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

971–980 of 1001 posts

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#971

Post by lrem »

redisman wrote: post #841
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…

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

Whoah, why is Sony group valued so low? They do a lot of things... Their P/E is half of Microsoft. But they're bleeding money, so something is amiss there.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#972

Post by kertoip_1 »

kungito wrote: post #365
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 are still missing a mobile platform and that's why I believe they will retry within the next few years

It's too late to capture mobile platforms, not only because the market is stabilized but most importantly: computing moves to the cloud, where Microsoft is already a big player. IMHO there is no point for them to do that.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#973

Post by pharmakom »

johnebgd wrote: post #920
babypuncher wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for Xbox, the biggest positive change in leadership has been the replacement of Don Mattrick with Phil Spencer in 2014. Xbox as a brand was in real bad shape when he took over.

Don Mattrick might as well have been a plant by Sony he was so effective at destroying all the good will Microsoft had built with gamers during the 360 era. Introducing Xbox One as a media center with no ownership through physical media was a disaster. Then again, Xbox branding is a total disaster anyway. The Xbox Series X vs the Xbox One X vs the Xbox 1 are all very different things but aren’t that far apart in name…

Halo 3 and Gears of War were must have games of that generation and the big hits from Sony (e.g. Last of Us) didn’t come till a bit later. These games were so successful that many looked past the RRoD and loved the 360. In this context I think buying studios makes sense.

I wonder if CoD will become XBox / Windows exclusive?

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#974

Post by octodog »

awill wrote: post #572

Microsoft 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 has not been making money on xbox. They're not investing money made with xbox.

Source on this? They have said in the past that they lose money on xbox unit sales but are very profitable from software/game sales. As far as I know there is no public information to suggest otherwise.

https://www.vgchartz.com/article/448650/microsoft-the-xbox-d...

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#975

Post by pjmlp »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #905
cwkoss wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Consumption on the go world, yes.

Mobile revolution for doing actual work on the go is mostly done in laptops, and Windows is still the champion on that regard.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#976

Post by pjmlp »

cletus wrote: post #691
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.

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…

Looking from the point of view that most people that actually want to do mobile work are using laptops or hybrid devices like Surface clones, they are doing pretty alright.

Sure they lost the mobile phones, but that market has already plateud, newer Android and iOS versions are only gimmicks for those on 2 year contract renewals to change devices.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#977

Post by marcellus23 »

cma wrote: post #568
JAlexoid wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they will. There's no point. There is a stable duopoly, where Microsoft can reap the benefits of competition between the two, without wasting any resources. May not be best for consumer - really great for business. (especially, if courts hold that Apple/Google cannot outright ban apps from their stores)

> There is a stable duopoly, where Microsoft can reap the benefits of competition between the two, without wasting any resources. The huge competition where both charge 30% of gross sales, far higher than even the federal corporate tax rate, which is only charged on the net.

They’re the ones providing everything from the OS through the dev environment and the hosting and payment processing, not to mention marketing and having built the billion devices that users are purchasing from.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#979

Post by 9dev »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #873
Teknoman117 wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not for a couple of versions but I think it's inevitable. It's in their DNA as a company to push embrace, extend, and extinguish.

Ah, come on. That’s what any reasonably similar sized company does all the time. It’s what shareholders demand (not that i think that makes it any better). But always singling out Microsoft for a decades-old stereotype is just getting old.

Re: Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard

#980

Post by pjmlp »

pelasaco wrote: post #777
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.

Unfortunately they didn't support their own game engine as they could: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA Stardew Valley and Terraria were actually IMO the best games produced with that

That you have to thank the traditional WinDev vs DevDiv political wars.

As usual the .NET product (XNA), got replaced by a C++ one (DirectXTK).

https://walbourn.github.io/welcome/

They acknowledged they should have behaved better, years later with the new management adding support for MonoGame on the XBox,

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2016/03/14/letter-chris-charla-i...

Post reply on HN