541–550 of 1001 posts
Competition oversight? Probably dead since Regan? After they stopped controlling AT&T the UNIX-Wars happened, impcompatiblity, lawsuits, closed-source has become a normal thing and proprietary software locked users in and competitors out. What platform will Microsoft support? Likely not: * Linux * BSD * MacOS * Nintendo * Sony Does anyone miss id Software? Native ports on Linux, incredible source-code and impressive…
With these kind of acquisitions, other companies are going to find it very hard to compete with Game Pass. I think we'll look back in 10 years and wonder why antitrust regulators did nothing, but it may be too late by then.
It'll depend on the perspective. For the gaming industry, this seems to push Microsoft into 3rd place (by size) behind Sony and Tencent. So hardly a monopoly and akin to T-Mobile's acquisition of Sprint a few years ago. It makes Microsoft much more competitive against Sony and even Nintendo since it'll likely bolster their 1P offerings in the future. But if Microsoft uses their ownership to favor their own game subsc…
I'm pretty sure that Starfield is announced to be a Windows/Xbox exclusive already.
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Sounds lovely for the suits. As a longtime Blizzard fan and a former Microsoft employee, maybe I'm just getting too old for this shit, but there's really only one thing I care about: Will they finally start getting the fucking games right again?
Hopefully first they will fire everyone responsible for cultivating a toxic culture culminating in sexually harassing a women to suicide and having a "Cosby" room at events. Don't care how good of games they are when thats the company behind them.
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Isn't that basically the same Nintendo and Sony? Save for the cloud platform.
Sony practically owns their cloud platform too, with their Gaikai purchase a decade ago[1] and PS Now being "PS3/PS4s in the cloud". [1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-07-03-sony-acqui...
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Talk about failing upwards.
Phil Spencer only took over after the failure of the Xbox One. They've been killing it since then.
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> [...] if Satya and the Board spin off gaming into an independent company at some point. I certainly think this should happen. The trillion dollar giants should not span multiple industries. They have absurd monopoly power and can make growing your own niche impossible. Why does a cloud computing / operating system vendor / hardware manufacturer / business software / developer tooling company also own the third bigg…
What's funny is that when EPB of Chattanooga decided they wanted a Fiber Network to build their smart power grid around, Comcast said no. So they built their own, and Comcast started suing them. A lot of stupid lobby fights later, and EPB Fiber Optics became a separate company with a loan from EPB (power company). Both wholly owned by the City of Chattanooga. EPB had to keep all power monies and all internet monies c…
It's wild how Microsoft has been able to vertically integrate gaming. They now own the distribution (Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Game Pass), the games (Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft + what they owned before), the OS (Windows, Xbox), the hardware (Xbox, many PCs), and the back end compute (Azure). The only thing they're missing, the network bandwidth, is mostly a commodity anyway. That's a heck of a moat.
They are still missing a mobile platform and that's why I believe they will retry within the next few years
With these kind of acquisitions, other companies are going to find it very hard to compete with Game Pass. I think we'll look back in 10 years and wonder why antitrust regulators did nothing, but it may be too late by then.
> other companies are going to find it very hard to compete with Game Pass I haven't really ever used it. I used to buy everything Blizzard made (OK that's an exaggeration, but I was all about WarCraft/StarCraft/Diablo...). Before Steam, I bought lots of games on disk. Now I buy most things on Steam. And I haven't bought anything Blizzard since Diablo III. Why wouldn't Steam continue to be competitive against Game Pa…