421–430 of 590 posts
I still don't get how $69B is a reasonable deal. Acti-Blizzard have been making 7-8B net the last few years, so it will take MS 10 years assuming constant returns just to break even. Why is it a good deal, especially in gaming. What does MS want with the customer base?
We likely won't see any real effects of this until the next generation of consoles, but I think in 3-4 years it is going to be very interesting to see what happens with gaming. 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…
You just repeat Microsoft's arguments, that's flawed and biased 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 inco…
I keep my fingers crossed for the revival of the StarCraft franchise. I grew up with the game, and it's kinda sad to see the current state of SC2: old bugs, new bugs, community trying to take over the processes but having a very bumpy ride, opaque decision making (de-facto spokespersons/community figures under muddy NDAs), and unfortunately all our 2010 fears (no local/LAN play!) coming true, when server outages are…
As a StarCraft 2 fan, I’m actually quite happy with the current game balance. The last two rounds of balance patches from the community were far better for the playability and fun of the game. It was alarming when Blizzard cut funding for GSL and it looked like the Korean scene was practically done, but Afreeca and the community pulled together and kept that prize pool interesting enough for the Korean pros.
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well, assuming there's actually a cloud gaming market. A fact that's still up for debate I think.
15 years is a long time though. I suspect we're not far away from being able to sell a 100$ device, that can AI reconstruct and upscale a super compressed video feed, so that you can stream with lower latencies or even with worse connections. 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 (assu…
That makes absolutely no sense. There is no possibility for a AI algorithm to be more efficient than a simple compression and decompression.
I still don't get how $69B is a reasonable deal. Acti-Blizzard have been making 7-8B net the last few years, so it will take MS 10 years assuming constant returns just to break even. Why is it a good deal, especially in gaming. What does MS want with the customer base?
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> needs a strong internet connection I've used Xbox Cloud Gaming on a cheap $300 Walmart laptop all over my home on WiFi, several different cafe/bar WiFi networks, and several places tethered to my phone without any real playability concerns. I might not recommend it if you're playing some kind of twitch shooter kind of game, but I've played a lot of Forza, Starfield, Gotham Knights, and Ghost Recon Wildlands on it.
I'm surprised, I had pretty much the opposite experience. I used Xbox Cloud Gaming to play through Halo 5 (the only game in the series to not have a PC port) in four sessions over a few months, wrapping up last weekend. I'm on a high spec desktop playing with an Xbox controller connected by USB. The desktop is on Ethernet, 200 Mbps down / 30 Mbps up. In my experience, the game frequently failed to start. Most often I…
I definitely got that a bunch right after Starfield launched, but it balanced out after several days. The period leading up before and after were and have been much better. Still happens sometimes though.
It's definitely not 4K, I'll grant you that. Playing Starfield locally installed on my desktop definitely gives a better framerate and higher quality, but ultimately I've put more hours in on cloud gaming simply because it's everywhere I have internet. I can play on my phone and an Xbox controller, anywhere.
I don't have much input lag, but I'm in a pretty well connected part of the country. On my phone right now ive got 20ms to microsoft.com, 19ms to google.com. At home on WiFi these values are in the low single digits. I dont know where Microsoft's servers are for the cloud gaming, that might be a part of it.
I still don't get how $69B is a reasonable deal. Acti-Blizzard have been making 7-8B net the last few years, so it will take MS 10 years assuming constant returns just to break even. Why is it a good deal, especially in gaming. What does MS want with the customer base?
MS has some obvious synergies with ATVI.
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> needs a strong internet connection I've used Xbox Cloud Gaming on a cheap $300 Walmart laptop all over my home on WiFi, several different cafe/bar WiFi networks, and several places tethered to my phone without any real playability concerns. I might not recommend it if you're playing some kind of twitch shooter kind of game, but I've played a lot of Forza, Starfield, Gotham Knights, and Ghost Recon Wildlands on it.
You must not be sensitive to lag or low latencies. Some players have no issue playing a 30fps games with dips into the 10s for example. Others do. For me, it's just simply not up to the quality I can enjoy the game at.
It's not 4K 120FPS, but on a 1080p laptop the quality was fine. Maybe unacceptable when playing on a 70" TV, but a 14" laptop or a 1920x1200 27" screen it's fine. Not as nice as natively rendered, but way nicer than what that $300 laptop could have done on its own!
It never dropped into the 30s, I consider framerates like that unplayable.
UK regulators were objecting the deal because they were concerned that the takeover would reduce competition in cloud gaming. 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 we…
Does this mean World of Warcraft will eventually be playable on Ubisoft's competitor to Nvidia's GeforceNow?
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.
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> 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?
Why are people acting like gamepass is a good thing