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Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

news.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#551

Post by cududa »

faisal_ksa wrote: post #527

I hate to see a monopoly in the gaming industry. Controlling the content will prevent any competition both in gaming consoles and in PC gaming. Forget about gaming on Linux or any new platform. Forget about sony's PlayStation and Nintendo. We are going to see the real face of Microsoft. What do you think Microsoft will do next? Buy unreal engine and unity and have control over the content and the tools to make them?…

You can run gamepass on Linux, so when all these games hit gamepass (which they will) it’s a net positive for Linux gamers.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#554

Post by nikanj »

rusk wrote: post #511
JAlexoid wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they will. There's no point. There is a stable duopoly, where Microsoft can reap the benefits of competition between the two, without wasting any resources. May not be best for consumer - really great for business. (especially, if courts hold that Apple/Google cannot outright ban apps from their stores)

I’ve heard that thanks to patents and stuff they already makes loads of money out of mobile as it is!

I wonder if the Nokia phone division sale included the NGage patent portfolio

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#555

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

raxxorrax wrote: post #78
s3r3nity wrote: post #16

Congratulations to Phil Spencer, who started out leading an upstart team at Microsoft for a new game console called "Xbox" and is now "CEO of Microsoft Gaming" - a Microsoft Senior Leadership position. Oh, and he now leads the third biggest gaming company on the planet: > When the transaction closes, Microsoft will become the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony. It will be interes…

I think for gaming this is pretty negative that everything is consolidated under large developers. I also don't think that the atmosphere under Microsoft will be better than under Activision. I hope PC gaming can detach from Microsoft as soon as possible to be honest.

Games are software. Changing the upper management/ownership isn't going to change deliverables. If anything, it could delay releases even further out with new overlords. Certainly they can clean house of the former companies HR department as well as any senior leaders that did nothing with previous issues.

It will take a long time before anything material comes from this from a games perspective. I would assume legal agreements are in place for cash-cow games like Call Of Duty on other platforms so that should alleviate any anti-competitive investigation.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#558

Post by belthesar »

cududa wrote: post #551
faisal_ksa wrote: post #527

I hate to see a monopoly in the gaming industry. Controlling the content will prevent any competition both in gaming consoles and in PC gaming. Forget about gaming on Linux or any new platform. Forget about sony's PlayStation and Nintendo. We are going to see the real face of Microsoft. What do you think Microsoft will do next? Buy unreal engine and unity and have control over the content and the tools to make them?…

You can run gamepass on Linux, so when all these games hit gamepass (which they will) it’s a net positive for Linux gamers.

If you've got a lead on how to do this, I'm interested. Last I looked, Gamepass on Linux only worked for streamed titles through a browser.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#559

Post by ouid »

jpablo wrote: post #402
curiousllama wrote: post #315

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.

Isn't that basically the same Nintendo and Sony? Save for the cloud platform.

Absolutely not, Microsoft owns your operating system on your general computer. At least you could argue that I am, in some sense, willingly entering the ecosystem by buying an xbox. Blizzard and Minecraft are primarily PC games.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#560

Post by mathattack »

curiousllama wrote: post #315

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.

People may be flooding into vertical integration, though the history of that isn’t great. (Look at AOL/TimeWarner or Verizon/AOL/Tumblr/Yahoo)

All it takes is missing one generation and the house of cards gets written down. Someone can create the next generation blockbuster for a lot less than $69bln.

To argue against myself, they’ve become a lot better at picking trends since Balmer left too.

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