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Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
711–720 of 1001 posts
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are going at it with their own Surface Duo based on Android, it is like Android but with Microsoft twist, so.
Duo is an utter facepalm. What are they thinking. It doesn't make the device cheaper or lighter, in fact it makes it heavier and more expensive. It constrains your interaction and UI model. It introduces unnecessary mechanical complications and points of failure. It made sense for Nintendo on the DS because it did reduce costs and the device could be small and light enough for it to work. The Duo is just different fo…
We could have had Windows 10X as well, but apparently the new blood on WinDev has lost track of what made Windows great, and are now as headless chicken running into all directions.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#713Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#714It'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
Microsoft is making the Game Pass catalog playable on mobile devices. I think that's their strategy there.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#715With 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.
Game Pass has major issues still. No integrated backup mechanism; only 3 changes to your home PC per year... Imagine reinstalling more than 3 times to find out that you can no longer play offline; absolutely horrible download speeds... Compared to Steam which maxes out bandwidth; and the interface for Xbox Game Pass on PC is terrible.
> absolutely horrible download speeds... Compared to Steam which maxes out bandwidth
Yeah, I've noticed that. I don't know why they do that, it's annoying. If I can download a game in a half hour I'd like it in a half hour, not next Tuesday, please.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#716Purely from the perspective of the job market, this move sucks. Before you could get Activision to bid against Blizzard to bid against Microsoft.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#717Microsoft is not building the future of gaming, they're buying it. Seeing a bunch of excellent third-party cross-platform games become xbox-exclusive is really sad for gamers. Microsoft has not been making money on xbox. They're not investing money made with xbox. They're using Office/Windows/Azure funds to boost Xbox, and it's not a fair fight. Sony and Nintendo don't have that kind of money. I get Sony has acquired…
Microsoft just purchased a bunch of has-been IPs that still have great amount of nostalgia. When Zenimax was acquired, it was coming off a couple of failed fallout games, a meh ESO and delayed Elder scrolls 6. Similarly, Activision-Blizzard has been in the midst of COD and Overwatch losing their gaming monopoly to Fortnite, Blizzard failing to create a good game for about 5 years and the big workplace lawsuit. It fee…
>Microsoft just purchased a bunch of has-been IPs that still have great amount of nostalgia
The #1 and #2 titles of 2021 are has-beens? And they also had the #1 and #2 of 2020.
https://venturebeat.com/2022/01/18/npd-the-top-20-best-selli...
https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/15/npd-reveals-the-best-sell...
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#718It'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.
This is an overly rosy view of Microsoft's moat (and acumen) IMHO. For one, Microsoft completely missed out on the mobile revolution. For another, look at Mixer. This was there attempt to clone Twitch. They threw a bunch of money at it and quickly gave up. To me this was insane. Streaming has shown to be great marketing for games and I never thought they'd give up so quickly and right before the new Xbox launch. Imag…
Interesting. I take that Mixer example as quite the opposite: throwing money at game streamers only really makes sense if they're trying to get yet another point of integration for gamers, no?
I take your word for it that the execution was lacking - and, perhaps, they were never going to win. Perhaps that's why they keep buying other, successful companies.
But it still builds to the same picture: even if they suck as operators, they're building a pretty darn big machine.
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#719I have to wonder how much investing in some of today's tech behemoths comes down to viewing them more as a holding company / investment firm and less about their original core products. Microsoft has lost tons of desktop share over the last decade, this should have been a death signal for them but instead amazing acquisitions like Mojang, GitHub, ActBliz have pushed them to an amazing market cap. Similar with FB loos…
Facebook own WeChat?
Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
#720What upsets me is that this news totally overshadows the news that Activision literally just fired 30+ more people for sexual misconduct.
And now the metaverse is solidified as a new buzzword for venture capitalists to pour money into despite collaborative VR being a thing for almost a decade already. Won't be long until they combine it with NFTs and use an inefficient & expensive blockchain to handle the marketplace of avatars and the like.