941–950 of 1001 posts
Now, that's curious. Microsoft can't allow itself [0] the kinds of culture scandals Blizzard still seems like it doesn't care about. [0] At least if they want to maintain all the government work they do.
Everyone here is talking about how this is great for gaming, or bad, or how they're becoming a monopoly... The only emotion I can feel is disgust. Disgust that Microsoft would tacitly approve of Kotick's decades of harboring, encouraging, and protecting sexual assault within his companies. The man allegedly, and settled out of court, for telling his secretary he was "going to have her killed". He hid internal sexual…
Everyone here is talking about how this is great for gaming, or bad, or how they're becoming a monopoly... The only emotion I can feel is disgust. Disgust that Microsoft would tacitly approve of Kotick's decades of harboring, encouraging, and protecting sexual assault within his companies. The man allegedly, and settled out of court, for telling his secretary he was "going to have her killed". He hid internal sexual…
Everyone here is talking about how this is great for gaming, or bad, or how they're becoming a monopoly... The only emotion I can feel is disgust. Disgust that Microsoft would tacitly approve of Kotick's decades of harboring, encouraging, and protecting sexual assault within his companies. The man allegedly, and settled out of court, for telling his secretary he was "going to have her killed". He hid internal sexual…
1. It's been reported that Kotick will leave once the acquisition is finalized (i.e. when MS actually owns the company). If and when that doesn't happen, _then_ I'll join in on the criticism. [edit: based on WSJ reporting, not official statement]
2. Kotick is the de-facto ruler of ABK. The acquisition's not happening unless you play ball. If getting ABK under new management and kicking Kotick out requires playing along for a while, then so be it.
3. A big part of MS's investment thesis here seems to be "ABK's assets are worth more than $69B, but their scandals are suppressing their valuation. We can fix the scandals and better realize the IP's true value". MS will be stupid to let ABK keep going without decisively handling the scandals.
* Sony is focused on their PlayStation walled garden. * Microsoft is consolidating more resources around Game Pass and the Xbox store. * Mobile is a large and rapidly growing segment, which Steam isn't able to capture. * Epic is pouring money into its own store.
Valve needs a backup plan to stay relevant in the 5-10yr time horizon. If the Steam Deck can take off, that might serve as enough incentive to keep games available on Steam and away from Windows exclusivity where MS might start building a walled garden.
Simple timeline of what will happen. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft embraced gaming, including the openness of the PC platform, and now are in the process of extending it with Game Pass and its value. They will eventually turn to the final E.
They probably won't be a pure monopoly, competitors will pop up, but it'll be an all subscription world and Game Pass will be the Steam of this world, except not just for PC and Xbox but for most platforms they can get their service to work on.
We will no longer own our games. Eventually Game Pass will be cloud only and the files won't even sit on our devices. And the worst part is no one cares, not now or in the future. Everyone just wants access to the latest games at the cheapest cost. And clearly the US government (I'm not a US citizen nor do I live there fyi) does not care to lift a finger against something in this sector.
I hate to suck up to another company, who itself does many bad things, but I hope Valve is able to keep the PC platform open for at least as long as I care to play video games. It's out of their own self interest, but they've done wonders for the Linux community and contract some great people to improve linux gaming for everyone, not just them. And they're releasing hardware that isn't locked down. Honestly, I hate to feel good about what a big company like Valve is doing, but I'm greatful.
Competition oversight? Probably dead since Regan? After they stopped controlling AT&T the UNIX-Wars happened, impcompatiblity, lawsuits, closed-source has become a normal thing and proprietary software locked users in and competitors out. What platform will Microsoft support? Likely not: * Linux * BSD * MacOS * Nintendo * Sony Does anyone miss id Software? Native ports on Linux, incredible source-code and impressive…
I'm sorry. does gabe produce games anymore?
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.
Everyone here is talking about how this is great for gaming, or bad, or how they're becoming a monopoly... The only emotion I can feel is disgust. Disgust that Microsoft would tacitly approve of Kotick's decades of harboring, encouraging, and protecting sexual assault within his companies. The man allegedly, and settled out of court, for telling his secretary he was "going to have her killed". He hid internal sexual…
I don't see the same issues. 1. It's been reported that Kotick will leave once the acquisition is finalized (i.e. when MS actually owns the company). If and when that doesn't happen, _then_ I'll join in on the criticism. [edit: based on WSJ reporting, not official statement] 2. Kotick is the de-facto ruler of ABK. The acquisition's not happening unless you play ball. If getting ABK under new management and kicking Ko…
This is the correct answer.
The intrinsic value of the company is worth more than the share price, which is being pulled down by the scandals and highly negative PR.
Microsoft have bought a bargain.
Everyone here is talking about how this is great for gaming, or bad, or how they're becoming a monopoly... The only emotion I can feel is disgust. Disgust that Microsoft would tacitly approve of Kotick's decades of harboring, encouraging, and protecting sexual assault within his companies. The man allegedly, and settled out of court, for telling his secretary he was "going to have her killed". He hid internal sexual…
I don't see the same issues. 1. It's been reported that Kotick will leave once the acquisition is finalized (i.e. when MS actually owns the company). If and when that doesn't happen, _then_ I'll join in on the criticism. [edit: based on WSJ reporting, not official statement] 2. Kotick is the de-facto ruler of ABK. The acquisition's not happening unless you play ball. If getting ABK under new management and kicking Ko…
Do you have a source for that? Not because I disagree but I really want to hope you're right, and I would like evidence to make that belief have some real evidence.