Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

news.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

901–910 of 1001 posts

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#901

Post by fomine3 »

simonh wrote: post #571
pjmlp wrote: post #452

Earlier 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…

It's just not for you. Bigger dual screen makes sense for some people.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#902

Post by fomine3 »

bduerst wrote: post #669
u2077 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I’m worried about. With them owning both the games and the OS that they are played on, we could be forced into a subscription. Paying to own may be a thing of the past.

Paying to own is already a thing of the past for music and movie content. How is this different?

Thankfully we can still completely avoid subscription for music legally.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#903

Post by aceki »

cwkoss wrote: post #884
cletus wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think "the mobile revolution" is a joke and never materialized. 95+% of mobile games are unoriginal clones with layers of mechanisms to reduce fun unless the user pays. People who enjoy games have largely abandoned mobile, save a handful of decent titles that were ported from other platforms. Mobile-first gamers are: people (mostly kids) who are so naive about games they will accept garbage (or cant afford a better…

Mobile gaming is mostly crap, sure, but it is still quite profitable. I think the parent was referring to having a successful mobile platform like Google or Apple so that Microsoft could skim their commission off all those mobile games.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#904

Post by fomine3 »

icu wrote: post #576
t3rabytes wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Games Pass is such ridiculous value that my "non-gaming" partner got a Series-S with Games Pass to play MS Flight Simulator, and as an aside, to have games available to myself and our kids (it was impossible to get the Series-X in the UK in the lead up to Christmas without paying scalpers). I have a PS5 (sadly from a scalper), and I begrudgingly got Plus to fully experience the PvP aspect of Demon's Souls but the…

Even Game Pass without Cloud gaming is bargain. I surprised that it also come with cloud gaming for free.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#905

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

cwkoss wrote: post #884
cletus wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think "the mobile revolution" is a joke and never materialized. 95+% of mobile games are unoriginal clones with layers of mechanisms to reduce fun unless the user pays. People who enjoy games have largely abandoned mobile, save a handful of decent titles that were ported from other platforms. Mobile-first gamers are: people (mostly kids) who are so naive about games they will accept garbage (or cant afford a better…

I don't think they meant just in terms of gaming, but the mobile revolution in terms of how smartphones took over the world and Microsoft missed the boat.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#906

Post by fomine3 »

palijer wrote: post #84
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.

I looked around for a while, a d I can't actually find a list of any mergers that antitrust regulations actually prevented. I'm assuming some survivor bias is involved here and we don't hear about the ones that stopped early, but it seems that what I and most folks assume antitrust regulations do is different than what actually happens. I remember the Sirius/XM merge and how those were the only two players in the mar…

Qualcomm and Broadcom

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#907

Post by p1necone »

cwkoss wrote: post #884
cletus wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think "the mobile revolution" is a joke and never materialized. 95+% of mobile games are unoriginal clones with layers of mechanisms to reduce fun unless the user pays. People who enjoy games have largely abandoned mobile, save a handful of decent titles that were ported from other platforms. Mobile-first gamers are: people (mostly kids) who are so naive about games they will accept garbage (or cant afford a better…

(Simplistically) Business people think about money, gamers and ground level game developers think about games. The "mobile revolution" as told by C-level executives was about the former, and it's been a screaming success.

Mobile games were never going to replace more traditional games because it's a totally different market, but companies don't really care about that anyway - they might not have /understood/ that mobile games were never going to supplant traditional console and PC gaming, but they didn't need to because they made fistfuls of cash anyway.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#908

Post by polishdude20 »

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.

And their windows game store is still full of bad UX and random bugs and glitches that make it look like it was built by amateurs.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#909

Post by fomine3 »

MrDresden wrote: post #806
mrtranscendence wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wonder if this is due to MS hosting their content at fewer datacenters and thus needing to balance the data flow to each user better. Valve has boxes hosted at many ISPs around the world and so each location could have lower usage numbers, thus less need to throttle. Pure speculation though.

Valve's CDN (In my recent case, Akamai or Limelight) achieves fastest download speed I've ever used. I wonder why they do aggressively, and other don't.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#910

Post by Keyframe »

palijer wrote: post #84
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.

I looked around for a while, a d I can't actually find a list of any mergers that antitrust regulations actually prevented. I'm assuming some survivor bias is involved here and we don't hear about the ones that stopped early, but it seems that what I and most folks assume antitrust regulations do is different than what actually happens. I remember the Sirius/XM merge and how those were the only two players in the mar…

Nvidia/ARM doesn't look healthy anymore.
Post reply on HN