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Consolidation is concerning, but this also means there’s a good chance Booby Cocktit will be booted out.
…Booted out with a golden parachute, but a boot nonetheless.
A golden parachute so big he could trivially buy into the next company. If he wanted to retire, he would have long done it.
Worse, what if he ends up as the boss fo GamePass or Xbox?
I think Microsoft is aware of the bobby issue enough to not consider letting him run anything of theirs.
No way Microsoft let’s that happen. He’ll be forced out. The only reason Microsoft looked into this consolidation is because he was running the company value into the core of the earth.
Him fucking off is by far the best outcome of this whole situation
What’s most disappointing about this aside from the negative impacts it has on consumers with no benefits is how it shows what a grip Microsoft has on uk entities. This has been a problem for decades. Microsoft is one of those companies that has its tendrils all throughout the uk, and they can get whatever they want. Even when what they want is in opposition to decisions made by authorities specifically designed to block this kind of thing.
It sounds like the issue the regulator had was something specific to cloud game streaming, and Microsoft addressed that.
The CMA had originally blocked the acquisition over cloud gaming concerns, but Microsoft recently restructured the deal to transfer cloud gaming rights for current and new Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft.
yes that’s mechanism where you see microsoft get what they want. they do a platitude that doesn’t affect them, that they generally won’t even bother to enforce. because the regulatory body can’t just say “they made us do this by talking to someone higher up that said we had to do this”
the CMA never goes back on decisions like this, their decision is final and you can only fight it by going to the courts and the courts will only rule on if it was legal for the CMA to make the decision, not on the validity of the decision.
yet microsoft gets an unheard-of do-over.
Consolidation is bad for consumers, this would never have gone thru pre-reagan admin
Counterpoint: Consolidation in such a fast paced industry with a low barrier to entry isn’t as bad as physical goods consolidation. If Microsoft acts in bad faith, people just won’t buy games from that studio anymore, developers will just leave the company and start a new studio, free lance, or work for another party. It’s not like ABK was lighting the market on fire either. Microsoft is buying a trash heap and hoping to turn the internal culture around to bring back neglected IPs
Counter-counterpoint: When Activision bought and consolidated Blizzard an Blizzard North, they made it worse and people still slave away for them, and enough people buy their objectively inferior products to keep them going on life support to be sold again.
They became a poster child of what’s wrong with the industry (Diablo Immortal) and nobody learned anything. Baulder’s Gate 3 did more to further a healthy ecosystem than any merger has.
The gaming industry has a low barrier of entry?
$69 Billion.
Yes. Independent developers have regularly released smash hits like Stardew Valley.
And how many dozens of indie games came out that same week whose studios folded afterwards? Or how many devs didn’t even release their first games because they ran out of money during development? Or how many smaller studios who were making fun games got irresistible offers from big studios to buy them out? What about the engines that are becoming increasingly more hostile towards devs?
Let’s hope they can chew what they’ve attempted to eat. They can barely manage their first party studios, and now they’re going to attempt to manage one of the biggest publisher/studio.
Manage? They just want the money from King and to prevent games from releasing on PlayStation.
I mean yeah, that’s how acquisitions and exclusivity works. It’s not like PlayStation bought Bungie to lose money or make exclusivity deals with third parties to bring games to Xbox. That’s just how this industry works.
By manage I mean, they’re gonna handle so many companies without a good track record of being able to do it. To make the money from King they will need to be able to retain talent and steward its properties properly.
they’re gonna handle so many companies without a good track record of being able to do it. To make the money from King they will need to be able to retain talent and steward its properties properly.
No they don’t. As we’ve already seen, MS doesn’t have to do anything in regards to development. Promotion, marketing will get a boost but they can be hands off most of the technical details and still make bank. Bethesda, King and Activision are all quite profitable on their own. Now they simply can’t develop for Sony and they get distributed on Game Pass day 1.
Also, exclusionary buy-outs are bad for the market and should not have been allowed. MS buying up huge game competitors and then restricting their choice on which platforms to develop for is clearly anti-competitive behavior.
You’re right, they’ve been hands off and basically done bare minimum for marketing and promotion. And it hasn’t been working well for them at all, exhibit A: Halo Infinite, exhibit B: Redfall. Clearly they can’t sustain this anymore.
Starfield has been probably the first example where they actually got invested in the production, delayed a game by a year, got their entire QA team test it. Layoffs from top to bottom at 343 is probably another example of them intervening.
Regarding exclusionary buyouts, I don’t know if you aren’t aware of it. But it has been a thing in this industry for decades. This is how Sony got where it is today, by being highly competitive by making exclusionary deals and buying studios with whom they had exclusionary deals with for years. Sony entered this industry out of nowhere and bought their way into success, and everyone agrees that only made the market more competitive. Xbox had no games and was not bringing competition in market, and now that it has more games, it’s anti competitive?
The difference with MSFT is that they bring their games to PC (an open platform) via Steam, and to Xbox, along with a price accessible service of GamePass, so it doesn’t force a gamer into first buying a $400 console and then a $70 game to play on it.
We can agree to disagree, my original point is primarily around lack of confidence in MSFT’s ability to manage these studios and do justice to their legacy. Sure making workspaces less toxic and inclusive for everyone is a massive win, but will employees stick around under a new management that seems pretty incompetent to eff up their own flagship series (Halo).
That’s great news, hope this goes through, soon.
Hope it doesn’t. MS has a history of anticonsumer practices that goes all the way back to the 90s.
No matter what they say to the regulator MS will stop releasing any ABK existing IP onto Sony and Nintendo consoles.
Even though it will not directly effect me as a PC gamer it is still a bad thing for the industry as a whole.
MS is the last hope to safe some of the classic Blizzard titles as the state of Activision Blizzard as it is simply can’t get any worse.
Why? As in, why are they “the last hope”? What can they do that ActiBlizzKing cannot?
What can they do that ActiBlizzKing cannot?
Literally anything.
There is currently a handful of devs doing the occational balance patch for SC2 otherwise the game is complelty dead from the developer side. On the MS side, AoE2 and other even older games are doing so much better.
… that game came out 13 years ago and was supported with expansions for 6 years
And AoE2 came out 24 years ago and is supported with expansions to this day.
And SS1 came out 29 years ago and just got a remaster. This isn’t a years-pissing context. Starcraft II was supported way long, and extensively. And like all good games, eventually the vast vast majority of players have moved on, and then the devs might move on, too.
Isn’t the expansion content between SCII’s expansions and AoE2’s expansions significantly different?
EDIT: the last one was 3 races (note: races are significantly less diverse in AoE2 vs in SC2) and 3 campaigns, each with 6 maps each
I feel like the Co-OP commanders they added fairly frequently would constitute roughly the same amount of race content. Campaign content not so much but the main campaign of each SC2 expansion is 26 stages, not including branching paths.
The original AoE or the rereleases? Because i had to pay for the definite edition.
Comparing one thing to an exception is dumb in the best of times
StarCraft 3 and warcraft 4 hopefully.
Maybe a non shit diablo game.
Why would they do that? CoD is a better investment. This is MS. Not some fan boy.
They need more games for their pass.
But do they need the games to be good? Activions sucks balls, but why would microsoft make the games good again and remove all the shit with microtransactions etc.?
They would just contract Blizzard to make that, so if they were able to do it they would have done so already.
Since when was that a thing that Blizzard does?
I haven’t played it but I have read that Diablo 4 has been mostly well received. I guess there’s been a fiasco about one of the updates to it, but that’s not something unique to Blizzard and theoretically could be fixed in another update, no?
Me too, I know it’s not a popular opinion on here (for good reason) but this should put more pressure on PlayStation and drive competition there, make gsmepass more attractive and hopefully shake things up at Activision blizzard which could go either way, but worth the risk given how shitnthey currently are.