Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard

“Due out in the first half of 2000, Halo will have a simultaneous release for PC and Mac, with multiplayer compatibility between the two operating systems. While you'll need a 3D card and a powerful system to take full advantage of the game's features, it'll be scalable so you can play it on less powerful machines.” http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/26/halo.idg/

Things got delayed ~18 months so Microsoft could port it to XBox thus waiting till November 2001. Then tacked on another 2 years to release it on Mac.

The PC gaming market is thriving thanks to Steam and indies.

Playstation is doing well. Switch is doing great.

Microsoft? Aside from providing Windows and DirectX, they're basically invisible. Xbox is just a cheap wannabe PC with no great games. It's a wonder they've supported it for this long. Maybe this acquisition gives them a fighting chance against Sony and Nintendo.

It's not like Activision and Blizzard are even particularly beloved, just pumping out endless sequels. They're steady but relatively soulless cash machines that don't really innovate anymore anyway.

Having Microsoft in control might improve their internal cultures, maybe make Blizzard games finally available on Steam, get more and Bethesda Xbox games on GeForce Now, etc. Maybe even make more games cross platform and with good controller support. Those all seem great. Meanwhile the real innovation will continue to come from indies while the behemoths just keep pumping out new graphics (which are often just Unreal anyway, which is again not Microsoft).

Microsoft is just too minor to be dominant in modern gaming, and Activision is a has-been that just keeps making filler titles. It's not some great loss to the industry. Now if someone acquired Valve, that would be a tragedy...

I feel like it's only bad because it's still mostly a half-way house. Slapping existing AAA titles onto networked GPUs and calling it a day streaming gaming in my view.

Streaming gaming is actually a thing for me when someone builds a game using it that would absolutely not be possible using traditional technology. For example, an MMO so massive that the average player's network stack couldn't handle all of the events, so the only rational option is to render everything on some supercomputer and ship the final frames.

Consider also that you can get a lot of reuse out of a particular scene graph if multiple players are in the same one. Many such cases in streaming gaming. There are new, multi-server engine architectures that will not be possible until we start saying things like "this will be a streaming-only exclusive". That is probably the scariest proposal an MBA in any AAA studio could hear in 2023, so I don't expect you will see Blizzard or Sony playing in this flavor of traffic any time soon.

Honestly I would cherish the moment. It would be the most likely path to actually seeing HL3 released. The one time the filthy capitalists manage to do a good thing...

Valve to me has become a pathetic, rent-seeking platform owner. No clue why the gaming community still holds them in such regard. Linux support and not being publicly traded must be a massive deal for some gamers I suppose. The indie developers who launch on their platform are much more deserving of your attention & praise. The guys who developed battle bit have done more to improve my gaming experience than anything all of Valve has done since Portal 2 was released over a decade ago.

Both in 2017:

7:13.9 - Chevrolet Corvette C7 Z06 Christian Gebhardt.

7:43.8 - Civic Type R, Honda didn't name the driver.

Having said that the Nintendo Switch competes against the Series X in my home for time. It has some seriously good titles that my son loves to play.