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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

#211

Post by djsumdog »

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…

There are a lot of great Indie titles, and you can get a lot of them DRM free on Humble or Gog.

I've loved a lot of Devolver's stuff. The Red String Club, Hotline Miami I/II, Katana ZERO .. all super incredible games with gameplay and story that's just as fun as the any of the big AAA shops.

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

#212

Post by acomjean »

Microsoft bought Bungie in 2000. -(Halo was going to be for mac, and demoed by Steve Jobs who I guess made it look so great Bungie sold.)

released a bunch of very successful games as xbox exclusives.

7 years later Bungie left microsoft as its own company again. (not sure how that happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie

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

#213

Post by save_ferris »

QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #194
curiousllama wrote: post #172

Microsoft is just trying to recreate console lock-in without having to subsidize hardware so much. (1) Microsoft is trying to expand their gaming division, but struggle with first-party games. This acquisition is an acknowledgement that MSFT needs Bethesda creatives. (2) Microsoft's big strategy right now is to build their Xbox ecosystem - they're pushing GamePass, Xcloud, etc. heavily, and trying to become Netflix f…

I don’t see how $10/mo is at all profitable with them adding all these AAA games to it.

I'd be curious to know what kind of impact that $10/mo/user would have compared to the traditional game sales cycle from a revenue stream perspective.

Say that the system has a current-gen lifespan of 5 years and users run their subscription throughout the duration of the service, that's $600 per user assuming no price increases. I don't game nearly as much as I used to, so that would cost me way more than I've spent the last several years on games.

The shitty thing about a model like this is that I can't just power the system on after 6 months and just play without turning the subscription back on.

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

#214

Post by gabereiser »

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.

Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can’t fault them for milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from the “Hey! This worked! Let’s just keep doing this!” IP milkage. Game dev, like software dev, has gotten more and more complex. What was once a vision of unity and standards is now Unity3D or micro-fracture SDK’s of the same graphics pipeline concepts and a wasteland of bones from those who came before you.

I know from experience. The “I’ll write my own engine” bug bit me in 2005. I wrote Reactor3D on XNA in 2007. Worked with Bill Reiss while he masterminded XNASilverlight which eventually would become the basis for MonoGame, which we all love and adore.

What’s interesting is the non-mention of itch.io

I think if enough people want new and interesting games, it will get done. Dev’s are surprisingly open to ideas, it’s the publishers (money people) who have a problem with change.

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

#215

Post by djsumdog »

gambiting wrote: post #186
iruoy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you say is Microsoft's worst game for microtransactions? I've played Forza Horizon 4 for a while and you can buy cars in that game, but you earn enough points that they all become pretty cheap after only a few hours in the game.

The biggest issue for me was that certain in-game cars were locked behind the spin-the-wheel game, and while(thankfully) there was no way to spend real life money for more spins, it still felt absolutely shit that I could have 100+ in-game hours, hundreds of millions of in-game currency, and yet no, I can't have that Mercedes E63 AMG, because it can only be won through spins. In Horizon 3 you could just buy any car a…

Horizon 3 was a lot of fun, but 4 just got repetitive and boring. It felt like the same game with really dumb gimmicks like being able to buy houses.

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

#216

Post by pascah7 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #153
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…

You could make the argument that because of Steam having such reach / monopoly on the PC gaming market, Steam (and by extension Valve) is effectively the publisher of games like that, and a very large one at that. There's GoG that mostly focuses on vintage games, and Epic that spends tons of money to get (timed?) exclusives on indie games + free handouts, but I'm not sure how well it's working for them to get market…

GoG does have a bunch of new games though. And IIRC they are owned by CD Project Red who are doing some big games now :)

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

#218

Post by ineedasername »

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…

We still have large, amazing, original games coming out of small studios. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an excellent example.

We may get to a point where there are practically no "medium-large" developers and only "massive" ones like Microsoft, but I'm confident we'll still get great games from outside the massive groups.

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

#219

Post by gertrunde »

eunos wrote: post #36
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…

Don't forget Tencent.

And not just Tencent - there are also other companies, like NetEase, which while smaller than Tencent at about 1/6th of the size, still takes more annual revenue than EA. (Going by figures on Wikipedia).

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

#220

Post by minimaxir »

gimmeThaBeet wrote: post #95
lewisj489 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did it not go well? > Kinect Sports Rivals Great game > Sea of Thieves Another great title

the things Rare has been known for were platformers (Banjo Kazooie, Donkey Kong) and FPS games (Goldeneye, Perfect Dark). Perfect Dark Zero in 2005 was probably the last title in either of those veins, which was a launch title for the 360 (soon to be 2 consoles ago!) Sea of Thieves is certainly a feather in their cap, it's just a bit disappointing that we haven't been able to see Rare take a modern crack at the thing…

Most of the Rare staff responsible for those games have left in the decades since (many of them formed Playtonic, which was the pitch behind Yooka-Laylee)
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