Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#841

Post by redisman » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 9:45 PM UTC

paulpan wrote: post #438

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.

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…

Nintendo and Sony are small potatoes compared to MSFT in 2022. 70B and 150B market cap against a 2.27T one. Japanese tech companies are happy to stay in their niche. But now Microsoft has an incomprehensible advantage in available capital. Apart from the Japanese government blocking the sale they could just buy them

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#842

Post by kelp » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #560

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.

Another example right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29980227

Intel is buying fab capacity from TSMC. Backing away from vertical integration to force their own fabs to compete on the open market.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#843

Post by bregma » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

reducesuffering wrote: post #635

zymhan wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are very much a commodity.

Nvidia and AMD, of $650B and $160B market caps, make commodities?!

Consumer game hardware is small potatoes in the revenue stream of those companies. They might be important to the game-playing consumer, but they're regarded as commodities by industry.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#844

Post by VRay » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

dleslie wrote: post #563

izacus wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand what you're trying to say here? If Microsoft starts subsidizing Game Pass games from their other businesses (like Amazon, Google and Apple do for their other services), it'll make the business model of actually selling games unviable by pure race to the bottom. As a result, you'll lose independent development and market diversity because everyone will need to beg Microsoft (and maybe Sony and…

I used to hold the same opinion as you, and for the most part I still do. But I think the subscription model is a solution to the race to the bottom, because it creates an artificial level of quality assurance. Take PlayPass, for instance: the play store is a landfill of endless trash, but PlayPass adds both a level of curation and it unlocks all the microtransactions. So for a low yearly fee you get access to the be…

I dunno, I tried Apple Arcade, and the games on there are decent, but I really didn't feel like I was getting my $5/month's worth

Any random $20 Switch title from the Shovelware Shelf at your local retailer is so much more polished and fun than even the best phone games, it's insane

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#845

Post by jpeter » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #43

These acquisitions are ridiculous. How long till Disney buys Microsoft? Why even bother having more than one company in the US?

We are going for the Cyberpunk future. But instead of Arasaka, Kang Tao, Militech and Biotechnica, we get Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Facebook

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#846

Post by redisman » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

akmarinov wrote: post #38

sabertoothed wrote: post #4

The name Blizzard is still magical to me. As the maybe 15-year old playing Warcraft II and drawing strategies on a piece of paper. I don't play computer games anymore. But it was magical.

They've now fallen so low, it's like it's a completely different company.

All the original creators of the magical IPs left a long time ago.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#847

Post by redisman » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

tempestn wrote: post #837

I'd love if they might breathe some life back into Starcraft 2, or even start working on 3. Normally I'd be worried when the company that owns my favorite game gets acquired, but it'd hardly be possible to do less with it than they already were.

Warcraft 4 please. They made Age of Empires 4 happen too

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#848

Post by danhab99 » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

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?…

I'm worried that the gaming industry is on a decline. Some of the biggest games are >5 years old, I can't think of a big franchise that started in the last 5 years, the steam greenlight program is a pile of shit, and new games are getting held to the standard of existing games which discourages new-comers.

I almost wanna throw my hands up and give in, like how big can a problem be before it stops being a problem.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#849

Post by oneoff786 » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

faisal_ksa wrote: post #593

oneoff786 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think no chance that Tim Sweeney sells Epic. Unity is a public company and I think would benefit immensely from being acquired by Microsoft.

Everything is for sale for the right price. And what is good for Unity does not mean it's good for the consumers.

Well unity is dropping the ball hard for consumers so something different would likely be an improvement

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#850

Post by dgellow » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

StreamBright wrote: post #808

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.

>> has been able to vertically integrate MS for a long time had such opportunities which it missed almost every single time. On the other hand, Apple had similar opportunities and succeeded almost every single time. The MS list: - Windows Mobile - Zune - MSN The Apple list: - iTunes - iMessage - iCloud - iOs (some more)

Microsoft is extremely successful with Azure. Apple did not compete at all on public cloud offering.