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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

#511

Post by dragontamer »

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…

River City Girls (WayForward), Factorio, Two Point Hospital, FTL.

Plenty of games out there, no reason to keep buying the same 3d-action RPG formula from the AAA-studios unless that's a thing you like.

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

#512

Post by leetcrew »

WorldMaker wrote: post #504
leetcrew wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if they would just keep cranking out sequels at the same level of quality but no real innovation, I would be pretty happy. mass effect 1 was pretty good, me2 was great, me3 was still decent. why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? similar with far cry. fc2 was great, but probably too unforgiving for the mainstream audience. they dumbed it down a bit for fc3, and fc4 was more of the same but with a c…

> why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? Obviously everyone has their opinions, but I thought Andromeda the strongest sequel to ME1 story content wise. Andromeda's failings weren't in the story or the content (ME "B-Team" or not, thanks to Anthem's black hole, they wrote most of the strongest story content in all four games), they were technical. EA absolutely should not have pushed BioWare to Fros…

I didn't actually finish the game, so I can't speak too much to the story. for me it wasn't even about the bugs; I just thought the andromeda open world was the blandest of any I'd played at the time. it was like they looked at the lunar rover minigame from me1 and decided to make it the whole game. I wish they had just stuck to the traditional rpg level design of the previous games. I didn't much like the combat mechanics in andromeda either, but that could just be personal taste.

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

#513

Post by shrimp_emoji »

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…

Europa Universalis 4 is way better than Stellaris, friend.

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

#514

Post by mikewhy »

staticman2 wrote: post #199
iruoy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Microsoft store is pretty good actually. I got 6 months of game pass for PC and didn't encounter any problems.

When it works it's fine but sometimes the window store breaks and you basically have to reinstall Windows- in whole or in part- to get it running again. It also is designed to prevent modding and doesn't work with Steam Link for remote play even though normal non-steam games work with Steam Link just fine.

GloSC[1] will get you steam controller mapping / streaming for UWP apps (and more, but I've never had an issue ie adding UPlay games as non-steam games). Here's Minecraft Dungeons running on iOS via Steam Remote Play that I just recorded[2].

Also, Windows Store / GamePass doesn't stop modding, as Crusader King 3 proves.

[1]: https://alia5.github.io/GloSC/

[2]: https://imgur.com/a/Zwz9yvV

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

#515

Post by hueho »

mywittyname wrote: post #443
shuntress wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To directly name some of games you seem to be implying are automatically bad; I'm personally very happy with Doom (2016), Doom Eternal, Breath of the Wild, and Mario Odyssey. I am glad that ID and Nintendo have been "milking" these IPs.

I think there's a difference between continuing an IP and milking one. When the same IP gets passed to a dozen different studios who each create vastly different experiences, that's milking and I generally don't like it. The whole point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and having different studios working on the same IP is contrary to that goal. Nintendo does not milk IPs, IMHO. They actually put a lot of th…

> why Nintendo rarely outsources games

That's an overstatement: Nintendo co-develops a lot of titles with other studios, outsource a lot of their smaller IPs (mostly to Japanese studios), _and_ is being rather friendly to letting people do smaller spinoffs of their big properties.

Examples of third-party colaboration, in no particular order:

- Koei Tecmo co-developed Fire Emblem: Three Houses, did both Fire Emblem Warriors and Hyrule Warriors, which are franchise spin-offs using their Dynasty Warriors engine and gameplay, and Nintendo trust them so much that their next canon Zelda game will be a Breath of the Wild prequel developed by them, using the Hyrule Warriors label.

- Bandai Namco is more or less the main developer of Super Smash Bros since the Wii U/3DS iterations, with Sora Ltd being essentially just a consulting company run by Masahiro Sakurai. Bandai Namco is also co-developing the new Pokemon Snap, and developed Metroid: Other M.

- Capcom developed both Oracle of Ages/Oracle of Seasons and Minish Cap, two portable and very well regarded entries in the Zelda Franchise.

- On the Mario side, pretty much all of their Mario sport titles are handled by Camelot, with the exception of the Mario & Sonic Olympic series, which are published by Sega direcly, and their highly praised portable RPG series Mario & Luigi was developed by (sadly defunct) Alpha Dream.

- Then there was that time when they gave the Mario franchise to Ubisoft and they made a Rabbids-crossover, XCom-like game, which is just too goddamn funny to not put in here separately (especially since it was also fairly well received by critics).

- Good-Feel, another Japanese developer, made entries to both Kirby (Epic Yarn), WarioLand and more recently, Yoshi franchises (Wooly World/Crafted World).

- There is a metric shitton of Pokemon spinoffs (that's probably where you will find the worst offenders of bad outsourced games, to be quite honest, but even then there are series like Pokemon Mistery Dungeon, by Spike-Chunsoft, which are very well regarded).

- And as a another Zelda example, Cadence of Hyrule, made by the Crypt of the Necrodancer developers.

There are more examples, but overall a large part of their output nowadays is made by third-parties, with of course a lot of their projects - big and small - being handled by their in-house studios. That's not even counting the fact that some studios readily associated with Nintendo, like Intelligent Systems and HAL Laboratory, are actually independent (they just like working with Nintendo).

Sorry for the large response, I was bored.

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

#516

Post by gdulli »

DominikD wrote: post #41
wpdev_63 wrote: post #7

Holy sh!t. Bethesda is huge! Well I was just thinking the other day that Microsoft really doesn't have any first party studio that are really as good as Sony's first party. IMO they didn't release a game 'this' gen that makes picking up a xbox one worth it. This could change that with fallout and doom. Also this allows them to bring the ID tech engine under their stewardship.... I just hope that they don't trash the…

No Microsoft game has monetization as bad as Fallout 76. So whatever Bethesda does from now on can't be worse than what it does today. ;)

I only started Fallout 76 this summer so I can't speak to the bad state it launched in. But the recent major update got good word of mouth and it was on sale for $15. I haven't paid a dime extra and I've had a full single player experience that matches or succeeds Fallout 4.

If you just want another single player Fallout game, this game is a steal and has no monetization problem. What I can't do is build up a camp using a lot of different trinkets from the store, but luckily I don't care about that.

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

#518

Post by WorldMaker »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #487
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…

I don't think it's fair to include Microsoft in that list. They buy game studios so they can close them and shelve their IP after several attempts to turn beloved franchises into GAAS products. They're less of a game studio conglomerator and more of a recycling bin.

Depends on which era of Microsoft Game Studios / Xbox Game Studios you are talking about. Also, Microsoft has never really shelved IP ever, even Flight Simulator is back out of retirement! They've sold IP back to (nearly) the original developers, which is somewhat unheard of outside of Microsoft (Fasa's BattleTech/Mech Warrior and Shadowrun IP brands are back in the "indy space" because Microsoft sold it back; you rarely hear of an Activision or EA IP getting sold back to small developers). Even Microsoft's worst turnover period of developer subsidiaries had some interesting mitigating circumstances: Bungie wanted to be independent again (and again that's a weird case where you'd be surprise to see a developer like Bungie spin back out of an Activision or an EA; Bungie themselves had to do a ton of work on their publishing contracts to avoid being swallowed up by Activision with Destiny), and rumors are that whatever happened to Lionhead may have been a suicide, though who knows if the story will ever be substantiated one way or the other (and Lionhead's IP hasn't been "shelved" for long either with Playground Games working on a new Fable).

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

#519

Post by alasdair_ »

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…

Isn't WoW Classic published by ActivisionBlizzard?

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

#520

Post by eunos »

gertrunde wrote: post #219
eunos wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

And also Bilibili might also join the industry with Fall Guys mobile https://twitter.com/ZhugeEX/status/1297205586350747648
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