Does this mean that future versiona of Fallout will showcase Pip-Boys runnig Microsoft Windows?
Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
421–430 of 798 posts
Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I mean, Sega don't have the mindshare they used to when they owned hardware, but they're very much still a thing.
(replying to both you and the parent) It's a possibility but pivoting to software isn't easy by any stretch, and it wasn't something Sega should have even been able to do (financially.) The only reason it happened is because Sega's biggest debtor, Isao Okawa, forgave that debt on his deathbed. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/17/business/isao-okawa-74-ch... In a slightly altered timeline where Okawa didn't do this, Se…
Nintendo has famously large cash reserves rich and a quick Internet search suggests they have about 7 billion in cash. Things would have to go very badly for them to go out of business, especially as they can presumably issue new stock to help raise money for a pivot in some sort of doomsday scenario.
Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Right now, Steam is still the leader I wonder how they compare to Apple.
Apple probably doesn't have much revenue from the OS X desktop store, but if we're talking about total gaming revenue, Steam is around $5 billion/year and Apple is around $20 billion/year. Although I'm pretty sure Apple's # represents gross sales, not their 30% cut. I don't know if Steam's # is the revenue they receive after their cut, or if it's gross sales. If their # is the cut they take, they'd be far ahead of th…
The mobile gaming market and PC/console gaming are basically two distinct markets with very little overlap though.
Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tod…
The "living game" approach has to do with the cost of the DLC and the difficulty at moving the price point of a game (while costs to build it go up).
This allows the studio to make money on the game based on the continued DLC which needs less development investment.
It isn't so much "milking" but rather "acknowledging a change in the way games are monetized because the price of the initial game isn't changing."
Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
#425Incredible that Fallout and Obsidian are now under the same roof again. The Outer Worlds was fun, and I want to see Obsidians efforts continue. Still, new Vegas 2 would be fine too.
How is The Outer Worlds? I heard it is basically space Fallout, which if that is half as good as it sounds I am all over it.
It's definitely a spiritual successor to New Vegas, but overall it's much smaller in scope and (in my opinion) has a less satisfying progression system.
Pros: 1. Solid Writing: I found the story to be interesting and engaging. There's great ambient world building via notes you find and the main story is fairly interesting with lots of branching paths. 2. Flexible playstyles: they really committed themselves to allowing you to play how you want to. There are the standard melee and ranged playstyles, but stealth and speed are also completely viable for the entire game as well. 3. Combat: Combat is actually pretty good. They replaced VATS with a time dilation mechanic that is basically bullet time/slowmo. I played a ranged character so it felt cool to slow down time and get headshots, etc. Maybe it feels less good with melee characters, I don't know.
Cons: 1. Limited loot: This was a big dissapointment. There were only 2-3 weapons per category, plus a few special weapons thrown in. I felt like I basically had 2 guns for the entire game, which was a bit of a let down. It was disappointing to get the same generic gun again and again from enemies, especially compared to the huge variety of guns in NV. 2. Less exciting progression: They changed the perk system to be much simpler and there are many fewer perks to choose from. Around the mid game I basically had selected all the good perks and felt like there was no point in selecting new ones. You also get perks from leveling up skills but I found that those weren't well balanced and frequently the first tier of perk unlocks were way better than the later tiers, which didn't incentivize much specialization. 3. Setting: This one definitely comes down to personal preference but I was not a big fan of the aesthetic. They swapped 1950s nuclear age with 1920s art deco. Some of the environments and costumes look cool, but generally I found it to be less compelling and exciting than Fallout. This is arguably an unfair comparison because they had a big body of existing Fallout lore to build on for NV but IMO it's a much weaker universe - I can't see it being as interesting even after they make a few games in this setting.
Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
#426Earlier 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…
Blizzard did not charge for WoW Classic. It merely requires an active subscription to the regular game. There's no additional purchase or subscription.
The company invested significant development into Classic. The project started as a fork of Legion, in order to benefit from a decade of anti-bot measures, compatibility fixes, and Battle.net integration (auth and chat). They then ported the original game forward and added "layering" to avoid crashes that plagued the original game in 2004 and 2005.
Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, the joke is funny but realistically it's clear that Valve is getting back in the game, so to speak, and we're probably going to see some VR followup to Alyx in the next year or two.
I'm not sure about that. I read Alyx as a very successful tech demo intended to push the market sector out a bit and make money off the platform and hardware, rather than a renewed more games-centric direction for Valve. Much like iD's output often being tech demos for the game engines that they then license to other studios.
Tech demo? Have you played it?
It's a heck of a "demo". It's about the size of Half Life 2.
Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Epic is successful in their lawsuit against Apple, then I think it's only a matter of time before the consoles will have to allow alternate stores as well. The hardware-is-sold-at-a-loss argument that people like to use to defend closed console stores isn't as convincing when the console makers also own the biggest money making game studios as well. Go Epic, go!
Following from alternate stores on consoles, we're not far away from Valve's SteamBox, i.e. prebuilt PCs marketed for living room play. I'm disappointed the idea never took off. I would love the game industry to fully embrace Linux. If cloud gaming gains more traction, the industry might just do that. Why develop games to run on custom-built blades in a data center when generic blades exist?
> prebuilt PCs marketed for living room play
That's been a dream for a long time:
Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nintendo is self-sustainable, Apple is exerting a lot of influence among smaller studios with Arcade. Like Annapurna Interactive (which is nota bene funded by Oracle).
Nintendo is just two bad generations of hardware from being vulnerable enough to sell itself (IMO.) They had only $4.3 billion cash on hand as of 2018 (surely more by now thanks to the success and maturation of the Switch.) But Microsoft just dropped a little less than double that on ZeniMax. I wish Nintendo were in such a rock-solid place where I'd feel confident about them existing forever like Disney but I don't t…
Wow you say "only $4.3 billion" for not huge company.
Re: Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
The weird thing about F76 is that the monetization doesn't effect the game, it's just not very good. I have never supported a game through microtransactions, but I actually felt I wanted to for F76 as it seems like a candidate for a "Forever Game" fallout world that gets expanded upon. But they have nothing I would ever want to buy.
I hope this acquisition will fix Bethesda. Skyrim was their last game worth talking about, everything since then has either been effectively a Skyrim mod or a cash grab. With exception to Doom.
I loved Fallout 4