FTC seeks to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard
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Sincerely hope the deal falls through and the company goes bankrupt.
I actually only (re-)learned of the game recently (I recall its original announcement), but not enough to know anything more about it and I have been meaning to go back to it and check it out. Do you have a short version of what lends you that opinion?
Another way to put it is that for me it worked while Samwise contributed but was in check.
Edit: Now I'm not blaming them, from a business perspective they had to follow the shifting zeitgeist and it obviously worked, old school D&D/Warhammer/Heavy Metal/... were totally uncool at the time especially for teenage millennials.
That game exists, and it's called Path of Exile. It is also the poster child for why most of D2 aged really, really, really poorly.
Another take on that same concept is called Last Epoch.
Double the price for minimal fixes? They didn't even bother including fixes for known issues which known workarounds available on the vault like e.g. HotU companions sometimes not using most of their abilites because the AI selects the mount ability as the best available one.
Really, these old games should just be released to the community to maintain them like iD used to do. And if someone like Beamdog wants to profit off such maintenance then they better be able to do so without taking the original down from sale because they know they can't actually compete with vanilla + community patches.
Sometimes it's not that they lost the touch or that they sold themselves. It's just that we're not teenagers anymore, in an old internet cafe playing on LAN with our friends. Even if a similar game is coming back, the entire moment with all its context is not.
Still, I'm happy to see they're still alive and faithful to their roots.
Obsidian has been arguably less so, but grounded and the outer worlds have both been unique feeling and creative titles in my eyes.
Troika? Obsidian?
Even revenue for the developer, or in enjoyment for the user? Because Torchlight (ex-Diablo-II ICs) was a humdinger of a D-II sequel in terms of gameplay, but sales? Not so much.
This makes me think that the biggest value that the studio brings to the table for revenue is brand recognition.
IOW, it doesn't matter how good the game is, brand recognition gets you over the line sometimes.
Overwatch was the first Blizzard game that I liked less and less the more they patched it.
Overwatch is all about swapping heroes during the game
Blizzard even incentivised swapping heroes more in Overwatch 2 (30% ult charge retained, vs. 0 in Overwatch 1)
I tried out Overwatch 2, despite all the negative press it is fun and sweaty. I had plenty of fun despite not playing as Kiriko and I'm sure I could easily derive 10s if not 100s of hours before feeling a need to unlock Kiriko.
If a game is taking so much of your time and you have a job, why isn't it ok to just pay a bit to unlock a hero?
I'd take these kinds of monetisation over destiny 2 which didn't even have p2w or clash royale (before season pass)
It's just odd to think that a certain part of the meta is paywalled. It really messes with the sense of competitive integrity.
Normally I'd be fine with a battlepass, but I refuse to pay activision any money out of principle.
I wonder if that's why the "Real Money Auction House" from Diablo 3 existed.
"Gamers" might believe this but do the stakeholders actually believe that? The company is still printing money. [1]
[1] https://gamerant.com/diablo-immortal-made-300-million-dollar....
To put things into perspective - in its heyday - WoW was half as profitable as Tesla is now...
It's hard to catch lightning in a bottle twice.
They made WoW. It was insanely profitable. Their valuation soared. They sold. They declined.
It's hard to say if its reversion to the mean or the Activision acquisition - but it's hard to argue Blizzard hasn't declined by every metric.
Considering the cost to create and amount of reputation damage it caused, YES. Diablo immortal was a massive failure.
According to the article they generated roughly the same amount of revenue in 4 months as the previous record breaking game did in an entire year. I wish I had that kind of reputation damage.
That is a good point, the amount of raid shadow legends adverts on the internet have become a meme at this point. I haven't seen any ads for Immortals here in the US and the financial report doesn't break down marketing spend by property.
That’s the calculation you need to look at, not earnings as if expenses prior to release was 0$.
According to the article I linked Immortal generated roughly the same amount of revenue in 4 months as Raid Shadow Legends (the previous record holder) did in their best year. That is a domination of that gaming niche.
Do you have a source on this $7B a year profit figure? I've tried to find it and can't find anything even close to $7B revenue let alone profit going back to 1994.
Also fyi, WoW was originally released in 2004, not 1994.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-revenue-does-World-of-Warcraf...
The paid stuff was a monetization tactic after the decline.
So many fun franchises are basically dead because they aren't nearly as profitable as a freemium game and selling digital garbage. Single player FPS is basically dead. RTSes are also effectively dead. The only place you'll find such things is from indy devs and they don't have anywhere near the budget to make something as good as what we used to get :(.
There could always be a sc3 or aoe18 (or whatever). There are infinite areas to explore.
People are largely still completely satisfied with what they have now.
That being said AoE2 is an awesome game :)
Different strokes for different folks.
The problem occurs when the game has been out long enough that all the active players are leagues ahead of a new player; either they wait forever for a match or get steamrolled.
The main problem is that it's a 12 year-old game, that's been largely abandoned by the developer. The other main problem is that unlike a skill-based MOBA, you can't blame anyone else for your losses. The third main problem is that the game is incredibly stressful, demands 100% of your attention, and the smallest mistake can lose the game for you.
my brother in Christ, you got it backwards - being abandoned is the biggest blessing an old Blizzard game can receive.
They'd probably add commander level and equipable commander items which grant buffs to your units. You'd have a chance of getting one item each time you win a pvp fight and you can increase the quality/rarity of the drop by using cash shop items. Oh, and the rare items might require a higher commander level... Obviously you'd also be able to buy temporary buffs to your XP gain, so you can equip them sooner.
They could maybe even focus more on group pvp (i.e. 4vs4) so the whales can carry scrubs to wins. That would give them a chance of loot even if they're just there to be farmed and will make them properly fawn over the mighty whales that let them gain their pointless upgrades.
Perfect whale farm.
Those first 50 games were crazy because you were matched randomly with other new and established players, so sometimes you would play someone really good who would steamroll you in the first 5 minutes, and sometimes you got someone who had at most played the scripted campaigns against the AI and thought they could sit there for the first 30 minutes slowly building up an army.
It was actually pretty fun not knowing which way it would go, and whenever we matched with newbies my partner and I got to experiment with a bunch of different strategies that would never work in a real game.
This right here is my fundamental problem with multiplayer RTS games. The fun I get out of them is in the slow burn long buildup, but other players always find ways to optimize the early game so they win fast and never actually get to the fun part where everyone has massive bases lobbing nukes at eachother. The fun way to play is not the optimal way to play.
It's now been about 10 years since I've even bothered trying an RTS online.
My partner and I had way more fun in those early games when we could stretch it out to 30-60 minutes sometimes. Once you're playing against ranked people who are there to win it's just a mad rush to the first or second tech tier.
It was pretty much the same as SC2, they just never told you in the UI. e.g. Dragoons do half damage to mutalisks. Yamato cannons don’t kill zealots.
The way to beat players who play strong openers is to play a strong opener yourself, but not necessarily all-in aggressive. If you want to get to the late game you enjoy you must get better at the early game. Harass the other guy early, scout their build, make sure you're building counters to what the other player is playing. Defend well. Deny their economy here and there. Inevitably crush them with nukes and capital ships after 30 minutes of solid fundamentals.
(Starcraft is still a lot of fun and I'd encourage you to get back in to RTS playing)
I think maybe what you meant to say was "... and expect to _win_"
Plenty of people have fun turtling (:
This is one thing I liked about Total Annihilation — defense tech was relatively strong, so some amount of turtling and racing to get high tech artillery (eg) was a viable approach.
I think a larger issue is that there's like 3-5 games to get ranked and then a bit more to get really ranked properly. And by SC2 design the early game is resource constrained so decisions are important and even with the right decisions execution is hard.
Watch a few games on Youtube.
It was a fairly popular variant of the game too, never had trouble finding matches
They're less niche and more fun to watch as e-sports for the casual player.
RTS streams are downright boring if you're not actively competing at ranked matches.
MOBAs seem super confusing if you dont play. Its 30 minutes of nothing happening, and then like 15 seconds of people getting really excited and then the game is over.
I disagree. A lot of Korean viewers never even touched the ranked online multiplayer when BW was mainstream esports. Heck even my dad watched it.
The fun of RTSes is the learning curve, but throw in a bunch of "you can buy a special unit for $10" and all the sudden the game balancing is destroyed. That leaves you with inconsequential things like avatar skins to sell and very few people would buy those.
Couple that with the fact that new players aren't likely to spend hours online playing the game (because they get destroyed) and you've got a major problem.
For me, the fun of RTSes was in single player games and lan parties.
Big difference between the cosmetics for an FPS and RTS. There aren't a lot of cosmetic options you could come up in an RTS.
I remember the transition. I kinda hated it, to be honest. Not because of the drops (they were introducing hats and loot well before this) but because the influx of players were...low quality
Elden Ring and the Souls games are difficult and even to a point intentionally alienating but have had massive success including in the mainstream.
I don't know what it is but I feel there's something else going on with the rapid decline of RTS besides the difficulty.
Other competitive games like CS/Valorant gives you downtime in between rounds and when you die. Similarly with MOBAs, travel time in between your base and lane, when you die. Even fighting games, when you get a hit in, it's back to muscle memory for your bread and butter combo, and rounds are much shorter.
I realized I wrote a mistake: I did play a handful of MP matches of World in Conflict after finishing the (very enjoyable) single-player campaign. It was fun, but not as much as the single player portion; and I never invested enough time for it to be fun.
I could see something like SC2 being fun with 2-3 people playing 1 player's role at a time. 1 person on the econ, 2 people on the army. Or much better AI that you can override selectively, so if you want to handle the fighting you can, or if you want to handke the econ you can.
This also describes chess, yet that has a significant online presence.
Luckily, most of the time you just to have wait about a year to get them on PC, often for a cheaper price too.
Also single player FPS games still exist, just not standalone as they used to.
You can see this well in comparing Crysis 1 with 2 & 3.
This is not just about gamepad console => m&k PC, by the way.
But its certainly better than not having story games at all. Sony's story games are really really good, and they finally realized that releasing on PC is a win-win for everyone, more money for Sony, more games for PC, because most of the time no one wants to switch from PC to PlayStation
I also don't think RTS is dead but the category has been stale for some time. I grew up playing Age of Empires 2, and the game still has a healthy player base with regular new content being added. However compared to the turn of the century the pace of innovation has definitely slowed down.
I am not interested in 4X games.
> 4X (abbreviation of Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) is a subgenre of strategy-based computer and board games, and include both turn-based and real-time strategy titles.
It's nothing like "pure" RTS like starcraft where everything is actually real time. Their 4X games have: speed control, pause, turns (days and months, depending on a game and action). If you remove ability make turns simulatinusly and make a single turn into a day - not much will change in gameplay other than it will take longer.
New Wolfenstein and Doom games, yearly call of duty, halo infinite, Titanfall 2, half life alyx, super hot, metro exodus, black mesa, destiny 2, deep rock galactic, the list goes on.
I can't understand folks who don't understand this concept. You are not the only opinion in this world, and the media and critics are incentivized to create drama.
Doom Eternal came out in 2020, and LoL is one of the most popular games of all time. SC2 just released a huge patch that revamped a lot of balance issues that had cropped up over the past decade...
Gaming has never been more diverse and well funded. It's wild to me that you see the huge selection you've got available to you and could possibly believe we're in anything but the best gaming era of all time right now.
The gaming industry is experiencing the same hyper-commercialization that the movie industry has experienced.
You can argue that the super hero movies of today and the remakes are "better" than older movies on the best objective metric we have (how much revenue they generate), and that we're in "the best era of film of all time" right now, but... I don't know who truly believes that, subjectively. :p It feels wild to believe that. I certainly don't, and I don't for gaming either.
Funny story: I got Doom Eternal about a year after it came out. I needed to make an account, even though I only play singleplayer. When first opening it, I got bombarded by pop-ups from a dozen DLC and update cycles, like a little history of its updates thus far. I cringed at the social media-like network integration stuff in the main menu. I play for a few days. On like the fourth day, when opening the game, this pop-up appears in-game, but it's empty. It's like some network notice, but it's broken. The pop-up is blank. There's no way to get past it. Nothing helps. The game essentially bricked itself via its own botnet bloatware (a thing an older game would never do). Apparently, it happens to console and PC users alike, and there was no solution around it. It's as if it accidentally ripped you, the user, off, in that a digital product just stopped working. (Let's not even mention the plight of future gamers trying to simulate the always-online DRM so they can play it in an emulator. Hey--at least Bethesda removed the kernel-level anticheat following backlash, allowing the game to run on Linux again!) Luckily, even though I was past the usual playtime limit, Steam gave me a full refund. :D
Also, Diablo Immortal is probably more profitable than all the previous Diablo games put together, and I'll leave it to you to decide if that's a case where profitability or even popularity maps with whatever we truly mean by "quality".
I agree, a lot of parallels can be drawn between modern AAA games and superhero movies. the quest to reach the largest market has resulted in products without much in the way of nuance or new ideas. this is kinda what you have to do if you're going to spend $250mm on a game or movie. even achieving wide appeal within a single large country isn't enough to reliably make that back; you have to make something appealing (or at least inoffensive) to most of the world.
at the same time, I think you are missing just how much the gaming market has expanded since 10-20 years ago. while very successful for their time, games like halflife are very niche by today's standards. there's no like-for-like comparison between cod:mw2 and a game from the early/mid 2000s.
if you expect AAA games in 2023 to scratch the same itch as they did back then, you will surely be disappointed. they aren't designed for the same audience. but by and large, more money is available to fund development for all sorts of games today. concepts that would have been a janky mod for some other games ~20 years ago are full-fledged titles of their own now. ymmv of course, but I find that when I lose the expectation for modern AAA-level graphics, there are tons of great new games available in recent years.
GOG still exists to avoid most single player DRM issues (some games have limited single player content that requires an internet connection) and with a better refund policy, although unfortunately they don't have good Linux support. I have an entirely offline game system and rarely have any kind of issue due to that (Zachtronics games are some of the worst since you can't see how well you did on a level without an internet connection, unless they changed that since I last tried one a few years ago). GOG has about 4500 games at this point (catalog shows a few hundred more with "hide DLC and extras" but some are miscategorized DLC), not nearly as many as Steam but still quite a few (unfortunately, some developers don't keep the GOG version up to date).
Ok, very simple example, are slot machines fun?
I think anyone can objectively look at a slot machine and say "no, that's really not fun". Yet, people spend their entire retirements on slot machines. People DIE pumping quarters into a slot machine. People wear diapers to slot machines. Slot machines are HIGHLY profitable for casinos (which is why they have them).
Fun and profit are not the same thing. Some games, such as Diablo Immortal, have realized that addicting is more profitable than fun. The entire game industry has learned that if you randomize rewards (loot boxes) you can trigger addiction without having a fun game.
> You are not the only opinion in this world
I'd look into the mirror before giving this advice. I realize that some people find gambling fun. Whatever floats your boat. But I also realize that there is such a thing as gambling addiction and it is highly profitable.
That said, I reject a definition of fun that involves how profitable something is because of the slot machine example.
If fun is anything, it's not getting a diaper rash while going broke.
i.e. if it were just electrical impulses going back and forth?
Fun cannot be discussed, or argued, because you cannot properly share that context with others, and you cannot deny the reality of their context.
But good is a property of the game itself -- it's essentially the answer to the question "how well does the game achieve the goals it chases, and how well does it choose its goals?". This is still somehow subjective, but dramatically less so -- we can actually discuss it in a manner that's sensible. To a degree, the discussion has to factor in that we have different beliefs of what those goals are, and whether those are good goals to have, but this is true of any judgement.
And when talking about whether a movie, book, game, etc is any good, no one gives a shit whether you had "fun" playing it, because that tells us nothing about whether its good. It just tells us "your" experience -- your specific relationship to the work -- more about you than it... but we're not talking about you.
But that wasn't the comment I was responding to. The comment I responded to made the positive assertion "Things are fun because they are profitable"
> what you define as fun isn't apparently what others define as such, at least when it comes to voting with their dollars.
If you want to change the argument to "fun is unknowable" I can get behind that statement. However, I think the slot machine example is a really good one to prove that fun and profit are not the same thing. Even if you want to argue that the slot machines can be fun, I think you'd have a hard time arguing that addicts to slots are all having a blast.
What's changed in the gaming industry is more focus on profit and less on fun. The gaming industry has learned is what B.F. Skinner discovered decades ago [1], how to get repeat behaviors out of someone with randomize rewards.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201311/us...
Your whole "slot machine" example is predicated on my response being, "Well no, slot machines aren't fun." However, I do think slot machines are loads of fun! Not for me, but for the millions of people who sit there, spend very tiny sums of money (think like $5 for literally 12 hours of chill entertainment), and get to feel good about themselves while they do it.
I feel like tossing in a patch from SC2 as an indicator that it's actively being supported is a little misleading. SC2 had the opportunity to compete with LoL and Dota2 for viewership but Blizzard made a LOT of mistakes with the first expansion that alienated players and sent them to LoL, Dota2, or CSGO.
Their game design philosophy and slow patch rhythm sabotaged the momentum that the pro scene had been building (warp gate tech, infinite value units like Brood Lords and Swarm Hosts, frontloading all Terran power into Stim units, etc). They also catered the ladder experience solely for competitive players, they didn't introduce many (if any) casual-friendly modes until far too late.
Wings of Liberty was a great time, though.
But also, just not being able to play cooperatively with friends was the final death knell. SC was designed for an era where you played alone and then you played against others who played alone because there weren’t a lot of anyone playing SC or anything really.
LoL unlocked an entire demographic of kids who wanted to play with friends. A great explosion in online VC tech helped foster this and the rest is history. Gaming is now a social activity and all the top sellers right now effectively leverage this.
And I'm going to have to disagree about "not as good as we used to get". Is there any question that Zero-K/Spring (or BAR/Spring) aren't way better than Total Annihilation (ok, maybe not for the orchestral score), despite being entirely community-made ?
* Disco Elysium
* Tyranny
* Shadowrun, all of them
* Pathfinder: Kingmaker
All within the last decade, and at least for Disco Elysium and Tyranny, every bit as good as Planescape Torment.
Western RPGs though.. I don't have high hopes for ES6.
Other games with those qualifications: Ultima underworld Arx fatalis Two worlds series Deus ex series
The obsidian games typically have plenty of utility spells, but not always.
Oblivion has some of that stuff too but it's definitely simplified.
Skyrim has no spell crafting at all, which means combat becomes "mash mouse button" or "sneaky arrow". Lycanthropy is pretty fun though, but also wears out. Mods definitely saved the game since they add all the crazy shit that is missing.
The trend is quite obvious though. Don't get me wrong, I'll still definitely play the shit out of ES6, I just don't feel it will reach the glory of Morrowind.
> Ultima underworld Arx fatalis Two worlds series Deus ex series
Sadly I've already played all of these. Never did finish Arx Fatalis though, might go back to it..
Especially with graphics million times faster than the devs could have imagined.
That has got to be a joke.
Tyranny has MMO-style ability cooldowns that make combat a boring spam-what-is-availale fest, pretty much no enemy or encounter variety, companions which barely any development compared to those in PS:T, as well as a story that is obviously cut short of what it should have been.
I also don't play CRPGs for the combat mostly. That's why the old Infinity Engine games were a lot of fun, it was about cheesing through the game in funny ways while enjoying an amazing story.
hm isn't there a ton of different single player FPS out that are fairly creative? Like Deathloop recently, MW2 single player campaign was pretty good.
It's the innovation in multiplayer FPS that's gone pretty much short of biannual efforts from AAA (Battlefield, CoD) and 1-2 niche attempts from indies (Hell Let Loose was good, Cycle Frontier) Otherwise it's just closing the gap with freemium and premium
HL3 just needed to merge the two storylines/timelines and give players both.
Imagine multiplayer with that!
I almost question whether having this deal blocked may ultimately be the best for Microsoft...the game industry seems to be collapsing in on itself. The one big thing I'd argue with myself on there would be a lot of the IP and its ability to be applied to non-gaming "metaverse" applications. Games aren't getting any better, and often, aren't as good as what we had 10 years ago, but I can't argue that the graphics are improving significantly, even if it doesn't matter to me in the slightest from a gaming standpoint.
Though, I probably underestimate the never ending stream of children who are always making fun of each other for not having the latest shiniest skin or emote in whatever "Free" game they happen to be playing these days.
Anecdotally, I played the game briefly at launch and it died in terms of player numbers very very quickly.
Haven't been following recently. What have made the things to look brighter? It's really hard to see these things as a non-player these days because of all the negativity surrounding the company. Can't say I don't see why it is that way, though.
It's oligopolistic, you have a virtually integrated behemoth across multiple sectors that is too big to fail, which is not good for competition and thus for consumers.
> If anything, this just makes Microsoft into more of a conglomerate: something we should be encouraging and is good for a society!
Is this sarcasm I'm missing? There's nothing wrong with conglomerates, but enormous vertically integrated with exclusivity ones aren't good for society.
Doesn’t sound too-big-to-fail to me. Big on it’s own isn’t necessarily bad.
What for? Blizzard's a shell of its former glory and hadn't done much of note recently (even if it's still making money). The way things are, within Activision, Microsoft or on its own, I don't really see Blizzard making anything on the level of their best games in the future.
That said, even if it's activision, and even if you can can somehow separate them, the talent that made blizzard blizzard (whatever era of it you enjoyed) is likely long gone.
The fact that they repolished D2 into a game absolutely worth playing today on modern hardware, gorgeously really shows how good he was. And tbf, how good the graphics team is. D2R is a wonderful game, and the fact that the same old (but great) engine is actually still running is kinda incredible.
I wish OW2 was a gem like that. A friend and I have over 1k hours each into OW1.
Pre-orders on Steam turned into Epic exclusive caused an uproar. It came out on Steam a year later and I waited another year after that, then waited for a sale.
And got a patched, polished game with mods - fun for co-op with friends.
I don't think my "protest delayed" purchase 2+ years later made an impact on them. But it sated me.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Sounds like the FTC does not trust Microsoft’s assurances.
This has not been my experience when playing any game that uses the UWP / Windows store API. I must've sunk 20+ hours into trying to get Forza 7 to start. It would launch and play fine maybe 1/20 times, and then exit to desktop with no error after about 20 minutes of play.
The other 19/20 times it wouldn't start, and the support online was abysmal. Suggestions include rebooting your machine, reinstalling the game (which was an 80GB download), reinstalling the GPU drivers, and I even got desperate enough to attempt a technique that was parroted on many forums as a fix, which is to install and immediately remove a completely unrelated Windows app store game. This worked a few times and then stopped working, or maybe it was just a coincidence. I spent a few hours trying to get my money back from MS and gave up on that too.
I miss the days when you could just run a .exe to start a game - if this is the future of gaming on Windows, then gaming on Linux could actually be a viable competitor.
I would only use pc for some RTS games (like AoE, civ, and things along those lines) which don't need such huge compute requirements.
It is unsolicited advice but I'd suggest that Microsoft get the Windows store working right before it spends billions on a source of games for it that as it is people won't be able to play. (... for that matter, am I the only one who sees links to unwholesome "Youtube shorts" on the Youtube home page that don't actually play? I have the problem both on Windows/Firefox and my iPad)
The usual cause for something like this is that management is incentivizing for something that isn't quality. Velocity is the normal one that gets people, but there are a few others that occasionally get people (number of open tickets/lack of outrage on social media/etc).
It is, of course, possible that the team is incompetent, but that's usually an easier problem to fix, and if the team has had normal turnover, the odds of them having consistently incompetent ICs for years on end is pretty low.
I support this because MS is already huge (Windows, Office, Xbox) and Activision/Blizzard is huge.
There is already way too much centralization. EA owns too much. Honestly there may be some Sony shouldn’t have been allowed to acquire (I don’t keep track on either side).
So MS + Activision is just too centralized for me. If the argument is “we need this to compete with EA” then we should break up EA.
I like to describe them as a many-headed beast; Some are benevolent, others less so.
Open sourcing a lot of stuff has been amazing for the MS ecosystem. But then they pull the Hot Reload move.
Two steps forward, a half step back, seems like.
Some people have been floating around the idea that Sony could respond by acquiring Square Enix. Not sure if that is actually fiancially viable, but I would much prefer Sony and Microsoft acquire smaller studios (think Playground Games, Bluepoint Games) and leave bigger players like Activision and Square Enix alone.
But I don’t like just flat out consolidation of already large companies. I don’t see a benefit (to gamers) in that. Just investors/business people.
I do. I've had Microsoft account hacked with no way of recovering it despite still owning the email associated with it. I continuously get email notifications from Microsoft stating that there's suspicious activity on the account but recovery is effectively impossible.
I won't buy anything at all that requires a Microsoft account to use.
1. Opened a MSN.net account in early 00's. Fake name/birthday provided as is the norm for the day and only email validation was required at the time.
2. Opened a Skype account in early 00's. Fake name/birthday information provided as is the norm for the day and only email validation was required at the time.
3. Microsoft merged Skype and MSN.net
4. Bought a Surface Pro in early 10's and that required a Microsoft account. Hated it and returned it, but now there's a CC and name associated with the account.
5. Account was hacked in mid 10's. Lost access.
6. Recovery workflow now involves "verifying" questions and answers that were never a part of the sign-up workflow, and secondary workflow involves "verifying" fake name/birthday information that's long since forgotten, or verifying purchases and prices and CC numbers (which have since changed), or verification of email.
7. Verification of email isn't enough because it's not a second factor. Want more verification.
8. MS phone support refuses to help, and brick & mortar staff have no capability to recover accounts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_video_game_console_genera...
To over-simplify, I foresee two possible outcomes.
1. The merge makes AB worse. That's fine because while I somewhat enjoy their games, they aren't doing anything ground-breaking and their existing catalog of games is good enough for me to keep playing if I ever get the urge for something they've made. And if they fold in a flaming wreckage of nonsense, that's fine, because again, their existing catalog of games is fine as is, and I wouldn't greatly miss future entries.
2. The merge makes AB better. Great! Maybe some of their existing IPs are improved beyond simple incremental improves and maybe even some new IPs that are worth playing come about. I see this is a win for everyone.
I do see the side of "MS has enough money to bully companies like Sony", but the thing is, Sony is still the clear leader in the console gaming space. This means any concession that MS gives out end up feeling like handouts to the market leader, which just feels strange to me.
But at the end of the day, if that means agreements to release titles like Call of Duty on Playstation (is anyone really concerned whether they come out on Nintendo platforms?) that's fine by me as well.
I don't find this to be the case at all. SONY is market leader in consoles because they've been doing a better job. Microsoft cross-funding their way into a monopoly wouldn't make MS decision making any better, would it?
As an extreme example: Imagine MS buying out all major game studios in 2013 (they certainly have had the money to do it). You -- as the consumer -- would've either been stuck with a console that made every wrong decision, but has every game on it. Or a console made with better decisions but with no games. How is preventing this a handout to the market leader?
I just don't see this merger moving the needle much on the competition between the two companies.
I just don't understand how this merger would be even entertained by the FCC. The only reason MS is lagging behind Sony is because of their own incompetence (outside of Japan). Allowing this much of a cross funding to offset incompetence shouldn't event be on the table.
It's so disappointing to me that Activision kept Blizzard as part of the name during the merger. Decision makers at Blizzard were replaced with decision makers who Activision liked and now the company is just Activision with Blizzard's IP.
Everyone who made the Blizzard name worth paying attention to was either gone or pushed into a different role by the time Activision ruined their name, but people still say things like "Blizzard sucks" instead of "Activision sucks" (hell, even "Activision Blizzard sucks" would feel better).
I'm don't even think that it's wrong to say "Blizzard sucks"; it just sucks that it's true.
There's already way, way, way too much consolidation in industry today (not just "the games industry"; all of industry). What we need to be doing is breaking up many of these megacorporations, and then reversing the burden of proof for mergers & acquisitions: not "we'll stop this if it's proven that it would be harmful," but "we won't allow this unless it's proven to be beneficial", with a fairly high bar.
It just seems so absurd to me to see so many people who trumpet the power of the "free market", but then advocate for this kind of hyper-consolidated situation as if it's remotely like a "free market". Yes, sure, I can buy my $thing from Oppressive Megacorp A, B, or C, all of whom have a huge interest in maintaining the status quo and avoiding meaningful competition.
There are on the order of 10 video game companies with over a billion usd in revenue. There are 3 distinct console manufacturers (4 if you count the steam deck, 5 if you include PCs). Then there’s the mobile gaming market, which has all the big players plus a bunch of others.
Duopoly’s and small markets goodness or badness is irrelevant in this situation.
That said…I agree with you, though I doubt MS would help.
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/overwatch-2-topped-...
https://www.pcgamer.com/diablo-immortal-hits-30-million-play...
https://www.gamespot.com/amp-articles/wow-classics-success-s...
everyone with multiple accounts will have logged in on each at least once to get the three new heroes
this is over forever now
This isn't the primary console buying to remain in power. This is the current third place platform buying to be a competitive force.
Considering Nintendo just does Nintendo things and I doubt either company really sees them as a competitor (which isn't a bad thing to be clear, but they clearly have different ideas of gaming).
We basically only have Sony here who has a long history of anti consumer tactics that in my opinion do a lot of harm on the gaming space. We are starting to see the Cocky "we can't do anything wrong" attitude from Sony again this generation that we saw when they first announced the PS3. That is bad for gamers and the industry. Just look at the complete opposite approach that Sony took with the PS4. Sure they still made some of their questionable decisions, especially later in the generation.
The fact is we need a strong competitor to Sony and Microsoft has made a lot of strides to get there, but this acquisition will put them right up next to Sony.
Now yes, Microsoft has a history as well. Particularly during the 360 generation, we can't ignore that. But we also can't ignore that Phil Spensor was not in charge at that time.
We also can't ignore that as gamers. Activision Blizzard has been in a bad state for a while now. Sure they may still be raking in money, but their games have continued to stumble over the last few years.
That is before you get into all the harassment issues that a drastic change is necessary and honestly I don't know what other company I would actually want to buy them. Sure not Sony, EA, and outside of those... who could realistically afford too.
For the record: I am saying this as someone with all 3 consoles and a gaming PC. But my playstation is my least used console because I despise many of the business practices that Sony gets into. I don't want to reward those behaviors.
https://truthonthemarket.com/2014/09/13/peter-thiel-on-the-v...
The lack of consistent enforcement of these laws really makes this a mess. And, while CoD is a mega-seller, it is hardly unique, has been declining in quality (and was never top tier), and it is weird to assume it will be a huge phenomenon forever.
Microsoft have also bought plenty of smaller studios without getting into much trouble.
I personally am glad that they seem to react before it's too late for a chance. The gaming market still have a fairly healthy amount of competition. If 5 years down the road MS had managed to suffocate Sony, then it would be too late to react.
A giant backlog of great stuff that was made by smaller studios placing their bets on a project they think is good and has passion behind it, and a bunch of perfectly mediocre, forgettable new stuff with logos of IPs we used to love, the product of numbers crunched from focus group testing that couldn't possibly offend anyone for any reason.
Yeah. The biggest studio acquisition that Sony has done in the last decade was Bungie, that employs about 820 people. The next biggest would be Insomniac Games with over 400 employees?
Meanwhile Activision-Blizzard had closer to 10,000 employees, and Zenimax had >2000 employees.
The scales seem quite vastly different.
Bethesda alone as more IPs even if you don't take other ZeniMax's IPs in to consideration.
So what? That was obviously just a move to try and prevent the FTC from doing exactly this, not out of the goodness of their hearts. Great, 10 years of 1 series continuing to be cross-platform, and then you blink and 10 years is up and Microsoft has bought the entire gaming space and Sony dies a slow death because they didn't have infinite money like Microsoft. Or Microsoft buys them too!
Here's your 12 new plates of gray goo to choose from, straight out of the Microsoft games factory. Enjoy.
The thing about games, if they're gray goo, you don't buy them. There's lot's to choose from. Games are a meritocracy, they live or die on their own merits, regardless of which company produces them. If Microsoft turns them to gray goo, they only hurt themselves.
Honestly, blocking this acquisition is a green light for Sony to continue buying up companies and not having to compete by, say, making their own AAA shooter again. I'm not sure how this makes us better off.
Sony's first party game studio segment of their business is not bigger than Activision-Blizzard.
Looking at Q4 2021, around 20% of Sony's game unit sales were first party titles. It seems to vary between 10-20% depending on the quarter.
Total game sales accounted for $2.5 billion in revenue, so we can assume that about $500 million of that revenue is from Sony's own published titles.
We could be generous and assume that Sony games on average sell for higher than the typical game, you could bump that number up to something like $700 million.
Now let's look at Activision-Blizzard: In Q4 of 2021, their revenue was $2.1 billion, so they're bringing in up to 4x more revenue from game sales than Sony's revenue from their self-published titles.
Call of Duty alone brought in in $1 billion of revenue for 2021, so the Call of Duty business is about half the size of Sony's entire game development business.
Sony's game sales including the cut they take from third party developers on their platform barely exceeds Activision-Blizzard's revenue.
[1] https://gameworldobserver.com/2022/11/01/playstation-profit-...
[2] https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
The last thing you want is the public to start having control and financial interest in your creative vision. That gives us bullshit like loot boxes, NFTs, etc.
Requires a different corporate structure
As much as I enjoy indie games, I do think they've contributed heavily to the incredibly oversaturated market we see right now. It's downright impossible to find actually good mobile games for example without investing hours of research.
While there have always been people primarily motivated by profit, it at least feels like, in previous times, there was always the sense that the purpose of a business was to provide a product or service, and the profit was their reward for doing that well.
More recently, it feels much more like the purpose of a business is to make as much money as humanly possible, and whatever product or service they provide is just a necessary evil to make that happen.
Personally, I believe this can, as you suggest, be laid at the feet of Wall Street, and the insatiable drive for more profit, more growth, faster growth, more more more. How we get rid of it...is a harder problem.
Valve pioneered all 3 in games, and they're still private :shrugs:
> Microsoft, like Google, is creating a cloud streaming service; Microsoft, though, is not only offering a business model that is uniquely enabled by the cloud, but is spending billions of dollars directly and indirectly (through foregone sales) to get that business model off of the ground (when-and-if Game Pass has a huge subscriber base, then signing up 3rd-parties will be easy — the challenge is getting to scale in the first place). This is the work that Google was never willing to do, and why Stadia was doomed to fail.
> This also explains why I worry the eagerness of regulators to act before markets exist in any meaningful way is a bad idea. One of the acquisitions Microsoft has made in pursuit of this subscription strategy is Activision Blizzard, and I do, for the record, think it is important to scrutinize this deal, and perhaps extract guarantees from Microsoft that some of the titles involved (particularly Call of Duty) remain cross-platform (which as I noted, makes economic sense anyways)...
> This framing suggests that Microsoft is going to unfairly win a cloud gaming market that is inevitable, much like Google once won the inevitable Internet search opportunity. The lesson of the Google cemetery, though, is that inevitable opportunities are the exceptions, not the rule; to that end, I would argue that Stadia’s failure is evidence that absent a Microsoft-level investment the cloud gaming market will never come into being in the first place.
https://stratechery.com/2022/google-kills-stadia-why-stadia-...
Whereas if Microsoft has a large library of first-party titles, they can take a loss on unit sales to grow the platform. At some point if they are successful they hope to get to a size where other AAA third-party publishers like Activision are willing to sign a licensing deal like "Microsoft agrees to pay $Xm / year for unlimited streaming of the CoD franchise".
But it's not obvious to me that there's a viable path to getting Activision content on their streaming platform. (It's not available on GeForce Now, for example). Anyway, on this licensing point I'm not an expert, so I'm interested in others' thoughts here. Particularly what the current licenses for existing GeForce Now / Game Pass games look like.
Isn't this Microsoft's job in building a valid product out of game subscription/streaming? What's the goal here - Microsoft owns every game developer to have on their subscription service?
It's like saying Spotify must buy all the big labels because how else could they run a streaming business?
https://www.pcgamer.com/xbox-chief-reveals-more-about-how-de...
Games have been massively devalued by Game Pass, PS Plus, indie bundles, and Steam sales. Plenty of bargains for the consumer, but it's not good news for the majority of developers.
If developers can't make money from selling games outright, well, look at the mobile game market...
In general I find his articles take the perspective of those running large corporations, not the perspective of public interest.
* The player doesn't actually own anything. I routinely play games I purchased 5+ years ago, which is a fantastic long term entertainment investment.
* The player doesn't have a direct relationship with the game studio. Microsoft injects themselves a middle man, and is essentially rent seeking.
* The player has much more limited rights to run the software the way they want to. I can legally buy a switch cartridge, a switch, and run the switch game on an emulator. Nintendo hates this. My access to Game Pass games is legally limited to ways Microsoft considers appropriate.
There is no indication that physical copies are dead. In fact, for all the impacts of streaming on movies, you can still buy physical copies of almost every movie.
This isn’t about killing “choice”, it is about giving consumers a different choice than the one you would make. But thankfully it isn’t zero-sum so you can still buy a CD custom wrapped in plastic
Might want to talk to DVD and Netflix. Physical copies are on life support, and you won't be able to buy them anymore except through GamePass or equivalent service.
This is what Microsoft wants, because they can continue to charge a subscription price for decades old games (there's a few selections on GamePass if you want decades-old games).
It’s okay, it isn’t the first time that the interests of “the market” are in opposition to one’s values and it won’t be the last.
Most people don’t have the same values as you seem to have. That doesn’t mean that either are wrong, but it does mean you might be tilting at the wrong windmill
> because if the market is any indication, people prefer a fixed cost subscription service.
I'm not sure what you're debating here. I'm saying physical media is dead. You're saying both they're not and they are?
I think the "average" PC and Steamdeck player is interested in emulation, so it's a good segment of the market but not the largest. If a game was only ever released on Game Pass (and do you really think Microsoft doesn't want a Game Pass Exclusive) then running the game outside of a Microsoft Game pass context is illegal.
Let's not pretend that unethical stealing is the only option.
If a hundred billion aliens in another galaxy watched a pirated movie, nobody would even know. If the aliens came down to Earth and took all our water, we'd all die.
Another option would be to purchase a VPN to route through a country where it is playable. But if you had to choose between the 2 options of pirating or paying more money to a different "shady" activity... I feel like the choice is pretty clear.
Both are piracy, but the latter holds the stigmatism, and the former is openly advertised by podcasters and youtubers everywhere.
People in general don't want to pirate, but they will if it's the best option (just look at the often-cited example of Steam). That's the only thing keeping publishers in check. Without it, I'm sure prices for content would be much higher than they are right now.
Should you be able to attend an event without a ticket, just because that venue has a "monopoly" on that evening's entertainment? You're not reducing the enjoyment of others, nor are you decreasing the artist's revenue.
This isn't an accurate analogy because the OP has no option to enter the venue at all, even if they want to pay.
> no one has a right to experience a specific piece of creative content
The whole motive behind copyright is that society is entitled to culture. By granting artists a time-limited monopoly, they can be incentivized to create and release more and more content, which makes society's culture richer and more widely available to everyone.
So I'd argue that the status quo OP describes is contrary to the actual objective of copyright itself.
Are you suggesting that if i couldn't get a ticket to a concert i want to see, I am entitled to some kind of compensation?
That wasn't my main argument however. Please read it below in my original response.
>commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, and scholarship.
Yeah, there is plenty of "content" to watch. The problem is that there tends to be content people want to watch, because word has gotten out that it is high quality, or (in this case) a trailer/ad looked appealing, and having it locked up on zero, maybe one, platforms doesn't really satisfy someone?
> The House Energy and Commerce Committee penned a letter to Michael Rapino Tuesday asking the executive to clarify ...
> ... Ticketmaster could be slapped with fines ...
This has zero teeth and won't change a single thing. It's virtue signalling at best.
ETA: although this is much bigger than just MSFT.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
Or, I can think of Ratchet and Clank, Last of Us, or anything Japan Studio makes off the top of my head. When I think of Microsoft’s IP, such as Halo, Gears of War, or Age of Empires*, things feel more acquisition-oriented.
Personally, I’d like to see Microsoft imitate Sony in that fashion of bringing new IP up where they can.
Xbox could compete with exclusive games without acquiring studios to stay competitive with Sony's exclusive games, but how can Sony compete with a 69 billion dollar acquisition?
Would what be the same? Would it still be bad and I believe the FTC should block it? Yes. But there's also a lot more variables than just once sentence hypothetical.
If the merger were completed, it would certainly change things, but it wouldn't be any guarantee of Microsoft's dominance, or even a first place finish. So to block the acquisition based on something that might happen seems like a clear case of regulatory overreach.
Yes - Sony are the ones to hold on to exclusives right now. Not Microsoft.
Unless you're talking about their Windows Phone exclusivity deal before that which kneecapped them when they could have been making Android devices all those years and might have been competition in the Android space to this day.
The argument was that Blizzard isn't doing so hot either, and that Microsoft would fix them.
> “Microsoft has already shown that it can and will withhold content from its gaming rivals,” said Holly Vedova, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Today we seek to stop Microsoft from gaining control over a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in multiple dynamic and fast-growing gaming markets.”
Based on the FTC's statement that reads to me, a layman, like they're trying to extract a commitment from Microsoft to publish future games on all platforms.
I don't personally think the FTC is going for a consent decree here though, Lina Khan is about antitrust, I think they are trying to block mergers as a matter of business.
- stock value down considerably
- shareholders just lost their only chance at a decent buyout
- just finished worst media cycle in recent history
What's left for Activision Blizzard? What can they do with a company this gutted?
Edit: This is a sincere question, I ask it as someone who enjoyed Diablo, Overwatch and Hearthstone. Where do they go from here?
The problem is that it's not enough money for the greedy owners behind the scenes who have nothing to do with the games themselves. Think the hedge fund owners, the banks, the note owners, etc. They want increasing amounts of money such that there's no money left to sustain the teams making the games.
A pure case of greed.
Blizzard itself can most likely stand on its own.
Shed the FIFA license (fifa wants more and more licensing fees every year) - and spin Activision sports out as its own entity/product line.
The successful products are fully capable of sustaining their own production & staff, without having to feed the corporate coffers of a conglomerate that only wants increasing profits without any regard to the products and teams themselves.
Everyone at the company wins except for the overlords who lorded over the profits and continued on the path of consolidation for the only reason of lining their own pockets.
Amazing IP! The loud minority hates every new game/expansion with a passion everything, but the majority of people I talked to enjoy playing overwatch 2, enjoy the new wow expansion, and most importantly we'd all (begrudgingly) buy any new warcraft/starcraft/diablo/overwatch game.
That being said, I love the game because I lived Overwatch 1.
Anyways my quote is "enjoy playing", and sounds like we both fall into that category. The game engine and polish with the original is often overlooked IMO.
> With control over Activision’s blockbuster franchises, Microsoft would have both the means and motive to harm competition by manipulating Activision’s pricing, degrading Activision’s game quality or player experience on rival consoles and gaming services, changing the terms and timing of access to Activision’s content, or withholding content from competitors entirely, resulting in harm to consumers.
How does any of this harm competition? These represent competitive actions. MS would be forcing Sony to invest in new features/content for their platform in order to make up for lost appeal. If a consumer is "harmed" by a game not being available on another platform, then first-party exclusives should be considered harmful unilaterally. I should hope that this same reasoning applies to Sony's recent acquisition of Bungie.
And it sure is suspicious how Nintendo isn't brought up here. Nintendo's ongoing success without CoD was a key argument for Brazil's approval of the deal. How can Sony argue that CoD is essential to them when MS has offered them a 10 year grace period to figure out something that Nintendo clearly had figured out from the start?
I at least kind of understood the arguments Sony made about cloud gaming being a nascent market which MS could dominate by coupling their Azure platform with Game Pass and a few big name titles like CoD... but they don't really say anything about that in this release.
I guess we'll see if this pans out for the FTC should they choose to sue, but I'd bet heavily against them if this release is a representation of the arguments they intend to make in court.
There's just so much money to be made with mobile games. Diablo Immortal probably cost almost nothing to make and will probably make over $1 billion when all is said and done. How can a games company ignore that?
This is getting to the point where it requires government intervention. Virtual currencies, randomness (eg loot boxes) and obfuscated outcomes all combine to hidehow much real money things cost and how much you're spending. It's predatory in exactly the same way slots are.
Until that happens, games are going to just be sports franchises, shooters and mobile games with a handful of exception that are mostly longstanding franchises.
They used to have a reputation of quality and care and now its anything but. Blizzard has completely tarnished its reputation for a quick buck. I guess you're supposed to milk the money while you can but its just an awful look.
I'm a long time OW player and I literally _never_ bought skins or used them. I had 1k in loot boxes that I never opened just because I don't care about the skins... but now any sense of "progress" even if it was to just hoard virtual boxes is now gone and replaced with a big "screw you, pay me" button. It just feels so scummy.
I just wish for once companies could think of ways to make money without screwing over developers _and_ players.
I'm sorry Sony but you are lame. Ever since the company left Japan for California their focus changed and you lost all the magic. Japanese game studios were treated like second class citizens and special treatment was given to boring AAA western studios. It would be a huge positive if Microsoft actually managed to turn you into Nintendo.
[0]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/637cecede90e0...
My Switch (and Oculus Plus) are consistently being played years after purchase. My PS4 last got fired up to play Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid 5.
This part is important:
"In a complaint issued today, the FTC pointed to Microsoft’s record of acquiring and using valuable gaming content to suppress competition from rival consoles, including its acquisition of ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda Softworks (a well-known game developer). Microsoft decided to make several of Bethesda's titles including Starfield and Redfall Microsoft exclusives despite assurances it had given to European antitrust authorities that it had no incentive to withhold games from rival consoles."
All past aquisitions are not even close to these and therefore also irrelevant.
Microsoft is already competing fairly well after their aquisition of ZeniMax. And let's not forget that they have a monopoly on the OS that PC games run on.
As a whole MS is also many times larger than Sony.
There's is just no reason to let them have this extra power.
As I see it letting this deal go through would be a big gamble on MS severely screwing up the advantage of having way more popular IP than Sony could ever dream of.
How does xbox-exclusive releases fit in with this goal? Are are just playing word games where you mean you'll release a bunch of indie and old games to more platforms while restricting new games?
I am not making a judgement whether or not the merger should go through, but I would love that the result to be the end of deliberate platform exclusive titles
Also, the counterfactual can very much be one where ABK as an independent public company makes a deal to make CoD a Playstation exclusive. In the acquisition scenario, anyone will be able to play (including Nintendo users)
From the OP:
> In a complaint issued today, the FTC pointed to Microsoft’s record of acquiring and using valuable gaming content to suppress competition from rival consoles, including its acquisition of ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda Softworks (a well-known game developer). Microsoft decided to make several of Bethesda's titles including Starfield and Redfall Microsoft exclusives despite assurances it had given to European antitrust authorities that it had no incentive to withhold games from rival consoles.
So it seems the FTC is catching on to what a lot of the tech industry has known for decades: never trust Microsoft
Maybe they do this to try to get support from Microsoft regarding the Apple and Google App Store. Anyways some what expected but still disappointing. Feels like FTC could fooled by Sony in my opinion.
Same for work emails, work operating systems, work cloud, work documents and work seeking itself. And by extension, it is in charge of running a lot of our governments at all levels.
And now they're also in entertainment. I mean they were before, but with Activation Blizzard they will be 50% of our games.
It's hard enough but doable to de-google one's life. But Microsoft? I guess some redneck survivalists achieved that to some extent.
Microsoft, "We make all attempts to prevent games from running on anything but our platform."
If you are against the Figma acquisition and the consolidation of medium-sized companies, then you should be also against this one, which the FTC has made the right decision with this.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33518102
Also if not Microsoft then a chinese corp will buy Blizz, for example Tencent. But I guess that would be okay
What has Disney bought up during the current administration?
This move away from the consumer harm standard is recent and the new FTC chair is committed to making sure we go back to the old days of Anti-Trust.