271–280 of 590 posts
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He won’t continue working after this year, like you said. Microsoft can’t magically make his equity disappear.
I think the problem is the optics of allowing him to continue working a single day after Microsoft takes over. It sends a message that it's okay.
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> I do suspect that Microsoft may have been behind Starfield releasing in its half-baked, dumbed down state though a la “We need it on game pass by X, make it happen!” In fairness to Microsoft, "half-baked" would be how I describe all of Bethesda's previous releases as well. I don't think Starfield is that far off how Skyrim or Fallout 4 was on release. Starfield's a long shot from where Skyrim and Fallout are now af…
> In fairness to Microsoft, "half-baked" would be how I describe all of Bethesda's previous releases as well. I don't think Starfield is that far off how Skyrim or Fallout 4 was on release. Starfield's a long shot from where Skyrim and Fallout are now after years of patches and DLC, but I think not far from where they started. I've got friends that go deep into Bethesda releases on launch and they all agree that Star…
I sincerely hope that MS will put a lot of time in to make the next elder scrolls good, but my money is on another flop.
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Pentiment is a masterpiece.
It also never would have been released without gamepass, so we have some evidence that Microsoft acquisitions don't all end terribly
Obsidian seems to be thriving under Microsoft, doing all sorts of crazy things that their previous history hinted at that they were capable of but never had the resources or the publisher buy-in to explore. It's fascinating to watch so far. I'm curious to see what they do with the bigger budgets of Avowed and Outer Worlds 2.
Everything will just get slowly worse.
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…
PS5 is widely regarded as the best playstation experience since the PS2.
Great backwards compatibility and third-party support.
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Mostly its because Activision/Blizzard is such an obviously shitty terrible company that any deal that sees cool IPs taken out of their hands is seen as a positive thing.
Which games has MS shown good stewardship of? Halo is a shell of what it once was and has snubbed the players with false promises in recent iterations (couch co-op used to be a staple of Halo but they reneged on their promise to include it with the latest). AFAIK they haven't had any good exclusive IP for Xbox in a while. They've had a few dynamite hits (ex. Sunset Overdrive) but haven't followed up on any that I'm a…
Normally I'm against such huge mergers - but Activision Blizzard is one of the most hostile companies against their users and employees I have ever seen. I can't imagine this being a bad thing for game fans.
God damn man. How is this not an antitrust violation? The only answer is that we live in truly corrupt times. What is our answer to this?
Because it really isn't a violation of antitrust as is currently defined. Linda Khan's article here is, IMO, one of the best overviews of why: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado... What's frustrating is that this requires legislative change, which, given the current political climate, seems like a sisyphean task.
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…
well, assuming there's actually a cloud gaming market. A fact that's still up for debate I think.