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Comment by 015a | Hacker News Reader

Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get to be this large, such that now we really have to consider blocking every acquisition, even though this one in particular I think wouldn't be all that bad and may actually be a positive for consumers. Activision is an unusually cruel and extremely horrible company, whereas the Xbox Division of Microsoft has been one of maybe only a couple "great" stewards of the gaming industry for consumers (Epic is also a great company, but beyond those two when it comes to major developers/publishers there's far more bad than good). I'm genuinely of the opinion that all of Xbox, Activision, and their customers will be worse-off without this deal.

This is a HackerNews Arm Chair Quarterbacking Stretch, but I think a really positive move for Microsoft would be to spin-off Xbox into a separate company. I can't imagine the division is all that profitable; its grown to confer practically zero positive network effects for Microsoft's other businesses. Culturally its got to be the weirdest thing Microsoft does nowadays. This AB deal likely single-handedly increases the valuation of the division by, jeeze, 50%? Maybe more.

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>Epic is also a great company

No, it's not. It does the exact same shit that Activision does except it targets an even younger more vulnerable demographic. Did you forget about this? https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/245-milli...

I don't agree with the FTC's conclusion on that case, and while it doesn't reflect positively on Epic, its not nearly as negative as the myriad of things other gaming companies do on the regular (lootboxes being a big one, which are still very common in Activision, EA, & Valve games, among others). Epic is one of the good ones; that doesn't mean they always do good things.

> Epic is one of the good ones

Maybe if your only comparison is Activision and EA. When you consider all the dark patterns Fortnite employs to encourage logging playtime and making purchases, they're only separated from those others by degrees. Stacked up against developers that largely avoid those patterns (FromSoft, Nintendo, CDPR, etc), Epic is most certainly closer to the "bad" side of the spectrum.

Yeah, I have no idea how GP thinks Epic is the gold standard. There are way better developers with extremely successful games that don't have this bullshit: Naughty Dog (Last of Us, Uncharted), FromSoft (mentioned, Elden Ring), Portkey Games (Hogwarts Legacy), Guerrilla Games (Horizon), Insomniac (Spider-Man), Santa Monica Studios (God of War), Sucker Punch (Ghost of Tsushima), Rockstar (Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto[0]) and many others. Epic is near the bottom of the list, not the top.

[0] The online has micro-transactions but even if it didn't exist, the single player experience is well worth the money alone and is on par with all the others.

Listing Microsoft and Epic as good guys is wack. "Disagreeing" that Epic's practices are clear-cut intentional abuse had me searching for a punchline.

> I have no idea how GP thinks Epic is the gold standard.

Where, exactly, did you read "gold standard"? No one said that. No one hinted to that. The words stated were "great company" and "one of the good ones".

Epic is neither of those so it doesn't matter.

>Epic is also a great company, but beyond those two when it comes to major developers/publishers there's far more bad than good

I listed all major developers, many of which are owned by mega publishers like Sony.

Hogwarts Legacy certainly looks good, but the mobile game hogwarts mystery(or something like that) by the same studio was full of dark patterns and also devoid of actual gameplay.

But you just listed companies that aren't even comparable; they're at entirely different market capitalizations. FromSoft and CDPR are babies compared to Xbox, Sony, Nintendo, Activision, EA, and Epic. FromSoft has a rough valuation (its hard, because they're owned by Kadokawa) of maybe the low nine figures. CDPR is larger, in the low billions. Epic is like $40 billion. Activision, clearly, around $85B. EA, around $35B. And Microsoft/Sony, obviously, a lot, lot more.

Team Cherry and concernedape are also extremely amazing and ethical developers. But they aren't peers to the companies we're talking about. Its easy to be ethical when you're small. Its laudable to maintain a sense of those ethics when you're large, even if the absolute measure isn't a perfect score.

Nintendo is far scummier than you let on; they're among the scummiest video game companies on the planet. It just doesn't come through in their fantastic and "pure" gaming experiences; but the fights their legal team chooses to engage in are ugly, despicable, and very unique among gaming companies.

Then what you meant to say is that it's a good business, not a good [video game] company. Good video game companies make good video games, of which there are many others. Epic, Activision, and EA have high valuations because their games are filled with micro-transactions, not because their games are superior to others. This is good for investors but not consumers (who your original comment was championing).

> Team Cherry and concernedape are also extremely amazing and ethical developers.

Team Cherry produced a great game. I wouldn't be willing to call them a good company or a good team; their track record shows as plainly as you could possibly wish that they are terrible at developing games.

I have a tough time coming down to hard on free to play Fortnite. You can spend more. They incentivize you to spend more. That's been a staple in fashion for a long time.

But at the same time I think there's something cool about being able to hop in without shelling out $60. And getting updates and new content for years.

Their target demographic is kids whose brains haven't developed yet and are unable to resist buying shiny digital things with their parents' credit cards and Epic makes sure to add as little resistance as possible. It's no surprise they wanted to add their own payment system to Fornite on iOS: Apple's has too much friction and parental controls to prevent abuse like this. The commission Apple collected was just a drop in the big bucket they were after.

From the FTC blog post:

>The FTC alleges that with millions of consumers’ credit cards conveniently in hand, Epic failed to adequately explain its billing practices to customers and designed its interface in ways that led to unauthorized charges. You’ll want to read the complaint for details, but here are a few of the dark patterns the company allegedly used.

>According to the complaint, Epic set up its payment system so that it saved by default the credit card that was associated with the account. That meant that kids could buy V-Bucks – the virtual currency necessary to make in-game purchases – with the simple press of a button. No separate cardholder consent was required.

Scum. Glad Apple booted them from the App Store and the courts sided with Apple.

I wonder when the FTC is going to crack down on mobile gaming for this reason. Google and Apple profit tremendously from various companies targeting vulnerable demographics in their games.

Well, it's only a stupid authoritarian act when China does it...

> Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get to be this large, such that now we really have to consider blocking every acquisition, even though this one in particular I think wouldn't be all that bad and may actually be a positive for consumers.

As an avid world of warcraft player, the community as a whole has been hoping the merger goes through for exactly this reason. Activision has seemingly forced through a lot of bad changes over the years to try wring out as much money as they can.

I'm a part of the StarCraft 2 community and we were similarly hopeful about this deal as StarCraft has been neglected by the company for years. The community was already in full doom mode over Korean tournament funding getting pulled, this is not going to improve the atmosphere.

I'm not sure "I want my favorite game to get better" is a good reason to allow more mega-conglomeration.

Why not? In abstract the argument is:

"I want this product to be better"

The reason we don't want companies to gain market power (the feared result of mega-conglomeration) is because it allows companies to charge more for the same or a worse product.

If this person believes that Blizzard being acquired by microsoft will result in a better product, then they expect the net benefits to outweigh the negatives of Microsoft's increased market power over the video games market.

Acquisitions that produce a consumer-surplus should be most welcome!

I'm curious on how a MS merger would be good? At the start, they would almost certainly try to merge user accounts into MSN accounts. Likely force a migration down the line, after merging doesn't work.

The way I think others are thinking about it is that to Activision, making innovative new franchises or long term investments in general is a big risk since they are 100% a games company. Whereas if Microsoft owns them may face less pressure to cut costs/long term investments since it would make up a much smaller part of Microsoft's financials.

Whether that is how things usually turn out in practice with these sorts of acquisitions is a question I don't have a good answer to.

I just don't think I've seen evidence from MS that they foster that sort of thing, either? Have they shown that they can do a new franchise?

Or is the idea that MS would just dump a lot of money on them? Do they have a track record of that?

>force a migration down the line, after merging doesn't work

like the Mojang --> Microsoft --> XBox fiasco

Exactly what I was referencing. I should have said it. :D

If they merge user accounts but you can support for older products or other game changes it's possible people would be ok with that

Certainly many would be ok with it. The ones it will hurt will be the heavy users that have multiple accounts, is my guess. Also is annoying to families. Game accounts are just game accounts, even if that has grown. Giving the kids an MSN account did not sit well with me.

I and many other people had their accounts completely borked by the required migration. My lifetime license, gone, either through malice or incompetence. For trillion dollar companies, I always have to assume malice.

The solution to Activision being horrible shouldn't be to let it get eaten by a marginally less horrible even more giant company.

It should be to break it into smaller pieces so that consumers have the flexibility to avoid the more toxic segments of the company and the market can decide whether their bad behavior matters or not.

Why doesn’t the market just avoid the whole thing, which is toxic?

Xbox is loss leading hard for Microsoft right now. Profits are down, console sales are down, and things on the horizon are looking not too great. If Xbox spun off, they’d go out of business within the decade because there’s no reason to own one besides taking advantage of Microsoft’s net-negative gaming subscription.

It seems like video game consoles aren't competing based on practicality (hardware) anymore and are mostly just rent seeking with ways to abuse the legal/IP system.

There used to be a much bigger moat to assemble a platform that could play cutting edge games. Now PC game engines/graphics drivers are getting so good the console SDKs aren't such a big boon and the hardware is basically just CotS.

Yeah. Sony and Nintendo still try to shake things up with their bespoke controllers and hardware doohickeys, but Microsoft's approach is just to release plain old PCs that only run their code.

Nintendo would be successful even without hardware. Their IPs have firmly planted themselves in global awareness to an unimaginable level. They'd give Disney a run for their money.

Then on top of that they built an ecosystem of toys and software to monetize their adoring customers.

Nintendo recognized the deadend of the hardware race in the early 2000s, and continued developing their "mascots" while Sony and MS abandoned theirs. I don't think Microsoft and Sony have the DNA to pull of something like this. They are still software and hardware companies respectively.

Xbox is Microsoft's only consumer division that has substantial revenue. Even consumer office brings in half of what Xbox does.

Microsoft is making the right moves here slowly shifting away from hardware (no profit) into software in the gaming space, but it's going to take some more time to do so.

Potentially it makes more sense to drop xcloud (huge black hole for the next ~10 years), to adhere to CMA's claims of them dominating the cloud gaming space, so they can continue with Game Pass (the part that actually matters for Xbox).

>has been one of maybe only a couple "great" stewards of the gaming industry for consumers

I'm not sure I'd give them much credit on this, since MS/Xbox hasn't achieved much at all in the gaming industry over recent years. Maybe there's not much egregious evil there a-la Activision's leadership scandals, but the track record is not great.

As a gaming industry consumer who's been playing Microsoft consoles and games my entire life, MS has recently:

- Ruined the Halo franchise

- Stymied the current console gen with the Series S' weak memory capabilities

- Acquired multiple beloved studios and released little to nothing over 5+ years, with their highest profile release being Starfield, the game Bethesda was already developing when MS bought them and made it a platform exclusive

- Edit: Forgot trying to turn the Xbox One into an always-online TV set-top box

Spinning off Xbox might be a good idea, if it's MS' senior leadership that keeps hamstringing their success. Because if the Activision acquisition proceeded like their previous studio acquisitions, we would see one or two Activision games release in the next decade, along with maybe a mediocre COD TV show.

> - Edit: Forgot trying to turn the Xbox One into an always-online TV set-top box

people call this a terrible idea, i thought it was a great fucking idea. At the time, and frankly still, streaming apps are mostly what we use tvs for these days, and the platforms to run them that are shipped INSIDE of the tvs we buy fucking suck, uniformly.

While the xbox was built as a gaming console initially all they really wanted to do was expand that notion. It could be an everything box for your '10 ft experience' It could play games, and be a dvr, and be a streaming interface, and and and. They could easily spin out another sku with lower specs to curtail some of the gaming power and make a more streaming focused box (like an apple tv but by microsoft) and sell that to the parents while selling the beefy gaming one to the kids.

I think the thing that sunk it was some Orwellian notion about the kinect. It's awesome tech, get a siri/alexa plus body tracking. The biggest downside being that MS's stance on privacy is 'peasants get no privacy'. At the time siri/alexa were still in their early stages and people were creeped out by them. Siri with eyes was extra repellent.

Well that and gamers throwing a fit because they didn't want their gaming console to be useful to their parents and other non gamers ...

You're misrepresenting what people were actually upset about with the Xbox One's original plans leading up to launch. If they wanted to add that Kinect functionality, whatever, but they announced it in a state where the Kinect was REQUIRED and had to always be plugged in. And it wasn't just always-on motion-tracking sensors, but an always-on microphone. In addition to that, your Xbox had to do a call to home every 24 hours to make sure you were still allowed to play physical games you purchased. You couldn't buy or sell used games, or lend them to a friend.

The DVR stuff wasn't a big issue for anyone, but it was emblematic of the fact that Microsoft didn't give a shit about gaming. Sony was already pulling ahead with exclusives people wanted by the end of the previous generation, and all Microsoft had to show for the next generation was a home entertainment system that had too much DRM and focused on their motion control gimmick at the point where everyone knew it was a fad that came and went in 2006 with the Wii. And on top of all this it was an extra $100 on top of the PS4's price.

Saying gamers were mad because the system could be useful to their parents is incredibly disingenuous.

Wasn't the biggest thing with the kinect everyone was upset about was that if you say, rented a movie, there would be an implicit agreement that x number of people can watch at that price. If x+n people were watching, you would get up charged. Then also question of, what if only x people are watching but 1 person walks in a room, then walks out, would they have counted that as x+1?

First I've heard of that. I did a quick search just now and it sounds like it was some patent that was filed but there was never anything officially stated about it.

Yeah it's certainly something that they hardware could enable (in a limited and easily gameable way). But I don't think they talked about that anywhere but maybe with studio execs.

Mighta been a case at the time where someone saw the patent and a bunch of people jumped to the conclusion that it was a for sure thing that was gonna happen.

>Well that and gamers throwing a fit because they didn't want their gaming console to be useful to their parents and other non gamers ...

I think it's worth revisiting the announcement. Gamers were upset because the launch presentation of the new console spent very little time talking about games. That presentation was followed by a Q&A with the notorious "we have a console for people without reliable internet, it's the xbox 360" quip. The "peasants get no privacy" attitude really felt like it was just part of a bigger "the peasants will buy what we say" attitude.

I'm with you on the utility of the basic concept. I actually really enjoyed using the Kinect to control Netflix. There was a good concept buried in the xbone vision that I would still like to use today - but Microsoft fumbled the execution tremendously badly and in particular, did so in a way that did not show "good stewardship to gaming."

On that note, the Kinect almost ended Rare as a studio...and the cool media features introduced with the Xbox One are now as dead as the Kinect.

I have a pile of kinects I built up by snagging them out of goodwills and other charity shops. It's still cool as fuck tech. I mostly use the original 360 version because there are open source sdks for them that run on pretty much every platform. I think there are a few half baked K2 sdks that are open source these days but I haven't looked. They are great for interactive art projects. Tons of use in the computer assisted art space.

Totally, the Kinect was the first device I ever “hacked” with and really was what got me into programming. It’s a lot of fun to mess with to this day, when I last pulled mine out I was tinkering with full body tracking for SteamVR. It's too bad the K2 never got the same robust software platform since the hardware had some interesting capabilities, I recall the project I was working with said it had some advantages in the scanning range but the software was too unreliable to recommend it.

Is there anything like it available on the market new in box today? I recall the RealSense cameras seemed comparable but those are gone now.

Golly. I still do miss being about to navigate Netflix titles by just swiping my hand in either direction. That really felt like the future made real and now it’s been discontinued for years.

Microsoft has sought to dominate the living room long before Xbox.... remember Windows Media Center? I don't know if it is still their strategy (seems like not by your post, I don't have an Xbox One S and my living room runs Kodi on Android TV) but it has been their intention for a while.

Windows Media Center is truly dead and all the TV-focused/Roku-competitive parts of the Xbox One were turned off years ago in OS changes. (Many were turned off only months after that sad launch. Some of them were great features and there is reason to lament their loss in the massive turnaround.) The Series S/X successor consoles have never had any of those parts of the OS and the above comment that this "Xbox One living room debacle" being "recent" feels outdated at best.

Microsoft seems to have given up on the living room entirely outside of gaming ambitions.

Its funny, prior to getting a SmartTV I used my Xbox One basically as Microsoft imagined. Game console, dvd player, and box to run my streaming apps.

Even after getting a smart tv I still use gaming consoles or an apple tv for everything. The smart tv apps are generally dog slow and terrible uis and menuing in comparison to the apps that have decent compute behind them.

I've transitioned to using a chromecast and my phone for most everything. I expect it uses a little less juice than running the console, so I come out ahead there.

Xbox's role in the gaming industry has, funny enough, very little to do with Xbox itself. It's their competitive presence that has kept Playstation from stagnating and making terrible decisions. You can see this extremely clearly when the 360 was outselling the PS3 and Playstation/Sony made plenty of management changes to shift directions.

I can agree there - MS has an important competitive role in the marketplace and it's not like Sony has always been a great steward to the community by comparison. I have mixed feelings about exclusives in general, but Sony has certainly played that game more than MS.

But the 360 was unveiled in 2005 and was replaced in the market a decade ago. My criticisms are really oriented to the last 5-10 years. On that note, I'm reminded of the Xbox One "your game console is for watching TV and will always be connected to the internet" release. And in that generation, it was the clamoring market and Sony's response (like the classic 'how to share secondhand games' video[0]) that pushed Microsoft to stop acting unreasonably.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48nCBnc9VBs

Yes that's very true! Much to their benefit, Playstation has been positively aggressive in recent years, I would attribute a lot of that to Mark Cerny (and the core platform tooling team) learning from PS3 mistakes and making the platform prioritize ease of development, and also from Xbox's mistakes on trying to pivot to general entertainment.

> Activision is an unusually cruel and extremely horrible company, whereas the Xbox Division

Even if this were true, there is no guarantee that the acquiring culture will actually be imposed on the acquired. In fact it's often the opposite, with the acquired "infecting" the parent company - particularly when the acquired comes with a large headcount.

Is part of what makes companies like this horrible the fact they WANT to get bought?

The one company I have in depth knowledge of going through an acquisition tried to drive employees away where possible, and fire others, down to a skeleton crew of overworked disgruntled employees because it makes them look REALLY good in the short term for being acquired.

If you couldn't count on acquisitions by larger companies being approved easily, the only other way to game companies can generate profit is by maintaining current games (at least to being playable, without terrible reviews from bugs), and /or develop new games...

I was literally fired while recovering from cancer surgery because the company I worked for was selling itself to Wimba (who in turn was selling itself to Blackboard). My company wanted to reduce headcount to look better for Wimba.

Screw those guys...

"Its extremely frustrating how we let the tech companies get to be this large,"

With how quickly tech changes and the risks involved, companies have to find multiple revenue streams if they want to survive. Pretty much every startup dream is to one day become a huge company.

I feel like with Gamepass and all their exclusives being day 1 on Windows as well, there's probably more crossover nowadays than there has been in years, but overall you're right that spinning out Xbox entirely would make a lot of sense.

They can't spin out Gamepass because it is a money pit. There aren't enough subscribers to fund large budget game development. At the same time, Gamepass trains subscribers to not purchase new games, because they'll be on Gamepass eventually.

I hate the idea of Gamepass because I saw it happen to cable television.

In the 1980s, for instance, MTV really showed music videos. It got bought by old fogey Sumner Redstone who decided unilaterally that we couldn't see music videos anymore -- funny now that we have YouTube it's been discovered that people want to watch music videos when they can. (A bit of destruction like Musk buying Twitter?)

If you buy a game you are voting with your dollar, if you subscribe they're going to make an Assassin's Creed game this year, and next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. The game industry is going to make whatever games it wants to make, and Microsoft will pay them, and I guess people will play them because they don't have a choice. We saw that with cable, since they get paid whether or not you watch, they can skimp on quality and collect increasing payments year after year. The movie and TV industry has been driven mad by streaming because suddenly performance matters... Disney is completely capable of producing a product that upholds it's brand but why do it when you can get $7 a month from every cable subscriber for ESPN whether or not they watch sports?

I'm confused why you think they aren't tracking what games are played for how long, and won't optimize based on that. I would assume there's some royalty type situation with gamepass where the games that get played more get some percentage of a pool.

You can rail about cable all you want, but some of the best shows of the last few decades were on cable. Breaking bad, mad men, the shield. Greatly expanding the choices allowed for networks to take risks in attempts to gain a small but I yerested audience, rather than having to appeal to the entire general public, and what we got was amazing.

More time spent does not equal enjoyment. Some games treat their players like employees and make them work pretty hard for their imaginary prizes. I wouldn't want a games library optimized for maximum time expenditure.

No kidding. The whole idea of (even partially) evaluating a game's value/quality by how long it takes to finish it is a mind virus. It leads to bloated, grindy experiences where a shorter game might have been more appropriate or even more fun.

While I agree paying out based on time spent may incentivize games into poor behavior, I think there are ways to account for that (e.g. weeks of the month the game was played more than an hour or two total). Greatly reducing the up-front investment to try out a game allows for different types of games to find an audience.

If I have to pay $20 to try out some indie title, I might put it off a long time until it's on sale or never try it. If it's already included in a subscription I pay for, I might try it early or right after hearing some buzz about it. More people jumping in on that buzz can create a wave of enthusiasm that greatly increases the reach of the game that wouldn't happen if a similar number of sales trickled in over an extended period, which might increase players (and possibly sales on other platforms) more than otherwise.

It's been noted many times in the past, some of the big breaks for indie studios were when they got accepted into these programs or ones like it.

I've only seen a few games so I can't say this is universal but when I play Japanese games on the Xbox all of the achievements say something like "5.4% of gamers accomplished this" which indicates that very few people finish this games, but a few western games I played didn't seem to show these percentages and I wonder if this is an attempt to work on people's psychology.

I didn't realize this was a thing that could be enabled/disabled per-game. I think all achievements on Steam come with the "x.x% got this" stat.

> I would assume there's some royalty type situation with gamepass where the games that get played more get some percentage of a pool.

My understanding is for non-exceptional games (like, not Fortnite-scale), they just provide a flat fee with a fixed-length contract. Your studio gets $X and it will be on GamePass for Y months. I'm sure gameplay stats are taken into account for future contract renewals or for other games with the same studio, but no, I don't think there is any kind of explicit revenue sharing going on. It can be a hard decision for studios, since they have to balance lost income from sales against the guaranteed income and added publicity from being on GamePass.

Source: Stuff I remember from podcasts, mostly Brandon Sheffield on Insert Credit. Sorry, I know that's not a great reference =/

Because that's not what gives them money. They are tracking what games bring in new subscribers.

Is the xbox division the main gaming division of MS?

Games aren't bad for MS, It brings in more than 3 billion a quarter.

How many times have you seen I do most of my stuff on Linux but I still boot in to windows for games. An independent xbox would be less likely to use Windows for their OS.

Given how badly the Xbox for Windows system functions (lots of games don't even support the Xbox Series S/X controller reliably until you set them up to use Steam as their launcher), it already seems like the Xbox organization doesn't think much about Windows.

> spin-off Xbox into a separate company. I can't imagine the division is all that profitable

only like $5 billion in annual revenue, doubt they'll want to let that go for no reason.

I guess it could reduce the risk of another platform creating network effects.

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