991–1000 of 1001 posts
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Paying to own is already a thing of the past for music and movie content. How is this different?
I’m not saying it’s different, it’s more like the nail in the coffin. Movies, music, apps, games, treadmills, coffee, printers. Anything that can somehow have internet connectivity becomes a subscription.
How will the company/person receiving the 68.7billions dollars protect them from INFLATION? Will they use the capital immediately to buy assets like ETFs?
All cash deal. Yup. Inflation is going to eat all of your cash pile Microsoft so you better spend it fast. But my thinking is that they should've acquired Valve which controls digital PC gaming distribution not big gaming studios like Zenimax and Activision Blizzard.
I was also thinking about inflation! How will the company/person receiving the 68.7 billions dollars protect them from inflation? Will they get swapped immediately for ETFs?
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Nintendo operates on different rules due their absurd array of reliable IPs. I get the sense that MS, Sony are still trying to sort out their own "Mario, Zelda, Pokemon" clone with mainstream movies/merch potential and all that entails.
Halo is probably the closest thing they have to a Marioesque IP.
ie Pikachu has already sold a lunchbox by the time you have explained what the space marine guy is about.
This all seems really simple-minded but having identifiable brands are incredible business. I definitely see MS and Sony trying to Mario-ify their characters. Aloy/Horizon Zero Dawn is a good candidate for this.
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…
> Upon close, we will offer as many Activision Blizzard games as we can within Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, both new titles and games from Activision Blizzard’s incredible catalog. [Xbox PR] > The acquisition also bolsters Microsoft’s Game Pass portfolio with plans to launch Activision Blizzard games into Game Pass [MS PR] In case anyone still doubts that Microsoft is all-in on Game Pass.
Are you sure everything that Activision / Blizzard publishes will be on GamePass day one?
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Also apparently tencent owns like 40% of Epic Games? It's all bullshit folks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6-r7GNlZvk&ab_channel=Cap.H...
What’s the bullshit part of Tencent owning 40% of Epic Games? Fortnite possibly wouldn’t be what it is if not for Tencent’s early investment and support of Epic Games. That then further goes into Unreal Engine not being what is today either.
Note that I'm not even criticizing or otherwise knocking these business practices, I'm simply making some observations. My use of the term bullshit was particularly to describe the illusion of choice. Not that it's anything new. http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/c...
I think the world would be just fine without fortnite, but I will say unreal engine is pretty nice to have. Probably just a matter of time until Microsoft owns unreal engine as well.
Tangentially relevant due to Tencent involvement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ&ab_channel=Peopl... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY&ab_channel=Peopl...
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…
Now if they buy Sony or Nintendo then I’ll actually be concerned. But for now they’re hardly controlled opposition or anything lol
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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
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AOL/TimeWarner was a failure because because it valued AOL at $200B and TimeWarner at $164B. AOL was just way over-valued. It wasn't really an integration failure so much as paying too much for something. If Time Warner had bought AOL for $2B, it would have been fine. The problem is that they merged valuing AOL at 100x that when it wasn't worth it and later sold for $4.4B to Verizon. Likewise, Yahoo/Verizon bought a…
Tumblr could easily have been Instagram, Yahoo just had no idea what to do with it and completely missed the boat on mobile. A lot of people thought Zuck was insane when he paid $1B for Instagram, and I think we'd all agree that bet paid off pretty handsomely.
