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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

#641

Post by dijit »

mcrider wrote: post #529
dijit wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW Ubisoft is very hostile to being acquired. I worked there for 6-7 years and the CEO fought off vivendis acquisition. Which was not the first. He has even gone so far as to decentralise the Canadian studios so that if the company was somehow acquired the aquirer could not close down studios without heavy fines from the Canadian government.

Could you elaborate on that last point or share a source? I don't doubt you but I don't understand the legal basis behind that move (but sounds interesting)!

Standard: I am not a lawyer disclaimer here.

The way it was described to me was that there's two major types of fine that the canadian government will levy against large companies that dump lots of workers at once.

1) More than 50 people within a 4week period.

Usually this means that the company must continue paying employment benefits on behalf of the company for a period of a year (iirc).

2) More than x% of your company being closed down.

You can get around #2 by claiming redundancies or claiming that you've moved the job to another canadian state (or, centralised a position), but once you give the studio its own legal entity and place an MD in charge (who is legally responsible for the studio) you can't do that any longer because the parent company continues to have a legal presence in the country, but operations are considered separate/independent.

Thus, if you close down the studio you've effectively terminated 100% of employment there which will garner super heavy fines.

Also also: Ubisoft doesn't want to piss of the canadian government either because nearly their entire profit exists in the tax break that montreal gives game companies.

.. but, like I said, this was told to me only a few times by a few high level directors and it was when we were talking about Vivendi trying to buy us, and they were also not laywers, so it could be a lot of chinese whispers.

But I've spoken to Yves, and while he's a really genuinely nice person... he will salt the earth before he sells the company.

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

#642

Post by codezero »

noncoml wrote: post #552
citizenkeen wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every game has somebody who loves it. Even that terrible Superman game. Fallout 4 wasn't total garbage, but it was huge step down from Fallout 3 or Skyrim.

> it was huge step down from Fallout 3 or Skyrim In what way? And how is your opinion better metric than my opinion? You have data to back it up?

How about comparing metacritic scores?

https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/fallout-3

https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/fallout-4

One might slice and dice this by platform, but I think there was a general consensus that 4 was not as good as 3 both in meta score and user score.

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

#643

Post by codezero »

zamalek wrote: post #349
ehnto wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird thing about F76 is that the monetization doesn't effect the game, it's just not very good. I have never supported a game through microtransactions, but I actually felt I wanted to for F76 as it seems like a candidate for a "Forever Game" fallout world that gets expanded upon. But they have nothing I would ever want to buy.

I hope this acquisition will fix Bethesda. Skyrim was their last game worth talking about, everything since then has either been effectively a Skyrim mod or a cash grab. With exception to Doom.

Just to double down on Skyrim - I paid for it at least four times.

Once on PC, once on Xbox, another time to get the remastered special edition, and finally on Nintendo Switch and I had zero regrets tbh. I even played switch and xbox in parallel when I traveled more.

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

#644

Post by toyg »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #279
toyg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TikTok is not an investment in tech, it’s an investment in relations with the US public sector. The fact that it comes with an actual company attached is almost irrelevant for Oracle.

MS has plenty of "relations with the US public sector" already, they won the DOD JEDI contract. They didn't need to spend anything on TikTok. TikTok is a fad, like Instagram and other social networks.

> MS has plenty of "relations with the US public sector" already

Indeed, which is why in the end they didn't go for it and oracle did: one of the two cared about improving the relationship more than the other.

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

#645

Post by andoriyu »

kleiba wrote: post #195
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but was id actually involved in the 2009 Wolfenstein or in New Order? I think not. However, they did develop Doom 2016...

2009 - they were producers, but the development was done by Raven Software and published by Activision. So not really involved other than owners of IP?

New Order - not at all, maybe as engine developers. Right for that IP were transferred to MachineGames in 2010 right after ZeniMax got hold of them.

As for Doom 2016 - they enlisted a lot of outside help after Doom 4 was scraped. Bethesda's game directors helped them a lot because they already figured how to make "old ip" to sell well with modern gamers (see Fallout 3).

side note:

I don't think id managed to get deliver a lot of good games since John Romero left. (just like John Romero didn't deliver many good games since the separation)

John Romero and John Carmack were like a dream team, but without each other it was meh.

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

#646

Post by TwoBit »

swyx wrote: post #467
dangoor wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carmack's Facebook Connect talk last week[1] sure made him sound very plugged into what's happening at Oculus. I was surprised, given that I, too, thought he had essentially left for AI research. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y

yeah he sounded like he was tech lead for the project, i am surprised to learn he's "independent"

Most of the higher level Oculus engineers are very in tune with what is happening within Oculus and the industry. There is constant discussion internally about it, and Oculus still knows more about VR than anybody else. Source: I was one of them.

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

#647

Post by dijit »

munk-a wrote: post #559
nonbirithm wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the fact that the Epic Games Store exists is a step towards countering Steam's monopoly on mainstream titles. People complain about the loss of functionality like screenshots or the in-game browser when using Epic. And there are exclusivity deals. Complaints against those things are valid, and the actual implementation of the storefront needs a lot of improvement, but I'm wondering if a Steam monopoly would have…

I have one particular example of this I love since it happened right on the borderline. I own Anno 1800 on steam, but if you don't you can't (at least for the foreseeable and likely future) - Ubisoft pulled Anno from the steam storefront shortly after launch but ! Probably due to some contract shinnanegans with steam, they continue to offer expansions + DLC to users who own Anno already on steam while new users remai…

Be a bit mindful blaming ubisoft for stuff vanishing from Steam.

A significantly large part of why Ubisoft started cozying up to Epic was not because of the 5% stake tencent has in it.

It was because Steam pulls all kinds of nasty shenanigans but ubisoft will not state any of it publicly because it would hurt their relationship.

Steam has outright pulled all ubisoft games before, and ubisoft took the blame. People assumed it was because ubi wanted to push uplay; but it was all about someone at valve deciding that we'd violated some rule about content distribution.

We gave UK players of AC:Syndicate a country specific hat which wouldn't have made sense to the global market.

They didn't warn, we woke up to see that kotaku[0] had run an article about it before we even knew ourselves.

This is not an isolated incident, just a dramatic one that I remember as my own personal shifting point w.r.t. steam, because I'd only just started working at Ubisoft and was hating on uplay and was quite fond of steam.

[0]: https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-pulls-big-games-from-steam-165567...

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

#648

Post by zamalek »

noncoml wrote: post #552
citizenkeen wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every game has somebody who loves it. Even that terrible Superman game. Fallout 4 wasn't total garbage, but it was huge step down from Fallout 3 or Skyrim.

> it was huge step down from Fallout 3 or Skyrim In what way? And how is your opinion better metric than my opinion? You have data to back it up?

Skyrim was a significant technical advancement of Gamebryo, not just in terms of visual quality or so forth, but also in terms of what was possible with the engine. Fallout 4 was a minor upgrade and could have easily been a total conversion mod for Skyrim - there was no innovation and it did nothing new. Irrespective of whether people enjoyed that re-skinned Skyrim, it was a blatant cash-grab.

The argument has nothing to do with anybody enjoying the game, a metric that I did not mention at all in my comment, it has to do with a growing trend where Bethesda has been doing the absolute bare minimum to cash in on their fans' good will.

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

#649

Post by ordinaryperson »

Mobius01 wrote: post #549
acomjean wrote: post #212

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

Also note they Microsoft mismanaged the Halo property royally. The most recent failure the delay of Halo Infinite, that allegedly has been in development for over 4 years and will miss the launch of the new Xbox console due to poor quality. Microsoft also run Rare almost into irrelevancy after the acquisition. Not the greatest track record there.

Honestly Halo started to go off the rails at Halo 2 and that silly cliffhanger ending. And I'm still not sure I understand the plot of Halo 3.

So I don't know if you can pin the blame for what happened to the Halo franchise on MSFT.

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

#650

Post by shultays »

ohyeshedid wrote: post #608
tmpz22 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fallout 76 was an unmitigated disaster and absolute embarrassment to the studio however [1]. [1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8

So was No Man's Sky when it came out. Though rare, sometimes studios do the right thing over time. FO76 seems to be having a better second act.

I think comparison is a bit unfair since nms is (mostly) single player while fo76 is not. If nms gets good (i believe it is good btw, I play it regularly on VR) it would still sell 5 years later but fo76 would be dead if it can't keep up player count high.

So yeah, a failed multiplayer/mmo game is a bigger failure imo, because it is hard/impossible to recover from

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