Microsoft completes $69B deal to buy Activision Blizzard
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
SC2 is still the best RTS there is. Immortal, Stormgate, and ZeroSpace are all showing great promise, but none of these is even at the public alpha stage. So SC2, with all of its problems, it is.
Warcraft 3 was a great balance between micro and macro management due to the Hero concept. SC always just felt like a game of numbers… but I am sure I just wasn’t as experienced.
Regardless I would love it if the genre stayed alive and I am glad Age is continually updated and stable.
Ms bought Skype - useless as Zoom won the Covid era
MS bought Lynda.com- who?
MS bought LinkedIn- does anyone pay $90 a month to use it?
MS bought Danger - the best tactical keyboard mobile phone. DEAD
MS bought Halo vr system a $3509 pos that never got an update
Ms buys stuff , never making stuff.
I expect starcraft would be the same, maybe cant go back to it former glory but atleast it would be alive especially if make it to gamepass
You end up with a design by committee with minimal community input, which feeds the cycle back into balance whine shitposts and YT reaction videos. It's arguably better than nothing, but far from healthy.
I miss David Kim.
There's always a chance and I hold onto hope. Baldur's Gate 3 is a CRPG with a budget way beyond what I would ever be comfortable risking on a genre that has been fairly niche in the overall video game landscape for 15+ years, and it paid off massively. However, being realistic, BG3 is a game that is strong regardless of your skill level and the other genres I've mentioned struggle with that.
Interesting take. Why do you think that is? They just fallen out of fashion or something else?
Hell one need only look at the size of this years EVO.
If you're looking for a more fair match, and don't mind SC2 being a very different game, you should give it a try. If you can max out on literally anything before 15:00 and a-move your opponent, you will probably get a 50% winrate.
I wish star craft had a "scatter" button to space out your units like command and conquer has (its been a decade but I think the button is X). Maybe even some formation options to avoid everyone packing in a tight ball where the move command is issued. AOE is so lethal in SC I think it hurts the gameplay.
Its a safety issue as well. Pro terrans often have wrist issues from splitting their units. With the other races it isn't as crucial, but still an issue.
What deep pocketed Microsoft could do is really up the ante and make the prize money for tournaments of say Quake (they own ID) or SC2 and others really high and attract even more buzz etc etc.
I just hope these games and IP don’t just become afterthoughts. Will we get a demonic hell on earth new doom game? Will we get an even more hellish Diablo game? Will we get a SC3?
With all these game studios under one roof I wonder how many games will get axed in the pursuit of “synergies”?
I could easily claim the opposite. There's very little to no mention of SC2 for Blizzcon '23 as well.
Also I wonder why "World of starcraft" never happened. Terran would play like kinda like Planetside, zerg could play like the alien team in Natural Selection, protoss like the predator in the AVP games.
Microsoft gave game streaming rights to Ubisoft, which made the Activision deal possible: https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/13/why-microsoft-had-to-relin...
"For Ubisoft, this deal means it has full and exclusive cloud-streaming rights to all current commercially available Activision games, as well as those released in the next 15 years." !!!
Ubisoft is the real winner here.
That last part is also why I think the Ubisoft deal is probably funny. Rumors are Ubi is also leasing much of their cloud gaming from Azure's white box version of xCloud, so Microsoft is likely still going to get paid for people playing Activision things through Ubi's so far unfinished cloud gaming app.
As a gamer, few things would turn me away from a potential purchase more than the phrase "cloud gaming app". It sounds like DRM-infected bloatware ready to kick me from a server the moment my connection even hiccups. Only "cloud gaming app, now by Microsoft" could be worse.
I think this is why tech companies keep trying to implement cloud gaming and it keeps flopping with consumers. Tech industry people who aren't much of gamers themselves think there is some large untapped market of people who aren't gamers right now but could become gamers if the barrier to entry were lowered. In theory that logic makes sense but in practice that market just doesn't materialize. The barrier to entry for gaming is already quite low, it's a very cheap hobby and almost everybody who really wants to play games has already found a way to do so without cloud gaming.
If you're the kind of gamer who does love having a collection of old games you go back to, then yeah its pretty terrible.
The "neat" thing about xCloud is that you can try it for free under most Game Pass subscriptions. I think that is actually where "cloud gaming" currently excels, as a faster/better/glorified replacement for the old "Demo" games and modes. (Try a Game Pass game for a bit without downloading it, on a day where you expect few connection hiccups, to see if it is worth the hour or so wait while it downloads.) I think that is also part of why xCloud probably does have large MAU numbers.
I've tried to see if xCloud is also useful on my mobile devices for on-the-go gaming, but the connection issues have mostly tanked that for me. (I do know people using it to play games on the Steam Deck that the Steam Deck doesn't as well support; but they generally play at home on home connections even if they prefer the "mobile-like" form factor of the Deck.)
But yeah, the argument is that the audience for "cloud gaming" is incredibly limited (needs a strong internet connection, doesn't want to invest in up-to-date gaming hardware, or wants stranger form factors) and always will be, which is why it is fascinating that Microsoft got so much flak from the UK commissioners about controlling the current "cloud gaming" marketplace: Microsoft seems to be the most successful mostly just because it is an incredibly limited audience with few gamers interested. Most everyone else who has tried to enter the market, including Google, has failed to find players. (nVidia seems the next most successful and even they admit it is a niche side-project for them. They've been partly so successful by how much money they haven't spent and how cheap they've managed to run it so far, comparatively to the investments of their peers and bigger companies like Amazon and Google.)
Then again, for a lot of these games you currently get some level of advantage for throwing a lot of money at your system so you can run with better settings at a faster framerate, so maybe it's not so much less fair as differently fair.
Having your competitive game reduced to pure input output doesn't solve cheating (especially in an age of image recognition and trained AI/ML), but it does even the playing field a lot.
I use it regularly for single player games and it's quite nice! AFAIK they have the biggest supported library yet that is still my biggest issue with it: it doesn't support some of the games I'd like to play on it!
I had the best experience, quality wise, with Stadia though.
Provided you have a good internet connection, if you could just run a AAA game off of your crummy computer or tv, why would you buy an expensive graphics card? It is definitely where things are going.
For example looking at September's games by MAUs[1], #6, #10 and #17 seem like good fits for cloud gaming, but the rest seem like a bad fit for cloud with fairly benign recommended hardware and latency sensitivity. Developers seem to be aware and willing to target fairly modest hardware specs for these titles as well. For example the new CoD's recommended GPU requirements is a 1070 and previous game was a 1060, which matches up with Steam hardware surveys.[2]
[1]https://newzoo.com/resources/rankings/top-20-pc-games
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/steam-survey-results-june-...
there's no need to rent a PC 50ms-100ms away for esports when a bottom of the range PC will happily run it at 144fps
Latency concerns, connection reliability, and bandwidth are all potential factors.
It’s the opposite of what I want!
With cloud gaming it's possible to playing field far more, because competitions can now force the same latency by introducing artificial latency.
Cloud gaming also eliminates cheats like wall hacks (or fog of war removal), which is currently possible because the game client and rendering engine all run on a local machine.
Playing a game with latency is horrible, be it artificial or not. If you want the pinnacle of any esport, it will be played on LANs and never streamed.
It's a subpar experience that almost exclusively casual gamers deem acceptable.
Nvidia seems to be leading the way here.
But imagine in the cloud, they only needed to render games at 320p, and then they'd stream it compressed at low bitrate using H266 (assuming it's out in a few years). Then your "console", only needs to AI regenerate and upscale the feed, and it ends up looking photo-real or close to it.
You could even explore methods of compression on the video that the AI is best as reconstructing from.
That makes absolutely no sense. There is no possibility for a AI algorithm to be more efficient than a simple compression and decompression.
That said, I think I remember hearing that Overwatch (or maybe Overwatch 2, I honestly haven't played either and don't have strong enough associations to differentiate between them in what I've read) either is already or is going to be made available to play via Steam, which would be a pretty stark departure from Blizzard's usual insistence on using the Battle.net client for their games, and I wouldn't be surprised if in the long run things get more streamlined between former Blizzard properties and other Microsoft owned games. When the initial deal was announced (back before all of the process around approvals started), I remember a lot of people half-joking that it wouldn't take long for Microsoft to just make WoW subscriptions part of Gamepass, which still doesn't seem _that_ far fetched to me, and I certainly wouldn't be at all surprised if some Blizzard games end up being available through the Microsoft store on Windows. If this does happen, I hope that they don't complete deprecate the "old" ways of launching the games mostly because Blizzard games often work extraordinarily well via Wine, and at least as far as I'm aware, there isn't any super reliable way to install and run games from the Microsoft store on Linux.
But presumably they could sell their rights or license them to others, so who knows how this will actually play out.
Putting Nintendo aside since they really don't compete, they are kinda just in their own "Nintendo" space and that isn't a bad thing.
But Sony having some real competition is a good thing. Sony has a bad tendency of anti-consumer tendencies in their gaming space when they are the leader and they get cocky. They did it with the PS3 and they are repeating some of that with the PS5 generation.
Not that Microsoft hasn't engaged in some of their own practices, but at the moment we have a basically unchecked Playstation and that is bad for the gaming industry. We need real competition in the gaming space.
We can argue all day that Microsoft could have built their own studios, but IP is also very important. So are established developers with a certain style of game associated with them.
Will this actually be good for the gaming industry? I don't know. But I know that the current situation isn't good either.
I'm curious about which "anti-consumer practices" Sony is responsible for, that Microsoft isn't.
So far it seems to me that Sony did acquire some gaming studios, but mostly smaller ones. Microsoft has recently bought two big studios with massive franchises, of which some are already not available for Sony platforms.
Backwards compatibility: It was a mess on the PS3 with different launch models having different levels of compatibility. They later removed this functionality completely on the PS3. The PS4 had no backwards compatibility for PS3 instead you had to purchase (or subscribe) to play games in the cloud, games you may already own.
Compared to Xbox which the Xbox One did not launch with backwards compatibility once the leadership was changed they started a project to bring backwards compatibility to Xbox 360 and OG Xbox games (admittedly on a limited basis but you could stick in your original disks and it worked, no extra charge). This carried over to the Series consoles.
Related to this Sony has re-released their games many times and been able to thanks to the lack of proper backwards compatibility.
The price of the PS3.
The cell processor of the PS3, Sony thinking that devs would bend over backwards to support their architecture.
Paying developers either for exclusive content or for exclusive third party games. The content is the one that really drives me insane because if you buy a game on another platform you are getting less content for the same money.
Blocking cross play with other consoles for a long time and then only allowing it in certain situations (I don't actually know if this has improved yet or not).
There are likely a few others that I can't remember right now but I am about to hop into a meeting. But has Microsoft done some of these things? yes, but before Phil Spensor came in and changed Xbox.
I don't see how using the Cell processor could be considered "anti-consumer". After all, we are talking about a time when consoles didn't generally use "off the self" processors - Nintendo had a customized PowerPC, too. Using more generic architectures is a quite recent development.
> Paying developers either for exclusive content or for exclusive third party games.
Both Microsoft and Nintendo do this, in different ways. Let's not forget that some of Microsoft exclusives came from Rare and Bungie, studios with a relatively long independent history.
> There are likely a few others that I can't remember right now but I am about to hop into a meeting. But has Microsoft done some of these things? yes, but before Phil Spensor came in and changed Xbox.
Spencer was the GM all the way back to 2014, so I don't think that's true.
On the other hand, I honestly cannot believe that we are discussing if Microsoft is more anti-consumer, or more monopolistic, than Sony.
I have several Xbox games that have to be played on original hardware and are not supported by backwards compatibility, and Nintendo only ever supported previous systems when they did offer backwards compatibility.
You missed Sony removing Other OS, SACD playback, and other on the box features from the PS3. I still have no idea how they got away with that.
By contrast the Xbox 360 was built with a relatively simple tri-core PPC G5 which mapped to the hardware of the hardware of the Xbox One much better. The OG Xbox was just a Pentium III PC which no doubt made backwards compatibility with it much simpler (just need to virtualize an Xbox).
Microsoft has also had its own share of consumer unfriendliness, like the ridiculously expensive WiFi dongle for the 360 or how the current gen Xbox uses a proprietary expansion card slot for storage upgrades (contrasted with the PS5 which just needs a mid-to-high spec NVMe SSD like you’d put in a PC).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
PS5 is widely regarded as the best playstation experience since the PS2.
Great backwards compatibility and third-party support.
[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-raises-price-of-playstatio...
Yes the PS5 is successful and they are now making some cocky decisions because of it. I also believe that they made some cocky decisions with the PS5 given how well the PS4 was.
In the same regard they made some decisions with the PS3 because of how well the PS2 did. The exception then was gamers reacted negatively so they were forced to change. This time that is not happening.
A little reminder: https://twitter.com/shinobi602/status/1712869694833643528
Since 2018:
- Sony: 10 acquisitions
- Microsoft: 15 acquisitions + 12 with this one, total: 27
How many 1st party games Microsoft have released this gen? How many for Sony? Yeah right.. Don't you think that's where the problem lies?
Is "Sony cocky", or is Microsoft lazy and incompetent?
Sounds like it's the latter + hardcore lobbying (or corruption at this point) all around the world, yet again..
Nintendo "don't compete"? Nintendo "is just in their own 'Nintendo'" space? Oh come on..
https://www.ign.com/games/the-legend-of-zelda-tears-of-the-k...
Personally, I think the entire "console" industry is just a bunch of predatory anti consumer bullshit, and all 3 of those companies should be forced to end a huge list of harmful business practices.
The part that always confuses me is why the heck does the government keep deciding to protect Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo's monopolies? These 3 companies always seem to get special treatment, such as with the DMCA exception and the recent California right to repair exception for game consoles. This literally only protects 3 nonessential entertainment companies, two of which aren't even from the US. The piracy argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny, so I don't get it. ESA lobbyists are probably really good at their jobs I guess.
It does not matter what the industry is, a 70 billion acquisition from one of the only trillion-dollar companies just is not a good thing.
We live in an unprecedented amount of consolidation, meaning that in every market, there are less and less players competing against each other. How is that a good thing exactly?
Also, the standard for what constitutes anti-competitive behaviour is different in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The US uses higher pricing as the prime signal, whereas the EU uses a lack of viable competitiors.
I don't know if Microsoft will be a better custodian of all that gaming history, but as the company most synonymous with the PC today, maybe they will. (If so, among other possibilities PC Game Pass could get very interestingly different from Xbox Game Pass.)
Halo is a shell of what it once was and has snubbed the players with false promises in recent iterations (couch co-op used to be a staple of Halo but they reneged on their promise to include it with the latest).
AFAIK they haven't had any good exclusive IP for Xbox in a while. They've had a few dynamite hits (ex. Sunset Overdrive) but haven't followed up on any that I'm aware of.
I don't think this is a point against Microsoft, they owned both Halo and Bungie during the golden era. The quality dropped off sharply once Bungie decided to work on other projects and Microsoft had to put together a new team to replace them. If they're still capable of supporting game studios however they did with Bungie, it could be exactly what Blizzard needs.
IMO, exclusives are one of the biggest issues with game systems nowadays, especially now that consoles are basically just reskinned and optimized computers.
Contrast with Activision's stewardship of grinding their workers in to bloody dust, and sprinkling sexual abuse on top. Kotic has to go. Before this acquisition became a news story the news was full of employee lawsuits and California itself initiating action against the awful management.
If life gets considerably better for Blizzard workers under new leadership, they can make better products.
Microsoft has done a singularly great job valuing the communities around games, often more than the companies they acquired.
Activision in particular was the death of Blizzard. They have a poor reputation which is very well deserved. I consider this acquisition a rescue of IP I’d given up on. I’m looking forward to the next chapter under Microsoft.
For context, it’s important to review Microsoft revenue in gaming (a loss) and how they justify it - they see gaming as a brand play. Unlike most AAA corporations in gaming, protecting the brand of their games and studios is far more important to them.
There is no such thing as "free". We will pay for it later.
once you start exploring gamedev, FGC, or retro gaming cultures, you find more interesting people that care about game mechanics. your average call of duty player would put up with the verification can system if it meant they keep getting their gaming fix.
Everything will just get slowly worse.
So in the end, the electorate is not choosing a representative that represents them. Or, these niche concerns are not the concerns of the majority of the electorate.
With something like Ranked choice voting, competition would be introduced into the electoral system. Making 3rd parties viable will also give a larger percentage of the electorate representation in government. Plus more people will be engaged in the political process.
CGP Grey has a short and informative video on the topic, as well as videos on alternative electoral systems we could use. All his videos on other topics are top notch if you got some free time, check him out.
How we vote is controlled by the states, so we don't need to beg the two mainstream political parties to get this done.
I believe a couple states already have done away with FPTP voting, so it's possible. Alaska and Maine IIRC.
Oregon recently is looking into doing it as well but I am not sure if they passed it yet.
you mean protrust lobby :)
Tech companies have long understood, and in fact may be entirely predicated upon the understanding that you can leverage one monpoly to create another.
If I make a game that can only run on your platform, then you gain a monopoly on platforms that can run that game. These platforms then become not fungible, and therefore de facto monopolies. There is a certain amount of "we haven't tried to port our game to other platforms", which probably shouldn't be an explicit violation of the law, but entering an exclusivity contract with a game studio is, in my opinion, a pretty clear restraint of trade.
There are many other outlets for distribution, including the plain Jane internet, on all the platforms it's available for. Notably, this includes SteamOS devices like the Steam Deck, something no other console officially offers, as far as I'm aware.
Valve is remarkably fair.
Regarding at least the Blizzard side of the acquisition, I feel like Microsoft ownership may end up being a good thing for their underused IP. Microsoft has strong incentives to release RTS (StarCraft, Warcraft) games to bolster PC usage for gaming and maybe bring more attention to the Windows Store (IMO forcing minecraft onto the Store was a blunder as the upgrade experience was fucking terrible) if they choose to use it.
In fairness to Microsoft, "half-baked" would be how I describe all of Bethesda's previous releases as well. I don't think Starfield is that far off how Skyrim or Fallout 4 was on release. Starfield's a long shot from where Skyrim and Fallout are now after years of patches and DLC, but I think not far from where they started.
> Regarding at least the Blizzard side of the acquisition, I feel like Microsoft ownership may end up being a good thing for their underused IP. Microsoft has strong incentives to release RTS (StarCraft, Warcraft) games to bolster PC usage for gaming and maybe bring more attention to the Windows Store (IMO forcing minecraft onto the Store was a blunder as the upgrade experience was fucking terrible) if they choose to use it.
Blizzard needs focus, though time will tell if Microsoft can help with that.
Overwatch is a mess right now. The release of Overwatch 2 has gone poorly. The balance is poor. They only do patches like twice a quarter, so it feels like they always have to make very conservative changes because who knows how this change interacts with the 30 other ones in the patch notes. It means heroes that are broken or unplayable tend to stay so for months on end. The pro league is in shambles in the best case, and dead in the worst and most likely. They've been losing players. PvE never really launched, and now they're charging extra for the shitty scraps that came out of it.
Diablo 4 is basically dead. 5 million players on launch, 300k last month. They're down to ~5% of the players they started with a year after launch. The core gameplay was not fun, and I can't believe no one noticed it forever ago.
WoW is WoW, but it's stale. The most exciting thing they've done in ages was re-releasing old versions of the game. They're basically just waiting to get upended by something actually innovative.
At this point, I love Blizzard's characters and worlds, but I think their games are D tier. They have the half-finished feel of a Bethesda game, but they don't have any of the fun. They don't resemble the same Blizzard that originally released SC2 and WoW.
Word on the street is that the principals at the top of Obsidian and Bethesda still hate each other, Microsoft keeps them at arms distance, and Obsidian isn't in a rush to do a new Fallout game even if "Daddy Microsoft" forced Bethesda to share its toys with the other studios (just like "Daddy Interplay" used to do, which is part of what led to the mess of Obsidian, inXile, and Bethesda all having crazy drama with each other before Microsoft became the new Interplay of RPG company owners).
I think that Obsidian's Outer Worlds was a very good F:NV successor. It had most of the hallmarks of the Fallout universe, just tweaked with a bit more space sci-fi and a weirder sense of humor. One of the interesting things about Starfield to me is how often I'm comparing it to Outer Worlds (and how often it feels like Outer Worlds was the better more coherent story/RPG in a similar way to F:NV fans like to compare Fallout 3/4 on either side of F:NV).
The rumor mill suggests the opposite is true. Bethesda intended to ship the game over a year ago and Microsoft delayed it to make sure it wasn't the next No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk.
Bethesda has been consistently simplifying their games since Morrowind and I don't think they've ever had smooth launch.
While it's true Microsoft rushes many releases, I don't think they're entirely to blame in this case
Nuts & Bolts was a good Banjo game and close enough to "actual" for me. Sure, all the "building" mechanics were silly, but all the classic platforming was still there and the building mechanics just added more collectathons to series infatuated with collectathons. That felt very true to Banjo-Kazooie to me.
Rare's love affair with Kinect and building a lot of Kinect games would have never been questioned if it was a love affair with the Wii in the same time.
Similarly, overlooked treasures like Kameo and Viva Pinata would probably have tons of fans if they had released on Nintendo platforms.
Rare Replay reminded me that Rare has done three big pirate games in their history plus one of the most beloved sections of Banjo-Kazooie is pirate themed, so Sea of Thieves is just about the "Most Rare" that Rare has ever been. It's a delightful game and deserves the following that it has now. Hopefully "Safer Seas" in December will open up Sea of Thieves for more children and family play and for more players that can't yet see past the open-PvP to all the delightful Rare details and treasures inside.
Outside of that it's simply to try and narrow the (surprisingly large) Exclusives gap Sony has been enjoying the last decade or so.
> They own all the IP required to do a followup to Fallout New Vegas and NOTHING
I mean - didn't the team that would work on that launch Starfield in the last month?
Yep. Although one could argue there are are other studios who could be tapped to make a sequel.
Obsidian put out two games in the past two-ish years: Grounded (a co-op survival shooter) and Pentiment (a point-and-click murder mystery set in the middle ages). Both were well-received. In addition, Obsidian has also announced The Outer Worlds 2, a sequel to a game that (fairly or unfairly) was compared to F:NV.
They'll only step in directly if the studios are having problems they can't handle themselves, or performing very poorly.
They want the profit, not as much to direct everything on a micro-level.
EDIT: They will of course make more titles Windows/XBox exclusive too, which makes sense considering the investment.
Yeah, it's not like Microsoft ever bought a game studio that was making a highly-anticipated game, then made them release it as an XBox / PC Exclusive or anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(franchise)
https://www.halopedia.org/Halo:_Combat_Evolved_for_Macintosh
https://www.ign.com/articles/oblivion-remaster-fallout-3-rem...
MSFT will ensure that every possible MSFT product is adopted by the entire Activision organization.
*may have paramount cbs locking that up but Raven comes back to the family with id now
Windows is still the best alternative to expensive Macs (on mosty countries for common folks), or the Year of Desktop Linux right around the corner, but not thanks to Satya.
Linda Khan's article here is, IMO, one of the best overviews of why: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
What's frustrating is that this requires legislative change, which, given the current political climate, seems like a sisyphean task.
It is because Microsoft isn't anywhere close to being a monopoly in games.
You could have just read the comment to get the answer to your question.
hell, CMA only complained about the cloud business.
FTC tried to do something, but failed so spectacularly that even the judge had to say "you have to defend customers, not sony".
The whole monopoly argument doesn't work, we'll just end up with duopolies, or perhaps triopolies. See iOS vs Android.
What we need is an adjustment of the rules, where e.g. the top 10 companies instead of the top 1 company are treated as a monopoly from an antitrust point of view.
This will give consumers more to choose from.
I don't think we're anywhere near close to that in the videogame industry.
I mention this to my Eastern European friends and they laugh at the level of corruption the US complains about (compared to what they’ve had for decades+)
These days I’m not that sure that the case (only talking about the Eastern European countries in the US)
Sony's gaming revenue is ~26 B
8 % of MSFT's revenue is from gaming = ~15 B
Nintendo 12 B
ABK 8 B
EA 7.5 B
( and that isn't including tencent and netease. i didn't bother trying to find figures for them but they are in the running here too )
What's wrong with subscriptions? It lets a distributor scrape off the excess profit. Games are a hit driven business. It sounds great when a platoform offers two or three times the cost of development to a developer, but the model won't really work unless some titles make like 10x. Listen to Jason Blum explain why Netfilx is terrible for independent film.
You will just see a lot less independent developers (not hobbyists) and small publishers. Maybe no one cares. I will probably be retired by then.
If there are 3 roughly comparable companies that control 90% of the market, the competition is already low; if two of them merged, very little competition would remain. A duopoly is not as bad as a monopoly, but is still pretty far from an "efficient market".
But in this case, it will meaningfully reduce competition. For some reason UK's CMA only considered cloud gaming, which is a weird fixation. Maybe because it's an emerging market?
If all Activison Blizzard games become Xbox exclusive will reduce competition and screw consumers, yet that was dropped as a concern for who knows what reason.
2 of the biggest games ever belongs to them (Witcher and Cyberpunk)
And arguably having two IPs, both which are not original IPs, is not that huge.
Other than the fact that AAA companies can cut costs from this I'm not so sure about what people are negative on this one. So if you don't want to buy a PC or get an Xbox, but you really like CoD, you might be out of luck eventually. I would think that what we're really concerned about is whether indie studios can get off the ground and create new experiences.
Thus, even pure indy gamers are being harmed here. Worse it’s yet another sign that US regulators have no intentions of limiting monopolistic behavior.
https://www.axios.com/2022/03/03/embattled-activision-facing...
Caesar, Crash Bandicoot, Diablo, DJ Hero, Empire Earth, Gabriel Knight, Geometry Wars, Guitar Hero, Gun, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Hexen, Interstate ’76, King’s Quest, Laura Bow Mysteries, The Lost Vikings, Overwatch, Phantasmagoria, Pitfall, Police Quest, Prototype, Quest for Glory, Singularity, Skylanders, Solider of Fortune, Space Quest, Spyro the Dragon, StarCraft, Tenchu, TimeShift, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, True Crime, Zork, and probably a few others I missed.
Really, try GOG. You can download and install skyrim, and play it offline with no DRM or cloud/online/advertising/tracking nonsense.
MS has some obvious synergies with ATVI.
It's not the 80s anymore, so it's really weird to be treating games as an embarrassing hobby for boys, rather than part of the multibillion dollar entertainment industry.
More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37867334
Wtf is going on with the institutions that are meant to prevent this?
It’s the death of ownership. Everything you consume is now a subscription.
Gamepass will be the new norm.
He's getting rewarded for building a toxic, fratboy workspace, sexually and psycologically harassing women.
I wonder if Microsoft can be held accountable for allowing a sex predator like him to continue working.
What hurts way more at scale is the increasing monopolistic power of Microsoft Games. That should be the primary focus of everyone's attention.
This weakens Sony, Nintendo, Steam, Epic. The consumer. Everyone but Microsoft.
Microsoft can give away "experiences" under-cost and sink a lot of human attention into it. That translates to opportunity cost will be spent in the machine rather than distributed economies of innovation.
As a shareholder since 1999 my cost basis for my shares in ATVI is about $1.11 - Exiting at 95.00.
Pretty good return TBH.
Like I just don't understand what people expected. It's Fallout/Skyrim in space. It has a ton of the exact same mechanics, the exact same weak points, the exact same strong points. I'm sure I'll enjoy it, I'm just not chomping at the bit to have it right now and so will pick up the Game of the Year edition with all DLCs included for like $20 in a year or two.
If you like Bethesda games, you'll probably like Starfield. If you don't, you won't. I personally enjoy them, they're excellent "brain off" entertainment for me and at the same time I understand why some people don't like that, and that's also completely fine but I just don't get why people are flipping their lids in either direction. By all accounts (bearing in mind I haven't played it) it is exactly, 100% to the letter what I expected it to be.