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

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691–700 of 798 posts

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

#691

"It's obvious that the current trend is creation of the one single worldwide company owning all the businesses and all the countries." Vladimir Lenin, 1915.

The East India Company was founded in 1600 and had its own army before it was nationalized. So it is not like big companies is something that never happened before. And as we can see in the US, the state can easily control, cooperate with and even destroy companies, no matter how big they are.

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

#692
post #604

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…

As long as no one buys From Software everything will be ok. Praise the Sun.

Fear the Old ~~Microsoft~~ Blood.

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

#693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> quality of game engine is completely orthogonal to how good a game is, right? That's exactly my point. I haven't once conflated the two, all of your comments have.

> That's exactly my point. I haven't once conflated the two, all of your comments have. How? The disagreement is if Fallout 4 was a moneygrab or not. Is that correct? According to you it was because it "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…

No. It's measuring the amount of investment into the game.

Some very dedicated folks took the pittance of time/money afforded to them and made a fantastic effort. Imagine what the same people could have done with an engine that wasn't merely a minor graphical improvement. Imagine what FO4 could have been with richer story telling technology (dialog mechanics, interaction mechanics, etc.), instead the content team was stuck with the same scripting power available in Skyrim.

BOTH the effort of people who clearly care about the franchise AND the publisher's shameless money grubbing show in the final product.

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

#694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can’t fault them for milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from the “Hey! This worked! Let’s just keep doing this!” IP milkage. Game dev, like so…

Look at when Blizzard tried starting new a new IP with Overwatch, I'm sure they did okay but Overwatch doesn't have the same legendary luster that Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo have (or had).

From a raw sales standpoint Overwatch has done better than most of those games. The only Blizzard game that beats Overwatch in terms of raw revenue is WoW. I find that tech people that used to game in the 90s tend to way overestimate how popular and successful those early foundational games were in comparison to modern games. Overall growth in the game industry (especially PC world wide) has been massive

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

#695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually feel compelled to express an opinion regarding WoW classic: It's a garbage money grab. The idea that there is a huge nostalgia fueled demand for the original experience doesn't absolve a multi-billion dollar developer from a complete lack of support or quality of life improvements to the game. There is just too much overlap with the fact that they can literally re-release a game with practically zero devel…

If you think wow classic had "practically zero development cost", you don't know what you're talking about.

Care to elaborate? How many lines of code do you think were written for the release of WoW classic compared to the original release?

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

#696

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…

Godot, Blender, itch.io, Krita. Nobody forces you to use walled gardens. Games are entertainment, not something mandatory, so I wouldn't worry too much. If there's too much of an lock-in from the major vendors, it will simply cause the indie scene to explode.

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

#697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually feel compelled to express an opinion regarding WoW classic: It's a garbage money grab. The idea that there is a huge nostalgia fueled demand for the original experience doesn't absolve a multi-billion dollar developer from a complete lack of support or quality of life improvements to the game. There is just too much overlap with the fact that they can literally re-release a game with practically zero devel…

Blizzard did not charge for WoW Classic. It merely requires an active subscription to the regular game. There's no additional purchase or subscription. The company invested significant development into Classic. The project started as a fork of Legion, in order to benefit from a decade of anti-bot measures, compatibility fixes, and Battle.net integration (auth and chat). They then ported the original game forward and…

> Blizzard did not charge for WoW Classic. It merely requires an active subscription to the regular game. There's no additional purchase or subscription.

I'm not sure what you're getting at, in my experience a massive chunk of the players don't play 'retail'. So the cost is just that, $15 a month.

Beyond that, do you have a source? It's not clear that any of these things they've been developing had significant costs in replicating for Classic.

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

#698
post #71

The year is 2040. Gigaconglomerates Tencent, Activision Blizzard Ubisoft (ABU), Microsoft and Apple gatekeep the entire gaming industry. Rebel guerilla groups of small publishers and indie developers rise up to take control of their encampments.

I mean this is the future described in Cyberpunk novels. United States of Coca Cola, Republic of Microsoft. Mega Corporations will replace states in an era of neocorporatism (AKA something else...), that's inevitable.

Every day we draw closer to the world described in Snowcrash and Neuromancer.

Once we have cheap, ubiquitous VR, all we're missing is Kouriers, skateboards with those cool wheels and a cult based on a dead language.

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

#699

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…

If you think Valve will exit software development, then you don't understand the market. Valve did do that and had this luxury when they were the only big game platform on PC. Unfortunately for them, there's GOG, EPIC, and MS Game Pass now. They need exclusives and the best way to do that without going the EPIC route is by developing their own games.

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

#700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is The Outer Worlds? I heard it is basically space Fallout, which if that is half as good as it sounds I am all over it.

It’s ok. It scratched that “Bethesda fallout” itch better than Bethesda did, but ultimately I found it got a bit monotonous and dull after a little while. It’s not a bad game, but it’s no masterpiece.

Yeah, I didn't like it either. The graphics are good, but there was nothing that made me want to keep going; the writing just wasn't good. It's one of the best games ever since I wasn't tempted to play for just "5 more minutes". No loss in productivity.
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