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Comment by izzydata | Hacker News Reader

It's strange to see some gamers praise this acquisition as if it will have any positive effect on some of the games they enjoy. In no world will Microsoft decreasing the competition going to be a good thing for consumers.

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Mostly its because Activision/Blizzard is such an obviously shitty terrible company that any deal that sees cool IPs taken out of their hands is seen as a positive thing.

One thing I see as an ancient PC Gamer is that Activision also sits on one of the largest hoards of IPs. Not just "cool" IPs from today's games (a lot of people are mentioning Activision's odd/bad stewardship of Blizzard, of course), but Activision bought a lot of the classic publishers in its history as a massive M&A shop. The legacies of Infocom, Sierra, Knowledge Adventure, Davidson, and many more both well known and almost forgotten to history developers and publishers have all been locked into Activision's forgetful vaults. It's such a huge swath of classic PC games. Some of that catalog Activision eventually allowed onto at least GOG (with GOG allegedly doing a lot of the preservation work to make them run), if not Steam, but there's still so much of gaming history that Activision has either claimed to have lost (No One Lives Forever, as one commonly discussed franchise) or just seems disinterested in the IP they own because they can't figure out how to build mobile games from it.

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.)

Are you saying I might see Torrin's Passage 2 now?

I also kind of wish to see that. Al Lowe is beyond retired at this point, but maybe Microsoft money can buy at least outlines of his four (!) proposed sequels.

Can you imagine a Leisure Suit Larry in 2023

I regret to inform you that the most recent original Leisure Suit Larry game, "Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice," came out in 2020 (2021 on console, 2022 on mobile).

If you're making a Larry game that's tame enough to be allowed on mobile/console stores, why even bother at that point.

Wow

Came here to say this. Activision has been such a poor steward of Blizzard's properties that I find them largely unplayable. It may be unlikely that Microsoft will course correct away from data-drive, engagement-focus mtx games, but I know Activision never will.

Rumor is that Bobby is stepping down once the acquisition closes, which is a good start.

He is gone on the 01.01.2024, until then he remains CEO

I've argued about this deal on Twitter at length, and the prevailing sentiment of those who favor this acquisition comes down to one thing, and one thing only: getting more AAA games "for free" on Gamepass. Discovering why these people call this an "increase in competition" will be an exercise for future generations of intelligence researchers.

Can't wait for the wailing and gnashing of teeth when the free ride ends and Microsoft starts turning the screws on their (now captive) audience.

I give it a few years before GamePass is as much a month as a full price game and the only way to make it a good deal is to convince yourself they you were going to buy at least one full priced game a month anyway.

I can only speak for myself. I was pretty keen on starcraft and starcraft 2 back in the day, and I made a decision a few years back that blizzard wasn't the sort of company I wanted to support with my money anymore.

Before or after the Activision aquisition?

I never played WoW, but I think every other game up to D3 is a masterpiece.

I don't know about the other fellow, but for me it was when they banned Blitzchung and revoked his prize money for saying "Liberate Hong Kong" on a stream.

Maybe from an artistic perspective, but not from a financial one. It will inevitably mean gamers will spend more money for less game. They might hide it will with their game renting service and microtransactions, but if this was not the case there would be no reason for them to acquire Activision Blizzard in the first place. They see some way to profit by reducing competition.

It is _possible_ that their rental bundle results in a better deal for a reasonable segment of the market than the aggregate of one-off title purchases would be. Though the lock-in means if they jack up the price it might become a poor deal after the fact. Or if you are the kind of person that would purchase fewer games than the total subscription fees would cost, it also wouldn't be better. But sometimes bundling is indeed a better deal for consumers.

As a gamer, I'm most interested in the artistic perspective.

Which games has MS shown good stewardship of?

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.

Age of Empires, for one. Thoughtful updates and remastered versions that aren’t priced like new games. Then new games that are actually worth the update. Can’t wait for that same ethos to be applied to Warcraft.

I love SC2 and think it is one of the best esport games. However it is considered a "classic game" for Blizzard and they have a skeleton crew maintaining it. Funding for professional events has been decreasing consistently and especially reduced in 2023. There was a recent controversial balance patch that highlighted problems with community interaction and communication -- and no one knows how soon until a new patch might be deployed. (While it's also true that most fears by players are overblown). Basically, the whole community just holds its breath hoping things continue as they are and the other shoe never drops on a 13 year old game.

Best case scenario is that Microsoft embraces these properties and revitalizes them without ruining the game in the process. Worst case is they kill it completely...

I’m not sure what Blizzard’s strategy with esports is (or now Microsoft’s), but they basically imploded the official Overwatch league by being extremely ambiguous about whether or not it would continue, buying out franchise contracts to leave the league, and leaving Twitch for YouTube.

Microsoft definitely takes the Halo esports scene seriously, so running an esport well is definitely in their skillset. Hopefully those people are paying attention and want to get promoted.

>Halo is a shell of what it once

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.

Exclusive IPs aren’t and shouldn’t be a marker of good stewardship.

IMO, exclusives are one of the biggest issues with game systems nowadays, especially now that consoles are basically just reskinned and optimized computers.

Sunset Overdrive was a single game publishing contract with Insomniac Games best known for its Sony second party games and now entirely owned by Sony since 2019 (just after Sunset Overdrive). Microsoft can't follow up on Sunset Overdrive.

I don't know if you count it as a game, but Flight Simulator? Sure there was a decade or so when nothing happened, but I think they more than made up for that.

Forza is pretty good

I used to love their games, the past decade has been nothing but a slog for them. I'm hoping M$ might be able to turn some of that around.

I think at least as far as Blizzard is concerned the prevailing mood amongst players is given the current state of their games, chances are any change would be better than no change.

Like MS has a good track record with improving studios they acquire ... Studios under them seem to succeed despite them not because of them.

MSFT as an employer and work environment has industry standard (very good) ESG / DEI stuff, and work life balance is apparently excellent.

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.

Arguably their best and most succesfull games were produced by hard grinding devs that loved the game they were wotking on and the gamers that played them.

You can feel about ESG/DEI however you wamt, but it has nothing to do with producing great games.

What if you feel that it’s integral to producing good games because it means people who care about it will come work there.

This fetishization of crunch as somehow unavoidable is disgusting.

Or maybe people that don't care about games nor gamers will prefer to work there and spend their time on other things, who's to say?

The 'modern' output is what it is and it was disliked by the majority of the player-base, so much that if it wasn't for re-releases of the old content some of their franchises would be near dead.

Your argument that gaming is getting worse and more popular is absurd on it’s face.

The sexual abuse scandal is what finally broke me free from World of War craft. I had been playing WoW since the invite only beta.

My gaming backlog is still insanely huge and I won't be going back.

The relevant competition is between Xbox and PlayStation exclusive titles. Xbox has essentially no exclusive titles that are any good, while PlayStation has many. It will make Xbox more competitive, theoretically. Though I don’t think Activision Blizzard has any great games these days anyway.

I completely disagree. I’m a long-time gaming enthusiast who has followed Activision, Blizzard, and Microsoft Xbox since their beginnings.

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.

Because it means more games for GamePass and Geforce NOW.

Chances are games will be added to the gamepass, meaning we get these for essentially free.

> meaning we get these for essentially free.

There is no such thing as "free". We will pay for it later.

I'm paying now. Like $15/mo or so. And I download $300/mo worth of titles. So what's the concern?

That’s called a bait-and-switch. Once physical games are no longer a thing, I would expect to see the GamePass library shrink, the subscription get more expensive, or some other unanticipated switch that drives up the cost. Companies don’t operate at a loss[0] for the benefit of their customers. They’re conditioning players to later extract more value later.

0 - https://www.thegamer.com/microsoft-xbox-game-pass-negatively...

Legislation can prevent these things from happening.

That said, your scenario is probably more likely without a massive cultural shift or the introduction of Ranked choice voting.

The same thing that happened with Netflix. Everybody loved it when it started, now things come in and out of the catalog, quality has gone down, prices have gone up ads have been added, and you need to subscribe to 10 other services as well.

Why are people acting like gamepass is a good thing

Because it is for now. If they mess with it then it'll not be a good deal and folks will leave it.

The first part of all the shit that's bad, is to have a phase where it's good first.

"It's good for now" is just the typical path to it becoming shit.

This is as equally true of "it's shit now and will continue to be". Capitalism demands profits and enshitification ensues. Might as well enjoy what you can while you can.

My guess is that they'll introduce tiers where your current price gets much less access. Presumably this will be done when customers have no where else to go for the titles that they want. Customers will get angry, many tweets will be sent, many articles will be written, maybe MSFT will even issue a statement saying they will pause the plan until they can "better communicate the value to our customers". Then, they will jam the plan thru anyways and their customers will deal with it. This movie is a remake.

I'm more concerned that I won't have access to the games because I don't play on Xbox or Windows.

So you campaigned against Sony buying Bungie too, right?

I thought it was terrible news. But Bungie is so much smaller than ActiBlizz - they have one active franchise in one genre and maybe another one starting soon in roughly the same genre. Meanwhile ActiBlizz has something like a dozen popular franchises.

It's like the difference between Comcast buying a small, local ISP vs. Comcast buying Verizon in terms of scale and number of people impacted.

I've been campaigning against this consolidation since EA bought Westwood in '98.

To be frank, Sony seem to have bought Bungie more for its live service expertise than its IP. Not fond of this direction but it's hard to argue that Sony bought them to starve Microsoft of game releases - Bungie has like one franchise that's so-so in popularity.

I do agree here, but also I think if a company is acquiring to give an even better service to their own users it's a good thing (as one of those users). I'm sure I read they've agreed to keep them cross-platform so it won't impact Playstation users (maybe a delay with new games being released on Playstation, like how FF16 isn't on Xbox yet) - but what I am really hoping for is the games simply become part of the Xbox Ultimate subscription.

For me personally, neither Activision nor Blizzard has released a game I wanted to play since Legacy of the Void (2015). This will not have any impact on how I play games for at least the next 3 years.

I have long term fears that month-to-month game subscriptions will eat the world and in 15 years people pay for games in the same way they currently pay for streaming videos ($10-$20/mo to many content providers).

You can play via cloud streaming on other devices.

That's just playing on Xbox/Windows with extra steps.

Because the gaming culture isn't like the FOSS culture.

it should

mainstream gaming is closer to crack addict culture than anything else

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.

kpop culture is closer to "crack addict culture" than mainstream gaming.

People should enjoy doing what they like so long as they don't hurt themselves or others

We all die at the end of our lives, so do what you love.

I've only ever seen gamers grouse about this acquisition fwiw

Then you haven't spent any time on Twitter.

How familiar are you with Activision?

most gamers are just mindless addicts at this point. Activision started releasing almost same game every year and they still buy that game. It even has same name (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare) as old versions without being remastered or sth. Blows my mind.

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