the apps that are available for the other distros like Gnome Maps. Since it is based on Ubuntu I was expecting to find a larger app ecosystem compared to Mobian but that wasn't the case (I tried searching both in the store app and using apt search in terminal). Also, many apps in the store are actually repackaged progressive apps.
The default OS (Manjaro Plasma) is the least polished of all the ones I tried, it is quite a lot slower than Mobian or Ubuntu Touch and even basic things like placing an app on the home screen are broken, and I have no idea why they chose it as the default OS.
I don't feel like MS would do better on security or privacy compared to android.
> android's software, usability and its users not having to buy everything apple to do simple tasks.
Software as in third party apps or? What does the last point mean? What is an example?
I don’t care about privacy or security for my self. I use iOS devices because of usability and UX. After webOS then Windows Phone died I moved on to iPhone 6S and stuck with iPhones.
https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-legacy-of-firefox-os-c58ec3...
A phone that doesn't let you speak to your friends, family, and coworkers is going to be a tough sell. Getting all those from the get go, without a large user base to motivate the developers, is going to be a tough sell.
Aside: Seeing MagSafe chargers for iPhones these days makes me chuckle. Also a webOS innovation from back in...2009.
Depends what you mean by a lot of people, and what kind of alternative you have in mind. Tech folks want something open source, like the degoogle androids we already see. Non-tech folks don't care much about Android, they just want something that works and has all the apps. So it would be hard to have any real competition, considering even Microsoft had to pull the plug
That said, my friends seem to love their Samsung foldable phones. "Having a tablet available at any time in your pocket is a game changer"
(I don't understand how it's a game changer, but there you go, one counterpoint)
Long term plan, obviously.
Or a xPhone where they could leverage Xbox gaming on Mobile with Android compatibility.
It is sort of strange to think Microsoft prospect all of a sudden looks fairly bright.
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-07-03-sony-acqui...
https://news.microsoft.com/2019/05/16/sony-and-microsoft-to-...
At the time Microsoft where not throwing so much money at games development an IP ownership. I wonder how Sony feel about this now.
Sony, perhaps. But I do think the cloud platform is a critical piece, because it is a huge source of value capture (e.g., all CoD compute on Azure is no small deal). It also allows significantly more dominance in distribution via cloud gaming - and coincidentally, Microsoft has been much more aggressive about owning distribution with Xbox Game Pass. This is all on top of the fact that Microsoft influences the PC and console markets, not just the console market.
Think candy crush and loot boxes vs fun single player mario games
The games people care about deeply like SM64 have remakes that aren't that hard to get.
Just that Halo was the closest IP in terms of prestige.
ie Pikachu has already sold a lunchbox by the time you have explained what the space marine guy is about.
This all seems really simple-minded but having identifiable brands are incredible business. I definitely see MS and Sony trying to Mario-ify their characters. Aloy/Horizon Zero Dawn is a good candidate for this.
Or do they have an "absurd array of reliable IPs" because they operate differently?
I have a PS5 (sadly from a scalper), and I begrudgingly got Plus to fully experience the PvP aspect of Demon's Souls but the fact that it comes with a bunch of PS4 games for free, especially a few that I've been meaning to buy, makes it worth the subscription.
I doubt Sony would have done this without the pressure from the Games Pass.
I think Microsoft know that the PS4 won last gen on the basis of the amazing exclusives it had. I think that Microsoft is going to put a lot of exclusive pressure on Sony this gen with their buying spree (Bethesda etc), and while it is very hard to find time for gaming, I'm glad we have both systems in my house.
Edit: Hah okay yeah the PS3 and hubris…does mean things could change pretty quickly and world wide (outside Japan and maybe a few other East Asian countries), Xbox could be neck and neck if not winning out again. I’d rather not have either win out. Sega was never going to survive, we don’t have another gaming console company in sight unless Steam Deck counts, so the relative parity of Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox is nice. Throw in Valve for now too.
Things can change so who knows. I don’t enjoy casual mobile games. I do enjoy the Quest 2. I can only imagine how great VR gaming will be by the end of this decade. Then we have Roblox, a single game [platform], valued at roughly the same price as Activision without the acquisition margin.
They just completely lost me to their branding strategy from that point. If I can't keep track of which console name does what, it's going to take something really compelling to make me pay attention. I'm still not actually sure what the PS5 competitor is even called.
Not completely impossible. I managed to purchase an Xbox Series X directly from Amazon UK on 20th December. Amazon also had sufficient consoles in stock they were able to not run out for more than 12 hours [1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/23/22852161/xbox-series-x-a...
They actually reported profit with game pass.
https://www.essentiallysports.com/esports-news-not-the-only-...
At 15 dollars per month, 18 million subscribers, that's 3.25 billion dollars. They bought Betheseda for 7.5 billion. So now they're in the hole 4.25 billion and they still have to pay to run an entire extra company.
Why do you keep bringing Phil up. A loss leader isn’t the same thing as a growing SaaS. You are putting words in his mouth while repeating Phil said this, said that.
The article you linked does not say anything while adding up its word count. It’s common knowledge gaming companies say consoles never make a profit (except Nintendo). Game Pass is a fledgling growing SaaS. Of course sustainable is the right term. Nothing News worthy.
Taking away PR words as fact is not sustainable. It doesn’t work.
All it takes is missing one generation and the house of cards gets written down. Someone can create the next generation blockbuster for a lot less than $69bln.
To argue against myself, they’ve become a lot better at picking trends since Balmer left too.
Having highly optimized flagship titles though is what makes these vertical integrations so appealing in this market, in my estimation.
[0]: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ps5-vs-xbox-series-x
FWIW I don't endorse everything in the link to toms guide, I just wanted a reliable source for hardware specs
They fabricated their chips - not sure if they still do. Initially this was great, they owned the equipment and got things 'at cost'. However, they had trouble refining their tooling to get < 14nm for several generations.
This made them less competitive for a while, while having a pile of expenses a more lean design house wouldn't have. They'll surely be fine, but it's not the same sprint they've had for quite a while.
Two years ago I would have expected this trend to continue and for Intel to stop in-house fabrication, but with their new CEO and some prodding from the US government, they are now investing many billions of dollars into new fabs.
Likewise, Yahoo/Verizon bought a lot of properties at inflated values. Tumblr wasn't worth $1.1B, but Yahoo wanted to buy one of the hot up-and-coming properties to feel relevant.
I think the big issue is the price one is paying and whether one has a plan for the purchase or if the purchase is more "but if I don't make a big move, what am I doing? I can't go wrong following trends, right?"
For example, AOL/TimeWarner was a situation of over-paying because TimeWarner was afraid that the internet was going to eat the world and they needed to stay relevant. AOL was so hot and it's easy to get swept up in the moment thinking "I need to get on board now or I'll miss it!" Likewise, Yahoo feared becoming irrelevant as Google took over the internet and thought buying Tumblr would make them the hip forward company once again.
Activision Blizard seems like a reasonable add-on for Microsoft. $69B isn't that much money for it given it would represent a P/E ratio of around 26. Apple's P/E is 30, Amazon 62, Microsoft 34, Google 26. So they aren't paying an absurd amount given Activision's profits. Even if they did no integration or strategy, Activision could simply continue doing its thing and contribute favorably to Microsoft's bottom line.
With a tiny bit of strategy, it seems clear Microsoft could get even more value out of the company. Maybe a few Xbox exclusive titles to push their console business. Maybe some stuff for their game streaming service.
If Disney has shown us something over the past few years, it's that owning IP that people like allows you to keep spinning new versions of that IP. Activision has lots of that kind of IP in the gaming space so Microsoft should be able to use that to its advantage.
I think there's a big difference between buying Activision at a price whose P/E ratio is better than your own and where there are clear strategies that could offer you even more value compared with the "omg, I'm getting left behind! I'll pay anything you want" panic purchases/mergers of other companies.
Also worth noting on the AOL/Time Warner comparisons everyone is making: Everyone knew dial-up was on the way out in 2000, they just assumed AOL would 'figure it out' because they were the current market leader. Not clear to me (other than maybe metaverse, controversially) what MSFT's looming problem they need to 'figure out' is.
There's obvious optics to draining the cash balance, but it's not a problem per se, because worst case, they just return it to shareholders and Net Income/EV should be unaffected.
Conversely, what's wrong with McKesson, if their revenue is $250bn and growing, but their market cap is $40bn?
Even with their recent 11-12% correction their PE is ~33.5. [0] That’s higher than today’s S and P PE, and more than double the long term median (~15) and mean (~16) PE. [1]
This means that the market is betting on some combination of margin expansion and outsize revenue growth.
McKesson is in another industry with different margin and growth, and is valued differently.
A lot of people thought Zuck was insane when he paid $1B for Instagram, and I think we'd all agree that bet paid off pretty handsomely.
It just blocks some body parts.
Introducing Xbox One as a media center with no ownership through physical media was a disaster.
Then again, Xbox branding is a total disaster anyway. The Xbox Series X vs the Xbox One X vs the Xbox 1 are all very different things but aren’t that far apart in name…
I wonder if CoD will become XBox / Windows exclusive?
When they showed that off I knew nobody at Xbox had a single clue who their audience was.
Dell installs a Microsoft operating system on SSDs from the lowest bidder and puts them in a Foxconn motherboard with a CPU from AMD or Intel.
Gasprom is a majority state-owned company in Russia. This can't really be an example of anything to do with a free market.
The typical example is Apple, because they're currently very profitable. But they've been doing vertical integration for decades and their history is full of instances of almost going out of business. The previous "see how well vertical integration works" example was IBM.
A lot of companies just outsource that and lose out on the profits, it is one of the reasons tesla has such high margins.
For the same reason. Vehicle seat are, for better or for worse, typically model-specific. Before there was Tesla there was nobody making Tesla seats. Would anybody be surprised if they start outsourcing that soon, given that they now have enough volume to attract third party suppliers and seat manufacturing is certainly not their competitive edge?
> A lot of companies just outsource that and lose out on the profits, it is one of the reasons tesla has such high margins.
Vertical integration increasing margins is just an accounting trick.
It costs $5 to make a widget, the widget maker sells it to the car maker for $6, the car maker sells it to the customer for $8. The non-vertical car company has a $2 unit margin, the vertical car company has a $3 unit margin. But to get it they take on all the risks and expenses of the widget maker.
If making widgets is a commodity market then the $1/unit is going entirely to fixed overhead (otherwise someone would charge less and gain market share). Taking on the fixed overhead in exchange for the $1 is breakeven and increases systemic risk by reducing supply diversification. But on paper your margins increase by $1.
I doubt this will happen. Here is the reason they started making seats themselves as explained by the big cheese himself: https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=357
Given what happened when they worked with supplier last time, I doubt they would want to give up the ability to innovate by going back to a supplier even if they are big.
Furthermore, I think suppliers might not be chomping at the bit to work with Tesla anymore. When the Model 3 was being developed, that insanely large preorder volumes caused some suppliers to do whatever it took to get the order from Tesla because of FOMO. Some even stripped their margin to the bone in the hopes of establishing a long term relationship with Tesla. In the end Tesla did not deliver on the numbers they promised and this lower volume caused massive financial problems for some suppliers, especially the smaller guys. I think there were even some bankruptcies of smaller outfits. Given Tesla's reputation as difficult to work with, I don't fully think they will get preferential treatment compared to someone like Toyota or Honda (which I hear suppliers love to work with).
FUN FACT: The largest Tesla skeptic subreddit /r/realTesla was started by someone who was supposedly a liaison between Tesla and the seat supplier during the Model X days. In fact he watched the whole Model X train wreck from start to finish and his banning from /r/teslamotors when he detailed all the disasters happening during Model X led to the creation of /r/Realtesla.
This is an explanation for why they designed their own seats, and basically amounts to "existing seats were uncomfortable." That makes sense when the status quo is junk, but now they've got a good seat, what does it matter who manufactures it?
Are they expecting to do a lot of further seat innovating in the future? Does seat technology have a rapid rate of change?
> Given Tesla's reputation as difficult to work with, I don't fully think they will get preferential treatment compared to someone like Toyota or Honda (which I hear suppliers love to work with).
People care more about what you're doing right now than what you did when you were just starting out. Tomorrow's reputation is based more on today than it is on yesterday.
>Are they expecting to do a lot of further seat innovating in the future? Does seat technology have a rapid rate of change?
Well maybe for other manufacturers that rely on these suppliers no but I think the real point that Elon and Sandy were getting at was that anything a user touches should be made in house as that is what you can craft carefully to perfect the customer experience. Will their seats change? Well so far they have gone though 4 or 5 revisions so it seems like they continue to make changes and iterate.
>People care more about what you're doing right now than what you did when you were just starting out. Tomorrow's reputation is based more on today than it is on yesterday.
Suppliers will happily give a quote, its just that the quote will likely be higher to account for the added expense of working with Tesla. People go from supplier to supplier and since this field is very much relationship based, I can see Tesla losing out to other manufacturers especially when supply is crunched like right now. For a lot of parts(for example seats) there are only 2-3 companies to choose from. If they burned bridges with all three then what?
I wouldn't be surprised if this effect could even be mathematically quantified.
Intel is buying fab capacity from TSMC. Backing away from vertical integration to force their own fabs to compete on the open market.
For me your comment rings the same as saying look at the stock price of AMD under and after Lisa Su.
Really, I could see them launching their own engine. Think of all the studios and talent they have now. They have the engines behind Halo, CoD, WoW, Overwatch. Could build an Unreal competitor.
id Software is not the company it once was, but they still make engines. idTech 7 is their last one, powering Doom Eternal.
idTech would be great for Halo and Call of Duty. But it isn't great for The Elder Scrolls, Starcraft, Gears, and many different games Microsoft Studios are working on. EA already tried to make every studio to use Frostbite for every single game and ended up with disasters like Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda.
By what measure are these games considered disasters? I was under the impression they were critically well-received and sold a decent amount each. DA:I was a better game than DA:O 2, for example (at least IMO).
Regardless, I fail to see what the engine has to do with anything, considering they both presented noticeable graphical and mechanical upgrades over their prequels.
Inquisition's development was a disaster due to poor tools. Pax 2013 demo, for example, was faked because no one knew what gameplay would look like(A YEAR BEFORE RELEASE), and it was mostly caused by missing engine systems. Game turned out to be OK though.
I am having a hard time understanding what the Frostbite engine had to do with any of this. Anything you can point to besides your opinion on the matter?
Seems to me the engine was perfectly capable of doing everything you wrote it can't do and both games were successful deliverables.
Even Google now ships VS plugins for Android game development and Stadia.
For one, Microsoft completely missed out on the mobile revolution.
For another, look at Mixer. This was there attempt to clone Twitch. They threw a bunch of money at it and quickly gave up. To me this was insane. Streaming has shown to be great marketing for games and I never thought they'd give up so quickly and right before the new Xbox launch.
Imagine if Mixer streamers had early access to the new console and titles? And drops? Viewers absolutely love drops.
What if the Xbox Game Pass included a Mixer sub like Amazon Prime does with Twitch Prime?
To me this just showed they have absolutely no idea what they're doing.
I mean, look at how much money they've thrown at Bing.
What makes Twitch successful is not any one streamer. It's an ecosystem. Raiding is huge on Twitch for streamers supporting other streamers.
You don't build a forest by planting one very large tree. A forest is everything from the tallest tree to the undergrowth.
> do you really think a bunch of obscure streamers nobody watches having drops would have made a bigger difference?
I absolutely do. You see this on Twitch whenever a popular game has drops and the viewer numbers go through the roof. Sure there are a bunch of AFK viewers just wanting the drops but this is a game of numbers. Some are real people. Some will stay.
On the streamer income side, I really don't think you can overestimate how huge of an impact Twitch Prime has on Twitch.
Really agree with this. They should have been trying to pull as many streamers on the verge of success on twitch as they could (newly qualifying partners mostly) rather than trying to get already established talent to come over for big money.
I do think they also tried this, I knew of some mid-tier streamers who moved over as well, but they probably could have done more. Ninja was clearly a last ditch effort to save the platform rather than a calculated plan.
More to the point, no other platform has succeeded here either. Whatever that Facebook streaming thing is is a non-factor, YouTube streams exist but seem to be used primarily as a way for YouTubers to do events rather than a real Twitch competitor, etc. I'm not sure a Twitch competitor can be viable until Twitch does something to drive people away. The network effect is strong.
He specifically mentioned stuff like: needing a hotmail account to register, when you register you had some random name assigned to you and had to go into your profile to change it afterwards, etc. Small stuff basically, but it added up and Microsofts corporate structure prohibited quick adjustments.
I take your word for it that the execution was lacking - and, perhaps, they were never going to win. Perhaps that's why they keep buying other, successful companies.
But it still builds to the same picture: even if they suck as operators, they're building a pretty darn big machine.
Do you know who benefits the most from Bing? Google. Why? Because Bing's (subsidized) existence helps create this illusion that there really is more than one search engine. Google loves that Bing exists because it nicely helps them avoid having to have the monopoly talk.
Mobile-first gamers are: people (mostly kids) who are so naive about games they will accept garbage (or cant afford a better gaming system) and whales who enjoy spending large amounts of money to move up the leaderboards.
Mobile gaming C-level's loved talking about the mobile revolution for a decade, but I really think it was all optimistic nonsense in service of their fundraising.
Mobile revolution for doing actual work on the go is mostly done in laptops, and Windows is still the champion on that regard.
Mobile games were never going to replace more traditional games because it's a totally different market, but companies don't really care about that anyway - they might not have /understood/ that mobile games were never going to supplant traditional console and PC gaming, but they didn't need to because they made fistfuls of cash anyway.
Sure they lost the mobile phones, but that market has already plateud, newer Android and iOS versions are only gimmicks for those on 2 year contract renewals to change devices.
There is so much IP that is tied up with Activision-Blizzard that it seems like a good deal.
What's different now is that Microsoft is focusing on becoming the Amazon Prime Video of video games. While you will still be able to buy the games outright, the games of the companies they're purchasing will be part of the monthly price gamers pay to play.
So for instance, because they own Zenimax, I can load up any of the Bethesda / id games and play as part of my subscription. And when Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI come out, they'll be part of that price too. Buying Activision brings Call of Duty, Overwatch, Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, and a host of other games under the same umbrella.
I guess they've decided that low monthly subscriptions paired with season passes for content is the way of the future for gaming.
For me personally I have a hard time justifying game pass. I only complete 2-3 games a year at best and it's really expensive at that rate.
Weirdly, that's the exact reason that I can justify Game Pass. Though I imagine you mean that you only play 2-3 games thoroughly, where I play a much larger number of games through the year, but rarely for long enough to finish them.
Stardew Valley and Terraria were actually IMO the best games produced with that
As usual the .NET product (XNA), got replaced by a C++ one (DirectXTK).
https://walbourn.github.io/welcome/
They acknowledged they should have behaved better, years later with the new management adding support for MonoGame on the XBox,
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2016/03/14/letter-chris-charla-i...
Between gaming (the biggest form of media), supercomputers, science computation, crypto nonsense, etc. It's really looking to me like nvidia is actually one of the biggest power players across the globe. Makes me really wonder about the tech they aren't flashing to the public. I was personally astounded when I saw their announcement to purchase ARM. I've seen a few instances of people saying the dead acquisition is stifling innovation. Honestly I'm kind of happy it didn't go through. Probably just a lack of vision on my part, though.
Note that I'm not even criticizing or otherwise knocking these business practices, I'm simply making some observations. My use of the term bullshit was particularly to describe the illusion of choice. Not that it's anything new. http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/c...
I think the world would be just fine without fortnite, but I will say unreal engine is pretty nice to have. Probably just a matter of time until Microsoft owns unreal engine as well.
Tangentially relevant due to Tencent involvement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ&ab_channel=Peopl... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY&ab_channel=Peopl...
Cool you’re seeing how much Tencent controls. However the linked site doesn’t give good data and info. Tencent has stakes in far more things and the stakes they have are known too. While the site lists only a fraction of them. Including not listing much, much bigger stakes they have. Or not listing the actual specific stakes they have in companies like Kakao which are known. Or not saying their Epic Games stake percentage.
I should get to posting content! My notes on Tencent are pretty detailed if I may put humbleness aside for a second lol. But I don’t publish anything. Seeing sites with such weak info, is motivating.
—
Yeah there isn’t much choice in any thing. I don’t care about games, but Take Two (Grand Theft Auto, etc) are the 3rd biggest independent gaming developers and publishers. They have a market cap or $28B and are buying Zynga for $13B. Zynga themselves have swallowed dozens of companies amounting to a couple billion. EA, the 2nd largest, bought Popcap who make Bejeweled and Zombie vs Plant. Pokémon Go developer is valued in the billions and Google, Nintendo, among others have sizable stakes in it.
For all the positives HN and other geeks give Steam and Valve. They still charge a 30% cut. Only finally changing it up a bit because of Fortnite’s profits letting Epic Games compete with their 12% cut. So as much as saying Fortnite going away is no problem. At least they are the ones fighting the three headed modern gaming walled gardens of iOS App Store, Play Store, and Steam. Sure, it’s more like the enemy of my enemy situation, but that’s better than them not being around.
Edit: thanks for the reply! Most people don’t reply after the first 24 hours. Just set up a bot to get reply notifications. Was happy to geek out on this topic for a bit. Even though the bigger issues of monopolies and how screwed us normal people are, are not pleasant.
If you wanna get wilder if you’re an SO user. Prosus, who owned 40%, maybe 32% these days, of Tencent, bought Stackoverflow :P. They have also invested in many tech companies.
MS for a long time had such opportunities which it missed almost every single time.
On the other hand, Apple had similar opportunities and succeeded almost every single time.
The MS list:
- Windows Mobile
- Zune
- MSN
The Apple list:
- iTunes
- iMessage
- iCloud
- iOs (some more)
> Microsoft is extremely successful with Azure.
I do not see any disagreement here.
To say this also ignores the XBox and its controller, which often trades places with the modern PlayStation controllers for what is considered best-in-class.
Microsoft has plenty of hardware design capabilities.
I should have been more specific - I was thinking of the CPU and GPU design.
I think we'll look back in 10 years and wonder why antitrust regulators did nothing, but it may be too late by then.
I'm assuming some survivor bias is involved here and we don't hear about the ones that stopped early, but it seems that what I and most folks assume antitrust regulations do is different than what actually happens.
I remember the Sirius/XM merge and how those were the only two players in the market, and it was wild to me how that was allowed to happen.
(Visa + Plaid)
AT&T's threat assessment of T-Mobile was correct at the time.
I think that assessment was obvious to everyone at the time. The question is whether buying out competitors is good for the public.
Of course, the cash was a penalty for not being able to pull off the merger; if the cash was critical for T-Mobile to become the threat it has been, the outcome is ironic.
The equivalent for this merger would be something like Minecraft and Bethesda games on the A-B launcher for 7 years. Huge giveaway by AT&T I think, as foolish as it might have been for them to think the merger would actually go through; having at-least 4 major carriers was policy at the time and still is (Dish's spectrum hoarding notwithstanding).
https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/nvidia-slash-arm-merger-inquiry
“FTC Sues to Block $40 Billion Semiconductor Chip Merger” 2 December 2021 https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/12/ftc-s...
The original purchase of Rite Aid by Walgreens was aborted due to similar concerns, although that one ended in a revised partial acquisition anyway.
The Staples acquisition of Office Depot/Office Max was stopped as well on anti-trust grounds.
They also blocked a merger of Nasdaq and NYSE.
Those are all since 2010. I'm sure I'm forgetting a few big ones too. They should definitely be blocking more, but they have stopped some.
So even the antitrust that goes through usually only goes through because powerful (often monopolistic) forces want to block a merger, not because it’s what’s objectively best for competition.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/visa-and-plaid-abandon-merger...
A lot has been written about the decline of antitrust enforcement in the US since 1970.
https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s...
Just today, the DOJ and FTC announced plans to toughen up on mergers and acquisitions.
>The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division kicked off a process to rewrite merger guidelines for businesses on Tuesday, signaling a tougher stance toward large deals.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/18/ftc-doj-seek-to-rewrite-merg...
Saw an indie game last night and felt like buying it.
Steam Deck is Valve opening up an alternative to Microsoft land.
Although I will admit I'm tempted to cancel my pre order since I'm worried it won't run well.
If Microsoft starts subsidizing Game Pass games from their other businesses (like Amazon, Google and Apple do for their other services), it'll make the business model of actually selling games unviable by pure race to the bottom. As a result, you'll lose independent development and market diversity because everyone will need to beg Microsoft (and maybe Sony and Apple as other megacorps) for money scraps.
This is very similar what actually happened in mobile games market - a race to the bottom that only left a few winners filled with exploitative anti-patterns that feed on peoples addiction to recoup their costs instead of selling the product.
It'll of course be amazing for users - games will be cheap! And free! Just like views on YouTube are, where creators are getting more and more burned out fighting against the algorithm which decides how much they deserve to be paid.
Also -- EA (EA Play), Ubisoft (Uplay Plus), and Sony (PS Now) already went the way of subscription gaming. EA Play is included in Xbox/PC Game Pass, and PS Now isn't just Sony's catalog, either.
Judging by the reactions I've seen to this acquisition around the internet, this crowd is really not that large.
The average consumer of today does not care in the slightest about owning things, they only care about being able to enjoy whatever the current flavor of the week AAA tripe is for now before the next flavor of the week comes along to replace it. When they're done with a game, they don't care about having it anymore.
This way you can fully play the game and if you really want to "permanently" add it to your library, you can do so for less.
Don't blame mobile games - they got those exploitative ideas from PC market.
The upside of a PC market, is the lack of a centralized authority to tell you what games are good - a.k.a the app stores. (App stores are horrible for games or any creative content discovery, as they use purely utilitarian categorization) That doesn't mean that PC, or web, games are any less exploitative than mobile counterparts. (remember mafia wars or farmville?)
Is it? Undoubtedly there's exploitative crap on PC, but there are countless great titles -- indie and otherwise -- released every year that you can pay money to own. On my iPhone I can hardly even find games to pay a fair price once to own anymore; it's almost entirely exploitative crap.
I used to buy games all the time on my iPhone; were it not for Apple Arcade I'd've hardly played anything in years.
In spaces where casual gaming dominates - exploitative games are top of the "charts".
I'm not an enthusiast gamer - I don't have time to search for indie games. What I see is primarily exploitative games, which turned me off gaming.
If you even read about gaming industry or new games - you're not the majority , that drives casual games to the top of the charts in primary app stores.
Regardless, my point isn't that there aren't spaces where exploitative games predominate. My point is that so many actual good games exist that aren't the slightest bit difficult to find, whereas my experience on the iPhone has been almost uniformly negative the past few years. On average, people just aren't willing to lay out ten, fifteen bucks for a game on mobile, so the race to the bottom is real.
Do you have to be an enthusiast gamer to find good PC games? Just google "best PC games", the first hit is a decent list from PC gamer. Takes all of 60 seconds to search and skim the list. If you don't have time for that, then you don't have time to be gaming at all. If I google "best iOS games" I see a mix of exploitative crap and games that are years and years old by now. (A list of "best iOS games 2021" that includes Bastion -- a game I was playing on my phone ten years ago -- is criminal.)
Take PlayPass, for instance: the play store is a landfill of endless trash, but PlayPass adds both a level of curation and it unlocks all the microtransactions.
So for a low yearly fee you get access to the best Play Store games, never pay for microtransactions, and don't need to go digging to find gems in the garbage heap.
Any random $20 Switch title from the Shovelware Shelf at your local retailer is so much more polished and fun than even the best phone games, it's insane
This seems to put the writing on the wall for the Steam Deck though, right? How many people are really going to care about a Valve system that can't run any of the popular games from the MS catalog?
I preordered the Steam Deck and plan to follow through with the purchase, but things look pretty dismal for Valve at this juncture. It seems like they're five years too late to the party with the Deck, and they now have no leverage to push MS to interoperate.
You can run Game Pass directly in a browser. So you could use GamePass on really any modern web connected device.
I would be shocked if Microsoft supported the actual GamePass app on Linux
It was absolutely unplayable without a controller, mind you, but it worked.
MS now has a truly huge library, and Valve extracting a portion of every sale on Steam isn't something that's likely to make them happy. They now have so many games that they can use DRM to force users into their own ecosystem (i.e. Windows 11/XBox) to play them.
You could say, correctly, that MS's previous storefronts have not been a great success, but with such a huge catalogue they can just pull the users wherever they want them. There's no incentive for them to allow a competitor to run their games.
Proton is only a solution for as long as MS allows it, and I don't see any incentive for them to do so at this point.
Maybe things move slowly and the Steam Deck itself can still deliver these titles before this happens, but the Valve "ecosystem" as such seems to have really poor prospects.
So far, it seems MS is quite happy to put its games on Steam as an additional revenue source. Looking now, Xbox Game Studios has 49 games on steam, including its latest and biggest offerings, such as Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5[0].
[0]https://store.steampowered.com/curator/3090835-Xbox-Game-Stu...
I don't know why anybody would give Microsoft of all companies the benefit of the doubt on this front.
Maybe the calculus changes as they eat up publishers and grow their catalog, but traditionally Microsoft's storefronts haven't done particularly well.
As some other folks have pointed out, the existence of WINE and other compat layers is actually hindering gaming on Linux, by disincentivizing game devs to make games directly for linux. A huge hit with the Steam Deck could actually start bringing more games directly to Linux.
That's a very generous definition of "Linux".
Android won, not Linux.
What's the GUI toolkit? Android's one. Audio? Same. Notifications? Android. Etc, etc.
There's a reason many people are scared of Fuchsia, it's not inconceivable that Google at some point just pulls the plug on Linux and replaces it wholesale with Fuchsia as the base for Android.
Linux on mobile failed utterly, from Maemo to Meego to Ubuntu Mobile to all other attempts.
Isn't that exactly what Tencent are well known for doing?[1]
> According to the designer, Riot managers had provided a PowerPoint presentation that she assumed Tencent had made for them, although she didn’t know for sure.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/15/china-video-gam...
> The deal still leaves Riot with a largely independent remit, however, with CEO Brandon Beck telling press that Tencent see Riot more as investment partners than as a fully-owned subsidiary.
> "Riot is going to remain completely independent. There are no redundancies, no layoffs, no synergy fishing, no leadership change," Beck told Gamasutra. "Nothing is going to change other than they're dramatically increasing their holding in the company. They see this more as an investment in a partner.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2011-02-07-tencent-ac...
I remember reading somewhere that Tencent has the reputation of not interfering with the game studios it had acquired.
Somehow I'm not impressed.
Yeah, I've noticed that. I don't know why they do that, it's annoying. If I can download a game in a half hour I'd like it in a half hour, not next Tuesday, please.
Valve has boxes hosted at many ISPs around the world and so each location could have lower usage numbers, thus less need to throttle.
Pure speculation though.
With who? Most names known for the titles of good old Blizzard are long gone. Possibly even retired.
I haven't really ever used it. I used to buy everything Blizzard made (OK that's an exaggeration, but I was all about WarCraft/StarCraft/Diablo...). Before Steam, I bought lots of games on disk. Now I buy most things on Steam. And I haven't bought anything Blizzard since Diablo III.
Why wouldn't Steam continue to be competitive against Game Pass?
(I'm just one person, but among the people I know that play PC games, I don't hear about Game Pass much. One person mentioned he's on a 14 day $1 trial - that was the extent of it.)
Game pass is significantly cheaper, unless you buy very few games on steam (and/or only buy them on deep, deep sale. Which doesn't really exist anymore in any meaningful way).
Sure, that $10 gets you only 1 month, but will you buy a different $10 game next month? Will you play this game for more than a month?
Pretty soon the GamePass ROI becomes difficult to ignore. (This coming from someone that doesn't have GamePass but is very impressed by the business model and value proposition around it).
This month, Game Pass subscribers will lose access to Cyber Shadow (launched January 2021), Nowhere Prophet (launched July 2020), Prison Architect (launched January 2021) and Xeno Crisis (launched August 2020).
I'm also having trouble believing that Game Pass will remain $10 for long. At some point Microsoft will want to start recouping its investments and it's gonna start hiking prices. I personally got pretty tired of the constant Netflix price updates and I'd rather not do the same to my video game collection. I didn't actually have a gaming PC between January 2014 and March 2021, and it was actually pretty nice to install Steam and see all of the games that I bought between 2006 and 2014 still waiting for me in my library.
I subscribe to Game Pass occasionally and it sucks every time to lose access to all the games I'm playing. It becomes a balancing act of "I can buy this game for $30 or I can play it (and others) for 3 months at the same price... but what if I want to play it again in the future?" Like most rental models, most times it's easier and cheaper to just buy the game upfront if you can afford it, especially when it's on sale, which is easy to predict (and be notified of) on stores like Steam.
But how long do you play these games for, and how often do you replay them? There are definitely games I replay a lot (Resident Evil games, for one) but there are many where I'm done after one playthrough. I'm totally okay "renting" it and moving on with Game Pass for a lot of titles.
Some of my most-played on Game Pass are Crusader Kings 3, ARK, Dragon Age, My Time at Portia, and No Man's Sky, which are basically what I go back to every time I resubscribe. But after getting up near a dozen months subscribed at $10/mo, I'm now really wishing I would have just dished out the cash earlier to buy the games instead, especially if I want to keep playing them over time. I'm very much in a sunk cost mindset though: "I've already paid to play the game so much, surely this month is the month I'll 'finish' it and get to stop paying, right? Therefore, I shouldn't pay full price to own it when I can just pay the $10..."
It's very much a digital Blockbuster all over again. There, too, I spent many more hundreds of dollars on repeatedly renting games that I should have just bought. But, like Blockbuster, Game Pass is really good for discovering new games because it's such a low cost to try anything in the library once.
super simple stuff.
steam presented a bit of an issue about owning what you pay for. because, if their service is down, you can't access your "assets". some people called it a type of subscription model.
with this shift in the industry, outright paying a subscription for temporary access, we move even further away from owning what we pay for.
imagine never buying a house but always renting. why be against it? who is that business model good for? what kind of world are we voting for when we buy into these types of businesses?
in the long term, a subscription model puts us, the customers, at a loss. and a successful business plans for long term.
But maybe they'll get there.
It's really is literally just Netflix of games. Not great at all when you want to watch Movie X, better if you want to just watch some movie, and the only way when you want their in house productions which in theory are striving to be high quality. GamePass isn't to that final level of exclusivity yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if some game goes "Only on GamePass" in the nearish future.
It's also similar to Netflix in that if your usecase was the old "Just streaming The Office only" you could probably just purchase it. A mono game player would definitely be better served just buying the title they want for $60 rather than a monthly fee, but it starts to get more attractive at just a few games per year.
Got Conan Exiles for $12 and played it for 3 months.
If you really like playing a wide variety of games, and like to rent them, then a $10/mo deal is excellent. I like to buy inexpensive games and play them for a long time. Should I even mention the 15 years I got out of StarCraft?
I'll go in waves, playing one game like crazy for a couple months, and then maybe not playing anything for a few. I like going back to the games I already know I enjoy and playing them some more, so I don't want to rent them.
So you get access to these games to try them, and if you really, really like them, you can buy them when they go on sale for cheap on Steam.
I don't use Gamepass because it somehow has eluded me, but it seems like a good deal even if I tend to buy games for cheap on Steam.
or if you want to play games that aren't on Game Pass. Though then it's not exactly a fair Game Pass vs Steam comparison, more Microsoft vs Steam.
I paid like $5/mo for 1 year of the Ultimate version, I can play games on both Xbox and PC and carry over progress for most of them. It's great. Steam doesn't have anything like that, so not sure there's any comparison to do.
For the gaming industry, this seems to push Microsoft into 3rd place (by size) behind Sony and Tencent. So hardly a monopoly and akin to T-Mobile's acquisition of Sprint a few years ago. It makes Microsoft much more competitive against Sony and even Nintendo since it'll likely bolster their 1P offerings in the future.
But if Microsoft uses their ownership to favor their own game subscription services (aka GamePass) as well as platforms (aka Windows 11, Xbox console), then certainly that'll be monopolistic behavior. Interesting to note that they're probably #1-#2 in either of those sub-industries. It's possible to end up with an "Internet Explorer-esque" antitrust scenario if Microsoft removes or heavily discourages Activision and Bethesda from making their titles cross-platform.
I'm pretty sure that Starfield is announced to be a Windows/Xbox exclusive already.
The only reason it got approved the third time was that regulators were convinced that either way, the US would only have three mobile operators because it did not look like Sprint could be a going concern.
Now if they buy Sony or Nintendo then I’ll actually be concerned. But for now they’re hardly controlled opposition or anything lol
It's only an issue if this negatively. affects the competitive market. And since games are a creative market - there's hardly any reason to fear that Microsoft can restrict access to new players.
This is not like a utility, that could technically force something on you. One company can buy all of game developers/publishers and still not make a dent in competitiveness of the games market.
Kids' PCs are windows. Microsoft has Game Store installed by default. Pop ups about the latest Fortnite NextGen, installed by default. More addictive than gambling but hella legal.
Easy scenario, no regulations. Market is heavily skewed and MS has a big win in the gambling for kids industry.
Nah, it's just a play to gain more monopoly into PCs and what runs on them. Today, it's a nightmare to get something signed for MS. God forbid you need to sign drivers. With them moving the goal post every now and then, broken APIs, broken SDKs and support SLA of infinity, pluton is a forced dependency.
Pluton is a pure business move with zero customer value. The greatest threat, last year, in security was supply chain attacks. And this tries to "solve" kernel modifications? End users have nothing to gain.
The thing about subscriptions is that consumers tend to buy multiple.
Their "software as a service model of IP consumption" didn't seem to bother many regulators so far.
Besides, with so many games out right seeking to get kids addicted, let's at least have some trade regulations. It's not like parents can ignore them.
Unity is a public company and I think would benefit immensely from being acquired by Microsoft.
Point is I agree it's not for sale, for the reason you describe, but also that one of the leviathans already has nearly the entire minority interest.
The internet has no updated information based thr original press release. Since that 40% Sonys purchase would have further diluted tencent. The only thing we know for sure, because he's said so: is Tim has a controlling stake.
We do not know if there is a dual class of shares, but that would be a simple tactic to maintaining comtrol.
They have so much money they could easily buy Ubisoft, EA and Take-Two and make all major games Xbox and Windows 11+ exclusives.
Firstly, "video gaming" is really competing against things like reading a book, walking your dog, board games, etc., so it's not like Microsoft can just start jacking up prices and people will have nowhere to go with their time.
Secondly, creating and releasing new games has never been easier. So many small indie game companies are creating great games to compete with blockbusters like CoD and LoL, the ecosystem for game development is plenty healthy, with or without Activision belonging to Microsoft.
Thirdly, they haven't done what you're saying with the games they have released; you can play Minecraft on the Switch [0]. Maybe wait for Microsoft to actually do the thing you're worried about before criticizing them for it! They have had opportunities to be exclusive and they haven't taken them, so it's not so simple as to just assume they will no matter what.
I'm not worried about the industry, but I am cautiously optimistic about what Microsoft will be able to do with some IP that I've loved for most of my life.
[0] - https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/minecraft-switch/
You're not wrong, but I can't agree with this.
The "information overload" problem has been known about for at least 40 years!
I'm sure that a pervasive predatory corporate development department backed by a cash-heavy company could reel in virtually all AAA PC games, but the long tail not so much. And the funny thing is, AAA has been a huge disappointment for gamers and I imagine investors as well over the last years, compared to its golden days.
Compare to say "owning your social graph" like Facebook, that's something that's much more robust. A good messaging platform doesn't take over the world in a few weeks like an indie game (almost) can, so Facebook has plenty time to acquire it or copy/steal their features.
My argument is that (most) video-games are still fundamentally passive consumption activities: recreation, that doesn't require someone to expend any "spoons"[1] to get some entertainment value. Whereas, I imagine for most people, reading literature, waling the dog, or even organizing a board-game session requires far more effort to initiate (not necessarily mental-effort, but effort in a general, abstract sense) whereas the whole point of video-games is to be a very-low-effort distraction from our existential anxiety.
So please substitute "reading a book, walking your dog, board games" with "watching YouTube-algorithm-recommended videos, Joe Rogan podcasts, and after-work boozing with your shiftmates".
Apart from maybe a couple unicorns they aren't, they're a seperate market.
The overlap of people playing Call of Duty and those playing The Binding of Isaac will be family minimal, same goes for sport games which you're hard pressed to find people in the previous camps playing despite massive sales.
I agree with the sentiment though, there's no shortage of quality games made by smaller teams both independently funded or with investment from big players.
I almost wanna throw my hands up and give in, like how big can a problem be before it stops being a problem.
Looks like Rust, Valorant, Apex Legends, and Escape from Tarkov are in the top 10 on Twitch. All came out within the past 5 years.
Probably dead since Regan? After they stopped controlling AT&T the UNIX-Wars happened, impcompatiblity, lawsuits, closed-source has become a normal thing and proprietary software locked users in and competitors out.
What platform will Microsoft support? Likely not:
* Linux
* BSD
* MacOS
* Nintendo
* Sony
It's also a big reason for the fact that americans spend far far more on healthcare than other countries. For reference, the US government spends 28% of your tax on healthcare. The UK government spends 18.8%, which is arounge average among western nations. And ON TOP of that, americans pay huge medical fees and insurance.
Inequality is partly caused by the two above issues, combined with the fact that its really damn hard to make much of a company for yourself when a vastly more powerful company is intentionally suppressing or if you're one of the lucky few buying out all of its competition.
Racism and Sexism are at least partly caused by ineqality, but another big part of it comes from the consolidation in mass media. Shock stories on the national news about the actions of ten or fifteen people can cause and deepen ingrained biases about millions.
https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/148348691488801996...
He is reporting that the chair of the FTC is begging for public comment on merger activity.
UPDATE
And just a few minutes ago, questioning whether this whole Microsoft/Activision will be stopped.
https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/148353211536295117...
Console platforms have not competed for games to be on their platforms for.... ever.
OW only support Windows.
I guess SC2 and D3 had support for many platforms, but not Linux.
It's a crap situation that I don't think is being improved or worsened here.
I don't miss id software, because they're still here, continuing to make amazing games. The last two Doom games were excellent.
...incidentally, Microsoft also owns them now.
The "new" Microsoft though, really is different than the old and might actually do quite well in stewarding this supposedly sinking ship into fairer waters.
But as a die hard Apple user with an active WoW subscription I can't help but feel slightly dismayed that the Apple x Blizzard deal never will (or probably could have) happen(ed).
That said, they do have a gaming service: https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/
My impression is also that Apple Arcade is already pushing the limits of how much Apple's management wants to touch gaming.
Big AAA titles take several years to produce and I doubt Apple will allow half-baked games to launch. That means we won't be seeing those games start to launch until 2023-2024.
Apple is definitely working on a VR headset. They've bought out 4-5 VR companies already. There were rumors of a 2022 launch, but 2023 matches up much better with their game studio launch dates.
That subscription is a HUGE moneymaker (that's how WoW made Blizzard so much money). Most serious gamers play 1-2 games for a couple of years. Traditional studios charge $60 (less for sales) and then release one $20-30 DLC per year. That gives them $120 over two years at the very best (though most players won't bother with DLC). Apple gets $80 per year unconditionally. Moreover, this will get casual gamers in addition to hardcore ones.
Now that Apple runs everything on M1 and even the slowest M1 chips have better GPUs than most Wintel systems, Apple can sell games to everyone. Because everything is using the same architecture (same CPU and same GPU across the board), their devs save a ton of time and money developing and optimizing which means their total time to deliver and cost to deliver is much lower.
I suspect that MS sees this as an extremely serious threat. They need to do everything they can to leverage xbox pass and compete.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-30/apple-can...
If Apple goes all-in on VR, the whole VR market will benefit from greater public acceptance. But at the very best I predict it'll be like the Nintendo Wii: a few games that are extremely popular, and then it gets old.
Which is a shame because I agree that Apple is in a great position to enter the gaming market. Imagine what Nintendo could do with powerful hardware in so many hands! But by the same logic, Apple should have crushed Spotify long ago, given its mile-wide lead with the iTunes Store, and yet the nicest thing I have heard about Apple Music is that it works with other Apple stuff. I honestly don't think Apple's management understands entertainment.
An average steam gamer has a 3-5 TFLOP 1060 rendering 1080p with a quad-core intel at 2.5GHz. A 6-core A15 (little cores are about as fast per clock as Zen 1) with a 1.3-1.5 TFLOP GPU comes quite close. If Apple wanted, they could add a magnetic dock with controls and extra battery for serious gamers too.
For something like the Apple TV (A12 isn't a slouch though no 4K gaming machine) they could offer streaming with remote rendering.
I suspect the launch 4+4 CPU with 32 or even 64-core GPU. They should sell that in a mac mini sized console with a wireless VR headset. That said, Oculus Quest 2 is quite popular and it has a Qualcomm 865 which is much slower than that A12 let alone the A15. They could definitely stomp the Ques 2 with an A15-based device and could go much farther with a M1/M2 chip.
Yes, but that's kind of the problem. The 720p phone has a lot of horsepower per pixel, but is crippled by touch controls. The Apple TV is _slower_ on a larger screen, with yet another frustrating input situation because Apple didn't put a gamepad in the package. (They don't even make gamepads! The MFi ones I bought were pure junk.) I can't imagine a more hostile environment to develop AAA games for.
To get that level of market share a company basically needs to subsidize the initial hardware/consoles. I don't think Valve has ever learned that concept and as such they are still selling the hardware at full price. This in contrast to say FB/Microsoft/Sony who actively subsidize their offerings because they understand the benefit of getting people locked in their ecosystem.
I predict a repeat of Steam Machines. (as a Linux user)
Their (leaked) employee handbook is literally subtitled "A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s there telling you what to do"
? You can't play DOTA2 or CS:GO or any of their real moneymakers anywhere but Steam.
Pretty sure it won’t. Too chunky for playing indie games on the go, not enough battery to play AAA. And if you plan having it plugged in as a desktop replacement, there’re batter gaming laptops.
Half Life Alyx was impressive but it also kind of sucked. Teleport movement breaks immersion hard. And the enemy design was clearly incredibly gentle to accommodate the fact that people are not in fact very competent in VR.
A Microsoft acquisition of this company is bad, and an Apple acquisition of this company would be bad.
When mega corporations like this consolidate, consumers always lose. Microsoft couldn’t win customers through product and service quality, so they bought one of the largest game publishers in the world so that their competition can’t sell those games anymore.
I think that’s accurate. Whether there’s room for and value in these kinds of playful conjectures is of course up to each of us to decide.
It's not like you bought into an open ecosystem, but now they closed it off.
No game release is a "positive for everyone" and never will be.
I can equally argue that my neighbor baking bread is not positive for me, because I don't get to eat it. And I like bread...
There is only one maker of Diablo, and no Torchlight is going to replace Diablo.
Games aren't going to get pulled from other platforms. New games may not come out on (insert-your-preffered-console), but they never were guaranteed to come out at all.
Thus consumers aren't loosing anything here. It doesn't even reduce competition.
And the market that would actually care, will already own multiple consoles... and a gaming rig.
You've actually managed to convince me that this is good for the market, not neutral.
Consumer doesn't mean "a specific individual that owns a PS5", it's a generic term meaning market participants that consume products. Consumers don't loose if prices for new products are substantially higher in a competitive market, because willingness for a consumer to pay the price in a competitive market equals to the value of the product.
Interactive game market is highly competitive. Therefore producer prices a product at $500 => consumer agrees that $500 is acceptable => consumer spends $500 => consumer gets $500 in value => cost - value = 0 => no consumer net loss.
I see your point, I really do, this stinks in all sorts of ways, but there could be a benefit here for a lot of players.
The answer to this conundrum for them should be, "Tough titties, learn to compete or die, but we will not allow you to bully your way into a market with money."
You're in HN, talking about MS and acquisitions, telling them to learn to compete?
Am I on the right website or has my browser been hijacked?
very much need, but that's how gaming industry works in general - hype, fans and all.
GamePass subscriber numbers are growing at an incredible clip.
Unless politicians make major changes to the anti-trust law its unlikely to be effective. And doing so would require major action in congress.
The president could use non anti-trust actions as well of course. But rather unlikely.
Sony Interactive Entertainment actually relocated to California a few years ago and literally everything PlayStation is under them so I'd probably call them a US company at this point.
If you're not familiar it's basically "Netflix of Videogames" where for a low monthly price (compared to buying a game at full retail) you get access to whole downloadable/streamable library of games.
It's such an outsized value that it's a big reason to choose an Xbox console over a PlayStation and it's pretty clearly the driving force behind these acquisitions. More games in the library -> More Game Pass subscribers -> More Profit.
For example tv streaming, where if your favorite movies/tv series maybe spread over dozen services and you need to pay subscription to all of them. Or it could happen that copyrights get bought by different providers and thus migrate from service to service. I will not be surprised if piracy will have a comeback for movies or tv-series.
So with gaming it will either be the same (too many providers to choose from), or reverse - if you'd like to play AAA title, you will be locked in with Microsoft.
On PC something similar may arise, but there would be much more competition and PC gamers may be more reluctant to use these services because there are more options when choosing where and how to buy/download/play games on PC.
I'm pretty sure piracy numbers for movies and series went up with the number of streaming services
> The acquisition also bolsters Microsoft’s Game Pass portfolio with plans to launch Activision Blizzard games into Game Pass [MS PR]
In case anyone still doubts that Microsoft is all-in on Game Pass.
As somebody who just got game pass, I feel kinda cheated for what I get; All the games offered there are the “f2p” versions, even MS first party titles like Halo only offer the “default” versions to play “for free” when paying a monthly subscription.
It’s like those free versions Epic hands out; They are playable, but they usually lack any and all of the “extra DLC content” that too often are needed to make a game actually fully fleshed out.
There are some exceptions, like Destiny 2 I believe, where the meaningful DLC is excluded, but that is not the rule. Game Pass is an incredible deal.
You’re getting the “standard” edition of the game. Sure, you’re not getting the expansion packs or other cosmetics, but neither is any other person that doesn’t buy the deluxe editions.
No, what they usually give you is actual customization options because in the full-priced standard edition those do not exist anymore.
As character customization has by now been apparently redefined as being wholesale "cosmetic" and thus locked behind an deluxe version up sale, MTX spending and FOMO season pass grinding.
It's a sorry state for AAA and increasingly even mid-tier developed games.
Often enough it directly affects gameplay, instead of playing with/against individual other people, which in many games used to be recognizable by their character customization choices, too often multiplayer now ends up looking like the clone wars.
As the only people that stick out with their customization are those that spend money on having any choice other but the one default choice.
Now pretty much all of that is either locked behind "Deluxe edition", MTX or dozens of levels of season pass for a single item.
Which is particularly cynical considering how they advertised this Halo as the "most customizable ever, no two Spartans will look alike!" [0], when the only way not to look alike is to spend at least 10 bucks for a new armor core.
Want that new armor core in a different color? Enjoy spending another 8 bucks [1] because color schemes are now armor core specific.
This is objectively worse than what people used to get when they bought the "standard" version, as effectively all meaningful multiplayer customization is now paywalled behind a ton of MTX and not just the "nice extras".
Halo isn't the only offender on that front, pretty much all the games that nowadays get released with a "standard" 50-60 bucks version, and then a 100+ bucks deluxe version follow this very same MO. Which would be okay if those "deluxe version" actually offered the full package, but they don't, what they offer is the same extend of customization options that used to be included with games out of the box, while getting "everything" has by now come an exercise of unlimited spending [2] because creating unlimited new color swaps, with every new "season", is the new most profitable business model, not releasing a fully functional and fleshed out game out of the box, that's by now the absolute rare exception in the "AAA" sector.
This is also exactly what many people have been warning about where MTX will ultimately takes us for literally decades, game pass is the ultimate manifestation of it; You subscribe to "games as a service" with a monthly fee, then you are supposed to spend money on those rented games to upgrade them to proper fully fleshed out versions, and then you are locked into the subscription because not paying for it now also means losing access to all the content for the games you purchased on-top of your subscriptions.
Anybody who looks at this and goes; "This is great for consumers!" must not be a consumer and must have completely missed all the relevant discourse about these developments during the last decades.
[0] https://gamerant.com/halo-infinite-armor-customization-milli...
[1] https://gamerant.com/halo-infinite-charges-8-color-blue/
[2] https://www.gamingbible.co.uk/news/xbox-halo-infinite-shop-c...
So to answer him, yes, you want to play dress up. Everything you’re complaining about is entirely cosmetic.
Disregarding that as "you only want to play dress-up" is not only unbelievably reductive, it's also a very lazy way to just hand-wave away a very real issue.
The same way you could disregard the vast majority of features from any game except core-gameplay features; "You want to color your car in your racing game? How silly, you only want to play dress up!"
I guess it's just naïve of me want to play things in games?
Maybe if you started with Halo 2. Halo 1 lan parties and Xbox connect you had a choice of maybe 10 colors. It was about the shooty-shooty. And maybe that's why I like infinite, I get pretty darn good shooty-shooty.
I agree to an extent that the customization system is a little broken though. Team games should force red or blue coloring, half the time I can't tell who is or isn't on my team. "Outlines" aren't enough. All so people feel that their $50 armor purchase isn't hidden.
I "started" with Quake, but that's besides the point.
> Halo 1 lan parties and Xbox connect you had a choice of maybe 10 colors.
At PC lan parties people had a choice between a myriad of custom skins particularly with GoldScr mods, all for free.
> It was about the shooty-shooty.
It was also about the community, particularly at a lan party, and part of a community is also being able to individualize your avatar.
This used to be very well understood for the longest time, and now it's suddenly considered "playing dress up" because billions dollar heavy AAA publishers, and developers can't be arsed anymore to put in any meaningful player customization that isn't monetized and FOMO'ed to hell.
> All so people feel that their $50 armor purchase isn't hidden.
Would you disagree that previous Halo games, short of going back over a decade, offered more, and particularly more meaningful, multiplayer customization options out of the box?
> Team games should force red or blue coloring, half the time I can't tell who is or isn't on my team. "Outlines" aren't enough.
They are enforced to such a degree that picking any blue color skin already gives you a slight advantage as enemies will always be colored red and allies always be colored blue.
Which is btw a very separate issue from armor types customization, people having different armor types makes it much more likely for you to recognize enemies from friends as 90% of people wouldn't sport the exactly same armor style that's completely indistinguishable.
It gives the whole affair a real "clone wars" vibe where you ain't fighting individuals, but yet another of the same model, something that wouldn't have been acceptable in single-player FPS games or multiplayer mods, like CS, decades ago.
But it's fascinating how your difficulties of differentiating players and teams trace directly back to the lack of non-monetized character customization, and that just passes right by you like a non-issue.
Maybe you enjoy fighting in the clone wars, I think it's greedy design and not conductive to good gameplay.
20 years ago non-commercialized mods got this right, I really don't see why wanting it to get right in massive AAA titles, with a pretty rich and established history in exactly that, is suddenly such a controversial opinion, on HN out of all places.
On one hand I get called out for wanting more than only the purest "core-functionality" ("You can shoot people, what more do you want?"), on the other hand people disagree with the notion of how these "low-content" version are very much "f2p" versions, as a lot of content that used to come out of the box is now relegated and hand-waved away as "playing dress up".
The only emotion I can feel is disgust. Disgust that Microsoft would tacitly approve of Kotick's decades of harboring, encouraging, and protecting sexual assault within his companies. The man allegedly, and settled out of court, for telling his secretary he was "going to have her killed". He hid internal sexual assault allegations from the board. They threw parties with strippers & DJs telling the women to drink more so their male coworkers could have more fun. They passed around a nude picture of a female coworker, leading to her suicide. An awesome person was promoted to be head of Blizzard, before leaving just months later, telling the board that she had experienced years of sexual misconduct working there, and there was no hope for them to ever change their frat-boy culture.
This isn't old information. It came to light just weeks before Halo Infinite was released. Phil Spencer & Microsoft had to be well into discussions at this point; and it didn't phase them. They didn't stipulate that he would have to leave; they instead leave him in charge of the company post-acquisition. They fire, what, a couple dozen people? In a company of tens of thousands?
Just... disgust. Maybe a little hope that Microsoft can improve their culture, but without signaling a fundamental change in leadership, that hope is dim. But at least they'll make some money.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/activision-videogames-bobby-kot...
This is likely good for current employees who might otherwise be likely future victims.
You're getting worked up for no reason. Maybe wait until Kotick actually sticks around before the outage?
Edit: It seems it's not expected to close until 2023 so maybe it takes MS longer to get him out.
1. It's been reported that Kotick will leave once the acquisition is finalized (i.e. when MS actually owns the company). If and when that doesn't happen, _then_ I'll join in on the criticism. [edit: based on WSJ reporting, not official statement]
2. Kotick is the de-facto ruler of ABK. The acquisition's not happening unless you play ball. If getting ABK under new management and kicking Kotick out requires playing along for a while, then so be it.
3. A big part of MS's investment thesis here seems to be "ABK's assets are worth more than $69B, but their scandals are suppressing their valuation. We can fix the scandals and better realize the IP's true value". MS will be stupid to let ABK keep going without decisively handling the scandals.
This is the correct answer.
The intrinsic value of the company is worth more than the share price, which is being pulled down by the scandals and highly negative PR.
Microsoft have bought a bargain.
Do you have a source for that? Not because I disagree but I really want to hope you're right, and I would like evidence to make that belief have some real evidence.
edit: ah the WSJ article
>The board of directors was blindsided by the California lawsuit’s allegations, including that an Activision employee killed herself after a photo of her vagina allegedly was circulated at a company party, according to people familiar with the board.
And here
> But here is where it gets even worse. A former female employee who hasn't been named publicly committed suicide while on a business trip with one of her male supervisors. The unnamed supervisor apparently brought sex toys and lube on their trip, and the state investigators believe this and a previous event where the female in question had a photo of her vagina shared around the office Christmas party led to her taking her own life.
Ugh.
Larger install base I guess. I’d been waiting for the Mac version for years and am surprised it never came.
It's well known that in the wake of the huge success of WoW they had to completely re-organize the company in order to be able to properly support a game with an active audience of that size. Their size, their structure, their culture, everything changed.
SC 2 recently went free-to-play. If the rest of their catalog is added to Game Pass, that will be something. Blizzard games have been stubbornly expensive years after release. I wonder what this means for Battle.net?
Microsoft has not been making money on xbox. They're not investing money made with xbox. They're using Office/Windows/Azure funds to boost Xbox, and it's not a fair fight. Sony and Nintendo don't have that kind of money.
I get Sony has acquired studios too, but by comparison they seem carefully planned. They're usually studios already making (mostly) playstation exclusives (e.g. devs of Returnal, Spider-Man and Dark Souls).
I wish they could use the Java version to do that, because bedrock is awful in a lot of ways. Microsoft seems entirely focused on merchandising, paid DLC, and driving users toward their paid server offerings. The game itself feels like it has been largely in maintenance mode for a long time, other than the recent caverns update.
It blows my mind when I think about how much money Minecraft must be worth, and how big MS is. Compare that to an indie game like Terraria, Stardew Valley, or Factorio and the difference in quality is night and day.
EDIT: They tried to buy Nintendo, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25672443
But I imagine Sony execs are struggling to comprehend what's going on. They've done so much right in the last few years. They've built some of the best studios in the world. They've delivered the best exclusive AAA content. Just in the last few years: The Last of us Part 2, Ghosts of Tsushima, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Uncharted.... And despite that, they still might not come out on top. Life isn't fair :).
>> Sony spent 20+ years building up and planning their 1st party studios. Microsoft could do that too, but it would take 20 more years.
Ironically, the Xbox (OG) was released 20 years ago.
First, the price they are paying is insane. The investors will be demanding the results eventually.
Also, buying studios won't fix the culture in Microsoft. They've had so many years and still can't make consistently good games. There are some gems in between but they are usually form partnerships or newly bought studios. Their in-house development seems like actual hell (Halo).
I also suspect that game pass will make them focus on GAS games (service games) with microtransactions, optimised for profit instead of fun.
If they want to go that route, charging by the month isn't the way to do it. There's a reason exploitative mobile games are free at point of sale. I predict that MS stays the course of putting decent first and third party titles on Game Pass and chooses to raise prices rather than mandate that Game Pass games be more exploitative.
I wish I had time to dig into Activision's financials to get a better feel on this.
They earned $2B last quarter, with over $500m going to Cost of Revenue. For a software company, I'm guessing a lot of this is in multiplayer gaming infrastructure. Cost of Revenue is another $716m, with half going to R&D (engineering) and half going to G&A (rent, administration, etc.).
In other words, if Microsoft can absorb the Cost of Revenue into Azure and optimize the G&A a bit, they can increase quarterly revenue by almost 33%. That's $10B/year. Plus, putting Activision's back catalog on GamePass might drive up GamePass subscriber count/retention and back catalog sales (see the first article linked below).
It would be tough to show this as hugely profitable over the short term, but I think they could model out a 5 year ROI very very easily.
> I also suspect that game pass will make them focus on GAS games (service games) with microtransactions, optimised for profit instead of fun.
I'm not a subscriber, but as a casual follower of GamePass I haven't seen it drive more MTX. On the contrary, it seems to have opened the door to more niche-y games that would have a hard time finding an audience elsewhere.
These two articles give developer quotes that are very interesting insights into both gamer behavior and the economics of putting a game on GamePass:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2021/03/19/game-pass...
https://www.gameinformer.com/2021/03/24/deathloop-dev-opens-...
Yes, these are probably MSFT sponsored and it's not all roses, but even if there's a core of truth to them it's encouraging.
Torn on this. On the one hand I completely agree. I doubt there'll be any anti-trust action, first because that doesn't seem to be a thing anymore and second because I can't imagine the American authorities getting in the way of Microsoft's competition with what are, at the end of the day, Japanese companies.
As a gamer who's loved Activision's franchises since childhood, they've run them all into the ground and if Microsoft can do better with them then let them try.
Side thought - maybe Nintendo and Sony will finally join forces to compete, as they almost did in the 90s.
Notably: Rocket League, Minecraft, Fortnight, Apex Legend, Overwatch
No antitrust action will be taken because even after all these acquisitions, Microsoft still competes with Take-Two, EA, Nintendo, Square Enix, Sony, Tencent, etc., plus a vast number of smaller players (Paradox, Sega, the sixteen gazillion indie developers on Steam...).
The purpose of antitrust law is to prevent anticompetitive behaviour by limiting the accumulation of market power. The most extreme case of this is monopolies.
I agree that no action will be taken, though. The current status quo is so full of market power abuse that this acquisition looks normal.
Activision/Blizzard certainly had a big sales tag on their forehead.
On what day? Looks like they dropped from 70bn last year same time to ~50bn at the start of the year and then sold for 69bn.
What are you talking about? Microsoft is embracing PC and cross play more than ever.
It also really should be the target of anti-trust action if that was a thing anymore. It's going to be a reality fairly soon that anyone who wants to play all the latest AAA titles will have to own at least two gaming devices.
That's not only annoying from a consumer perspective, but it's counter-productive from the perspective of how much redundant hardware it means in the midst of a chip shortage.
Microsoft has been releasing their PC games on Steam the same day they do on their own store for a few years now.
MS's track record seems to be only to be pro-consumer so long as it helps their bottom line.
This is an excellent point. You can argue that the Switch is so different, it can make sense to own a Switch plus a PS5. But the PS5 and Xbox Series X are so similar it is wasteful to be arbitrarily requiring you to buy both if you want 2 sets of exclusives.
That's ultimately why Microsoft did this. Previously it made sense to just get a PS4/PS5. You get the excellent Sony exclusives, and all the cross-platform games. You missed out on very few good Xbox exclusives. Not anymore.
I'm hopeful this stuff will still come to steam. I'm done having multiple consoles. I have a PS5 and a PC. I'm hopeful that's enough to not miss out on too much.
Specifically Windows, it has to be pointed out these days.
The interesting one here for me has always been Nintendo, they are a still a pure gamers play, and have managed to thrive in a world of shifting sands, sometimes bucking entire trends in the industry with success, like going all in on the Nintendo Switch form factor (a lot of the industry people thought mobile gaming consoles were dead in the water)
I think there's a lot of competition in this space still, and while I don't like consolidation either, its also hard to say Activision Blizzard is a well managed company at this point
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/business/global/sonys-bre...
[1]: https://www.cbr.com/spider-man-no-way-home-sony-most-profita...
When Zenimax was acquired, it was coming off a couple of failed fallout games, a meh ESO and delayed Elder scrolls 6. Similarly, Activision-Blizzard has been in the midst of COD and Overwatch losing their gaming monopoly to Fortnite, Blizzard failing to create a good game for about 5 years and the big workplace lawsuit.
It feels like Microsoft is taking on the challenge of reviving these companies back to being the powerhouses of old. In that sense it is a big challenge and not as simple as just buying the future of gaming.
If they wanted to do that, they'd probably try to buy Naughty Dog or Fortnite.
It's like acquiring Fiat Chrysler or General motors. Still big names, but clearly not the 'brands of the decade'. You wouldn't buy them to form a monopoly. You'd buy them to revive the brand.
The #1 and #2 titles of 2021 are has-beens? And they also had the #1 and #2 of 2020.
https://venturebeat.com/2022/01/18/npd-the-top-20-best-selli...
https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/15/npd-reveals-the-best-sell...
COD is admittedly not a has been, but it is like a top athlete in the twilight of their career. Still performing at the top, but no more #1 and the trends aren't looking great.
[1] https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Call_of_Duty
[2] https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_vid...
I hear Horizon: Zero Dawn was great. Didn't play it. Didn't pick it up when it stopped being an exclusive because it was no longer new by the time it hit PC.
My dance card is so full of Steam Early Access that I don't even have time for exclusives these days.
Source on this? They have said in the past that they lose money on xbox unit sales but are very profitable from software/game sales. As far as I know there is no public information to suggest otherwise.
https://www.vgchartz.com/article/448650/microsoft-the-xbox-d...
Oh, and he now leads the third biggest gaming company on the planet:
> When the transaction closes, Microsoft will become the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony.
It will be interesting to see in the medium-term if Satya and the Board spin off gaming into an independent company at some point. But for now it's wild to think about the fact that Microsoft owns the Call of Duty franchise.
Congrats to Phil on his resume bump I guess.
Though there is the switch tax where games that are 10$ on steam are 30 on switch.
Which isn't to say that you should by a switch. If you don't think it's a good value then obviously you shouldn't. I'm just saying that not buying it because 'the games are too expensive' seems like a pretty unjustified complaint to me.
[0] Not all of them were shit of course, but the catalogue is 90% shit and people did buy a lot of shit games.
Today you pay $30 (for some games, but a lot are still $60, $80, etc.) Plus the DLC, credits, extensions, registration to an account no ability to sell it or buy second hand.
Game industry got pretty bad, I've enjoyed it in the past, and I have the ability to just move on and ignore anything game related, what I am upset about is that today's kids are squeezed and coerced in order to play anything, and that is why I wish we had governments trying to put a stop to the current gaming companies greed
What you characterize as "greed" is more reflective of general consumer desires (physical media is pretty dead, and I say this having a paper library of around 500 books) and that games are ever-more-expensive to make.
For the preposterous number of person-hours that go into an AAA title, $100 isn't unrealistic. But there's price anchoring dating back to the nineties now, and that as much as anything is why games upsell the way they do. (The "complete edition" prices are probably more representative of what a sustainable price for a player really is.)
Or we can do microtransactions until our souls bleed and go back to single-use codes in the game case. That's a thing too.
While it is hilarious that you imply that vendor lockin, half finished games, arbitrary difficulty curves meant to stimulate mtx and a lack of ownership is a "general consumer desire" I think it is more reasonable to say that the consumer has no choice. They (or we) clearly still desire to buy videogames, so folks end up buying what is essentially trash.
You pay your money and you take your choice. I agree that it's silly, and that's why I don't buy those games. I buy and play a lot of games, but it's been at least five years since I bought a game (that didn't show up from Humble Choice or whatever and is languishing in my game keys spreadsheet) from Activision, EA, or Ubisoft.
I have gotten more enjoyment out of Starsector[0], a game that isn't even on Steam yet, than I've ever gotten out of any AAA game I've ever played. It cost me $15. (I have since bought it repeatedly for friends.)
> I'm just saying that not buying it because 'the games are too expensive' seems like a pretty unjustified complaint to me.
That's because on this topic you are quick on making judgements on people and don't (want to?) realize their reasons for not buying a switch can be valid and these reasons are not attack or counter arguments to the reasons for why you would buy switch games.
I am not an entitled gamer.
edit: and FWIW I was checking the switch page for Disco Elysium and I see that the price tag is the same as Gog's (39.99) but now I don't care anymore about discussing this topic here and now. Nintendotax gone ? Just checked Life is stange:true colours, same price tags as steam.
> Game prices on the switch is why I haven't gave in to the temptation yet.
Not:
> Game prices on the switch is why it's not worth gave in to the temptation yet.
> I guess the difference I'm trying to make is between "it personally isn't worth that to me", which is of course entirely valid, and a more objective-sounding statement of "games cost too much", which I think any objective analysis would say is ridiculous.
No, you built a straw man argument.
Do I go around asking for a refund because The Witness has been given for free and I paid for it in full upon release ? That would be entitlement. Not buying a switch because switch games are too expensive for me is not being entitled. I also think not buying a switch because I may think switch games are too expensive is not being entitled.
> [..] , which I think any objective analysis would say is ridiculous.
Yeah, way to go. First you suggest in a reply to me that people who think like you think I do are entitled and then you state your opinion is objective and then throw a blanket statement about something no one said and suggest this position is objectively ridiculous.
Fitting username.
I still play $60 for games because it's not a big deal for me but it's weird when I already have so much entertainment available for almost nothing. Playnite says I have 1050 games available to play, about 50 are duplicates and about 350 are from Game pass. I've apparently spent less than $600 on steam and much less than that on all other stores. Seems like the market value of the average game is about $1. (Hands waving furiously)
Gaming companies aren't entitled to my money. They're allowed to offer games for the prices they want, and the market is allowed to buy them or not.
Besides, many of those $10 games that are $30 on the Switch are made by smaller teams or even solo creators. Just because some video game properties have grown into giant franchises with multimedia companies pouring tens and hundreds of millions dollars and armies of people into them, that doesn't mean the majority of video game titles around are like that.
Come to think of it, in the light of the countless recent stories of overwork and abuse in the games industry and the scandalous quality issues plaguing high-profile releases in recent years, I'm not even sure if we should be incentivizing games having a lot of work go into them.
How come is it entitlement to not buy things that cost more than you think they are worth, anyway? Expensive things don't become cheap just because they're cheaper than four decades ago nor because they happen to be created and marketed by large corporations with lots of employees.
That's a fair point. My first guess is lootboxes and microtransactions being used to make up the difference, as well as underpaying employees. For big studios it is common to lay off developers immediately after a big release.
Regardless, I don't think that same logic applies to smaller studios.
> How come is it entitlement to not buy things that cost more than you think they are worth, anyway?
That isn't what I was saying, though I admit I didn't make it very clear. If you don't want to buy something because the cost isn't worth it to you, that's perfectly fair. What I am annoyed by and think is entitled is any kind of objective-sounding judgement that 'games are too expensive'.
the biggest is market size. in 1980, there were very few people buying games compared to today.
also, for non-aaa games, the difficulty of making a game has in many ways gone down significantly. NES era games were at the absolute limit of hardware capabilities, and required a ton of wizardry to fit within size constraints. now graphics expectations are higher, but modern computers are so much more powerful that you can afford a lot more sloppiness.
You can still redownload things. Nintendo says at some point they'll turn that off, but they haven't said when yet.
Even if you made sure to unregister your phone number and email addresses from iMessage first? You can do this while still using an iPhone to validate that it's worked before you give it up.
You are right, of course. And you can also do it afterwards if you forgot. There is no nefarious plan to void your messages when you change phone.
The "lock-in" and the lack of ownership/copyright extension for media provided by their service is absolutely a problem, but it's not "servitude". There's a couple of other members of FAANG where the relationship with users is much more like servitude.
I'm hoping the Steam Deck will provide a more open portable console.
When passion projects become "loss making", then people loose their passion for it.
I have a 14" gaming notebook (ASUS G14 2021) that's portable enough and offers decent battery life especially for lighter games with access to my Steam library offline, and plenty of key shops to find games for uber cheap when there's no demo available for me to vet the value of a title first.
Win-wins all around!
Do devs get more money from Steam than Switch on a per unit basis? If not, using Steam means the dev is not winning as much as they could.
Good for them though, I mean it's a great game, and it means the games don't depreciate much on the secondhand market either. Although I'm confident people don't want to sell physical Switch games, a lot of them have a lot of life in them and become prized possessions.
https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Indie/#p=0&tab=TopRat...
Do we count mods? DotA and CS would be indie if so, but are now quite commercial.
Indie studios have produced a lot of games with varied mechanics that are just a huge breath of fresh air for me, personally.
You'd never see a AAA studio making Factorio or Satisfactory, for instance. Probably unlikely to see them make a game like Darkest Dungeon, or Don't Starve, or Stardew Valley or Terraria or Starbound or.. the list goes on. You just might have to look a bit deeper to dig through the roguelikes and platformers.
e.g. Annapurna Interactive has been publishing AAA-quality titles from indie devs for a long time. And most of those games don't fall into the roguelike or platformer vertical.
But yeah, not many games between AAA and indie. :(
Lot of those studios between AAA and indie have closed or have been bought up, by Paradox, Microsoft, Tencent, Embracer/THQ Nordic...
* Puzzle (The Witness, Baba is You, Antichamber, Manifold Garden, ...)
* Survival/open-world (Minecraft, Terraria, Don't Starve, Subnautica, The Long Dark, ...)
* Horror (Amnesia, Outlast, Layers of Fear, Five Nights at Freddy's ...)
* Management/simulation (Factorio, Stardew Valley, Kerbal Space Program, ...)
* Metroidvanias (Cave Story, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, ...)
* "Walking simulators" (The Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Firewatch, ...)
Some of these maybe you'd disagree with (Are Metroidvanias just platformers? Can Minecraft still be put on a list of indie games?), but I personally think it's a crime to omit at least puzzle games and survival games. The offerings from the AAA space for those is not very impressive compared to the indie space.
Tencent and Microsoft have both spread a lot of money around. Perhaps for varying reasons, namely MS needs to make up for the lack of titles developed for the Xbox Series, and add titles to Game Pass to make it more a more attractive offering.
There's so many platforms to build for, and on some (xbox/ps5) a high(er) barrier to entry, vs. low on the PC, or mobile. I'm not surprised that there's much indie action on the xbox/ps5.
As an indie game developer (hard to get more indie than me, I think, since I'm doing this mostly solo), I can attest that it's never been easier to get your game on Steam or a console platform. On Steam it's mostly a matter of a $100 fee and filling a form. Consoles are a bit harder, but still dramatically more open to indie titles than say a decade ago, and all of them are possible to get on even for small developers.
I also wouldn't say that "the group of indie dev studios is dwindling". It's just a matter of the old indie studios "growing up" to become bigger enterprises, but there is tons of other people replacing them on the lowest rung, with teams of several people and true labor of love projects.
Have you looked at Steam recently? Indie studios are doing just fine, and new indie studios are popping up all the time. I'd argue the indie market is stronger than ever.
1. invested in by one of the platform owners themselves, in exchange for a [temporary] exclusivity agreement, making them essentially a sharecropper on the platform; or
2. invested in almost exclusively by a single bigcorp publisher, making the studio essentially a secret marque of that publisher for projects they don't want associated with their regular brand image.
Many of the games that later make it to Steam, were originally funded by either one of the platform owners, or by a bigcorp publisher.
> Many of the games that later make it to Steam, were originally funded by either one of the platform owners
My account is full of games (including top sellers) with no such arrangements. And I have more access to such games than at any time in history.
> What evidence? My account is full of games (including top sellers) with no such arrangements.
Ignore indie games that have been on Steam for years and years, or that only get published on Steam and no other platforms; these are the exceptions to the rule (despite this set containing some of the largest hits by sales volume.)
While there are studios that sell only on Steam and other low-barrier-to-entry channels, 99% of them don't last more than a year or two, because selling only on Steam is leaving almost all your money on the ground. There's a reason that many of these games don't get support updates any more and won't run on e.g. macOS or Linux after any major OS update, despite originally intending support for those platforms: the studio didn't survive.
And while there are indie studios that eventually take their console-exclusive game over to Steam, it's often still published by the publisher on Steam. Take a careful look at the Steam catalog page for the "publisher" field. If there is one? That's who's making the direct revenue on the game sales. Like the publisher of a book. The "author" — the studio — is only getting a commission.
There are a few indie studios who manage to "earn out" their deals with publishers, and take over their own Steam pages (though not usually their console marketing rights — the platform owners don't like dealing with the long tail of self-publishers, they much prefer well-known bigcorps as marketing partners.)
> Don't look at the game as it exists on Steam > Instead, look at any game that's still console exclusive.
So I should ignore all the evidence that refutes your position, and only look at a limited subset of data that does support it?
Having a publisher doesn't invalidate a companies indie label. Being "indie" has never meant being bootstrapped.
- Five Nights at Freddy
- The Binding of Isaac
- Hollow Knight
- Carrion
- Loop Hero
- Factorio
- Phasmophobia
- Frostpunk
- Valheim
- Satisfactory
- Deep Rock Galactic
- Stardew Vallley
- RimWorld
- Terraria
- Dead Cells
- Cuphead
- Among Us
- Project ZomboidThis is such a narrow, HN-ified view of indie developers that I genuinely have a hard time believing this is anything other than satire.
I don’t have any stats but would find that interesting, mainly as I’m not sure how much revenue indie studios have. Is the split like 10% get most of the money while the other 90% starve?
FWIW, I have heard they are hands-off and offer resources, like great groups for closed alphas.
The only concern I have is that they can become more hands on and excersie control over creative decisions in the future.
Personally, I value good stories from mid sized indy studios. The dominance of 2 engines can make things feel a bit homogenized. Pair a great story with another engine, and my interest is piqued.
This is inaccurate.
I don't have the stats to back it up, but the power of Unity Engine and Unreal Engine have effectively created an indie game developer renaissance.
One of my favorite games at the moment, Hell Let Loose, is published by an indie studio that started in 2017 as a Kickstarter project. They launched their PC version last summer and successfully launched an Xbox port this past fall. It is objectively a better (but harder) game than COD WWII or Battlefield V, both of which are considered AAA titles and have had hundreds of millions put into them for development.
Combine that with the lower barrier to entry with the discoverability of games on Steam and Xbox marketplaces and you have a very hot market. Oh, and consumers play video games now more than ever.
And, to my eyes, Epic uses openly monopolistic practices: they drop the license fee for the engine if you use their game store.
I used to make games, so I hated when people used GameStop because it avoided the developers getting any money. But now I'm thinking that GameStop would be great, because most all but three of the games I bought just suck.
These online-purchase-only systems frankly need a one-hour refund policy. So many games where the controls are just jank (like 100% janky). Like everyone looked at Celeste and thought "This game is good because it's hard" instead of "This game is good because it rewards skill". I'd rather play Celeste and Returnal than these other utter wastes of hard drive. I only made it through Unsighted because you can make yourself invulnerable: fun story, fun ideas, fun levels, jank combat.
Bah humbug.
There is quite a Nintendo tax on indie games though.
Hollow Knight was great; if I hadn't nearly fully completed it at the time I probably would have started another playthrough already.
Yeah, but from TFA:
>> Upon close, Microsoft will have 30 internal game development studios, along with additional publishing and esports production capabilities.
I don't see a need for this and agree with the notion that companies should not buy companies. There are cases where it makes sense, but I think another mechanism needs to be created because buying and selling companies is often too much like buying and selling people in addition to being anti-competitive.
yes, because what would he do without.
We already know that Bethesda is keeping their autonomy to make the same great games we love from them, and Starfield is a chance to prove it. The only downside being: Playstation owners losing out on playing what may end up being among the most popular titles in the next 5-10 years if Starfield and TES6 are a success.
Activision Blizzard already competed with Sony, which is why people think the market is more healthy prior to this acquisition.
In your comment you point out that Bethesda still has their autonomy. So why is it good again for MS to be acquiring these studios? They continue to make the same product in more or less the same way, but now have to appease their MS gods, all while generating more profit for MS to the benefit of not really anyone, except MS.
My last comments were more in the shoes of Microsoft.
Which is also a bad thing!!!
Gaming is not a human right.
Apple is not obligated to invest into building Apple Music app on Android or Windows. Just because Apple tied Apple Music into their own ecosystem, doesn't mean you are owed anything.
But I agree the concentration is still a problem in itself, even if the owners are OK.
They're becoming the Disney of gaming, which is scary, but hey, Microsoft gonna Microsoft.
I'm curious how game development is under the large tech companies like Microsoft. Game development is notoriously recognized as a slave driving industry for the labor force. Massive tech companies, like Microsoft, aren't exactly known as places to slack in the software world, but they also don't seem to have as toxic of a labor culture as the gaming companies who pass mountains of costs to their labor to remain competitive (Amazon perhaps being the exception here).
(Itemization and damage looks very bad in Diablo 4 previews though - damage in hundreds of thousands and "strictly better" items instead of trade offs)
What will happen to Bobby Kotick now?
> Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard, and he and his team will maintain their focus on driving efforts to further strengthen the company’s culture and accelerate business growth.
you don't need to make another Starcraft game. you can use that IPs to develop different kind of game like Warcraft is used to make Hearthstone the card game.
Microsoft is buying Activision Blizzard's IPs
Starcraft was just a fantastic game - people have been playing it for decades. Not sure how financially successful it has been (fairly well I would imagine) but it has a legion fan base.
Almost everyday play map or two on SC:R.
About time other studios get a chance to work with Blizzards IPs, they did well creating all those beautiful universes, but they struggle so much making just one new game every few years.
I've read the GP comment with a strong dose of sarcasm.
They love their Linux. I won't be surprised at all if some key games would magically become less compatible with WINE in the future.
The world, it be complicated, yo.
Consoles have always been packaged, standardized, and locked computers. That Nintendo is bad at security isn't proof of any great altruism. It just means they're not good at secure hardware design.
Actually Texas Instruments had a go at it with their beige TI-99/4A, but by the time that came out most of the TI-99/4As that would ever be sold were already sold, without the lockout. But it was the NES that turned the locked box into a business model.
Yes. I mean the sub-headline is XboxGamePass is now 25M+ subscribers. Logical next step isn't even games: it's convergence.
Curious we don't see similar consolidation in the Japanese market: Square Enix, Konami, Capcom, Tecmo, Bandai Namco, From. Even Nintendo. All seem attractive targets, no?
Samsung, Toyota, Hyundai, Sony... They all are huge conglomerates spawning across multiple industries.
Sony did expand on some fronts via acquisitions, e.g. Sony Electronics acquiring Konica-Minolta, Sony Electronic Entertainment acquiring several studios, etc.
I hope PC gaming can detach from Microsoft as soon as possible to be honest.
In what way is PC gaming attached to Microsoft? Microsoft Game Studios doesn't have a lot of market share in PC games besides Minecraft, and the industry is very diverse. Most games happen to run on Windows, but apart from DirectX they have resisted every attempt from Microsoft to use that in any way.
If PC gaming is attached to anyone it's Valve, but even that is slowly changing.
Wow, that sucks. They should acquire someone with a bigger catalogue!
And Obsidian Entertainment. And inXile.
PC Gaming runs on Windows, not on Valve's OS (while valve is intending to change that progressively).
It's not like you have to pay royalties to Microsoft if you sell a PC game (but you do have to pay MS/Sony if it's a Xbox/PS game).
You could see it coming that this is controversial.
1. Microsofts share in publishing video games isn't exactly what you'd call small. They acquired Zenimax Media [1] last year, which is kind of big. That said, Microsoft can't be seen as a dominator in the publishing market.
2. But the argument wasn't necessarily about who owns the most studios. Microsoft absolutely dominates in the platform market on PC. Games are developed for Windows. Period. Everything else is either niche or an extra.
1) Microsoft holds a very respectable share of the video game market (especially if you ignore mobile). But their share of the PC game market specifically is much smaller.
2) Microsoft is the dominant platform of PC gaming without question. But that doesn't make the market attached to them. Being without alternative or having high switching costs is what makes you attached, not merely using it. Most games are inherently multi-platform, either because they are built in an engine that is or because they are also sold on other platforms (mostly consoles). Not having Linux, Mac or SteamOS builds is usually a business decision, not a technical one. You could argue that they are attached to Microsoft because that's where the consumers are, and that's true in a sense. But that limits what kind of benefit Microsoft can get out of the attachment and what kind of damage they can do - at most as much as it takes to get enough consumers to switch (dual boot, some SteamOS device, etc). In a world where games sell platforms the attachment isn't very strong
God of War, a 4 years old PS4 title, was just released on PC and sold very well. That should tell you everything you need to know...
The Avengers was a large AAA game from the world's most popular media franchise and it recently tanked. "That should tell you everything you need to know..."
There are good AAA games and bad AAA games. The good ones do very well, the bad ones don't do as well. If we move the goalposts to say that the high-grossing/well-reviewed AAA games don't count then of course we're going to end up with a skewed picture of what the market looks like.
The fact of the matter is that the people who talk about games make up a small portion of the total group of people who play games. AAA still exists because it still rakes in cash, year over year.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/best-selling-video-game-ever...
But clearly the AAA studios have the market figured out, it's just easier, less risky, and more profitable to make shallow "product" than a rewarding and interesting "game."
And the same complaints hold true in film, where people argue that studios are just taking the safer, more profitable path. But the people who make those complaints aren't the audience that the studios/publishers are targeting, and they are a minority in the larger market as a whole.
I mean, don't get me wrong, there are indie games or whatever that break out or break the mold; Stardew Valley has sold 15 million copies since it launched in early access in 2016, and though I think the CoD game from that year sold more, I guarantee you there are more people still playing SV than CoD: Infinite Warfare. But Activision made their buck and moved on, and that strategy continues to work for them.
I'm just saying that there is definitely an appetite among the general game consumer for a more complex and cerebral type of game! And that it's sad to see such few of those titles come from the big studios (while at the same time they nickel-and-dime everyone with their dlc's and other schemes).
Unfortunately this is not true. Modern AAA franchises do not innovate. They are just shinier. You can find the same systems, and often more complex or creative ones, in games from the nineties and 2000's as you can today. Modern gamers either become jaded, seek out indie games, or, more often, simply buy what is offered.
Remember when the big question used to be "are video games art? CAN they ever be art?" I remember publications like PC Gamer spending a lot of time and energy wrestling with these questions. It wasn't lip service; it was a real goal that game creators at the time pushed towards, because gaming was trying to find acceptance and respect alongside other forms of media. I think that has mostly been lost, now. There is and will always be indie creators pushing their own creations that are inspired, but the AAA market is totally lost, imo, if you are interested in games as more than just a mindless bit of fun. That overarching sense of progressing towards something that could be considered true "art", is gone, for the time being.
edit: didn't mean to sound like I wasn't giving credit to all the fine indie games and game creators out there. There's still artistic and interesting things being created, just not by AAA studios :)
Even Minecraft and Fortnite, two of the most popular games in the world, are systemically quite interesting compared to games 20 years ago. (yes really, Fortnite is much more interesting than you might think looking at it superficially)
Defining “art” when it comes to games is of course subjective. Some would say The Witness is much closer to art than The Last of Us 2, while others would say the opposite… but does it matter? Either way they’re both fantastic games. The medium is still being pushed forward, you just have to know where to look.
Games like: Elite 2: Frontier, Star Control 2, Heroes of Might and Magic, KOTOR 1 and 2, all had strong writing, narrative, complex and difficult systems to manage, and were innovative in their time. And none were "indie" games (though at the time, some of these games could be made by 1 or 2 people). This is a real difference. Just look at the difference in Blizzard. Warcraft 2, Starcraft, and Diablo 1 & 2 made them hugely influential and successful because of their commitment to quality. Now, they're a joke. But somehow, still one of the biggest gaming companies in the world!
It's not about defining art. It's about a push to create games that can stand up to works of literature and cinema which are considered to be important artistic achievements. I'm happy to hear that there are titles out their which are striving for that, but AAA studios aren't doing that. In fact they actively push new titles as being cutting edge while they retain or dumb down systems that were created decades ago.
Disagree hard on Fortnite. It is very shallow. The building system seems interesting but is superficial. Yes it's integral to winning the match, but its not very strategic...just like Fortnite's shooting and physics are quite cartoony and not very tactical. It is a VERY poor "shooter," but a fun "battle royale game." There is a difference these days.
Minecraft was not a AAA game, it was just purchased by a AAA studio.
Again, I'm not saying that there aren't any games that are artistic or interesting. In fact that's the opposite of what I said in my original post! I'm saying that "The Industry" (which will ALWAYS have the most market share, visibility, and resources) is not creating those games. They are not interested. And that is a sad change from what used to be.
On top of that, there are still massive budget AAA games that are willing to take risks for artistic integrity. Obvious examples of this are things like Death Stranding or The Last of Us 2.
Blizzard’s quality hasn’t actually fallen. They’ve clearly had some internal culture issues but their games have always been stellar. They just operate on glacial timescales which everyone seems to forget. Their last release was in 2016, which was Overwatch, a fantastic game.
And re: Fortnite, if you don’t think the building is strategic, you need to watch some high end competitive matches. It’s incredibly tactical. Each player acts like a real time map designer trying to give themselves the biggest positional advantage (while balancing resource usage etc). I would argue that it uses the full 3-dimensions more than any other competitive game out there.
> There's still artistic and interesting things being created, just not by AAA studios :)
I guess that's my point and I didn't write it very well. AAA publishing/production has become a low-risk money-machine that feeds a very large audience occasionally surprising but increasingly bland content, while making small formulaic incremental changes year-on-year e.g. next-gen textures, bigger maps, more multiplayer servers and modes. Unfortunately a large proportion of players are happy with just that model as evidenced by the revenue derived from it.
https://www.engadget.com/xbox-phil-spencer-activision-blizza...
This exclusivity game has to stop. I understand MS’s motivations — they want people to buy their console, after all. But it’s awful that you can make an educated console decision, and then two years later have a good chunk of games stolen from you because of a merger.
I concur that I’d really like to see Linux take the PC gaming space over. Personally I feel that we should focus on indie games and low-level platform compatibilty — if enough users switch to Linux, AAA studios will have to follow. Except the MS-owned studios who have a standing order to ignore Linux, of course…
Just watch the LTT videos about gaming on Linux. Linux is a Cluster** of an OS to troubleshoot and configure.
I'm a dev myself I love my Arch and everything but this OS is NOT meant for normal people.
Its 2022, people don't want to fiddle around with a terminal.
Until Linux and its users don't fix the core problem of linux and thats usability, I don't see people switching to it.
Maybe steam changes this.. but we will see..
Is this a good thing though?
Computer illiteracy seems to be at a new high-water mark with the upcoming generation. They generally know how to punch some buttons to make a few things work, but nothing more.
If anything, I think we should be teaching the basics of the UNIX command line starting around 5th or 6th grade. Get those kids playing around and learning a bit more about their systems. Maybe teach a few little python or Javascript one-liners to automate some stuff. Not everyone will pick everything up, but a lot of overlooked kids would find a new skill that will help them no matter which direction their lives take them.
I love the terminal and everything but we should not teach people how to use it. The terminal is not the most user friendly thing out there is it? (maybe its harsh saying "should not teach" but lets say make them aware there is a terminal but there should be alterantives)
I would not get rid of it.. ever, but I would love to see alternatives to it. People are too fixated on working from the terminal and using the terminal that they don't see that its literally the thing that gate keeps people away from trying Linux.
People use the terminal because it's easier to learn and use than countless GUI windows.
The concepts aren't hard. People aren't stupid and there's no reason to treat them like they are.
My terminal usage on MacOSX and Ubuntu is equal - only running git commands and AWS CLI. And I play Steam games on my Ubuntu Thinkpad P1.
Have you ever tried running an old App on linux compared to windows lets say? Windows compatibility is unmatched. I can effortlessly run old programs and games.
If a linux project is abandoned for a few years, good luck making it run. (and I know you can always recompile etc, but thats besides the point, no "normal" user will compile an app)
You repeated an old cliche(which is false) and now you moved goalposts.
PS: I've tried to run multiple Windows apps that wouldn't run on Windows 11. I have an older In System Programming software, that I have to run in a virtualized Windows XP. So...
It will take a long time before anything material comes from this from a games perspective. I would assume legal agreements are in place for cash-cow games like Call Of Duty on other platforms so that should alleviate any anti-competitive investigation.
As a major, why should I take the (large) risk to develop novel product? When I can outsource that function to a large number of smaller companies, who either go bankrupt or produce something of value, which I can then afford to pay a premium to acquire, after its value is known? I.e. if I can substitute money for risk, why wouldn't I?
It seems to me that the mismanagement of Acti/Blizz is a product of a corrupt corporate apparatus. From the inside of Acti/Blizz, the problem is basically intractible, but I don't think that really applies the same way once you install higher rungs of authority. MS is no stranger to acquisitions, either, so it's not as though they will be asleep at the wheel during this transition.
the company is rotten from the very top, through the middle to the bottom
they're going to have one hell of a time cleaning that up
I certainly think this should happen.
The trillion dollar giants should not span multiple industries. They have absurd monopoly power and can make growing your own niche impossible.
Why does a cloud computing / operating system vendor / hardware manufacturer / business software / developer tooling company also own the third biggest gaming outfit?
Why, for that matter, are Amazon and Apple also movie studios (and soon to be game studios)?
This is ridiculous. These companies never have to compete with you. It's easy for them to funnel money into any effort and clone your product. You can struggle to grow revenue and they can simply allocate an engineering team and marketing budget.
You'll probably also have to buy your competitor's products or pay their taxes at some point.
So they built their own, and Comcast started suing them. A lot of stupid lobby fights later, and EPB Fiber Optics became a separate company with a loan from EPB (power company). Both wholly owned by the City of Chattanooga. EPB had to keep all power monies and all internet monies completely seperate in order to operate; otherwise, they would have too much of a competitive advantage over Comcast.
For the customer, it's just EPB, but for legalize and accountants, it's two completely separate companies, and money isn't allowed to go from the power division to the internet division and vice versa.
Imagine if these conglomerates had to do similar type of accounting. I don't know if that would be a positive for the customer/consumer, but it's an interesting thought exercise. Amazon might even consider shutting down quite a bit of e-commerce if they couldn't subsidize it with AWS...
Considering how much eBay charges for less - Amazon's eCom is not going to fold, if AWS was separated.
I don't think Comcast is in a position to claim victimhood, nor is EPB. However, I would be interested in seeing this type of accounting being enforced for companies that receive grants and significant tax breaks/advantages and have localized enforced monopolies, such as Comcast and several other large companies.
In what world is it a good thing that instead of accepting an offer to provide a needed service that you're in the business of, you refuse the offer and sue/lobby the requester into submission out of spite.
This world is so, so broken.
If you read what I said, Comcast, having received billions from the government to build fiber optic networks that they never built, should be under advanced scrutiny, perhaps forced to keep their internet providing monies separate from their TV cable system monies.
1850 - 1920 (Railroad + oil/steel trusts)
1880 - 1982 (ATT)
1950 - 1975 (IBM)
1985 - 2000 (Intel/Microsoft)
2008 - current (Google/Apple/Amazon)
2014 - current (Meta)
It's the nature of technology to produce consolidation, before the next breakthrough occurs and incumbents are typically swept away.
On the plus side, the length of dominant periods seems to be decreasing.
And realistically, data portability standards and pricing for cloud & ability to use independent app stores are the biggest tweaks I'd make.
What I was casting about for was the earliest example of innovation-suppressing economic subordination by force, over a wide area.
The Achaemenid (or later Abbasid) seem have featured more individual freedom, with regards to innovation, and less maximally-taxing policy to redirect economic output to ostensible land owners.
But the taxing and redirection of excess economic output, accomplished through ownership and lending of land, leading to an underperforming history of innovation, seems borne out by the history of Europe, regardless of the intricacies or framework through which it's viewed.
And that seems pretty on point for exactly what everyone is decrying with regards to consolidation into conglomerates in the tech sector.
Spending ~$70bn to acquire another company is also impressive. Sure, Microsoft has limitless resources, and using acquisitions to hurt the competition is something they love to do, but still.. He did it. This is his win.
This paints Sony as the unwilling party. Microsoft can say, “we would love to have CoD on PlayStation.”
Why else buy them? Most Blizzard games are PC first anyway.
I doubt that existing franchises will become exclusive.
https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/xbox-phil-spencer-bethesda...
I'd like to see this acquisition blocked, it will be bad for gaming long term to have so much control with one company.
Selling full versions everywhere else is good business, we saw that from both Microsoft and Sony making more PC ports - and for Xbox it is yet another driver into their subscription model.
You forgot to mention he started with billions of dollars backing him up. It was not like a small startup or something.
How big were Sony and Nintendo at the time? Even with Microsoft's war chest, it was an uphill battle.
And, to the GP point of crediting Spencer, there weren't even many synergies to exploit with a Microsoft console in the first XBox generation. It certainly didn't "integrate" with Windows in any way that made you more likely to buy it over alternative consoles.
AFAICT (as someone who doesn't spend much time console gaming now), its success was essentially built on the back of (1) access to capital, (2) savvy exclusives, (3) intelligent acquisitions, (4) avoiding missteps in hardware refreshes, and in later generations (5) strength of social platform. So, props where props are due, because 4/5 of those are skill. Especially while no doubt having to fight an internal battle against all the other Microsoft political power centers.
I guess, in retrospect, Microsoft's fundamental synergy was "developers, developers, developers!" And realizing trading more powerful commodity PC hardware for decreased programming difficulty was a good deal. There were a large number of developers, or future developers, dissatisfied with catering to {insert Nintendo or Sony weird architecture hoops du jour}.
I'm not trying to argue about the specifics about what happened, but just in general terms, there was always going to be room for a competitor in a space that big, that was changing that rapidly. Imho.
I'm more flummoxed by the fact that a fundamentally social-native offering didn't disrupt the existing ecosystem, in the 2000 timeframe.
We had chat. We had basic web. Keyboards weren't that expensive, were they? Seems a killer feature for kids.
Not straight "the Web on your console", but something more like AOL, Prodigy, and the late 90s portals.
My only explanation is that the 3 big platform companies were still thinking in packaged software/games, sold retail, terms. Hence XBox Live, when it emerged, was essentially a way to get more value (multiplayer) out of the packaged software you bought.
As a longtime Blizzard fan and a former Microsoft employee, maybe I'm just getting too old for this shit, but there's really only one thing I care about:
Will they finally start getting the fucking games right again?
Be happy that old Blizzard happened, I say, and look on with eagerness to new indie studios, many of which are being run by the same Blizzard vets.
Don't get your hopes up :)
Unlikely without regulatory intervention. The added value for MS shareholders here is that MS has now more leverage to gently heard gamers towards their platforms.
According to Wikipedia[0]:
> Spencer served as general manager of Microsoft Game Studios EMEA, working with Microsoft's European developers and studios such as Lionhead Studios and Rare until 2008
He came to be in charge of Xbox via his experience managing their internal studios. How's Lionhead doing these days btw?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Spencer_(business_executi...
You are reading too much from too little.
> A summary of those personnel actions was scheduled to be released by Activision before the winter holidays, but Chief Executive Bobby Kotick held it back, telling some people it could make the company’s workplace problems seem bigger than is already known, the people familiar with the situation said.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So long for immersive PC and console games.
For all the flak ActiBlizzard deserves for this situation, I'd be happier if it were illegal for Microsoft to publicly give them shit about while already in talks to buy. There's just way too many ways to abuse that for leverage.
It's self-serving, but more effective, as it actually got Blizzard to do another round of cleaning house.
I'm not convinced.
> Also, a law like that (and any law infringing a free market)
You don't have a market without competition, which is what acquisitions accomplish. There is no such thing as a free market, by the way, that's a fantasy. There have always been laws governing markets.
> disincentivizes growth
Yes, that's exactly what I want to accomplish. These companies are too big & powerful.
> and innovation.
Huge companies use acquisitions to squash innovation.
It might be bad for 3p developers, but it's pretty hard to argue that iOS is bad for consumers despite continuing to gain marketshare in the US.
> I'm not convinced.
So you think that cars built by 1 company providing engines and then another company sells you the cabin to put on top?
Should rocket companies not be able to build and launch rockets, or their own sats? Should we prevent Tesla from making batteries? Should Apple or Oxide (if you want a startup) be prevented from developing software and hardware together? What is that other then vertical integration.
Vertical integration is everything, being against vertical integration means that basically every company should only ever be allowed to control a single step in a production process. And its hard even define 'a step' even means, as even things like making steel requires many steps.
If you want things, at least actually figure out what you want because I don't think that is it.
I want competition. I want more choices. Acquisitions are the opposite of that.
>Yes, that's exactly what I want to accomplish. These companies are too big & powerful.
Economic growth is a consequence of gains in productivity. Therefore, we should champion economic growth because it allows us to do more during a day.
>Huge companies use acquisitions to squash innovation.
Another idea: people set up really innovate companies because they hope to be acquired by a bigger company. In other words – big companies enable an incentive structure favouring innovation. In general, VC:s (which drive most innovation today) hope to exit via an IPO – but selling to a big tech-company is a safety cushion. If we remove the safety cushion – the VC market will be more risk averse and less willing to spend on innovative, but unproven, ideas.
I agree this is a very good thing but I think we'd both agree that Apple buying Arm would probably be a very bad thing in the medium-long run. I don't know what the solution is but as a consumer, I'd like companies to collaborate and thrive in a single big ecosystem vs having one big company. For example, Activision games can still be on Game Pass without Microsoft completely owning them and as an end user, I think that is more balanced.
Consolidation always leads to job loss, the industry is very very small. At the same time, legacy publishers have a very different role now.
If I'm an indie dev, I don't need you to print the discs or box things up. The only 2 things publishers really do are QA and Marketing.
QA, for projects with a good community, can be free or very cheap.
Marketing, with again a good community,can be free or cheap. I think about the hikikomori game Pull Stay.
Nothing stops that game from selling millions.
The big publishers are much weaker now.
One could argue that Apple's actually the world's biggest game publisher.
They have the final say as to if your game reaches the masses
Battlefield 2042, GTA Definitive Edition, Warcraft Reforged, and Cyberpunk 2077 beg to differ.
At the same time, the best QA team on earth won't help if you rush the games.
They now have the IP to do whatever they want with our mind, they have the distribution channels, they have the capacity to run servers and also the technology to create truly immersive worlds; their planetary rendering engine, GPT-3 for NPCs, Minecraft, for example.
There is a market for it, the latest awesome release in the space has been World of Warcraft, Amazon's New World is turning out to be a major flop and there's also free publicity in terms of Meta's metaverse.. I'm rooting for Microsoft to create the next gen gaming entertainment experience, however that might look.
At least we have the xbox game pass which is absurdly underpriced.
Ultimately, it will depend on the team building it. Microsoft, the entity, couldn't give a rat's ass about the product, but the people building it might.
At this point, technology has advanced to a point where some truly innovative gameplay mechanics could be employed with relative ease. We're living in a summer of AI and game ones are still dumb as bricks. With the power of cloud and current AI research papers, I think a world could really feel alive with today's technology.
>Legendary games, immersive interactive entertainment and publishing expertise accelerate growth in Microsoft’s Gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud.
I wonder what this "cloud" means. Is Microsoft planing an alternative to Google Stadia?
This already exists [1]. I sometimes play Sea of Thieves with my kids on a Linux laptop through a browser. The only thing missing is haptic feedback / controller vibration, which makes both steering the ship and fishing difficult.
They already have it, Xbox Cloud Gaming. It's mostly a steaming pile of crap that can't handle billing or multi-language users without cryptic useless errors. Quality and latency are pretty bad too, and the games are meh and console versions only ( so it's poor for strategy games for instance).
Microsoft didn't just acquire Bethesda. They acquired the entirety of ZeniMax, so Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout Shelter, Doom, Wolfenstein, Prey, Dishonored. Clearly not dead by any stretch of the imagination.
Activision Blizzard, despite the sexual harassment allegations, has Overwatch, World of Warcraft (still a profitable title), Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 launching Soon™. From a business standpoint, I'd say they've made the acquisitions of a lifetime.
Diversification is good for any large entity not just an investment firm.
Not unlike in nature, a monoculture corporation lives and dies by their business being at all relevant in general, and the market (especially in the entertainment sector) is fickle.
So no loss for the gamers here, move along...
Overwatch is cool though.
edit: and oh my god, let's not forget the absolute dumpster fire of warcraft 3 reforged.
CoD was never Blizzard
WoW (vanilla) was so good it had a second successful launch 10 years later
Starcraft 2 remains immensely popular
WoW (retail) has had 3 of its last 4 expansions ultimately perceived as failures and is (justifiably, belatedly, finally) having its lunch eaten by the vastly superior Final Fantasy XIV.
Immensely is probably overstating Starcraft 2's popularity, but what popularity it still has is in spite of anything Blizzard has done for it recently rather than because of it. They've essentially abandoned the franchise to wither on the vine at this point.
This is the first acquisition, possibly ever, that I view as potentially a positive for the customers of the company being acquired, if only because Microsoft can't possibly mishandle Blizzard's IP and staff any worse than Activision and Blizzard already have.
Prolly knocked a few bucks off the price at least.
Activision doesn't create very much new IP these days, and that's where the talent is that brings new games and gamers to your platform.
What I am starting to worry about is Microsoft squeezing Sony out of gaming entirely. For a lot of casual gamers Call of Duty was the game or one of a few games they play and have played for years. A lot of those casual gamers own a Playstation. While Microsoft hasn't announced if Call of Duty will be exclusive or not, making the game PC/XBOX exclusive would be doctrine. The only example I can think of where they don't do that is Minecraft, so it is possible.
I personally prefer more companies rather than fewer. I also anticipate a large brain drain at Activision studios, like what has already happened at Blizzard. But the Activision brands are established enough (and formulaic enough) that it probably won’t matter either way.
Simple timeline of what will happen. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft embraced gaming, including the openness of the PC platform, and now are in the process of extending it with Game Pass and its value. They will eventually turn to the final E.
They probably won't be a pure monopoly, competitors will pop up, but it'll be an all subscription world and Game Pass will be the Steam of this world, except not just for PC and Xbox but for most platforms they can get their service to work on.
We will no longer own our games. Eventually Game Pass will be cloud only and the files won't even sit on our devices. And the worst part is no one cares, not now or in the future. Everyone just wants access to the latest games at the cheapest cost. And clearly the US government (I'm not a US citizen nor do I live there fyi) does not care to lift a finger against something in this sector.
I hate to suck up to another company, who itself does many bad things, but I hope Valve is able to keep the PC platform open for at least as long as I care to play video games. It's out of their own self interest, but they've done wonders for the Linux community and contract some great people to improve linux gaming for everyone, not just them. And they're releasing hardware that isn't locked down. Honestly, I hate to feel good about what a big company like Valve is doing, but I'm greatful.
> it's not their desire for the games to run there
And yet they can prevent their games from running on Proton like some devs have done by anti-cheat measures. IIRC Overwatch refuses to run on Linux and risks a ban because of the Vulkan translation layer.
I can definitely see why MS bought up publishers and developers to add to their stable - they can now, like Netflix, sell a monthly recurrent service that will keep their customers entertained with 'free' releases available on day#1, plus a leased library.
But (to me at least), they were already there. I'm there on PC and think the sell is even easier on Xbox. Buying Activision seems a bit pointless. Sure they can now fold in wavering CoD lovers, but the franchise is already looking a little wobbly - but they're paying for a company that's valued as selling a game every year for $50 to lure in the subset of customers who now think game pass is now worth it with CoD. (That's a shitload of new subs they need, or the price is going up)
My larger concern is that when they bought Zenimax or even minecraft, they'd paid well for 'good bones' they could build on. Activision is really just a pile of slightly rusty franchises (https://www.denofgeek.com/games/activision-blizzard-microsof...)
Now maybe they can revive some of those - Doublefine knocking out episodic Gabriel Knight makes me moist, or simply Guitar Hero with new weekly tunes - but MS could have done similar for a lot cheaper.
If I'd had the money in my bank account, I'd have maybe just had a slush fund to pick up and promote new talent/IP.
If they really wanted infra, Steam is still out there. If they wanted IP, Sega.
In the grand scheme of things I prefer seeing them absorbed by Microsoft than by Tencent.
- Overwatch hit the ground running to massive success, but hasn't materialized Overwatch 2 and has stagnated.
- Warcraft III Reforged is a total disaster and abandoned.
- WoW has a wide following of people in its vanilla form (i.e. taking things awy from what it has become), and the extensions aren't bringing a lot of value. There is speculation on whether it has hit its peak and is in decline.
- The Starcraft Remaster is basically the same game but with a bit nicer graphics.
- Diablo 3 seems to have done well.
I do hope it gets revitalized and the IP gets new life with better management, but Blizzard has been struggling.
Simply quitting would be seen as a sign of failure and would leave a lot of their performance-based compensation behind... But getting bought, that's a different story.
At least with that, I think that's exactly what the audience wanted. Anyone who wanted a different (and mechanically easier) game has Starcraft II.
When's Microsoft going to bring back Pitfall?
Tho, it certainly fits what MS has been going for with its gaming division; Game pass ultimate has a weird lack of „third party aaa” titles in certain genres.
For example EA Play is included in game pass ultimate, but by now all the new EA stuff is locked behind “EA Play pro”.
Having the whole Acti/Blizz lineup in there would be quite the offering. Particularly all the Call of Duties were never really sold in a “get all of them!” way. Now all of them might end up for “free” on game pass.
Especially this:
> Microsoft will acquire Activision Blizzard for $95.00 per share, in an all-cash transaction valued at $68.7 billion, inclusive of Activision Blizzard’s net cash. When the transaction closes, Microsoft will become the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony.
What exactly happens between now and "when the transaction closes"? How long does it take? Is there anything that would make it not close?
After all, this is all how the metaverse is going to become a reality and that is how Microsoft is going to create it.
I'm not saying that the harassment reports were false, just that Microsoft could have helped people talking to the press/organize the lawsuits, pushing up the stories in the medias and so on.
I think that this should really put some fear in Valve and I'm not sure what their play is from here. I know that Steam has a lot of goodwill built up but it feels like they've just coasted on Steam for so long, and it was inevitable that the larger players would look at their fat 30% cut for so little work and decide that wasn't going to last. A lot of people thought that Bethesda games would keep coming out for Playstation when the acquisition was first announced, and after it closed MS confirmed that going forward future title would be exclusive to them. I can't see any reason to this this will different, and especially just making these titles available through gamepass alone, not in a launcher or as a separate purchase. Do people think that Microsoft is spending tens of billions just to make sure that Valve can get a 30% cut on sales of COD and Fallout? It's like saying that Netflix is going to let Disney+ carry Stranger Things, because hey, Disney would pay them money to do so. Valve is like the cable company right now, someone else makes the content and they provide the delivery of it and skim off the top. Now that you have competing and more convenient delivery services, its going to be a lot harder to exist. Where do they go from here?
Not to mention that ATVI is a behemoth but their catalog isn't the same "everything-store" as 2000s ATVI (or current EA), it's a few (big) franchises. Hell, the Bethesda deal had more franchises involved.
I wonder what will Sony do now?
[1] - https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/microsoft-buying-act...
Overwatch has been on shaky grounds due to uncertainty surrounding the league and the release of the sequel.
Heroes of the Storm is still my favorite MOBA even though it's clearly on life support. I'd love to see Microsoft try reviving it once more by doing a big Heroes 3.0 push.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-buy-activision-bliz...
Beyond petty nonsense - Sure wish we had some antitrust laws in this country. The consolidation of every industry gross.
Also just in general, it'd be nice if the game itself worked as well as the in-game store which never has any issues.
With inflation probably coming in a big way it sounds like a great idea to spend all that money now.
* Sony is focused on their PlayStation walled garden. * Microsoft is consolidating more resources around Game Pass and the Xbox store. * Mobile is a large and rapidly growing segment, which Steam isn't able to capture. * Epic is pouring money into its own store.
Valve needs a backup plan to stay relevant in the 5-10yr time horizon. If the Steam Deck can take off, that might serve as enough incentive to keep games available on Steam and away from Windows exclusivity where MS might start building a walled garden.
MS announced today that it was acquiring Activision Blizzard Inc. (ATVI). This news comes on the heels of a year filled with government lawsuits, internal leaks, low morale and poor performance. Many analysts have commented that years of failing to invest in their IP and a string of poorly-received sequels have diluted customer and stockholder faith.
The past year has seen ATVI stock plummet after it was made public that the company was not being managed or governed in any meaningful way, down approx. 30% prior to today's announcement.
The 30% prior isn't the price they're bying at.
Oddly though, I nearly tried some weak defense. Outrage algorithms are destroying my brain.
But hey, at least better than being acquired by Tencent, eh?
[0] At least if they want to maintain all the government work they do.
Streamers, influencers, and competitive players whose livelihoods are based on some of these games will almost be forced into playing on the platform that gives them an advantage, whether that's an extra couple weeks of access or slight optimizations.
Most comments are about monopoly. But is A & B really that good? Or its just more of a optimization of financial strength between A &B and MSFT?
Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard just put them in number 3 slot. Tencent and Sony are far bigger in gaming. if Apple lawsuit didn't take down Apple store just forced Apple to allows third party payment option. i don't think Microsoft will get slap with a antitrust. Microsoft isn't even number 1 in gaming.
Not to say that will happen. Just that if it does, it wouldn't be on dollar size in game sales alone.
The evaluation is between Sony and Microsoft and this shifts things pretty significantly toward Microsoft.
They have no reason to pull out of those markets.
At least they didn't mess up Minecraft on Linux so far.
One party want to sell, the other wants to buy. As long as the deal doesn't breach any anti-trust laws, it's good to go.
Either there would need to be some revolution with the legal profession, or congress would have to pass some new law.
What the judges realized is that by an more open definition pretty much any company and any merger could be said to be against anti-trust.
So if you want such a law, you need to actually get some exact definition of how every is judged that can be consistently legally applied.
If you are referring to anti-trust laws preventing this, then MS would need to be buying a huge number of companies to monopolize the gaming market, not just Activision, in order to be in violation of this law.
They can "ask" gaming companies to use Azure if they want to run on Windows or Xbox. They can ignore Mac and PlayStation as platforms. They can bundle software licenses, payment gateways, and design hardware that only works in one ecosystem.
This is the modern monopoly. Good luck competing with it or avoiding their platform fees as you try to grow your revenue. You'll undoubtably wind up feeding your direct competition somehow or another.
> They can wield this power to force deals and push out competitors across their multiple business units.
The only way this would matter is if you can prove that they have some monopoly in any one market and use that monopoly position to drive up prices.
So if somehow could leverage their Windows OS as to sell games for 1000$ rather then 100$.
Microsoft does not have monopoly in any one market as far as I can tell.
There are still lots of other large publishers out there.. EA, Take Two, Embracer, Tencent, Epic, etc... I'm sure I'm forgetting some big obvious ones even.
They are definitely not "buying all their competitors" as you put it.
You said Tencent twice ;)
Isn’t that the point? Why can something as large as MS have a “division” that can go into mergers and acquisitions as if they were a separate entity?
> There are stills lots of other large publishers
…goes on to name 5.
> They are definitely not “buying all their competit
Sure, you can be as pedantic as you want and jump through hoops to come to that rationalization.
And I guess you can question my use of the subjective word "lots", my fault. I still think there are _enough_ large publishers around in the gaming industry that you can't really start throwing around terms like "monopoly" or "anti-trust" etc...
I was mostly just pointing out that the original comment was factually inaccurate by saying MS were buying up "all their competitors".
I'm not trying to rationalize or "jump through hoops" here. We're all just debating and guessing, having a conversation..
If you somehow accidentally assigned me to the opposite 'side' from the one you appear to be on, let me gently correct you.. I don't care enough about this to be picking sides.
Especially when Microsoft is using the rest of Microsoft to subsidize said "division"
But overall even though it's a big acquisition both together will still remain one amongst a few big gaming companies.
And now the metaverse is solidified as a new buzzword for venture capitalists to pour money into despite collaborative VR being a thing for almost a decade already. Won't be long until they combine it with NFTs and use an inefficient & expensive blockchain to handle the marketplace of avatars and the like.
EDIT: "Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard. [...] he and his team will maintain their focus on driving efforts to further strengthen the company’s culture."
Shame on you, Microsoft.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/activision-videogames-bobby-kot... — mirror at https://archive.fo/fzdAv
And if you're completely out of the loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Department_of_Fair_...
For example, Activision had a successful franchise Call of Duty that did releases every 2 years or so. Kotick’s insight was that they could release one every year and basically print money. He was right. He then used that money to acquire Blizzard, a company that had many beloved franchises. He then applied those same principles to the running of Blizzard, to the point where the company releases half baked, buggy, awful excuses for games. An example of this is Warcraft III Reforged. They did it because re-releases of old games are a reliable way to monetise nostalgia.
And that’s just the somewhat justifiable part. Because making money is good, right? Shareholders love that shit.
What’s less defensible is the toxic work culture that was fostered under him, where sexual harassment was endemic. Of course he never saw the fallout of that. They fired some patsies and called it a day.
To be fair though, they put two studios on it, which is very unlike other annual games, and a much better approach for WLB and avoiding (some) crunch.
> The goal that I had (...) was to take all the fun out of making video games.
> The executive said that he has tried to instill into the company culture "skepticism, pessimism, and fear" of the global economic downturn
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/activision-games-to-bypass...
To be honest, I think Microsoft and Activision deserve each other.
I love it! Political Opinions as a Game!
One could argue that Microsoft would have paid more, and I’m sure some enterprising lawyers will get paid by tricking some shareholders into suing over that, but that’s like arguing with the waves about when high tide is.
For games to be successful today, they need popularity. Twitch streamers need to play it. Youtubers need to make "how-tos", and word of mouth is king. Activision drove the final nail in their coffin with the PR nightmare this year. No amount of necromancy (Warcraft Reforged, Classic WoW, Diablo 2) can save the company long term.
> Once the deal closes, the Activision Blizzard business will report to Phil Spencer, CEO, Microsoft Gaming.
So no, they aren't keeping him around. Good call.
So if Microsoft buys out and fires Kotick, he'd walk away with like 678 million dollars. It's pretty weird that there are people who are happy about this proposition and are not named "Robert Kotick".
They wouldn't muddy their happy upbeat acquisition announcement by mentioning they're pushing him out, though.
So it's wrong to draw any conclusions yet.
For a moment, I was truly hopeful that we might see some reinvigoration for blundered projects like the Warcraft III reforged.
Perhaps even some hope that Microsoft might breathe new life into Starcraft II, which still stands as an incredible game.
/sigh
Unfortunately even under new management I don't see Starcraft getting much love, the focus is now on cross-platform games and RTS games are PC only (which is a small niche compared to the overall market).
I mean now that MS owns them maybe they can pull a Win11 :p
The game never really felt that great after Ben Brode left. Battlegrounds was pretty OK though.
There has been more activity than normal on the core game mode and Battlegrounds, although mostly focused on content (whether actual cards or cosmetics) than actual technology changes or new features.
Anyway, I think this acquisition will actually stop the bleeding snd create some stability
Realistically, there's a high chance that within a few months of the acquisition being completed he'll be expected to leave quietly.
Hopefully woke culture will take more of a toll on US tech and we will see more US companies opening up in Europe. The US tech centralization is bad for the world (and US consumers).
Sometimes it seems we hold those working the drive-thru window at a fast food place to a higher standard than major CEOs.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/activision-videogames-bobby-kot...
Don't think Microsoft is any better than Activision, although most software developers aren't really famous for being outgoing womanizers.
Smaller M&A where it's easier to swap the leader (like a startup - which most of us are used to) is MUCH easier/cheaper/faster than swapping out an established CEO of a public company.
They'll do it because he's a liability and they want to make a statement to the new company - but it'll be slow.
So that might be part of it.
https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1407658278893592579
Wait, it's an all-cash transaction valued at $68.7 billion?! So at least Microsoft believes they are doing well...
Even if CoD remains cross platform, if it's free on GamePass well that's a pretty severe competitive edge to the Xbox platform.
Not for long, I bet!
Just like that -- they're in the metaverse!
Should say "to bring the joy and community of gaming to XBOX AND WINDOWS USERS, across every MICROSOFT device".
Is the blizzard IP actually worth that much these days?
Might as well try to sell your PS(whatever) now before there are no games.
However with the DOJ taking more shots at large companies, MS should be worried about this one.
Apple is almost certainly planning to release AR/VR headset in the near future, this raises the question; what hardware is going to be used to power this headset; I'd bet Apple is working on a console like iDevice, or probably more likely an external GPU, that can be used with any Apple device.
Now imagine if Apple decides, admittingly in a very un-Apple like fashion, to allow anyone to run MacOS on their iPads, and iPhones; what that would do to consumer Windows market share.
This primarily establishes a moat against Apple, not Sony, and protects consumer Windows, not Xbox.
The cultural integration will be a lot easier than other M&A integrations; everyone at Activision is probably ready to move on from their current culture.
Starcraft 2 is one of the last game I still play with my ("old timer") friends for social interaction in the Covid era.
Dayum. Such cash.
And yet the stock stabilized at $83, meaning a lot of people are not sure the purchase will actually go through.
Wrt Blizzard specifically, where is the amazing company that designed Warcraft, Starcraft, WoW, ...
I find their recent offering ... bland.
I am Team X-Box because I just like it much more than the Playstation, buuut at some point we will all pay our MS-Fees like the powerbill.
What’s left to really show they’re going this direction is to release a VR that works on Xbox.
now maybe the personnel and HR and abuse can be handled since this is going to be run by a company with adults in the room and we can focus on not abusing people and instead focus on games! Here's to Diablo 4 and maybe a Starcraft 3?!
Diablo 4 being pushed back until Microsoft could oversee its development and release is pretty much a death sentence in my book.
I am sure this will result in better games than if not, lol.
But my thinking is that they should've acquired Valve which controls digital PC gaming distribution not big gaming studios like Zenimax and Activision Blizzard.
Already personally likely making more than enough money for him. I can kinda see point of selling when you want to do something for your dreams, but if company is doing your dreams what is the point.
He is ex long time employee of Microsoft and if the price is right he would probably sell. But Microsoft's mind is on Xbox/PC, cloud gaming, Xbox pass etc.
1. Buyout the company / developers and they now report to Microsoft.
2. Use a subscription model (game pass) to reduce and undercut the game, SaSS price close to free.
3. Sell the game on other platforms for the RRP.
In the case of software like GitHub, the best tools are now free forever on a near unlimited scalable cloud which many competitors cannot compete with, especially free. Squeezing the competitors to reduce prices and exit entirely. (Extinguish)
OpenAI is next up on this.
Who is going to be able to compete with Xbox Game Pass?
'You have a choice, you can pick Microsoft or Disney. More options would only confuse you'
How many indie games are there for Xbox?
Not to mention the potential platform abuses whereby MS can now gate their property behind Windows and Xbox.
And I’m not even that creative. Surely MS will get a return on their $70,000,000,000 investment whether it’s better for the gaming economy and consumers, or not.
Breaking it up just means you end up with a worst product for the consumer and a higher expense.
This is a common tactic to win public approval for anti-consumer acquisitions. It's always better for there to be more competition, not less.
Given that nearly every popular $60 game now has microtransactions, loot boxes, (paid) season passes, and maybe even (paid) DLC, there's absolutely no reason for the price increase. They're already making buckets of cash (and turning a profit) at the "just $60" price point.
Whether or not it's legal, it should not be celebrated.
However, they could also be withholding that until next week so they can get more news out of this acquisition, saying that he (and hopefully a lot of management) is stepping down would make a lot of news on its own, doing it now would muddle it.
Joking aside (I got over my Microsoft hatred when they started to finally embrace Linux and FOSS, YMMV (though I was salty about Nokia ditching Maemo!)), I have a deja vu:
Microsoft + Elop -> Nokia + Elop -> Nokia + Elop = Microsoft.
Microsoft + Ybarra -> Blizzard + Ybarra -> Blizzard + Ibarra = Microsoft.
Sure, I don't mention Kotick. I don't give a shit about Activision's IP, so no problem for me there. Its Blizzard's IP which I like, or perhaps rather, liked. Cause its gone downhill.. ehh.. 'somewhat'.