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Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

news.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#811

Post by spaceisballer »

t3rabytes wrote: post #493
goldfeld wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is quite wild. The only thing missing is good will.

I think Game Pass has built up a helluva goodwill bucket, from talking with friends of mine.

I would have loved game pass when I was younger for the sheer number of games. Now personally it offers me the ability to try things out and not regret dropping money on those games. I don’t play nearly as many games as I used to, but paying $15 and playing Back 4 Blood with friends was great. And I didn’t care when we all got our fill of it because I got my moneys worth. Personally it’s a great alternative to pirating.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#812

Post by anotherman554 »

tytrdev wrote: post #796
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.

They still rely extremely heavily on Nvidias ability to create more and more powerful hardware. I recently found out that like 70% of the world's supercomputers are powered by nvidia GPU compute. People often talk about the tech power of different countries (personally I've heard a ton of people talk about China in this way), but at the end of the day they are still reliant on the hardware manufacturers. Who am I to…

Microsoft uses AMD for their Xbox consoles, not Nvidia.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#814

Post by avrionov »

TameAntelope wrote: post #704
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?…

A real monopoly in video gaming isn't nearly as valuable as it first seems. Firstly, "video gaming" is really competing against things like reading a book, walking your dog, board games, etc., so it's not like Microsoft can just start jacking up prices and people will have nowhere to go with their time. Secondly, creating and releasing new games has never been easier. So many small indie game companies are creating g…

Reading books lost the competition long time ago.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#815

Post by calf »

_notathrowaway wrote: post #786
agd wrote: post #53

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.

Honestly, why should any regulator bother with this? It's video games, it is clearly not any kind of essential infrastructure/software.

Not that regulators might care but game software shapes how young people conceive of software and IP issues. A company notorious for manipulating IP buying out a massive game company means entire generations of children and families will be exposed to this software as a service model of IP consumption.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#816

Post by blibble »

chaorace wrote: post #206
blibble wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if he realises what "fun" he's going to have over the next years cleaning out the cesspit that is Blizzard

I've never overseen a merger before, let alone one of this scale, so pardon my blatant speculation... but will that really be such an issue? It seems to me that the mismanagement of Acti/Blizz is a product of a corrupt corporate apparatus. From the inside of Acti/Blizz, the problem is basically intractible, but I don't think that really applies the same way once you install higher rungs of authority. MS is no strange…

this buyout is a direct result of the sexual harassment suit (causing a 40% drop in share price since it started)

the company is rotten from the very top, through the middle to the bottom

they're going to have one hell of a time cleaning that up

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#817

Post by shmerl »

Being DRM-free and Linux gamer, this has no impact on me, but MS still gobbled companies like inXile and Obsidian in the past. So I don't see it as a good trend. MS feels like a black hole in this sense. It swallows everything. Nothing comes out.

At least they didn't mess up Minecraft on Linux so far.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#818

Post by terafo »

GuB-42 wrote: post #666
kizer wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next headline: MS to acquire Epic Games? Tencent is in the way there. Really, I could see them launching their own engine. Think of all the studios and talent they have now. They have the engines behind Halo, CoD, WoW, Overwatch. Could build an Unreal competitor.

Microsoft already has id Software! Epic Games historical competitor. id Software has Quake, Epic Games has Unreal. id Software is not the company it once was, but they still make engines. idTech 7 is their last one, powering Doom Eternal.

idTech is cutting edge tech. Their team is one of the best in the industry, second to none, competing with Epic, Insomniac and Naughty Dog. But it is not engine for general use, not now. It does one thing(FPS), and does it extremely well. But it lacks tools that you would need to create games of another genres. Things like advanced animation tools, dialogue systems, quest systems, ways to handle vast open worlds, etc.

idTech would be great for Halo and Call of Duty. But it isn't great for The Elder Scrolls, Starcraft, Gears, and many different games Microsoft Studios are working on. EA already tried to make every studio to use Frostbite for every single game and ended up with disasters like Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#819

Post by Tiktaalik »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #730
paulpan wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When they bought Bethesda last year they announced that Elder Scrolls 6 would no longer be a multi platform title, it would be a Microsoft exclusive. I wouldn't be surprised if they would try to take something like the Call of Duty franchise and make it Xbox/Windows only.

They don't even need to do that. They can keep releasing CoD on Playstation, but if they add it to Gamepass, that increases the value of Gamepass so significantly that it could tilt the console market toward Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#820

Post by TameAntelope »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #802
TameAntelope wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A real monopoly in video gaming isn't nearly as valuable as it first seems. Firstly, "video gaming" is really competing against things like reading a book, walking your dog, board games, etc., so it's not like Microsoft can just start jacking up prices and people will have nowhere to go with their time. Secondly, creating and releasing new games has never been easier. So many small indie game companies are creating g…

> Firstly, "video gaming" is really competing against things like reading a book, walking your dog, board games, etc You're not wrong, but I can't agree with this.

I avoided saying the words in my parent comment to try and minimize controversy, but if you're interested in learning more, what I describe is referred to as the "attention economy"[0].

The "information overload" problem has been known about for at least 40 years!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

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