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Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B

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Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B

#381

Post by tubularhells »

nonbirithm wrote: post #311
tinus_hn wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For these big conglomerates, the trendy thing is to have your own games store. Complete with exclusivity deals How else are they going to get people to use these stores?

Also the fact that the Epic Games Store exists is a step towards countering Steam's monopoly on mainstream titles. People complain about the loss of functionality like screenshots or the in-game browser when using Epic. And there are exclusivity deals. Complaints against those things are valid, and the actual implementation of the storefront needs a lot of improvement, but I'm wondering if a Steam monopoly would have…

Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version). Epic has nothing to offer me.

Furthermore, I know some gamedevs personally who release an early access level title with exclusivity deal on epic's playform just so that they gain access to further funding to finish the game and release on Steam for the actual shot at success. They take advantage of the money to fund their work, but have said that the numbers do not compare to that of Steam.

Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B

#382

Post by dangoor »

NegatioN wrote: post #374
flipgimble wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that Zenimax corporate, and likely some unknown exec in that machine, had a long standing grudge against John Carmack made me loose so much respect for them. I may not always agree with Carmack from what I've read on twitter (he works for Facebook now) but I have the utmost respect for him, his transparency in his key note lectures, and his supremely engineering focused priorities. His leadership at id Softw…

Just wanted to point out a small discrepancy here: As his bio on Twitter says, he's currently an independent AI researcher. But also sometimes consults for Oculus VR, although not actively employed there anymore. [0] It'd be very interesting to see if his return to Id might spark some changes :) [0]: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack

Carmack's Facebook Connect talk last week[1] sure made him sound very plugged into what's happening at Oculus. I was surprised, given that I, too, thought he had essentially left for AI research.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y

Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B

#383

Post by xevrem »

wwright wrote: post #245
apatters wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore. My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one…

WoW Classic is Activision, isn't it?

correct, Activision-Blizzard

Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B

#384

Post by Osiris »

logicOnly wrote: post #116
apatters wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore. My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one…

This is the inevitable trend of gaming since the 90s. Small team makes innovative and interesting game. Gets bought, makes a good sequel, then milks IP forever. It's up to you to move on.

The trend is definitely moving away from many separate games and toward "living" games. Look at how many games these days end up just doing updates/DLCs over many years rather than releasing whole new versions of the game.

Look at Destiny, there was originally planned for Destiny 3, but now the plan is just to make Destiny 2 the only game for the next 10 years with constant content updates. Even now, Destiny 2 of today is a significantly different than Destiny 2 at release.

Microsoft/343 have indicated that "Halo: Infinite" is planned to be this way as well, a living game.

Even indie games like Astroneer and Don't Starve are going down this route of updating a single game over a long period of time.

I'm not sure if that should be considering "milking", but it's definitely a change from how things used to be done.

Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B

#385

Post by harimau777 »

apatters wrote: post #94
francis_t_catte wrote: post #22

Soon we'll just have Microsoft, Epic, and a conglomeration of EA, Activision, and Ubisoft after Bobby Kotick forces them all to merge. Facebook will bungle up any chance they have of capturing the gaming market after writing a cryptic paragraph about their legal right to request blood samples from all Oculous users in the TOS. Valve will quietly exit software development altogether, and pivot to building custom vanit…

Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore. My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one…

Indy is great if you like one of the genres where they excel (e.g. rogue like, deck builder, walking simulator, retro, traditional RPG, etc.). However, if you are into genres like modern FPS or open world action adventure then good indy games are difficult to come by.

Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B

#387

Post by qayxc »

smileybarry wrote: post #237
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to target Xbox, you need to write a D3D renderer anyway (although the Xbox API has some significant differences, if I understand correctly). There's little point writing an OpenGL renderer if your target platforms are Windows, Xbox, and PlayStation (which has its own graphics API). Also, my understanding is that on Windows, OpenGL generally runs into more issues with driver bugs than D3D does.

> Also, my understanding is that on Windows, OpenGL generally runs into more issues with driver bugs than D3D does. I'm not sure if that's the case anymore, but it definitely has a bad rep on Windows. Initially (throughout XP and maybe some of Vista) OpenGL support on Windows was done by a OpenGL -> DirectX translation layer, so performance was always worse in OpenGL mode unless a game's Direct3D implementation was e…

> Initially (throughout XP and maybe some of Vista) OpenGL support on Windows was done by a OpenGL

Initially (Windows 95), OpenGL support was provided directly by the OS. Starting with Windows 98, Microsoft stopped updating the OGL version of their reference driver, so users were stuck with OGL 1.1 unless the graphics card driver shipped with a custom OpenGL implementation.

So whenever an application uses an OGL version higher than v1.1, it is provided by the graphics card driver and that has nothing to do with DirectX. There is no translation layer in that case (unless of course, that's what the driver does internally, but that's up to the manufacturer).

TL;DR Custom OGL drivers shipped with every graphics card that supported OGL in Windows since 1998.

Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B

#388

Post by syshum »

Trasmatta wrote: post #377
syshum wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that confused me, is the Announcement says MS is acquiring Doom IP, but from what I can tell they are not acquiring id Software, so how is that going to work?

They're acquiring Zenimax, and Zenimax owns id software. So id is part of the deal.

That makes more sense, I now have read the MS Statement it was more Clear than the one I read earlier that made it seem like they were only buying Bethesda from ZeniMax not buying all of ZeniMax...

Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B

#389

Post by hn_acc_2 »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #379
apatters wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore. My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one…

I actually feel compelled to express an opinion regarding WoW classic: It's a garbage money grab. The idea that there is a huge nostalgia fueled demand for the original experience doesn't absolve a multi-billion dollar developer from a complete lack of support or quality of life improvements to the game. There is just too much overlap with the fact that they can literally re-release a game with practically zero devel…

That's not fair...

1) Costs were not zero for the re-release. The only version of the game data (stats, items, enemy spawns etc.) was in the form of an original database backup (from an old employee's personal stash!). Classic runs on the modern WOW engine, so work was required to shoehorn the old data in and reimplement systems and interfaces which don't exist in the current WOW engine.

2) Before Classic's release, by far the most vocal crowd making demands of Blizzard were shouting their slogan "NO CHANGES". I really don't find it surprising that Blizzard has not made major changes since the majority of the player base requested as such...

Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B

#390

Post by yxhuvud »

masklinn wrote: post #260
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paradox isn’t exactly an indie

Yeah Paradox is a publisher so there are indie paradox games (e.g. cities skyline) but CKIII is from one of their internal studios so… not indie.

On the other hand Paradox publishing parts grew out of distributing their own games using IP that they have developed themselves all the way back from the late 90s.
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