Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
news.microsoft.comIt'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.
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 lot of properties at inflated values. Tumblr wasn't worth $1.1B, but Yahoo wanted to buy one of the hot up-and-coming properties to feel relevant.
I think the big issue is the price one is paying and whether one has a plan for the purchase or if the purchase is more "but if I don't make a big move, what am I doing? I can't go wrong following trends, right?"
For example, AOL/TimeWarner was a situation of over-paying because TimeWarner was afraid that the internet was going to eat the world and they needed to stay relevant. AOL was so hot and it's easy to get swept up in the moment thinking "I need to get on board now or I'll miss it!" Likewise, Yahoo feared becoming irrelevant as Google took over the internet and thought buying Tumblr would make them the hip forward company once again.
Activision Blizard seems like a reasonable add-on for Microsoft. $69B isn't that much money for it given it would represent a P/E ratio of around 26. Apple's P/E is 30, Amazon 62, Microsoft 34, Google 26. So they aren't paying an absurd amount given Activision's profits. Even if they did no integration or strategy, Activision could simply continue doing its thing and contribute favorably to Microsoft's bottom line.
With a tiny bit of strategy, it seems clear Microsoft could get even more value out of the company. Maybe a few Xbox exclusive titles to push their console business. Maybe some stuff for their game streaming service.
If Disney has shown us something over the past few years, it's that owning IP that people like allows you to keep spinning new versions of that IP. Activision has lots of that kind of IP in the gaming space so Microsoft should be able to use that to its advantage.
I think there's a big difference between buying Activision at a price whose P/E ratio is better than your own and where there are clear strategies that could offer you even more value compared with the "omg, I'm getting left behind! I'll pay anything you want" panic purchases/mergers of other companies.
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.
Tumblr was dead the second they turned porn off. Simple as that sadly.
How did they monetize it? I've worked in digital advertising and I can't imagine the adult content would get the same CPMs as general interest.
Did Instagram avoid that fate by never allowing porn in the first place?
Instagram has porn.
It just blocks some body parts.
See also: Flickr.
AOL bought TW not the other way around.
Sure, but Time Warner shareholders accepted AOL equity at an over-valued price. THAT's the fleece - Time Warner kept being a company despite AOL's failure, but the ownership shifted dramatically toward former owners of AOL.
Also worth noting on the AOL/Time Warner comparisons everyone is making: Everyone knew dial-up was on the way out in 2000, they just assumed AOL would 'figure it out' because they were the current market leader. Not clear to me (other than maybe metaverse, controversially) what MSFT's looming problem they need to 'figure out' is.
Microsoft's "looming problem" seems to be the $130B+ in cash they're sitting on, and finding something to spend it on?
Yeah, at least in traditional financial theory, if they can invest it in a way that has NPV of <$1, then they should invest that dollar, and if not, they should just return it.
There's obvious optics to draining the cash balance, but it's not a problem per se, because worst case, they just return it to shareholders and Net Income/EV should be unaffected.
They can give the cash back to shareholders.
Or their workers.
I dont think MS employees are complaining about salaries, if they dont like it they can easily switch to FANG companies.
the same people thanks to RSUs
MSFT has to figure out how to justify a 2.7 trillion market cap when their revenue is on the order of 170-180 billion. That’s a lot of sustained profitable growth.
Conveniently ignoring the fact that on that $180bn revenue, they generate $90bn in net income, resulting in a 30x P/E multiple (the actual way companies are valued), which is only slightly elevated vs. the S&P 500's historical average.
Conversely, what's wrong with McKesson, if their revenue is $250bn and growing, but their market cap is $40bn?
The larger you get, the harder it is to justify outsized PE multiples. Plenty of theory and empirical research supports this.
Even with their recent 11-12% correction their PE is ~33.5. [0] That’s higher than today’s S and P PE, and more than double the long term median (~15) and mean (~16) PE. [1]
This means that the market is betting on some combination of margin expansion and outsize revenue growth.
McKesson is in another industry with different margin and growth, and is valued differently.
I think vertical integration tends to win when the floor is built atop of commodities. The new consoles have similar hardware[0] and it really comes down to allocation of those hardware resources, which makes first party studios ways to differentiate your product from the competition, as you can justify the extra cost to make sure your first party console is optimized for in its unique ways, where cross publishing houses don't always do that, for example. This can differentiate gaming experience, even for titles that are cross platform, if one is optimized for say, the Xbox ecosystem, but its PlayStation port does not have the same kind of optimizations. How much this matters may remain to be seen, for now.
Having highly optimized flagship titles though is what makes these vertical integrations so appealing in this market, in my estimation.
[0]: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/ps5-vs-xbox-series-x
FWIW I don't endorse everything in the link to toms guide, I just wanted a reliable source for hardware specs
Intel has also been feeling the pain of vertical integration. Like with most things, double edged sword.
They fabricated their chips - not sure if they still do. Initially this was great, they owned the equipment and got things 'at cost'. However, they had trouble refining their tooling to get < 14nm for several generations.
This made them less competitive for a while, while having a pile of expenses a more lean design house wouldn't have. They'll surely be fine, but it's not the same sprint they've had for quite a while.
Intel still fabricates their own chips. Though notably, their new dedicated GPUs are made by a third party.
Two years ago I would have expected this trend to continue and for Intel to stop in-house fabrication, but with their new CEO and some prodding from the US government, they are now investing many billions of dollars into new fabs.
It probably means more to keep the Blizzard catalog off of Oculus than anything else. IMO many games in their catalog would be ideal in that environment and keeping them off of it goes a long way towards buying time.
To argue in favor of your point. Big vertically integrated firms often become insulated from economic, technical, and business realities. This eventually leads to politics winning out over technical or business savvy. At the extremes you'll have companies burning 10s of billions on pet projects going nowhere, or software engineers producing 0 lines of code per year.
I wouldn't be surprised if this effect could even be mathematically quantified.
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…
Don't forget one of the Xbox One's key innovative features: tight integration with your cable box. You know, that worthless piece of hardware tied to a $100/mo subscription that your Xbox 360 helped you replace entirely with its Netflix and Hulu apps.
When they showed that off I knew nobody at Xbox had a single clue who their audience was.
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?
Another example right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29980227
Intel is buying fab capacity from TSMC. Backing away from vertical integration to force their own fabs to compete on the open market.
Ballmer gets a bad rap but he was the one that got them moving towards Azure and cloud. He made MS a lot of money, they didn’t suffer under him. It was mostly just optics where he didn’t look good.
Look at the stock price under him, and then after.
Although it's plausible that had he stayed on for say another five more years, we would have seen the fruits of his early investments pay off and the stock appreciate accordingly.
The guy who had Nadella in charge of cloud the entire time? Ballmer is the one that not only placed Satya, but made the call to push and fund it.
For me your comment rings the same as saying look at the stock price of AMD under and after Lisa Su.
Nah, their model is different. They are building a Disneyland-like experience, where the public pays to "be there" and the attractions always change. Never been done before.
Exactly. They're going for quantity to ensure even if a bunch of stuff fails, they'll get a few hits. Sometimes all you need is a few hits.
That type of closed garden seems more like Apple, no?
Microsoft has been understandably eyeing that 30% on all digital goods sales Apple gets for years now. They missed the boat on the Windows store, but they'll do just about anything to keep a similar financial structure on the Xbox side.
Gasprom, Dell and Tesla may be some examples of companies that have done will with vertical integration.
Tesla is kind of vertically integrated, but mostly because they were the first to make a popular electric car, so adequate supply chains for those components didn't previously exist. It remains to be seen whether it's still an advantage when most of the industry is making electric vehicles and competitive alternate suppliers for those components are common.
Dell installs a Microsoft operating system on SSDs from the lowest bidder and puts them in a Foxconn motherboard with a CPU from AMD or Intel.
Gasprom is a majority state-owned company in Russia. This can't really be an example of anything to do with a free market.
The typical example is Apple, because they're currently very profitable. But they've been doing vertical integration for decades and their history is full of instances of almost going out of business. The previous "see how well vertical integration works" example was IBM.
Tesla also makes components like seats internally.
A lot of companies just outsource that and lose out on the profits, it is one of the reasons tesla has such high margins.
> Tesla also makes components like seats internally.
For the same reason. Vehicle seat are, for better or for worse, typically model-specific. Before there was Tesla there was nobody making Tesla seats. Would anybody be surprised if they start outsourcing that soon, given that they now have enough volume to attract third party suppliers and seat manufacturing is certainly not their competitive edge?
> A lot of companies just outsource that and lose out on the profits, it is one of the reasons tesla has such high margins.
Vertical integration increasing margins is just an accounting trick.
It costs $5 to make a widget, the widget maker sells it to the car maker for $6, the car maker sells it to the customer for $8. The non-vertical car company has a $2 unit margin, the vertical car company has a $3 unit margin. But to get it they take on all the risks and expenses of the widget maker.
If making widgets is a commodity market then the $1/unit is going entirely to fixed overhead (otherwise someone would charge less and gain market share). Taking on the fixed overhead in exchange for the $1 is breakeven and increases systemic risk by reducing supply diversification. But on paper your margins increase by $1.
>For the same reason. Vehicle seat are, for better or for worse, typically model-specific. Before there was Tesla there was nobody making Tesla seats. Would anybody be surprised if they start outsourcing that soon, given that they now have enough volume to attract third party suppliers and seat manufacturing is certainly not their competitive edge?
I doubt this will happen. Here is the reason they started making seats themselves as explained by the big cheese himself: https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=357
Given what happened when they worked with supplier last time, I doubt they would want to give up the ability to innovate by going back to a supplier even if they are big.
Furthermore, I think suppliers might not be chomping at the bit to work with Tesla anymore. When the Model 3 was being developed, that insanely large preorder volumes caused some suppliers to do whatever it took to get the order from Tesla because of FOMO. Some even stripped their margin to the bone in the hopes of establishing a long term relationship with Tesla. In the end Tesla did not deliver on the numbers they promised and this lower volume caused massive financial problems for some suppliers, especially the smaller guys. I think there were even some bankruptcies of smaller outfits. Given Tesla's reputation as difficult to work with, I don't fully think they will get preferential treatment compared to someone like Toyota or Honda (which I hear suppliers love to work with).
FUN FACT: The largest Tesla skeptic subreddit /r/realTesla was started by someone who was supposedly a liaison between Tesla and the seat supplier during the Model X days. In fact he watched the whole Model X train wreck from start to finish and his banning from /r/teslamotors when he detailed all the disasters happening during Model X led to the creation of /r/Realtesla.
> I doubt this will happen. Here is the reason they started making seats themselves as explained by the big cheese himself
This is an explanation for why they designed their own seats, and basically amounts to "existing seats were uncomfortable." That makes sense when the status quo is junk, but now they've got a good seat, what does it matter who manufactures it?
Are they expecting to do a lot of further seat innovating in the future? Does seat technology have a rapid rate of change?
> Given Tesla's reputation as difficult to work with, I don't fully think they will get preferential treatment compared to someone like Toyota or Honda (which I hear suppliers love to work with).
People care more about what you're doing right now than what you did when you were just starting out. Tomorrow's reputation is based more on today than it is on yesterday.
>This is an explanation for why they designed their own seats, and basically amounts to "existing seats were uncomfortable." That makes sense when the status quo is junk, but now they've got a good seat, what does it matter who manufactures it?
>Are they expecting to do a lot of further seat innovating in the future? Does seat technology have a rapid rate of change?
Well maybe for other manufacturers that rely on these suppliers no but I think the real point that Elon and Sandy were getting at was that anything a user touches should be made in house as that is what you can craft carefully to perfect the customer experience. Will their seats change? Well so far they have gone though 4 or 5 revisions so it seems like they continue to make changes and iterate.
>People care more about what you're doing right now than what you did when you were just starting out. Tomorrow's reputation is based more on today than it is on yesterday.
Suppliers will happily give a quote, its just that the quote will likely be higher to account for the added expense of working with Tesla. People go from supplier to supplier and since this field is very much relationship based, I can see Tesla losing out to other manufacturers especially when supply is crunched like right now. For a lot of parts(for example seats) there are only 2-3 companies to choose from. If they burned bridges with all three then what?
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.
Imagine if Mixer streamers had early access to the new console and titles? And drops? Viewers absolutely love drops.
What if the Xbox Game Pass included a Mixer sub like Amazon Prime does with Twitch Prime?
To me this just showed they have absolutely no idea what they're doing.
I mean, look at how much money they've thrown at Bing.
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 gaming system) and whales who enjoy spending large amounts of money to move up the leaderboards.
Mobile gaming C-level's loved talking about the mobile revolution for a decade, but I really think it was all optimistic nonsense in service of their fundraising.
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.
Ah, that's fair. I was working on a service ancillary to the gaming industry during the big hype, so I mostly associate the term with the push toward mobile games. Definitely valid outside gaming.
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.
(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.
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.
Who just bought Zynga?
Take Two. And Microsoft just bought King via Activision.
I don't know about that. They gave it like four years and spent a lot of money promoting it and it was still microscopic. They could have tried other things, but if Ninja couldn't draw viewers, do you really think a bunch of obscure streamers nobody watches having drops would have made a bigger difference? At some point you have to stop throwing good money after bad.
Ninja just recently [0] talked about why he thinks Mixer failed and it was not due to its potential.
He specifically mentioned stuff like: needing a hotmail account to register, when you register you had some random name assigned to you and had to go into your profile to change it afterwards, etc. Small stuff basically, but it added up and Microsofts corporate structure prohibited quick adjustments.
Throwing money at Ninja is really an example of poor execution.
What makes Twitch successful is not any one streamer. It's an ecosystem. Raiding is huge on Twitch for streamers supporting other streamers.
You don't build a forest by planting one very large tree. A forest is everything from the tallest tree to the undergrowth.
> do you really think a bunch of obscure streamers nobody watches having drops would have made a bigger difference?
I absolutely do. You see this on Twitch whenever a popular game has drops and the viewer numbers go through the roof. Sure there are a bunch of AFK viewers just wanting the drops but this is a game of numbers. Some are real people. Some will stay.
On the streamer income side, I really don't think you can overestimate how huge of an impact Twitch Prime has on Twitch.
> Throwing money at Ninja is really an example of poor execution.
Really agree with this. They should have been trying to pull as many streamers on the verge of success on twitch as they could (newly qualifying partners mostly) rather than trying to get already established talent to come over for big money.
I do think they also tried this, I knew of some mid-tier streamers who moved over as well, but they probably could have done more. Ninja was clearly a last ditch effort to save the platform rather than a calculated plan.
It is true that on Twitch, when a popular game has drops, the viewer numbers go through the roof. But I don't think you can extrapolate that an unpopular platform could pull viewers away from Twitch by having a bunch of unpopular streamers do drops. You'd probably influence which streamers on Mixer got viewers on Mixer, but would it get people to drop Twitch? I strongly doubt it.
More to the point, no other platform has succeeded here either. Whatever that Facebook streaming thing is is a non-factor, YouTube streams exist but seem to be used primarily as a way for YouTubers to do events rather than a real Twitch competitor, etc. I'm not sure a Twitch competitor can be viable until Twitch does something to drive people away. The network effect is strong.
They tried with the failed Windows phone. I think after that they wanted to stay out and focus on their strengths. Besides this purchase gives them King - of Candy Crush fame. So now they own one of the biggest mobile game devs.
You know there are essentially only two search engines on the internet right? Google and Bing? Microsoft is doing good and cornering market and is helping users forget that DDG and Ecosia and Yahoo are just Bing.
Who is Microsoft "doing good" for? It's not Microsoft shareholders. Bing is a money pit and poorly executed.
Do you know who benefits the most from Bing? Google. Why? Because Bing's (subsidized) existence helps create this illusion that there really is more than one search engine. Google loves that Bing exists because it nicely helps them avoid having to have the monopoly talk.
bing made 8b in revenue last year. your data is way out of date. its wildly profitable
Baidu and Yandex are doing pretty well in their markets.
Interesting. I take that Mixer example as quite the opposite: throwing money at game streamers only really makes sense if they're trying to get yet another point of integration for gamers, no?
I take your word for it that the execution was lacking - and, perhaps, they were never going to win. Perhaps that's why they keep buying other, successful companies.
But it still builds to the same picture: even if they suck as operators, they're building a pretty darn big machine.
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.
Microsoft winning at streaming and mobile would be horizontal integration, not vertical wouldn't it? Neither of those things are part of the "supply chain" of their core gaming business.
I'd like to read analysis about why only Twitch succeeded in this market.
They are still missing a mobile platform and that's why I believe they will retry within the next few years
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)
Purely anecdotal but I feel like we are at a point where a lot of people would definitely stop and take a close look at a non-Android alternative to the iPhone
> "a lot of people"
Depends what you mean by a lot of people, and what kind of alternative you have in mind. Tech folks want something open source, like the degoogle androids we already see. Non-tech folks don't care much about Android, they just want something that works and has all the apps. So it would be hard to have any real competition, considering even Microsoft had to pull the plug
Would be really hard to launch a new platform. Even if its excellent on its own unfortunately it can't survive without a big app catalog.
Yes, it would definitely be an uphill battle. But I wonder if you could build a platform where a progressive web app felt enough like a mobile app and therefore enticed more app developers than requiring them to learn native tools for another platform
Ever heard of Firefox OS?
https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-legacy-of-firefox-os-c58ec3...
Can a new phone platform be successful if it launches without whatsapp / wechat / line / instagram / [add a dozen social networks there]?
A phone that doesn't let you speak to your friends, family, and coworkers is going to be a tough sell. Getting all those from the get go, without a large user base to motivate the developers, is going to be a tough sell.
Easy solution, make the default app platform be based off of html/css/javascript. Now the entire ecosystem of web developers can build for your platform instantly.
The nostalgia I have for 2009-2011's webOS, as a former app dev for the platform and its embrace of the Web Platform, is still very much real to the point that I keep my Palm Pre 2 dev unit behind me in my home office. Still charges and boots just like it did back in 2010. I'd love to see something with the computing power of the present try it again (and I'm aware React Native exists), but my expectations of it ever coming to fruition are rather low.
Aside: Seeing MagSafe chargers for iPhones these days makes me chuckle. Also a webOS innovation from back in...2009.
I lost my old Pre recently. Will probably buy another for the nostalgia reasons as well.
Wasn't that PalmOS which got acquired by LG?
That would be Palm webOS.
My beloved webOS failed with that 11, 12 years ago.
They can always start from their old playbook with Embrace..
I would be very happy with a third option. As an iPhone user, I really am unhappy with iOS, but any time I even briefly entertain the idea of switching to Android, I laugh at the idea. Both options are bad, and I'm stuck with the lesser of two evils.
The new PinePhone actually looks kinda decent. Unfortunately it will likely go from an interesting idea to abandoned before my iPhone is ready for a replacement.
I have the PinePhone Beta Edition with Convergence Package and I tried all of the available OS alternatives, unfortunately none of those is quite ready for use as a daily driver.
Overall the best experience was with Mobian, this is actually pretty close to being a daily driver and if only performance was a bit better it could be OK (the new PinePhone Pro will be faster so I'm waiting to try Mobian with that).
Ubuntu Touch was the smoothest in terms of performance. The main disadvantage is I could not find some of the apps that are available for the other distros like Gnome Maps. Since it is based on Ubuntu I was expecting to find a larger app ecosystem compared to Mobian but that wasn't the case (I tried searching both in the store app and using apt search in terminal). Also, many apps in the store are actually repackaged progressive apps.
The default OS (Manjaro Plasma) is the least polished of all the ones I tried, it is quite a lot slower than Mobian or Ubuntu Touch and even basic things like placing an app on the home screen are broken, and I have no idea why they chose it as the default OS.
Why is android bad in your opinion? i personally went for IOS recently due to privacy,security being important to me(3 years of security update for 1.4k android device is ridiculous), but I'm pretty jealous of android's software, usability and its users not having to buy everything apple to do simple tasks.
I don't feel like MS would do better on security or privacy compared to android.
Windows Phone at least was trying different things almost a decade ago. Some were pretty decent features.
> android's software, usability and its users not having to buy everything apple to do simple tasks.
Software as in third party apps or? What does the last point mean? What is an example?
I don’t care about privacy or security for my self. I use iOS devices because of usability and UX. After webOS then Windows Phone died I moved on to iPhone 6S and stuck with iPhones.
> 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 get away with that because it's a two-sided market and they have all the consumers. Microsoft tried to woo devs on Windows phone and it didn't work, because consumers didn't follow.
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.
And they don't have to spend billions on building and maintaining their own platform.
Hard to see that lasting more than another 2-3 years.
I’ve heard that thanks to patents and stuff they already makes loads of money out of mobile as it is!
they make money but they lack control, e.g. MS can't decide how software/apps are distributed, what is trusted and what not, how apps are glued together, that's a huge miss, plus the 30% cut Apple and Google apply to payments, MS is missing out on a lot of money, and MS stores pale in comparison. Not that I support this model of distributing software, I prefer the old desktop model of downloading from internet, but don't think MS is making much money just because of patents.
Is there some particular cultural reason why MS have been so bad at the whole walled Garden thing? I’m thinking back as far as MSN
I'm not sure about internal cultural reasons why but it seems like Microsoft just sucks at user experience for the most part, which is the key to the walled garden approach to me. I've never used a Microsoft product (other than mayyyybe the Xbox 360?) and thought, wow, this product is awesome and I'd never willingly switch to something else. You know, that feeling you get when you use something like an iPhone or Google products in the 2000s/early 2010s?
well actually MS knows how to create a walled garden, but just enterprise gardens. They fail at consumer gardens because the leadership doesn’t see money there and are quite shortsighted at seeing it too. Eg see how they lost ads, search, browser, mobile. They’re in games because of Windows and later Azure, so, again they look at it through enterprise glasses.
I wonder if the Nokia phone division sale included the NGage patent portfolio
Nokia kept all their patents.
For anyone curious about that:
"Nokia will retain its patent portfolio and will grant Microsoft a 10-year license to its patents at the time of the closing. Microsoft will grant Nokia reciprocal rights to use Microsoft patents in its HERE services. In addition, Nokia will grant Microsoft an option to extend this mutual patent agreement in perpetuity."
https://news.microsoft.com/2013/09/03/microsoft-to-acquire-n...
Less so than they used to. These were mostly 90s patents and a lot of them expired in the past five years.
Yeah, there's already a quality- and cost-leader for the mobile market. MS would need to push their business office lock-in, but both they and Blackberry tried that. Without the consumer market it's not viable.
I could see them launching an Android “SurfacePhone” just because (to have SOME stance in mobile). Or Windows-based since Windows already has an android subsystem (or emulator right?).
It's called the Surface Duo, it's already on its second generation.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-duo-2/9408kgxp4xjl...
$1500 Android phone is giving me some Ballmer-era level laughs.
Nowadays it's fine if it is made well (actually not good even in 2nd gen, for software)
The Samsung Fold 3 was around this price at launch.
Hmm, if it had a headphone jack and NFC-F (which it seems the Japanese edition might?) I'd be interested. Microsoft has always made good hardware.
That's a foldable phone that you never use in 'full screen' mode, correct? For $1,500? Ouch.
I honestly don't understand which market segment that device is targeted to.
They haven't completely given up on mobile. The Microsoft Launcher for Android is really close to what a modern Microsoft mobile platform would feel like.
I use this on my phone, I really like it. All they have to do is leverage it and start a store, but not sure if the timing is right just now.
I think if MS embraced ad blocking and made edge (both mobile and desktop) support extensions including ublock origin they could really eat into that platform. At the moment you can run Firefox with ublock origin on Android ( which I do ) but quite a few extensions don't work ( like violent monkey). To me, being able to run ublock origin (and other addons) on Android is a massive competitive advantage, but Firefox can't seem to convert it to users in the mobile space, basically they have no real platform/marketing leverage.
People outside tech and geeky niches won’t leave something like Chrome because of stricter ad blocking.
Just like privacy, security, and the intense amounts of FB/Meta hatred, these issues aren’t the same for the populous at large.
I could see using this for work with office 365 integration but that’s the complete opposite direction of gaming for me.
Convinced they're just going to do the Netflix/Stadia route with mobile etc. Sell a controller, use the device you already have and stream games running from azure.
Long term plan, obviously.
Not so long term - xCloud has been in live public beta for a few years now.
This will be interesting to see. If Steam Deck becomes a successful device, I believe the Xbox division will release a mobile device to compete with Nintendo.
I mean if your controllers already support Bluetooth and you already have an Android-based dual-screen form factor device and you already have cloud gaming infrastructure.. do you really need an entire new device? Or do you need a bundle at point of sales
They should just copy Steam Deck.
I don’t think so. They’ve moved away from owning the platform (at least in mobile) in favor of services. Office is wildly popular in mobile OS app stores.
Microsoft is making the Game Pass catalog playable on mobile devices. I think that's their strategy there.
May be a Microsoft branded version of Android. Or like how Android currently work on Windows. Windows with Android compatibility.
Or a xPhone where they could leverage Xbox gaming on Mobile with Android compatibility.
It is sort of strange to think Microsoft prospect all of a sudden looks fairly bright.
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.
That is a really interesting thought. Now they got much more of everything both in terms of technology (cloud, mobile apps, hardware experience) and developers trust.
Wonder if Windows on ARM will be any help there
That's an interesting idea. I wonder if the size & concentration of that market is an effective deterrent?
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 for the sake of being different though. Classic solution in search of a problem.
We could have had Windows 10X as well, but apparently the new blood on WinDev has lost track of what made Windows great, and are now as headless chicken running into all directions.
I agree with you 100%, I've never even heard of or seen a use case for the dual-screen flip smartphone
That said, my friends seem to love their Samsung foldable phones. "Having a tablet available at any time in your pocket is a game changer"
(I don't understand how it's a game changer, but there you go, one counterpoint)
I watch everything on an iPad. For me personally, it’s a minor game changer to be able to do all that on one device. Same with the minor notes, management, journaling I do on it. Though as you say. Not a game changer because of the pricing. If this was available at the same price as current devices, I’d consider that a moderate game changer.
It's just not for you. Bigger dual screen makes sense for some people.
They don't need to have a mobile platform if they can get a foothold on game streaming on mobile.
just saying wouldn't be a bad idea to make a xbox mobile-android device in the near future now that they have mindshare again
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.
You mean a thing of the present. See the other front-page story about Diablo not working if you're offline for too long.
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.
...which is why nobody in their right mind would buy anything "smart" that can't be modified to be dumb.
Thankfully we can still completely avoid subscription for music legally.
I think we can already see what the future market will look like. Gamepass exists right now as a subscription service at $US10 per month and cheaper in many regions. And games to own cost anywhere between 2 months to 1 year of subscription. It does not make economic sense to stop pay-to-own, given almost all owners will keep the subscription in addition or will want to pay-to-own additional games in the future. The reason subscription services like Gamepass are taking off is it makes so much economic sense to many consumers. It even makes sense for infrequent gamers, as they no longer need to purchase dedicated hardware with the streaming services. If paying to own stops being a thing, I think it will be because the market is so small it isn't worth running the store fronts any more.
Fortunately, all the good video games have already been made.
Activision-Blizzard was the worst performing gaming companies during COVID so it stands to reason that this would be the best gaming developer considering how well Bungie did as an acquisition for Halo and the acquisition of mojang.
There is so much IP that is tied up with Activision-Blizzard that it seems like a good deal.
Sure... If $2B in profit up 46% YoY is worst performing I'll take it.
Bethesda/Zenimax massive $8B acquisition hasn’t appeared to have any issues yet though it is very new. Decent chance this acquisition doesn’t happen, but it does mean Microsoft can go after another 1-2 medium sized gaming companies with success.
Isn't that basically the same Nintendo and Sony? Save for the cloud platform.
Sony practically owns their cloud platform too, with their Gaikai purchase a decade ago[1] and PS Now being "PS3/PS4s in the cloud".
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-07-03-sony-acqui...
This is actually an area where I think Sony has dropped the ball; PS Now is an interesting service, and they have a pretty interesting catalog of older games from the PS2/PS3 era. But they don't advertise it well enough, and I don't think they put enough focus on new releases and keeping them available the way Microsoft does with Gamepass.
There's rumours of them revamping PS Now and PS+ into a new service.
I've heard these, and they should! It would give them direct competition to GamePass Ultimate, which is a tier of service they don't currently offer (unless you buy PS+ and PS Now as separate subscriptions).
I assumed Sony were migrating to or already using Azure at this point.
https://news.microsoft.com/2019/05/16/sony-and-microsoft-to-...
At the time Microsoft where not throwing so much money at games development an IP ownership. I wonder how Sony feel about this now.
I see. But because they're maintaining datacenters for PS3/PS4 streaming I think they have the potential to go hosted, at the end of the day multiplayer servers are developer-controlled and network servers (e.g.: PSN, Xbox Live) are mostly identity services and such. (Even matchmaking isn't the network's job anymore)
Nintendo yes. But they've long been a closed, relatively niche ecosystem. Their entire market cap is less than the value of this deal.
Sony, perhaps. But I do think the cloud platform is a critical piece, because it is a huge source of value capture (e.g., all CoD compute on Azure is no small deal). It also allows significantly more dominance in distribution via cloud gaming - and coincidentally, Microsoft has been much more aggressive about owning distribution with Xbox Game Pass. This is all on top of the fact that Microsoft influences the PC and console markets, not just the console market.
Activision are much better at monetising than Nintendo.
Think candy crush and loot boxes vs fun single player mario games
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.
> Nintendo operates on different rules due their absurd array of reliable IPs
Or do they have an "absurd array of reliable IPs" because they operate differently?
Halo is probably the closest thing they have to a Marioesque IP.
I'm not that big on FPS games. When I play Nintendo I generally play things like Mario Party or Mario Kart. A friend recently gave me an Xbox Series S, and off the top of my head I couldn't think of a single multi-player party sorta party game. I'm sure there are plenty of these games, but they definitely don't have the same type of draw as Mario.
The major non-Nintendo consoles have de-emphasized splitscreen and party games for a long time -- once we hit the PS4 and Xbox One era, it felt like most games didn't even support splitscreen at all, aside from a few indies. I think those games tend to rely on in-person interaction to boost the fun, and MS/Sony have decided to prioritize selling additional consoles instead of making one usable for multiple people.
The halo universe is pretty big. There are about 20-30+ books that I can recall, a phone game, and 2 RTS games on top of the FPS games we know and love. There is a TV show releasing this or next year. The universe of Halo is one I've grown up with and can't stop waiting for the next piece of lore to come out. There's a lot to enjoy in the Halo universe even if you don't play FPSes. The books themselves are solid though a solid % is just your run-of-the-mill fiction.
I don't think the parent was saying they were the same.
Just that Halo was the closest IP in terms of prestige.
Nintendo and mobile are the only real options for party games. Xbox and Playstation are for AAA enthusiast games.
From a pure marketing perspective the problem is Master Chief is such a blank slate unless you are pretty steeped in the lore.
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.
Absolutely not, Microsoft owns your operating system on your general computer. At least you could argue that I am, in some sense, willingly entering the ecosystem by buying an xbox. Blizzard and Minecraft are primarily PC games.
Pretty sure Nintendo operates their cloud platform as well, though it's hardly comparable as it only offers NES + SNES roms.
It offers some n64 titles now as well.
Sadly, these are emulated quite poorly.
It's pretty difficult to emulate an N64 with both accuracy and speed because its GPU is strange and flexible in all the wrong ways. And its game catalog isn't that large, so not worth the engineering effort.
The games people care about deeply like SM64 have remakes that aren't that hard to get.
I saw an SGI Indy on eBay today, that had some sort of N64 development device it came with. Not sure if it actually contained an emulator or maybe just a header for an onboard debugging port though. Sadly it was priced wayyy higher than the Indy I just bought so I ignored it.
I’d be more inclined to agree except that emulation of the same exact games went much better on the original Wii. Nintendo just phoned this one in.
Word of Dolphin hasn't made its way to Nintendo HQ yet?
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...
Guess this was what Steve Balmer meant when he said, DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS.
For how bizarre that moment was, he was 100% correct. Developers are the lifeblood of a hardware platform like this.
I mean, isn't this basically how it used to work when the console manufacturers were also the game developers? Like Sega and Nintendo.
It's not really the same. For one, when those were the two juggernauts in the game cartridge era, they weren't really in the business of just scooping up a bunch of game studios, because financially it didn't make much sense.
What's different now is that Microsoft is focusing on becoming the Amazon Prime Video of video games. While you will still be able to buy the games outright, the games of the companies they're purchasing will be part of the monthly price gamers pay to play.
So for instance, because they own Zenimax, I can load up any of the Bethesda / id games and play as part of my subscription. And when Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI come out, they'll be part of that price too. Buying Activision brings Call of Duty, Overwatch, Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, and a host of other games under the same umbrella.
I guess they've decided that low monthly subscriptions paired with season passes for content is the way of the future for gaming.
It's definitely a compelling offering. I don't think one model has to win over the other though. There will be room for subs and there will be room for steam libraries where you own licenses as well in the future.
For me personally I have a hard time justifying game pass. I only complete 2-3 games a year at best and it's really expensive at that rate.
> For me personally I have a hard time justifying game pass. I only complete 2-3 games a year at best and it's really expensive at that rate.
Weirdly, that's the exact reason that I can justify Game Pass. Though I imagine you mean that you only play 2-3 games thoroughly, where I play a much larger number of games through the year, but rarely for long enough to finish them.
That's fair, I could see if you wanted to try a bunch of games first. I have to admit I take them up on the 3 month trial every year or to do just that. But I always do the trial with the intention of playing a bunch of games and then never play one! Hah! But that is not their fault, it is mine.
That's me. When I want to wind down, I usually play a card based roguelike of some sort. I rarely finish the game (my current one is a game based on solitaire), but I get my money's worth out of it each month.
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.
Creation layer of the stack: Unity or Unreal.
I'm surprised they didn't snap up Unity before it went public. C# is the main language, cross platform deployment that goes well with .NET's new cross platform story and there are strong commercial markets for Unity like Movies, TV and Architecture that could benefit from Microsoft's enterprise sales force and relationships.
Visual Studio is still there, although losing market share
To Visual Studio Code
There is no better alternative for Windows and console game development, except C++ Builder and Delphi.
Even Google now ships VS plugins for Android game development and Stadia.
Next headline: MS to acquire Epic Games? Tencent is in the way there.
Really, I could see them launching their own engine. Think of all the studios and talent they have now. They have the engines behind Halo, CoD, WoW, Overwatch. Could build an Unreal competitor.
Microsoft already has id Software! Epic Games historical competitor. id Software has Quake, Epic Games has Unreal.
id Software is not the company it once was, but they still make engines. idTech 7 is their last one, powering Doom Eternal.
idTech is cutting edge tech. Their team is one of the best in the industry, second to none, competing with Epic, Insomniac and Naughty Dog. But it is not engine for general use, not now. It does one thing(FPS), and does it extremely well. But it lacks tools that you would need to create games of another genres. Things like advanced animation tools, dialogue systems, quest systems, ways to handle vast open worlds, etc.
idTech would be great for Halo and Call of Duty. But it isn't great for The Elder Scrolls, Starcraft, Gears, and many different games Microsoft Studios are working on. EA already tried to make every studio to use Frostbite for every single game and ended up with disasters like Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda.
>> EA already tried to make every studio to use Frostbite for every single game and ended up with disasters like Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda.
By what measure are these games considered disasters? I was under the impression they were critically well-received and sold a decent amount each. DA:I was a better game than DA:O 2, for example (at least IMO).
Regardless, I fail to see what the engine has to do with anything, considering they both presented noticeable graphical and mechanical upgrades over their prequels.
Mass Effect Andromeda was a disaster. Months after release Bioware Montreal was eliminated as a separate entity. They weren't even allowed to make already planned DLCs. It became a meme because of poor quality. And a lot of blame can be put on Frostbite.
Inquisition's development was a disaster due to poor tools. Pax 2013 demo, for example, was faked because no one knew what gameplay would look like(A YEAR BEFORE RELEASE), and it was mostly caused by missing engine systems. Game turned out to be OK though.
>> And a lot of blame can be put on Frostbite.
I am having a hard time understanding what the Frostbite engine had to do with any of this. Anything you can point to besides your opinion on the matter?
Battlefield is a multiplayer first person shooter. It doesn't need a dialogue editor, save system, third person camera, a lot of systems that help support advanced AI, and many other things that the Bioware game would need. Hence Frostbite didn't have all these things. They needed to be developed from scratch DURING the production. Which means half of the team was unable to work properly due to the lack of tools.
ME:A and DA:I had dialogues a save system, third person camera, etc. Why were they disasters if they were very successful in their own right? I don't understand what you are trying to get at.
Seems to me the engine was perfectly capable of doing everything you wrote it can't do and both games were successful deliverables.
Tencent and Sony have investments in Epic Games, not sure if either party wants to start selling to Microsoft.
Yeah it wouldn’t happen. Them two being the two biggest gaming companies too.
It is quite wild. The only thing missing is good will.
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 fact that it comes with a bunch of PS4 games for free, especially a few that I've been meaning to buy, makes it worth the subscription.
I doubt Sony would have done this without the pressure from the Games Pass.
I think Microsoft know that the PS4 won last gen on the basis of the amazing exclusives it had. I think that Microsoft is going to put a lot of exclusive pressure on Sony this gen with their buying spree (Bethesda etc), and while it is very hard to find time for gaming, I'm glad we have both systems in my house.
I liked the PS4 but even I feel like Sony didn't so much win the last generation so much as Microsoft lost it. Microsoft just never recovered from just how bad the XBox One launch was and Sony managed to win by pretty much doing nothing but releasing great exclusive titles. Sony right now seems to be fully into the hubris stage they were in when they made the PS3 and I feel like they are going to slowly lose market to XBox which has immerged from the disastrous XBox One humbled and with a greater desire to cater to their audience.
> Microsoft just never recovered from just how bad the XBox One launch
They just completely lost me to their branding strategy from that point. If I can't keep track of which console name does what, it's going to take something really compelling to make me pay attention. I'm still not actually sure what the PS5 competitor is even called.
The XBox branding department are big fans of The IT Crowd and completely unaware that it is a comedy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ
It’ll still be a while. Xbox still is in such a distant spot everywhere outside America. Europe and rest of Asia for sure. I’m not considering Japan in this. It’s fine that Xbox will never sell there. I think you’re right they’ll climb back. It’s just such an uphill battle.
Edit: Hah okay yeah the PS3 and hubris…does mean things could change pretty quickly and world wide (outside Japan and maybe a few other East Asian countries), Xbox could be neck and neck if not winning out again. I’d rather not have either win out. Sega was never going to survive, we don’t have another gaming console company in sight unless Steam Deck counts, so the relative parity of Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox is nice. Throw in Valve for now too.
Things can change so who knows. I don’t enjoy casual mobile games. I do enjoy the Quest 2. I can only imagine how great VR gaming will be by the end of this decade. Then we have Roblox, a single game [platform], valued at roughly the same price as Activision without the acquisition margin.
> it was impossible to get the Series-X in the UK in the lead up to Christmas without paying scalpers
Not completely impossible. I managed to purchase an Xbox Series X directly from Amazon UK on 20th December. Amazon also had sufficient consoles in stock they were able to not run out for more than 12 hours [1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/23/22852161/xbox-series-x-a...
This feels a little like Amazon Prime in that the cost of the total bundled deal is technically good, except that I don’t really want everything in the bundle, and would rather receive much less value for only somewhat less money. It probably works for a lot of customers, but I really avoid as many subscription services as I can.
Even Game Pass without Cloud gaming is bargain. I surprised that it also come with cloud gaming for free.
I would have loved game pass when I was younger for the sheer number of games. Now personally it offers me the ability to try things out and not regret dropping money on those games. I don’t play nearly as many games as I used to, but paying $15 and playing Back 4 Blood with friends was great. And I didn’t care when we all got our fill of it because I got my moneys worth. Personally it’s a great alternative to pirating.
Game pass is a loss leader. They will jack the price once they crush competition.
That’s what everyone thought.
They actually reported profit with game pass.
Not according to Phil in Nov 2021
https://www.essentiallysports.com/esports-news-not-the-only-...
At 15 dollars per month, 18 million subscribers, that's 3.25 billion dollars. They bought Betheseda for 7.5 billion. So now they're in the hole 4.25 billion and they still have to pay to run an entire extra company.
Why would you report an acquisition's cost with the operating expenses of an ancillary service? You should compare the operating expenses of Game Pass with its revenues (i.e. Game Pass subscriptions), and you should compare Bethesda's acquisition cost + operating expenses against its projected revenues (i.e. Bethesda game sales/subscriptions. Apples to apples, oranges to oranges.
We could do that, but that would hide the big picture. As Phil himself said, it's not yet profitable. It's a loss leader. True cost of ownership!
You are trolling at this point. I know we are to assume good faith, but the way you’re writing your replies. Repeating this Phil stuff. Combining two completely different things…
It's all Microsoft! The only way you sustain an unprofitable loss leader is by spending money from other parts of the company. To push game pass, theyve been buying IP. What's confusing about that? To There's no need for debasing accusations.
That might all make sense if Bethesda didn't also bring them other revenue streams. I mean, Elder Scrolls Online alone brings in a completely separate subscription stream and cash shop.
You keep ignoring every one saying that Bethesda acquisition which was Zenimax being acquired was also bought for other things and they got other things as well.
Why would you count Bethesda? I don’t understand the rationale. It isn’t even like they are the same revenue stream.
The article you linked does not say anything while adding up its word count. It’s common knowledge gaming companies say consoles never make a profit (except Nintendo). Game Pass is a fledgling growing SaaS. Of course sustainable is the right term. Nothing News worthy.
It's an answer to the reply that said they were profitable. They're not. They're 'sustainable'. That's it.
Even if you want to be anal about this. Phil saying the words sustainable doesn’t mean it’s profitable or not. It is just him saying stuff to the public. As if any corporate exec is ever going to be truly honest in public.
Taking away PR words as fact is not sustainable. It doesn’t work.
where did you get 3.25 billion? is that a years worth of subscription income? Does game pass blow up after that or something? Have subscriptions just stopped, 18 million and ..... no more growth.
If they keep buying stuff, they're not gonna make any money. It is thus a loss leader, as Phil indicated.
You understand those things they are buying have value right? That they are not just throwing money into the void. Investing in future growth is what businesses does in a competitive environment. If they don't keep buying stuff their service will fail and they will lose everything they had invested to that point. Thats how you don't make money.
Microsoft is buying stuff. Game Pass isn’t buying stuff. Microsoft makes plenty of money. Notice how any one can decide where to draw the line of what is what.
Why do you keep bringing Phil up. A loss leader isn’t the same thing as a growing SaaS. You are putting words in his mouth while repeating Phil said this, said that.
Yes, Microsoft makes plenty of money, that's how they're able to run game pass as a loss leader. Literally the original point.
So then game pass doesn’t lose billions. It makes billions since Microsoft does. Using your logic of assigning expenses and profit any where
They still don't own the graphics cards and displays (monitors &/or googles)
Microsoft has an AR goggle contract for the US Army, and functioning models of both this and the commercially distributed HoloLens, so you bet VR is in their reach.
They do have HoloLens though.
Those are very much a commodity.
Nvidia and AMD, of $650B and $160B market caps, make commodities?!
I'm not sure what market cap has to do with it? BHP Billiton is an _actual_ commodity (mining) company with a market cap similar to AMD [1]
GPUs aren't commodities in the traditional sense, it's more of a figure of speech to convey how interchangeable and standardized GPUs are nowadays.
Consumer game hardware is small potatoes in the revenue stream of those companies. They might be important to the game-playing consumer, but they're regarded as commodities by industry.
another strategy piece is linkedin for competitive analysis. They are able to see industry data for where all the top talent is working and when they are on the market.
DirectX, too.
The only thing they're missing is hardware design capabilities.
I disagree. The Surface line, which came out in 2012 and has been continuously refined each year after, are some really beautiful, inventive, and highly technical pieces of hardware. The hinge on the Surface Book especially generated a bit of buzz when it came out, and the rest of their lineup is quite solid.
To say this also ignores the XBox and its controller, which often trades places with the modern PlayStation controllers for what is considered best-in-class.
Microsoft has plenty of hardware design capabilities.
You are right, of course. The Xboxes are better and better hardware-design-wise each generation, and the Surfaces are highly rated.
I should have been more specific - I was thinking of the CPU and GPU design.
Is kind of strange, but I think Microsoft have some of the best keyboard and mouse on the market. ( Or at least use to have since I no longer use them ) And Surface Laptop, while far from perfect, you could see their continuous refinement year after year. Most company give up after a while. But Microsoft is actually making lots of progress for the PC industry.
Give it a few months, and they will acquire Subspace.
Already happened. Insiders know that snagging PriitK was the real motivation behind the Skype acquisition...
>> has been able to vertically integrate
MS for a long time had such opportunities which it missed almost every single time.
On the other hand, Apple had similar opportunities and succeeded almost every single time.
The MS list:
- Windows Mobile
- Zune
- MSN
The Apple list:
- iTunes
- iMessage
- iCloud
- iOs (some more)
Microsoft is extremely successful with Azure. Apple did not compete at all on public cloud offering.
>> missed _almost_ every single time.
> Microsoft is extremely successful with Azure.
I do not see any disagreement here.
They still rely extremely heavily on Nvidias ability to create more and more powerful hardware. I recently found out that like 70% of the world's supercomputers are powered by nvidia GPU compute. People often talk about the tech power of different countries (personally I've heard a ton of people talk about China in this way), but at the end of the day they are still reliant on the hardware manufacturers. Who am I to say that China or X country doesn't secretly have something that far outclasses nvidia hardware, though?
Between gaming (the biggest form of media), supercomputers, science computation, crypto nonsense, etc. It's really looking to me like nvidia is actually one of the biggest power players across the globe. Makes me really wonder about the tech they aren't flashing to the public. I was personally astounded when I saw their announcement to purchase ARM. I've seen a few instances of people saying the dead acquisition is stifling innovation. Honestly I'm kind of happy it didn't go through. Probably just a lack of vision on my part, though.
Microsoft uses AMD for their Xbox consoles, not Nvidia.
Honestly wasn't thinking about xbox at all. Good point. Now I'm wondering what the market share is between the two. I'd guess xbox is properly higher?
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.
I was just getting at the illusion of choice. At the end of the day it's all owned by the same handful of small groups. Found out yesterday that Blizzard apparently owns King. Tencent owns a cut of Activision Blizzard, as well as a slice of basically every gaming company. https://dataromas.com/what-companies-does-tencent-own/
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...
Tencent has been bogged down by CCP’s crack down. It’s valuation is likely higher than the market is putting it at, unless CCP continues their stuff even more. Money that Microsoft has doesn’t matter to a company that also pumps out billions in profit like Tencent. They have no reason to ever give up an inch of their 40% stake. Microsoft wouldn’t be able to own it or Unreal realistically. Tencent is a bigger gaming company than Microsoft.
Cool you’re seeing how much Tencent controls. However the linked site doesn’t give good data and info. Tencent has stakes in far more things and the stakes they have are known too. While the site lists only a fraction of them. Including not listing much, much bigger stakes they have. Or not listing the actual specific stakes they have in companies like Kakao which are known. Or not saying their Epic Games stake percentage.
I should get to posting content! My notes on Tencent are pretty detailed if I may put humbleness aside for a second lol. But I don’t publish anything. Seeing sites with such weak info, is motivating.
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Yeah there isn’t much choice in any thing. I don’t care about games, but Take Two (Grand Theft Auto, etc) are the 3rd biggest independent gaming developers and publishers. They have a market cap or $28B and are buying Zynga for $13B. Zynga themselves have swallowed dozens of companies amounting to a couple billion. EA, the 2nd largest, bought Popcap who make Bejeweled and Zombie vs Plant. Pokémon Go developer is valued in the billions and Google, Nintendo, among others have sizable stakes in it.
For all the positives HN and other geeks give Steam and Valve. They still charge a 30% cut. Only finally changing it up a bit because of Fortnite’s profits letting Epic Games compete with their 12% cut. So as much as saying Fortnite going away is no problem. At least they are the ones fighting the three headed modern gaming walled gardens of iOS App Store, Play Store, and Steam. Sure, it’s more like the enemy of my enemy situation, but that’s better than them not being around.
Edit: thanks for the reply! Most people don’t reply after the first 24 hours. Just set up a bot to get reply notifications. Was happy to geek out on this topic for a bit. Even though the bigger issues of monopolies and how screwed us normal people are, are not pleasant.
If you wanna get wilder if you’re an SO user. Prosus, who owned 40%, maybe 32% these days, of Tencent, bought Stackoverflow :P. They have also invested in many tech companies.
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 subscription services (aka GamePass) as well as platforms (aka Windows 11, Xbox console), then certainly that'll be monopolistic behavior. Interesting to note that they're probably #1-#2 in either of those sub-industries. It's possible to end up with an "Internet Explorer-esque" antitrust scenario if Microsoft removes or heavily discourages Activision and Bethesda from making their titles cross-platform.
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.
They don't even need to do that. They can keep releasing CoD on Playstation, but if they add it to Gamepass, that increases the value of Gamepass so significantly that it could tilt the console market toward Microsoft.
This is exactly the play I think will happen. I can also see them including for example a WoW subscription and maybe a monthly hearthstone pack or gems as part of Gamepass.
I, for one, welcome our new gaming overlords
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.
I think this was unneeded. Nobody singled out Microsoft, it's just that the discussion is about Microsoft, which happens to still practice this strategy. I think nobody would argue against the strategy being practiced by other corporations too.
> if Microsoft removes or heavily discourages Activision and Bethesda from making their titles cross-platform.
I'm pretty sure that Starfield is announced to be a Windows/Xbox exclusive already.
Timed I believe
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
You’re not wrong, but Microsoft has also never successfully out sold their consoles (well...except wii-u, but that’s not much of an achievement). That might change now of course, but it’s not like they are solidly number one. They’re actually last of the big three.
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.
It should be worth noting that T-mobile + Sprint succeeded on the third try after the first two were more or less blocked by regulators in the same decade (it didn't actually get all the way to them, but they signaled there was no way they would approved.)
The only reason it got approved the third time was that regulators were convinced that either way, the US would only have three mobile operators because it did not look like Sprint could be a going concern.
People also forget Microsoft’s Xbox sales are 3rd place - I.e. last - behind PlayStation and switch. The 360 is the only console they’ve sold that outsold a PlayStation, but technically that flipped at the very end of the console’s lifespan. It’s not like they dominate the market (yet).
Now if they buy Sony or Nintendo then I’ll actually be concerned. But for now they’re hardly controlled opposition or anything lol
they can release Activision and Bethesta titles only with game pass, and let Sony and Nintendo be free to implement game pass in their platform
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 market, and it was wild to me how that was allowed to happen.
AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile was aborted due to anti-trust complaints if I recall correctly.
The original purchase of Rite Aid by Walgreens was aborted due to similar concerns, although that one ended in a revised partial acquisition anyway.
The Staples acquisition of Office Depot/Office Max was stopped as well on anti-trust grounds.
They also blocked a merger of Nasdaq and NYSE.
Those are all since 2010. I'm sure I'm forgetting a few big ones too. They should definitely be blocking more, but they have stopped some.
Intuit was blocked from buying Credit Karma Tax just recently. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-d...
And MS from buying Intuit
Thank goodness, they don’t need any more power over people.
They blocked Comcast from merging with Time Warner Cable. By “they” I’m referring to AT&T and Verizon (the two biggest telecom providers in the US), who were afraid of a third telecom provider establishing a national footprint and potentially challenging them across wireless and wireline. By preventing the merger through their immense political connections, they keep both Comcast and TWC as regional players who are much easier to monopolize.
So even the antitrust that goes through usually only goes through because powerful (often monopolistic) forces want to block a merger, not because it’s what’s objectively best for competition.
It's also worth noting the FTC (not just the Justice Department) can sue to block mergers on competitive grounds: see Visa <> Plaid from 2020.
It does happen, but it's pretty rare. One example that comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-Mobile...
That failed merger's poison pill is the reason T-Mobile is the juggernaut it is today. The cash T-Mobile received allowed them to upgrade their network, and customers could roam free on AT&T's 1700MHz frequency.
AT&T's threat assessment of T-Mobile was correct at the time.
> AT&T's threat assessment of T-Mobile was correct at the time.
I think that assessment was obvious to everyone at the time. The question is whether buying out competitors is good for the public.
Of course, the cash was a penalty for not being able to pull off the merger; if the cash was critical for T-Mobile to become the threat it has been, the outcome is ironic.
I don't know what the breakup cash might have amounted to, but the AT&T roaming agreement was for 7 years, and it's only recently with n41/n71 that T-Mobile has done any better.
The equivalent for this merger would be something like Minecraft and Bethesda games on the A-B launcher for 7 years. Huge giveaway by AT&T I think, as foolish as it might have been for them to think the merger would actually go through; having at-least 4 major carriers was policy at the time and still is (Dish's spectrum hoarding notwithstanding).
And another fairly recent one: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/12/business/visa-plaid-termi...
(Visa + Plaid)
> I looked around for a while, a d I can't actually find a list of any mergers that antitrust regulations actually prevented.
A lot has been written about the decline of antitrust enforcement in the US since 1970.
https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s...
I think this is a huge source of a lot of the wealth inequality and just general dystopia we find ourselves living in. We need some sort of commoner lobbyist organization we can all be part of, the voting doesn't seem to be working very well. You have to literally pay the politicians.
Nvidia/Arm comes to mind as a recent acquisition prevented.
Because of the UK's CMA. the US equivalent does not seem to care about preventing these giant mergers as much.
https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/nvidia-slash-arm-merger-inquiry
“Mergers: Commission opens in-depth investigation into proposed acquisition of Arm by NVIDIA” 27 October 2021 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_...
“FTC Sues to Block $40 Billion Semiconductor Chip Merger” 2 December 2021 https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/12/ftc-s...
In the EU, Siemens and Alstom weren't allowed to merge their train divisions without significant divestment. Same for Daewoo and Hyundai shipbuilding just last week.
Meta’s (Facebook) acquisition of Giphy got blocked by European regulators iirc.
UK, I think. Still a weird decision. Of all the stuff Facebook bought they blocked Giphy. Not Whatsapp, Instagram, etc.
I imagine that if Facebook tried to buy Whatsapp or Instagram toady, they would be facing a different kind of a regulatory environment. It feels like the world has only recently awakened to how Facebook just tries to buy out their competition.
Visa/Plaid very recently
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/visa-and-plaid-abandon-merger...
> I looked around for a while, a d I can't actually find a list of any mergers that antitrust regulations actually prevented.
Just today, the DOJ and FTC announced plans to toughen up on mergers and acquisitions.
>The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division kicked off a process to rewrite merger guidelines for businesses on Tuesday, signaling a tougher stance toward large deals.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/18/ftc-doj-seek-to-rewrite-merg...
GE Honeywell was a huge one.
Halliburton / Baker Hughes merger was preemptively cancelled due to regulation
Nvidia/ARM doesn't look healthy anymore.
Qualcomm and Broadcom
It wasn't antitrust. It is more like "national security".
> other companies are going to find it very hard to compete with Game Pass
I haven't really ever used it. I used to buy everything Blizzard made (OK that's an exaggeration, but I was all about WarCraft/StarCraft/Diablo...). Before Steam, I bought lots of games on disk. Now I buy most things on Steam. And I haven't bought anything Blizzard since Diablo III.
Why wouldn't Steam continue to be competitive against Game Pass?
(I'm just one person, but among the people I know that play PC games, I don't hear about Game Pass much. One person mentioned he's on a 14 day $1 trial - that was the extent of it.)
You know that ever growing library of unplayed games that all steam users have? Game Pass is that, but instead of paying for games individually you pay a low fixed rate, and it includes many hot new releases that are still full price elsewhere.
Many of them on launch day too, instead of waiting 6-18 months for a sale
But if you wait 6-18 months for a sale it might actually work...
> Why wouldn't Steam continue to be competitive against Game Pass?
Game pass is significantly cheaper, unless you buy very few games on steam (and/or only buy them on deep, deep sale. Which doesn't really exist anymore in any meaningful way).
Ah yes I don't buy a ton of games, and I see sales all the time for Steam, like seeing $40 games for $10.
So imagine deciding to spend $10 on that game, then realizing it's on GamePass. You now can choose wither to spend that same $10 to have access to 150+ games (including that one that's on sale), or just that game.
Sure, that $10 gets you only 1 month, but will you buy a different $10 game next month? Will you play this game for more than a month?
Pretty soon the GamePass ROI becomes difficult to ignore. (This coming from someone that doesn't have GamePass but is very impressed by the business model and value proposition around it).
The big difference with Game Pass is that the $10 gets me all those games just for that month, whereas my Steam library is full of games I've bought over the years, usually for <$10/each. If I were to have paid $10/mo over the same period of time, I would have paid significantly more -- and I'd have to keep paying it in order to play those games.
I subscribe to Game Pass occasionally and it sucks every time to lose access to all the games I'm playing. It becomes a balancing act of "I can buy this game for $30 or I can play it (and others) for 3 months at the same price... but what if I want to play it again in the future?" Like most rental models, most times it's easier and cheaper to just buy the game upfront if you can afford it, especially when it's on sale, which is easy to predict (and be notified of) on stores like Steam.
>> and I'd have to keep paying it in order to play those games.
But how long do you play these games for, and how often do you replay them? There are definitely games I replay a lot (Resident Evil games, for one) but there are many where I'm done after one playthrough. I'm totally okay "renting" it and moving on with Game Pass for a lot of titles.
This might be specific to my tastes, but most of the games I play don't really have an "end" to playthroughs (and for the ones that do, it's very rare that I dedicate the time to play it start to finish without taking breaks to play other games, which usually drags playthroughs on for much longer than less casual players). And sometimes I just come back to old games years later for nostalgia.
Some of my most-played on Game Pass are Crusader Kings 3, ARK, Dragon Age, My Time at Portia, and No Man's Sky, which are basically what I go back to every time I resubscribe. But after getting up near a dozen months subscribed at $10/mo, I'm now really wishing I would have just dished out the cash earlier to buy the games instead, especially if I want to keep playing them over time. I'm very much in a sunk cost mindset though: "I've already paid to play the game so much, surely this month is the month I'll 'finish' it and get to stop paying, right? Therefore, I shouldn't pay full price to own it when I can just pay the $10..."
It's very much a digital Blockbuster all over again. There, too, I spent many more hundreds of dollars on repeatedly renting games that I should have just bought. But, like Blockbuster, Game Pass is really good for discovering new games because it's such a low cost to try anything in the library once.
The nice thing about Game Pass is that after a game has been on the service for a number of months, you get a 20% discount if you choose to buy it. It's useful for instances where a game you want to keep playing is about to leave the service, or you want to get off the subscription plan.
look at this way: a business makes a change (in this case buying vs subscription). do they do it in their own interest or yours?
super simple stuff.
steam presented a bit of an issue about owning what you pay for. because, if their service is down, you can't access your "assets". some people called it a type of subscription model.
with this shift in the industry, outright paying a subscription for temporary access, we move even further away from owning what we pay for.
imagine never buying a house but always renting. why be against it? who is that business model good for? what kind of world are we voting for when we buy into these types of businesses?
in the long term, a subscription model puts us, the customers, at a loss. and a successful business plans for long term.
There's a very long tail of interesting games, 150 games at a time just doesn't cut it. When the urge to replay an old favorite comes along, I'm incredibly uninterested in doing the equivalent of checking Netflix to see if it's still in the library. They'd have to have coverage at Spotify levels to make that start to seem interesting.
But maybe they'll get there.
I don't have GamePass but do find it intriguing. The value prop is completely on the other end. It's not wondering if you can play (or replay) some older game that you want in particular. It's when a new game comes out or you are in the mood for something you haven't played before, you can go to the page and find something to at least try for zero marginal cost. If you play or are interested in a broad swath of games, eliminating that initial hump of whether you want to invest money into it is a different ball game.
It's really is literally just Netflix of games. Not great at all when you want to watch Movie X, better if you want to just watch some movie, and the only way when you want their in house productions which in theory are striving to be high quality. GamePass isn't to that final level of exclusivity yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if some game goes "Only on GamePass" in the nearish future.
It's also similar to Netflix in that if your usecase was the old "Just streaming The Office only" you could probably just purchase it. A mono game player would definitely be better served just buying the title they want for $60 rather than a monthly fee, but it starts to get more attractive at just a few games per year.
Just FYI Game Pass has ~500 games right now. Full list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kspw-4paT-eE5-mrCrc4...
I'd still rather own my games than rent it out, especially since I know that there's also a constant stream of games leaving Game Pass.
This month, Game Pass subscribers will lose access to Cyber Shadow (launched January 2021), Nowhere Prophet (launched July 2020), Prison Architect (launched January 2021) and Xeno Crisis (launched August 2020).
I'm also having trouble believing that Game Pass will remain $10 for long. At some point Microsoft will want to start recouping its investments and it's gonna start hiking prices. I personally got pretty tired of the constant Netflix price updates and I'd rather not do the same to my video game collection. I didn't actually have a gaming PC between January 2014 and March 2021, and it was actually pretty nice to install Steam and see all of the games that I bought between 2006 and 2014 still waiting for me in my library.
I think most casual consumers nowadays only care to own staples like Mario Kart and everything else is closer to a long-term movie rental.
I paid $20 for Valheim and played that for about 6 months.
Got Conan Exiles for $12 and played it for 3 months.
If you really like playing a wide variety of games, and like to rent them, then a $10/mo deal is excellent. I like to buy inexpensive games and play them for a long time. Should I even mention the 15 years I got out of StarCraft?
I'll go in waves, playing one game like crazy for a couple months, and then maybe not playing anything for a few. I like going back to the games I already know I enjoy and playing them some more, so I don't want to rent them.
I think a very reliable method here would be to use Gamepass for trying games out and see what the landscape looks like without having to scout around much and also not paying just to try things. We used to do this with demos but they became very impopular and really, if you can play a full game instead of a demo, isn't that better?
So you get access to these games to try them, and if you really, really like them, you can buy them when they go on sale for cheap on Steam.
I don't use Gamepass because it somehow has eluded me, but it seems like a good deal even if I tend to buy games for cheap on Steam.
The annual steam sales still feel pretty deep.
> Game pass is significantly cheaper, unless you buy very few games on steam
or if you want to play games that aren't on Game Pass. Though then it's not exactly a fair Game Pass vs Steam comparison, more Microsoft vs Steam.
the cheapskate consumer really doesn't have much power here, though. Not many people will develop primarily for xbox if all they can hope is to have gamepass level money. Thats why despite it, Xbox is still very much a 3rd in the console wars, and microsoft has to resort to buying popular IPs to have a chance.
> Why wouldn't Steam continue to be competitive against Game Pass?
I paid like $5/mo for 1 year of the Ultimate version, I can play games on both Xbox and PC and carry over progress for most of them. It's great. Steam doesn't have anything like that, so not sure there's any comparison to do.
I would look at consoles first. Why would someone buy a Playstation, when you can now buy an Xbox + GamePass and get access to a large chunk of the biggest games?
As a GamePass subscriber, I mildly disagree.
Saw an indie game last night and felt like buying it.
Steam Deck is Valve opening up an alternative to Microsoft land.
Although I will admit I'm tempted to cancel my pre order since I'm worried it won't run well.
I don't quite understand what you're trying to say here?
If Microsoft starts subsidizing Game Pass games from their other businesses (like Amazon, Google and Apple do for their other services), it'll make the business model of actually selling games unviable by pure race to the bottom. As a result, you'll lose independent development and market diversity because everyone will need to beg Microsoft (and maybe Sony and Apple as other megacorps) for money scraps.
This is very similar what actually happened in mobile games market - a race to the bottom that only left a few winners filled with exploitative anti-patterns that feed on peoples addiction to recoup their costs instead of selling the product.
It'll of course be amazing for users - games will be cheap! And free! Just like views on YouTube are, where creators are getting more and more burned out fighting against the algorithm which decides how much they deserve to be paid.
There's a large crowd of people who'd rather buy to own games even if they're on Game Pass, even after the entire Bethesda catalog was added. I'm personally one of them, if I like/want a game a lot, I prefer buying it on Steam so I'll always be able to replay it. (I've even bought some games I discovered on Game Pass)
Also -- EA (EA Play), Ubisoft (Uplay Plus), and Sony (PS Now) already went the way of subscription gaming. EA Play is included in Xbox/PC Game Pass, and PS Now isn't just Sony's catalog, either.
>There's a large crowd of people who'd rather buy to own games even if they're on Game Pass
Judging by the reactions I've seen to this acquisition around the internet, this crowd is really not that large.
The average consumer of today does not care in the slightest about owning things, they only care about being able to enjoy whatever the current flavor of the week AAA tripe is for now before the next flavor of the week comes along to replace it. When they're done with a game, they don't care about having it anymore.
You get a discount (20%, I think) if you want to buy a game which is available on Gamepass and you have a subscription.
This way you can fully play the game and if you really want to "permanently" add it to your library, you can do so for less.
Most DLCs are not part of Game Pass, so if you really enjoy a particular game you can still purchase the DLC (at a discount), even without owning the base game. Of course this only makes sense for as long you are a Game Pass Subscriber. You would unfortunately need to purchase the base game from the Xbox / Microsoft Store before you can play your previously purchased DLC.
Even this is changing. A growing number of titles includes the DLC. I suspect that not all of them do due to licensing agreements.
I don't think it'll be amazing for users. The mobile market is just awful. It's almost impossible to find any good games that don't use these exploitative methods.
Yeah, I should really add "At least in the beginning" part - those systems are very great at the start as they try to siphon as much use as possible and trap them into the walled garden.
Agreed. It's a very deceptive business practice.
I used to hold the same opinion as you, and for the most part I still do. But I think the subscription model is a solution to the race to the bottom, because it creates an artificial level of quality assurance.
Take PlayPass, for instance: the play store is a landfill of endless trash, but PlayPass adds both a level of curation and it unlocks all the microtransactions.
So for a low yearly fee you get access to the best Play Store games, never pay for microtransactions, and don't need to go digging to find gems in the garbage heap.
I dunno, I tried Apple Arcade, and the games on there are decent, but I really didn't feel like I was getting my $5/month's worth
Any random $20 Switch title from the Shovelware Shelf at your local retailer is so much more polished and fun than even the best phone games, it's insane
I have no idea what's on Apple Arcade, but on Play Pass I've been playing the Kingdom Rush games, the Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, and a tonne of critically-acclaimed indie titles.
It's already a race to the bottom. It has been for a while.
Don't blame mobile games - they got those exploitative ideas from PC market.
The upside of a PC market, is the lack of a centralized authority to tell you what games are good - a.k.a the app stores. (App stores are horrible for games or any creative content discovery, as they use purely utilitarian categorization) That doesn't mean that PC, or web, games are any less exploitative than mobile counterparts. (remember mafia wars or farmville?)
> It's already a race to the bottom. It has been for a while.
Is it? Undoubtedly there's exploitative crap on PC, but there are countless great titles -- indie and otherwise -- released every year that you can pay money to own. On my iPhone I can hardly even find games to pay a fair price once to own anymore; it's almost entirely exploitative crap.
I used to buy games all the time on my iPhone; were it not for Apple Arcade I'd've hardly played anything in years.
Yes, commercial games have been a race to the bottom for a long time.
In spaces where casual gaming dominates - exploitative games are top of the "charts".
I'm not an enthusiast gamer - I don't have time to search for indie games. What I see is primarily exploitative games, which turned me off gaming.
If you even read about gaming industry or new games - you're not the majority , that drives casual games to the top of the charts in primary app stores.
Still not sure I buy it. Where are these spaces where exploitative games are top of the charts? It's not in the major PC game storefronts, for example (at least not in my experience). Steam is very good at recommending decent non-exploitative games to me right on its landing page. Same with Epic; even its prominent free games are generally non-exploitative. Game Pass is popular and also recommends a mix of very good games without having to search.
Regardless, my point isn't that there aren't spaces where exploitative games predominate. My point is that so many actual good games exist that aren't the slightest bit difficult to find, whereas my experience on the iPhone has been almost uniformly negative the past few years. On average, people just aren't willing to lay out ten, fifteen bucks for a game on mobile, so the race to the bottom is real.
Do you have to be an enthusiast gamer to find good PC games? Just google "best PC games", the first hit is a decent list from PC gamer. Takes all of 60 seconds to search and skim the list. If you don't have time for that, then you don't have time to be gaming at all. If I google "best iOS games" I see a mix of exploitative crap and games that are years and years old by now. (A list of "best iOS games 2021" that includes Bastion -- a game I was playing on my phone ten years ago -- is criminal.)
Indeed the Steam Deck is very exciting because what we've seen is that the mobile space is where Linux has been able to defeat Microsoft in end user adoption.
As some other folks have pointed out, the existence of WINE and other compat layers is actually hindering gaming on Linux, by disincentivizing game devs to make games directly for linux. A huge hit with the Steam Deck could actually start bringing more games directly to Linux.
> Indeed the Steam Deck is very exciting because what we've seen is that the mobile space is where Linux has been able to defeat Microsoft in end user adoption.
That's a very generous definition of "Linux".
Android won, not Linux.
What's the GUI toolkit? Android's one. Audio? Same. Notifications? Android. Etc, etc.
There's a reason many people are scared of Fuchsia, it's not inconceivable that Google at some point just pulls the plug on Linux and replaces it wholesale with Fuchsia as the base for Android.
Linux on mobile failed utterly, from Maemo to Meego to Ubuntu Mobile to all other attempts.
Right, but big developers have also been getting away with producing crappy AAA titles. They always have tried to push unfinished games to the market, but it has become more widespread in the last years. Now, with less competition, things might actually get worse.
> Steam Deck is Valve opening up an alternative to Microsoft land.
This seems to put the writing on the wall for the Steam Deck though, right? How many people are really going to care about a Valve system that can't run any of the popular games from the MS catalog?
I preordered the Steam Deck and plan to follow through with the purchase, but things look pretty dismal for Valve at this juncture. It seems like they're five years too late to the party with the Deck, and they now have no leverage to push MS to interoperate.
> How many people are really going to care about a Valve system that can't run any of the popular games from the MS catalog?
So far, it seems MS is quite happy to put its games on Steam as an additional revenue source. Looking now, Xbox Game Studios has 49 games on steam, including its latest and biggest offerings, such as Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5[0].
[0]https://store.steampowered.com/curator/3090835-Xbox-Game-Stu...
But doesn't this acquisition put MS in a much stronger position, and isn't the Deck a direct competitor to MS hardware? MS now has a massive game catalog and I can't see any reason they would want to allow Valve to access it on their own console. Maybe MS will tolerate Steam near term, but you can't tell me that MS enjoys letting Valve take a cut of every sale, and with so many huge titles they can absolutely force users into whatever store they want (and limit them to whatever platform they want).
I don't know why anybody would give Microsoft of all companies the benefit of the doubt on this front.
I don't know. If they were so bent out of shape that Valve takes a cut of every sale, they could have stopped at any point before now. If anything would force people to use Microsoft's storefront it would have been a new well-reviewed Halo game, but nope, there it is for sale on Steam. And that makes sense to me -- withdrawing from the predominant PC storefront would be a gamble that might not pay off, as anyone who doesn't wish to buy direct from Microsoft is a loss of $60*0.7 = $42 that they could've won buy selling on Steam.
Maybe the calculus changes as they eat up publishers and grow their catalog, but traditionally Microsoft's storefronts haven't done particularly well.
Why wouldn't it be able to? With the Proton compatibility layer almost all Windows-only games should run on it. And worst case scenario, one can dual boit Windows if Microsoft decide to be really aggressive vis à vis regulators and block their games from running on Proton.
> Why wouldn't it be able to? With the Proton compatibility layer almost all Windows-only games should run on it. And worst case scenario, one can dual boit Windows if Microsoft decide to be really aggressive vis à vis regulators and block their games from running on Proton.
MS now has a truly huge library, and Valve extracting a portion of every sale on Steam isn't something that's likely to make them happy. They now have so many games that they can use DRM to force users into their own ecosystem (i.e. Windows 11/XBox) to play them.
You could say, correctly, that MS's previous storefronts have not been a great success, but with such a huge catalogue they can just pull the users wherever they want them. There's no incentive for them to allow a competitor to run their games.
Proton is only a solution for as long as MS allows it, and I don't see any incentive for them to do so at this point.
Maybe things move slowly and the Steam Deck itself can still deliver these titles before this happens, but the Valve "ecosystem" as such seems to have really poor prospects.
Better yet.
You can run Game Pass directly in a browser. So you could use GamePass on really any modern web connected device.
I would be shocked if Microsoft supported the actual GamePass app on Linux
That's just cloud streaming, though. "Normal" Game Pass means downloading full games to run locally.
Can is a bit abstract. I've found it works really poorly in the browser ( just getting to the correct page that actually shows you the list of games available is a pain and requires multiple hops).
For what it's worth, I used xcloud for the first time on iOS this morning, where it runs entirely in the browser. It actually wasn't bad! I had to close out the browser entirely and reopen it to fix issues with the streaming, but once I did that it was much smoother than I anticipated, and jumping into a game was quick.
It was absolutely unplayable without a controller, mind you, but it worked.
I'm already wondering why these trillion dollar companies are allowed to make pretty much any acquisitions at all, let alone ones pretty clearly aimed at vertical integration.
Game Pass has major issues still. No integrated backup mechanism; only 3 changes to your home PC per year... Imagine reinstalling more than 3 times to find out that you can no longer play offline; absolutely horrible download speeds... Compared to Steam which maxes out bandwidth; and the interface for Xbox Game Pass on PC is terrible.
> 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.
At this rate it's going to be Tencent vs Microsoft and if I have to choose I pick Microsoft.
On gaming side the Microsoft from big players actually producing games seem the least bad option. Lot less bullshit in general than likes of Ubisoft and EA or Activision.
So, you're saying that between the giant douche and the turd sandwich you pick the sandwich?
Somehow I'm not impressed.
Sometime people prefer the turd they know compared to the unknow one
Tencent and Sony are still much larger than Microsoft's gaming division, even after this.
And if you compare Tencent and Sony's gaming division to Microsoft's gaming division?
Still much larger.
There's a difference though. Tencent doesn't dictate its studios how to conduct business. Microsoft on the other hand made Bethesda leave PlayStation, which negatively impacts their revenue, but plays into the hand of Microsoft.
> Tencent doesn't dictate its studios how to conduct business.
Isn't that exactly what Tencent are well known for doing?[1]
> According to the designer, Riot managers had provided a PowerPoint presentation that she assumed Tencent had made for them, although she didn’t know for sure.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/15/china-video-gam...
Quite the contrary:
> The deal still leaves Riot with a largely independent remit, however, with CEO Brandon Beck telling press that Tencent see Riot more as investment partners than as a fully-owned subsidiary.
> "Riot is going to remain completely independent. There are no redundancies, no layoffs, no synergy fishing, no leadership change," Beck told Gamasutra. "Nothing is going to change other than they're dramatically increasing their holding in the company. They see this more as an investment in a partner.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2011-02-07-tencent-ac...
I remember reading somewhere that Tencent has the reputation of not interfering with the game studios it had acquired.
Though that article is more than 10 years old, so I'd take anything written in it with a grain of salt
This quote doesn't fit the context here. In the article, it states this was about entering the chinese market, not about how to design their game.
Honestly, why should any regulator bother with this? It's video games, it is clearly not any kind of essential infrastructure/software.
Not that regulators might care but game software shapes how young people conceive of software and IP issues. A company notorious for manipulating IP buying out a massive game company means entire generations of children and families will be exposed to this software as a service model of IP consumption.
At this point both Google and Apple have more end users than Microsoft.
Their "software as a service model of IP consumption" didn't seem to bother many regulators so far.
Sure but I'm really pointing out that children play games and that's a prime age to manipulate people's political expectations of the world. Like what toys and cartoons do. In contrast to the workplace software of Google or whatever subscription young people today might be willing to pay to use Apple's hardware.
It's still a market that affects a lot of people's lives. I think it's good for them to stop these huge mergers. Let the small to midsize companies fight it out, but we've had enough of these huge and getting huger tech companies strangling out competition and innovation.
So, only food, water, electricity and housing should be overseen by regulators?
Besides, with so many games out right seeking to get kids addicted, let's at least have some trade regulations. It's not like parents can ignore them.
Not really.
It's only an issue if this negatively. affects the competitive market. And since games are a creative market - there's hardly any reason to fear that Microsoft can restrict access to new players.
This is not like a utility, that could technically force something on you. One company can buy all of game developers/publishers and still not make a dent in competitiveness of the games market.
Wrong. Here's a hypothetical scenario:
Kids' PCs are windows. Microsoft has Game Store installed by default. Pop ups about the latest Fortnite NextGen, installed by default. More addictive than gambling but hella legal.
Easy scenario, no regulations. Market is heavily skewed and MS has a big win in the gambling for kids industry.
my question is whether Microsoft was fanning the flames of all the controversy surrounding Activision recently and how much that dropped the acquisition price.
You could say the same thing about Disney, Netflix, HBO, Apple TV, Amazon prime, etc.
The thing about subscriptions is that consumers tend to buy multiple.
Very true, just like when Google bought DoubleClick. I couldn't believe that went through.
Gamepass will be the netflix of game... rental? Sharing? Streaming? Whatever you want to call Gamepass. I'm surprised it didnt happen sooner.
Blizzard is dead weight compared to the incredible profitability of Skylanders + CoD. I'd be willing to bet Blizzard gets spun off within a year.
Blizzard had a very big and dedicated fan base, the launch of a Blizzard game used to be one of the biggest gaming events of a year, their IPs are (were) loved by huge numbers. Current management did squander most of that good will in the last few years (mainly optimizing their new games for addictiveness instead of designing for fun), but I don't think it is too late, if under new management Blizzard pulls a 180 and goes back to make good games with the old IPs, fans will come back in droves.
> if under new management Blizzard pulls a 180 and goes back to make good games with the old IPs, fans will come back in droves.
With who? Most names known for the titles of good old Blizzard are long gone. Possibly even retired.
Nobody's irreplaceable if the will to do it is really there.
Right but if nothing about what made it good from the start is left what advantage would they have compared to any other assembled team? Games get replaced by the next new great thing at a rapid pace, there's no moat. So really don't get the idea of paying premium for a studio that Used to make great games.
skylanders hasnt been thing for years lol
We're way past the point where government is meant to be a check on unchecked capitalism. Mega monolith corps are the now and future.
It makes sense they’d acquire Activision now, especially after Intel and AMD are bootlicking them and implementing Pluton. Essentially any new or even existing titles will not be able to be pirated with Pluton enabled.
So, more proprietary hardware which now only MS controls, only they can update and audit. According to security researchers, is not physical tamper proof. Tackles niche security issue while the number one vector of attack, comprising 80% of them, is social engineering and not kernel modifications. And, according to you, eliminate piracy which not only doesn't hurt the gaming industry but has also become redundant with multiplayer only titles dominating said industry.
Nah, it's just a play to gain more monopoly into PCs and what runs on them. Today, it's a nightmare to get something signed for MS. God forbid you need to sign drivers. With them moving the goal post every now and then, broken APIs, broken SDKs and support SLA of infinity, pluton is a forced dependency.
Pluton is a pure business move with zero customer value. The greatest threat, last year, in security was supply chain attacks. And this tries to "solve" kernel modifications? End users have nothing to gain.
Yep you’re correct, it reminds me of old Microsoft doing sneaky things to attain monopoly status and kill competition. Hopefully ARM will not implement Pluton but I have a suspicion they will too if nvidia acquisition fails
the government will look the other way if there is a competitor to tencent.
There are so many gaming companies and platforms... An Anti trust case would be very hard to make.
I hate to see a monopoly in the gaming industry. Controlling the content will prevent any competition both in gaming consoles and in PC gaming. Forget about gaming on Linux or any new platform. Forget about sony's PlayStation and Nintendo. We are going to see the real face of Microsoft. What do you think Microsoft will do next? Buy unreal engine and unity and have control over the content and the tools to make them? We NEED open source game engines (Godot, Bevy) more than ever.
A real monopoly in video gaming isn't nearly as valuable as it first seems.
Firstly, "video gaming" is really competing against things like reading a book, walking your dog, board games, etc., so it's not like Microsoft can just start jacking up prices and people will have nowhere to go with their time.
Secondly, creating and releasing new games has never been easier. So many small indie game companies are creating great games to compete with blockbusters like CoD and LoL, the ecosystem for game development is plenty healthy, with or without Activision belonging to Microsoft.
Thirdly, they haven't done what you're saying with the games they have released; you can play Minecraft on the Switch [0]. Maybe wait for Microsoft to actually do the thing you're worried about before criticizing them for it! They have had opportunities to be exclusive and they haven't taken them, so it's not so simple as to just assume they will no matter what.
I'm not worried about the industry, but I am cautiously optimistic about what Microsoft will be able to do with some IP that I've loved for most of my life.
[0] - https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/minecraft-switch/
"So many small indie game companies are creating great games to compete with blockbusters like CoD and LoL"
Apart from maybe a couple unicorns they aren't, they're a seperate market.
The overlap of people playing Call of Duty and those playing The Binding of Isaac will be family minimal, same goes for sport games which you're hard pressed to find people in the previous camps playing despite massive sales.
I agree with the sentiment though, there's no shortage of quality games made by smaller teams both independently funded or with investment from big players.
> Firstly, "video gaming" is really competing against things like reading a book, walking your dog, board games, etc
You're not wrong, but I can't agree with this.
I avoided saying the words in my parent comment to try and minimize controversy, but if you're interested in learning more, what I describe is referred to as the "attention economy"[0].
The "information overload" problem has been known about for at least 40 years!
Disagree, I think it's spot on! But you may need to substitute for more modern attention hogs like Netflix, podcasts, mobile and web based games, indie games etc.
I'm sure that a pervasive predatory corporate development department backed by a cash-heavy company could reel in virtually all AAA PC games, but the long tail not so much. And the funny thing is, AAA has been a huge disappointment for gamers and I imagine investors as well over the last years, compared to its golden days.
Compare to say "owning your social graph" like Facebook, that's something that's much more robust. A good messaging platform doesn't take over the world in a few weeks like an indie game (almost) can, so Facebook has plenty time to acquire it or copy/steal their features.
> I think it's spot on!
My argument is that (most) video-games are still fundamentally passive consumption activities: recreation, that doesn't require someone to expend any "spoons"[1] to get some entertainment value. Whereas, I imagine for most people, reading literature, waling the dog, or even organizing a board-game session requires far more effort to initiate (not necessarily mental-effort, but effort in a general, abstract sense) whereas the whole point of video-games is to be a very-low-effort distraction from our existential anxiety.
So please substitute "reading a book, walking your dog, board games" with "watching YouTube-algorithm-recommended videos, Joe Rogan podcasts, and after-work boozing with your shiftmates".
Reading books lost the competition long time ago.
I think no chance that Tim Sweeney sells Epic.
Unity is a public company and I think would benefit immensely from being acquired by Microsoft.
I agree, imo unless something drastic changes, there's little chance Tim Sweeney sells control of epic. But I believe Tencent bought nearly half of it all the way back in 2012 I think? I think they raised money from some PE groups a few years ago, the internet seems to agree that Tencent still has 40%? But, it being a private company, I wouldn't stake too much on the accuracy of that.
Point is I agree it's not for sale, for the reason you describe, but also that one of the leviathans already has nearly the entire minority interest.
> internet seems to agree that Tencent still has 40%?
The internet has no updated information based thr original press release. Since that 40% Sonys purchase would have further diluted tencent. The only thing we know for sure, because he's said so: is Tim has a controlling stake.
We do not know if there is a dual class of shares, but that would be a simple tactic to maintaining comtrol.
I made this point in another comment thread, but I think MS would make a competitor to Unreal/Unity instead. Think of all the game engine talent they now have. The IW engine for CoD, Halo’s slipspace, WoW. They could readily assemble a team to build an engine on par with Unreal.
I could see it happen, but I feel a lot of these home grown engines are just too driven by tribal knowledge to be easily released to the public.
If it's any consolation, so too is Unreal, from my experience. A lot of the times the only documentation on a feature will be random Youtubers, and an official 3 hour stream from 4 years ago. Oh and the source code, of course.
Everything is for sale for the right price. And what is good for Unity does not mean it's good for the consumers.
Well unity is dropping the ball hard for consumers so something different would likely be an improvement
I'm worried that the gaming industry is on a decline. Some of the biggest games are >5 years old, I can't think of a big franchise that started in the last 5 years, the steam greenlight program is a pile of shit, and new games are getting held to the standard of existing games which discourages new-comers.
I almost wanna throw my hands up and give in, like how big can a problem be before it stops being a problem.
See: https://www.twitch.tv/directory?sort=VIEWER_COUNT
Looks like Rust, Valorant, Apex Legends, and Escape from Tarkov are in the top 10 on Twitch. All came out within the past 5 years.
Valheim, Fall Guys, Genshin Impact we're in the last few years.
Seems they're more likely to target the games than the engines though?
They have so much money they could easily buy Ubisoft, EA and Take-Two and make all major games Xbox and Windows 11+ exclusives.
You can run gamepass on Linux, so when all these games hit gamepass (which they will) it’s a net positive for Linux gamers.
You could run them on Linux for how long? MS will not allow any competition for its dominance over PC gaming. And trust me, they will use gamepass against Linux gaming and Valve and others.
Yeah exactly, MS will only play nice as long as they have to. If they own most of the popular AAA titles, you'd better believe everyone is going to have to use their launcher, with DRM which doesn't work on Proton, and log in to a MS account to play games.
How much longer do you think "PC gaming" is going to be a thing? Do you think it'll make the transition to VR? I don't.
Nor do I, but I think non-VR gaming is going to be bigger than VR gaming for a long time, maybe forever.
My predition is that within 5 years there won't be "PC gaming" - it'll all be cloud rendering. And within 5 years it'll be an even split between screens and goggles.
If you've got a lead on how to do this, I'm interested. Last I looked, Gamepass on Linux only worked for streamed titles through a browser.
How? Quick googling says no.
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 games?
I don't miss id software, because they're still here, continuing to make amazing games. The last two Doom games were excellent.
...incidentally, Microsoft also owns them now.
I honestly think behind climate change, the current state of anti-trust enforcement is one of the biggest issues facing Americans right now. It's disappointing that it's not even expected for anti-trust action to happen anymore.
A guy named Matt Stoller focuses on this sort of thing. He's been saying that the right people have been appointed to the FTC, but it remains to be seen if this will produce any real, consumer-felt fruit. This is him, just 2 hours ago, at the time of this writing:
https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/148348691488801996...
He is reporting that the chair of the FTC is begging for public comment on merger activity.
UPDATE
And just a few minutes ago, questioning whether this whole Microsoft/Activision will be stopped.
https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/148353211536295117...
This is not a new danger. Americans had to deal with that by the end of the 19th century. The elites were able to run back the clock and remove or control any anti-trust structure that has been created to avoid their crazy accumulation of money and power.
I think America might want to tackle health care, drug addiction, inequality, racism, sexism before worrying about anti-trust
I think having a handful of corporations owning everything makes all of those issues worse
Extending off what the other commenter said, consolidation within the medical market is a big reason for the opiod epidemic. It's not something that just came out of nowhere, its directly because a large company intentionally pushed for highly addictive drugs to be given to as many people as possible
It's also a big reason for the fact that americans spend far far more on healthcare than other countries. For reference, the US government spends 28% of your tax on healthcare. The UK government spends 18.8%, which is arounge average among western nations. And ON TOP of that, americans pay huge medical fees and insurance.
Inequality is partly caused by the two above issues, combined with the fact that its really damn hard to make much of a company for yourself when a vastly more powerful company is intentionally suppressing or if you're one of the lucky few buying out all of its competition.
Racism and Sexism are at least partly caused by ineqality, but another big part of it comes from the consolidation in mass media. Shock stories on the national news about the actions of ten or fifteen people can cause and deepen ingrained biases about millions.
Need to tackle corruption before we can solve any of those.
I think US have motivation not to do anti-trust enforcement. Dominated US companies dominates worldwide market and earn money for US, but also hurts US market.
Blizzard's (not sure about Activision games) ongoing support for most of those platforms has been pretty crap recently anyway. Diablo2 Resurrected removed mac support but they did add consoles.
OW only support Windows.
I guess SC2 and D3 had support for many platforms, but not Linux.
It's a crap situation that I don't think is being improved or worsened here.
What platform does Nintendo support ? It has always been like that.
iOS and Android, they have some gacha games there
I wouldn't exactly call super mario run a gacha game. (I don't argue with the others, though)
Microsoft seems likely to support at least Nintendo. With Game Pass and Minecraft, they've leaned more towards gaming as a platform. Some Switch games have full MS support including Achievements, which was surprising.
I will miss Starcraft on macos, but I guess I already gave that up with my M1 purchase. Couldn't give two shits about any of their other games.
I'm sorry. does gabe produce games anymore?
Pretty sure they were referring to the amount of resources Valve puts in to keeping the PC platform open, including the vast amounts of ooen source software they create and the ones they contribute to, primarily for Linux. Hiring devs to work on FOSS, contracting out to FOSS companies like Collabora and Sourcehut, these are great things to do. Valve does plenty bad, like any big company, but one thing they don't do is use their marketshare monopoly with Steam to create an actual monopoly, lockin, etc. Even their hardware isn't locked down.
half life alyx is pretty good i hear.
What does this have to do with competition?
Console platforms have not competed for games to be on their platforms for.... ever.
The old Blizzard always seemed much closer to Apple than Microsoft in culture. An incredible attention to detail and the onboarding experience, clean, fun and friendly design and a slightly rebellious attitude expressed through their willingness to enter new markets.
The "new" Microsoft though, really is different than the old and might actually do quite well in stewarding this supposedly sinking ship into fairer waters.
But as a die hard Apple user with an active WoW subscription I can't help but feel slightly dismayed that the Apple x Blizzard deal never will (or probably could have) happen(ed).
What a bizarre view of the world. It’s like teenagers gossiping about celebrity relationships, but with corporations instead.
A Microsoft acquisition of this company is bad, and an Apple acquisition of this company would be bad.
When mega corporations like this consolidate, consumers always lose. Microsoft couldn’t win customers through product and service quality, so they bought one of the largest game publishers in the world so that their competition can’t sell those games anymore.
Complaining about a bizarre world view and then dropping an equally bizarre and hyperbolic statement. I think this will be good, just as I think Microsoft's previous gaming acquisitions have been good.
For those who like Bethesda Games and bought into the Sony ecosystem? Good for you, maybe.
I am very sad that ES6 and Starfield will never run on a Sony console. Just like when some Gimlet podcasts I liked went Spotify exclusive -- this kind of thing is a net negative for the world.
Yes exactly - it should meet the current standard for anti-trust action that it hurts consumers. It's quite sad that this is not enforced at all anymore apparently.
personally, I'm glad they won't be wasting time catering to two lowest-common-denominator systems. as someone who's only ever owned a PC, I've always lamented my high end (or, after a few years, low-grade (but still better than console)) hardware going to waste on games which haven't figured out how to make proper use of it. we've had affordable SSDs for nearly a fricken whole decade and essentially zero attempts to optimize their use until now, now that consoles have them. and there still aren't any directstorage games out. it's ridiculous the frontiers we've lost, the games we've gimped, due to low end hardware restraints. someday i hope they ditch the idea of the "xbox" as well, and consoles are lost to the sands of time. but for now, at least they're only wasting their time optimizing for one piece of trash, and at least that trash uses the same OS.
Your complaint boils down to the equivalent of "why aren't safe speed limits on roads optimized around hypercars". Probably because the average car is close to a Toyota Camry. The number of people with high end PCs is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of console owners and publishers want to make money.
it's not just about high end PCs, though. like i said, something as basic as an SSD has been affordable for nearly a decade, for not high-end builds. but the fact the xbox one and ps4 exist, and didn't come with one by default, means nobody cared. it's a tragedy. whatever hardware level they decide that consoles get for a given generation holds back the development of gaming tech for their entire lifespan.
And you weren't aware of the potential risks of a closed ecosystem before?
It's not like you bought into an open ecosystem, but now they closed it off.
I didn't buy into either ecosystem. I'm just trying to show that it's not positive for everyone.
Never said it's positive for everyone but "consumers always lose" is equally false.
Commercial games aren't made to make everyone happy.
No game release is a "positive for everyone" and never will be.
I can equally argue that my neighbor baking bread is not positive for me, because I don't get to eat it. And I like bread...
"consumers always lose" and "it's not positive for everyone" are different statements with non-overlapping meanings.
> It’s like teenagers gossiping about celebrity relationships, but with corporations instead.
I think that’s accurate. Whether there’s room for and value in these kinds of playful conjectures is of course up to each of us to decide.
It's totally accurate bc humans are a simple ape that should be living in bands of 50 to 150, but then we had several technological revolutions. Someday well be more like star trek vulcans, I'm sure.
I'm not sure this is bad because Blizzard has been a total mess for quite some time. I'm excited to see if it can get better.
Consumers loose literally nothing from Microsoft's acquisition of Activision/Blizzard.
The tinted rose glasses are really strong. Most large company merges are close to never good for the end user - less concurrency and competition is not good.
Would've been valid only if the quality of products and services pre-acquisition were actually good, and for Blizzard games at least it's been anything but good in the past few years. Gaming is a very end-user-focused experience and until their testimonies come in due time, your abstract market competition spiel is irrelevant to it.
IP laws already prohibit competition.
There is only one maker of Diablo, and no Torchlight is going to replace Diablo.
Games aren't going to get pulled from other platforms. New games may not come out on (insert-your-preffered-console), but they never were guaranteed to come out at all.
Thus consumers aren't loosing anything here. It doesn't even reduce competition.
Yes consumers are losing here. In the near future, you will have to own at least two almost identical gaming devices to play all the relevant AAA games. That's basically a $500 tax being applied to gaming enthusiasts to get the same access to IP.
So what you're saying is that consumers aren't loosing access to games at all. They aren't forced to choose one to the exclusion of the other. Other consoles aren't forced out of the market. And other console manufacturer will have a market incentive to invest into similar games, to entice people from buying a second console...
And the market that would actually care, will already own multiple consoles... and a gaming rig.
You've actually managed to convince me that this is good for the market, not neutral.
I can't tell if you're joking, but I hope you are. Having to pay more to access the same products is not a net loss to the consumer?
You're stretching the term "same" to mean "new products created for a different use case". (5G is a net loss to a consumer, because you need to buy a new phone to access "same" product.) Same products are quite clearly not same here.
Consumer doesn't mean "a specific individual that owns a PS5", it's a generic term meaning market participants that consume products. Consumers don't loose if prices for new products are substantially higher in a competitive market, because willingness for a consumer to pay the price in a competitive market equals to the value of the product.
Interactive game market is highly competitive. Therefore producer prices a product at $500 => consumer agrees that $500 is acceptable => consumer spends $500 => consumer gets $500 in value => cost - value = 0 => no consumer net loss.
You're essentially making the argument that games are fungible while the other commenter is saying that they are not. The reality is that most games, yes including triple A games, are hot garbage and make no money and provide no benefit to everyone. It's a lot like the movie industry in that sense. So consoling myself that maybe someone will make a copy of the cool game I want to play doesn't really work, because that copy is near guaranteed to be expensive garbage
>It’s like teenagers gossiping about celebrity relationships, but with corporations instead.
very much need, but that's how gaming industry works in general - hype, fans and all.
This is the world we live in now. People rage against capitalism but at the same they'll hang their hat on corporation x and defend them to the death.
I don’t think these are the same people.
> Microsoft couldn’t win customers through product and service quality
GamePass subscriber numbers are growing at an incredible clip.
This sounds a bit like "ms should just make better games". Games are hard. Extremely hard. If Microsoft managed to incorporate the Battle net portfolio into their gamepass, there is some argument to be made about how much better that service would become.
I see your point, I really do, this stinks in all sorts of ways, but there could be a benefit here for a lot of players.
>This sounds a bit like "ms should just make better games". Games are hard. Extremely hard.
The answer to this conundrum for them should be, "Tough titties, learn to compete or die, but we will not allow you to bully your way into a market with money."
I sometimes really question if I'm back on reddit while reading some of these replies...
You're in HN, talking about MS and acquisitions, telling them to learn to compete?
Am I on the right website or has my browser been hijacked?
Buying Blizzivision is not the same as competing, it's them swinging their money dick around to take stuff away from the competition.
Not sure if an image campaign is enough to convince me that they have changed. They had to embrace open source to some degree because developers were plainly fleeing their environments en masse. Today it is extremely hard to find an expert for hard technical problems. Perhaps everyone is hiding somewhere, but I haven't found them yet.
Apple doesn't have a gaming division. Why would they be interested in acquiring Blizzard?
That’s why i included the paranthesis “(or probably could have) happen(ed)”.
That said, they do have a gaming service: https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/
Apple Arcade is for casual games that have to work on all of Apple's form factors (minus the watch, thankfully). I've tried it out twice. It is, with very few exceptions, in a completely different category from PC gaming because most people access it through a touchscreen. It's like comparing a PS5 and a Switch, except that Apple Arcade is not nearly as polished as the Switch.
My impression is also that Apple Arcade is already pushing the limits of how much Apple's management wants to touch gaming.
Apple has started to sink hundreds of millions into Apple Arcade the past couple years.
Big AAA titles take several years to produce and I doubt Apple will allow half-baked games to launch. That means we won't be seeing those games start to launch until 2023-2024.
Apple is definitely working on a VR headset. They've bought out 4-5 VR companies already. There were rumors of a 2022 launch, but 2023 matches up much better with their game studio launch dates.
That subscription is a HUGE moneymaker (that's how WoW made Blizzard so much money). Most serious gamers play 1-2 games for a couple of years. Traditional studios charge $60 (less for sales) and then release one $20-30 DLC per year. That gives them $120 over two years at the very best (though most players won't bother with DLC). Apple gets $80 per year unconditionally. Moreover, this will get casual gamers in addition to hardcore ones.
Now that Apple runs everything on M1 and even the slowest M1 chips have better GPUs than most Wintel systems, Apple can sell games to everyone. Because everything is using the same architecture (same CPU and same GPU across the board), their devs save a ton of time and money developing and optimizing which means their total time to deliver and cost to deliver is much lower.
I suspect that MS sees this as an extremely serious threat. They need to do everything they can to leverage xbox pass and compete.
No matter how much money you throw at the current Apple Arcade, most people will play the game on a 5" touch screen. If you want to target living room gamers with a gamepad, the same game has to work on an Apple TV that struggles to render 3D scenes at 4K (probably until an M2 version comes out?). I think it's just going to be a baseline of games for people/families who have Apple One, like how Solitaire and Minesweeper came with Windows.
If Apple goes all-in on VR, the whole VR market will benefit from greater public acceptance. But at the very best I predict it'll be like the Nintendo Wii: a few games that are extremely popular, and then it gets old.
Which is a shame because I agree that Apple is in a great position to enter the gaming market. Imagine what Nintendo could do with powerful hardware in so many hands! But by the same logic, Apple should have crushed Spotify long ago, given its mile-wide lead with the iTunes Store, and yet the nicest thing I have heard about Apple Music is that it works with other Apple stuff. I honestly don't think Apple's management understands entertainment.
You don't have to render identically. A 720p phone and a 4k TV are quite different.
An average steam gamer has a 3-5 TFLOP 1060 rendering 1080p with a quad-core intel at 2.5GHz. A 6-core A15 (little cores are about as fast per clock as Zen 1) with a 1.3-1.5 TFLOP GPU comes quite close. If Apple wanted, they could add a magnetic dock with controls and extra battery for serious gamers too.
For something like the Apple TV (A12 isn't a slouch though no 4K gaming machine) they could offer streaming with remote rendering.
I suspect the launch 4+4 CPU with 32 or even 64-core GPU. They should sell that in a mac mini sized console with a wireless VR headset. That said, Oculus Quest 2 is quite popular and it has a Qualcomm 865 which is much slower than that A12 let alone the A15. They could definitely stomp the Ques 2 with an A15-based device and could go much farther with a M1/M2 chip.
> You don't have to render identically. A 720p phone and a 4k TV are quite different.
Yes, but that's kind of the problem. The 720p phone has a lot of horsepower per pixel, but is crippled by touch controls. The Apple TV is _slower_ on a larger screen, with yet another frustrating input situation because Apple didn't put a gamepad in the package. (They don't even make gamepads! The MFi ones I bought were pure junk.) I can't imagine a more hostile environment to develop AAA games for.
A year back or so there were articles claiming that apple has stopped all development of content rich games, aiming at quick addictive ones instead. They released studios making the former from contracts.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-30/apple-can...
You would be shocked to know Apple was days late to buying Bungie, creator of Halo.
They was a way different time and a different Apple.
Exactly. MS has Xbox and has been buying up a lot of Game studios as well. Blizzard makes sense for them to buy; Apple doesn’t seem to be contending…
To start a gaming division with widely known titles already onboard.
What else are people going to do with their $3,000 Apple Goggles?
The rampant sexual harrasment is more in line with Microsoft's alleged culture.
The Apple of gaming is Rockstar Games.
The Apple of gaming is Valve/Steam. They make hardware and run a leading app distribution service while overall operating as a pricier minority of the industry.
They have any hardware that took off?
The index. The have a few other pieces of hardware they have made over the years. Currently they are making the Steam Deck, time will tell how that does.
I have an index. I like it. It definitely hasn’t taken off.
It's not the Index fault, just modern VR tech hasn't taken off. The Index is a great piece of hardware. And my prediction is that the Steam Deck will sell like hotcakes.
I think modern VR sucks. Beat Saber is cool but frankly beat saber would be just as cool on the wii or the kinect or on a normal screen with vr wands. It doesn’t actually utilize VR when you think about it.
Half Life Alyx was impressive but it also kind of sucked. Teleport movement breaks immersion hard. And the enemy design was clearly incredibly gentle to accommodate the fact that people are not in fact very competent in VR.
Natural moving (rather than frequent warp) is what I want to be solved on VR games.
It's a chicken and egg problem. VR tech isn't taking off cause there isn't enough market share to justify having great games for it.
To get that level of market share a company basically needs to subsidize the initial hardware/consoles. I don't think Valve has ever learned that concept and as such they are still selling the hardware at full price. This in contrast to say FB/Microsoft/Sony who actively subsidize their offerings because they understand the benefit of getting people locked in their ecosystem.
I predict a repeat of Steam Machines. (as a Linux user)
I'm pretty sure idealogically valve are opposed to locking people into their ecosystem. They don't even make it so you can only play their own games with steam, and they allow you to add non-steam games to your library. They're a weird comapny in general, they have a pretty hardcore horizontal management system going on in their company which as I understand as an outsider is a big reason why they've struggled to bring stuff to market of late.
Their (leaked) employee handbook is literally subtitled "A fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s there telling you what to do"
>They don't even make it so you can only play their own games with steam
? You can't play DOTA2 or CS:GO or any of their real moneymakers anywhere but Steam.
I mean that even if steam closed tomorrow, you would be able to play all your games. They're literally just installed in a folder on your computer and steam clicks the exe for you. They also released server code for most of their own games so you can run your own. Most companies would have gated access to their servers so you could only run the game when you could connect to their database
> Steam Deck will sell like hotcakes
Pretty sure it won’t. Too chunky for playing indie games on the go, not enough battery to play AAA. And if you plan having it plugged in as a desktop replacement, there’re batter gaming laptops.
I cant believe the Apple of Gaming discussion with no mention of Nintendo.
Nintendo actually delivers quality products, just too intelligent for American audiences. USA just wants guns, action, press A/Pay to win!
Ever heard of EA?
I wonder if this will trigger any antitrust lawsuits. I know Microsoft isn't that of the 90's but it seems like the political situation is ripe for politicians to go after "big tech" and this is a pretty major acquisition that will help Xbox be the dominant player in terms of content.
I doubt it. There are much bigger monopolies in the webspace / ecommerce space than the gaming space.
I know there are but I've been doing research on a ton of gov officials (starting a new gig in DC in tech policy) and wow, so many of them are taking a hardline stance on anything "big tech" now, so the political calculus may have changed since previous acquisitions went through.
Nothing will happen as we live in the post-Disney/Fox merger.
On the other hand, UK regulators blocked FB/Giphy and Nvidia/ARM mergers.
The UK sees a strategic interest in ARM
FB/Giphy tho?
Privacy concerns
TBF the mood music has changed on mergers and I'm not sure that would have gone through today.
In which way? As far as I can see, the size of M&A activity is only increasing
As is regulatory scrutiny.
Anti-Trust is not magic, its no longer a tool politicans can wield like a club against things they don't like. The courts have a definition and you actually have to prove abuse for those law-suits to do anything. Doing so if you can do it at all takes decades.
Unless politicians make major changes to the anti-trust law its unlikely to be effective. And doing so would require major action in congress.
The president could use non anti-trust actions as well of course. But rather unlikely.
Sure, but sometimes the threat of doing something and having an acquisition mired in a lawsuit or the Prez using the bully pulpit against your co can be a serious deterrent from engaging in an acquisition as well.
Yeah look how well that worked out for the previous administration vis a vis AT&T and Time Warner.
Given the insider hiring of Michael Cohen by AT&T I'd say there were other factors at play in that one
Abuse must be proven to break up an existing company. Nobody has to prove abuse to prevent mergers among major market members.
Of course, other countries besides the US could also block the merger...
You don't need Congressional action - the laws never changed, the definition of the courts did. Biden is appointing federal judges faster than even Trump did, so the opinion of the courts may be shifting very quickly.
It's not magic but it can block a deal.
the article say Microsoft will be the third largest gaming company behind Tenecent and Sony. how antitrust going to trigger if Microsoft doesn't have the entire market. if antitrust didn't take down Apple just force Apple to allows third party payment option. i don't see how this will trigger antitrust
Neither Tencent nor Sony are based in the US (although Sony does have a US subsidiary). AT&T and T-Mobile together wouldn't have been the whole cell phone market either, although consolidation in physical-presence utilities are seen somewhat differently from more easily distributed products.
> Neither Tencent nor Sony are based in the US (although Sony does have a US subsidiary)
Sony Interactive Entertainment actually relocated to California a few years ago and literally everything PlayStation is under them so I'd probably call them a US company at this point.
It's still only a part of the larger Sony, though, with other subsidiaries doing completely other things. They're not leveraging TVs from a US company into the Sony Pictures studios into game development into game publishing into tying the games to the PS5. Microsoft is all one company with divisions working more closely, in theory anyway, than Sony's subsidiary companies.
If moderate democratic senators could be bought with handouts to toe the party line (anyone remember those times?), perhaps closely examining mergers like this would be a higher priority. There are bills moving through congress though, and eventually with more authority, perhaps the FTC could make meaningful market changes. Like: making MS offer games on other platforms, or at-least not actively stopping them from running by offering good anti-cheat support on all platforms.
No way. The politicians are also bagholders now.
They always were. Worth noting the bags are larger now and there are fewer options to hold.
Politicians need something meatier than gaming content. I'd expect google or FB under that lens.
Seems like the social and commerce aspects are drawing scrutiny. I think MS will escape unscathed here
ahah very appropriate comment given your nickname mention of Atlas Shrugged!
Ironically, I made that some years after a serious libertarian phase and the "Un" is supposed to be the operative part of that as while I am a big fan of individuality, hard work, and limited (albeit ideally very effective) government I very much appreciate now the importance of other parts of society and that life is far more complex than many libertarians (and even myself still) would like it to be and requires a lot of nuance
I think that Microsoft's Game Pass has really changed the gaming ecosystem.
If you're not familiar it's basically "Netflix of Videogames" where for a low monthly price (compared to buying a game at full retail) you get access to whole downloadable/streamable library of games.
It's such an outsized value that it's a big reason to choose an Xbox console over a PlayStation and it's pretty clearly the driving force behind these acquisitions. More games in the library -> More Game Pass subscribers -> More Profit.
I guess it's just business at the end of the day, but IMHO this model in the end could not be the best for consumer after all.
For example tv streaming, where if your favorite movies/tv series maybe spread over dozen services and you need to pay subscription to all of them. Or it could happen that copyrights get bought by different providers and thus migrate from service to service. I will not be surprised if piracy will have a comeback for movies or tv-series.
So with gaming it will either be the same (too many providers to choose from), or reverse - if you'd like to play AAA title, you will be locked in with Microsoft.
I don't think we'll see a bunch of equivalent game passes like we see in video streaming, mostly because Microsoft can act as a de facto gatekeeper for what "passes" can be used, and they'd realistically limit it to only theirs, at least on Xbox.
On PC something similar may arise, but there would be much more competition and PC gamers may be more reluctant to use these services because there are more options when choosing where and how to buy/download/play games on PC.
> I will not be surprised if piracy will have a comeback for movies or tv-series.
I'm pretty sure piracy numbers for movies and series went up with the number of streaming services
Can you imagine if they make it so Game Pass covers your WoW subscription? WoW could see a comeback.
> 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.
Diablo 4 on Game Pass definitely makes for an interesting value proposition. Maybe login will actually work this time at launch :p
Are you sure everything that Activision / Blizzard publishes will be on GamePass day one?
I think that's pretty much a given.
If they want to be all-in on game pass, then they should actually go all in.
As somebody who just got game pass, I feel kinda cheated for what I get; All the games offered there are the “f2p” versions, even MS first party titles like Halo only offer the “default” versions to play “for free” when paying a monthly subscription.
It’s like those free versions Epic hands out; They are playable, but they usually lack any and all of the “extra DLC content” that too often are needed to make a game actually fully fleshed out.
You've got to be kidding. The version offered on Game Pass is the "Standard" edition, that isn't just a "free to play", "stripped down" version of the game. It is 95% of the game! The remaining 5% is almost always cosmetic items, like skins or cars, that really do not impact the core experience.
There are some exceptions, like Destiny 2 I believe, where the meaningful DLC is excluded, but that is not the rule. Game Pass is an incredible deal.
This “f2p” versions cost 60 dollars.
You’re getting the “standard” edition of the game. Sure, you’re not getting the expansion packs or other cosmetics, but neither is any other person that doesn’t buy the deluxe editions.
And the deluxe version gives you everything?
No, what they usually give you is actual customization options because in the full-priced standard edition those do not exist anymore.
As character customization has by now been apparently redefined as being wholesale "cosmetic" and thus locked behind an deluxe version up sale, MTX spending and FOMO season pass grinding.
It's a sorry state for AAA and increasingly even mid-tier developed games.
Often enough it directly affects gameplay, instead of playing with/against individual other people, which in many games used to be recognizable by their character customization choices, too often multiplayer now ends up looking like the clone wars.
As the only people that stick out with their customization are those that spend money on having any choice other but the one default choice.
What is Halo missing? MCC and infinite have all the relevant content, unless you wanted a dress-up game instead of an FPS.
Pretty much all meaningful multiplayer customization. Past Halo titles let you unlock a variety of different armor styles, and colors, by just playing trough the singleplayer.
Now pretty much all of that is either locked behind "Deluxe edition", MTX or dozens of levels of season pass for a single item.
Which is particularly cynical considering how they advertised this Halo as the "most customizable ever, no two Spartans will look alike!" [0], when the only way not to look alike is to spend at least 10 bucks for a new armor core.
Want that new armor core in a different color? Enjoy spending another 8 bucks [1] because color schemes are now armor core specific.
This is objectively worse than what people used to get when they bought the "standard" version, as effectively all meaningful multiplayer customization is now paywalled behind a ton of MTX and not just the "nice extras".
Halo isn't the only offender on that front, pretty much all the games that nowadays get released with a "standard" 50-60 bucks version, and then a 100+ bucks deluxe version follow this very same MO. Which would be okay if those "deluxe version" actually offered the full package, but they don't, what they offer is the same extend of customization options that used to be included with games out of the box, while getting "everything" has by now come an exercise of unlimited spending [2] because creating unlimited new color swaps, with every new "season", is the new most profitable business model, not releasing a fully functional and fleshed out game out of the box, that's by now the absolute rare exception in the "AAA" sector.
This is also exactly what many people have been warning about where MTX will ultimately takes us for literally decades, game pass is the ultimate manifestation of it; You subscribe to "games as a service" with a monthly fee, then you are supposed to spend money on those rented games to upgrade them to proper fully fleshed out versions, and then you are locked into the subscription because not paying for it now also means losing access to all the content for the games you purchased on-top of your subscriptions.
Anybody who looks at this and goes; "This is great for consumers!" must not be a consumer and must have completely missed all the relevant discourse about these developments during the last decades.
[0] https://gamerant.com/halo-infinite-armor-customization-milli...
[1] https://gamerant.com/halo-infinite-charges-8-color-blue/
[2] https://www.gamingbible.co.uk/news/xbox-halo-infinite-shop-c...
> Pretty much all meaningful multiplayer customization.
So to answer him, yes, you want to play dress up. Everything you’re complaining about is entirely cosmetic.
Character customization has always been a huge part of multiplayer games even before MTX became a thing, particularly for Halo titles.
Disregarding that as "you only want to play dress-up" is not only unbelievably reductive, it's also a very lazy way to just hand-wave away a very real issue.
The same way you could disregard the vast majority of features from any game except core-gameplay features; "You want to color your car in your racing game? How silly, you only want to play dress up!"
I guess it's just naïve of me want to play things in games?
> always... particularly for Halo titles.
Maybe if you started with Halo 2. Halo 1 lan parties and Xbox connect you had a choice of maybe 10 colors. It was about the shooty-shooty. And maybe that's why I like infinite, I get pretty darn good shooty-shooty.
I agree to an extent that the customization system is a little broken though. Team games should force red or blue coloring, half the time I can't tell who is or isn't on my team. "Outlines" aren't enough. All so people feel that their $50 armor purchase isn't hidden.
> Maybe if you started with Halo 2.
I "started" with Quake, but that's besides the point.
> Halo 1 lan parties and Xbox connect you had a choice of maybe 10 colors.
At PC lan parties people had a choice between a myriad of custom skins particularly with GoldScr mods, all for free.
> It was about the shooty-shooty.
It was also about the community, particularly at a lan party, and part of a community is also being able to individualize your avatar.
This used to be very well understood for the longest time, and now it's suddenly considered "playing dress up" because billions dollar heavy AAA publishers, and developers can't be arsed anymore to put in any meaningful player customization that isn't monetized and FOMO'ed to hell.
> All so people feel that their $50 armor purchase isn't hidden.
Would you disagree that previous Halo games, short of going back over a decade, offered more, and particularly more meaningful, multiplayer customization options out of the box?
> Team games should force red or blue coloring, half the time I can't tell who is or isn't on my team. "Outlines" aren't enough.
They are enforced to such a degree that picking any blue color skin already gives you a slight advantage as enemies will always be colored red and allies always be colored blue.
Which is btw a very separate issue from armor types customization, people having different armor types makes it much more likely for you to recognize enemies from friends as 90% of people wouldn't sport the exactly same armor style that's completely indistinguishable.
It gives the whole affair a real "clone wars" vibe where you ain't fighting individuals, but yet another of the same model, something that wouldn't have been acceptable in single-player FPS games or multiplayer mods, like CS, decades ago.
I'm sorry you're not enjoying the game.
I didn't write a single thing about my enjoyment of the game?
But it's fascinating how your difficulties of differentiating players and teams trace directly back to the lack of non-monetized character customization, and that just passes right by you like a non-issue.
Maybe you enjoy fighting in the clone wars, I think it's greedy design and not conductive to good gameplay.
20 years ago non-commercialized mods got this right, I really don't see why wanting it to get right in massive AAA titles, with a pretty rich and established history in exactly that, is suddenly such a controversial opinion, on HN out of all places.
On one hand I get called out for wanting more than only the purest "core-functionality" ("You can shoot people, what more do you want?"), on the other hand people disagree with the notion of how these "low-content" version are very much "f2p" versions, as a lot of content that used to come out of the box is now relegated and hand-waved away as "playing dress up".
Why the negative implication? Is "playing space soldier" somehow more valid than "playing dress-up"?
This criticism has nothing to do with Game Pass. There are micro transactions whether you buy the game stand alone, play via Game Pass or play the free to play multiplayer.
That is not at all the case. I've played over 20 games, full games, on Game Pass.
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 assault allegations from the board. They threw parties with strippers & DJs telling the women to drink more so their male coworkers could have more fun. They passed around a nude picture of a female coworker, leading to her suicide. An awesome person was promoted to be head of Blizzard, before leaving just months later, telling the board that she had experienced years of sexual misconduct working there, and there was no hope for them to ever change their frat-boy culture.
This isn't old information. It came to light just weeks before Halo Infinite was released. Phil Spencer & Microsoft had to be well into discussions at this point; and it didn't phase them. They didn't stipulate that he would have to leave; they instead leave him in charge of the company post-acquisition. They fire, what, a couple dozen people? In a company of tens of thousands?
Just... disgust. Maybe a little hope that Microsoft can improve their culture, but without signaling a fundamental change in leadership, that hope is dim. But at least they'll make some money.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/activision-videogames-bobby-kot...
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 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Alas, I now realize this was not in an official statement, but merely reporting by the WSJ. I'll edit my comment to make that clear.
Microsoft might completely upend their entire leadership eventually, but the easiest way to kill a merger between publicly traded companies (in which a majority of shareholders from both companies must approve) is to announce sweeping leadership changes the same day as the acquisition announcement.
> Phil Spencer & Microsoft had to be well into discussions at this point; and it didn't phase them. They didn't stipulate that he would have to leave; they instead leave him in charge of the company post-acquisition.
You're getting worked up for no reason. Maybe wait until Kotick actually sticks around before the outage?
I think it's a lot more likely that the culture gets overhauled under MS than without an acquisition.
This is likely good for current employees who might otherwise be likely future victims.
Its also possible this is collateral (except it happens first) to building a better company from the ashes. I'll be wrong if this person stays at blizzard after a year. I think they want the IP and brands foremost.
Everything I've read is he's only still in charge until the merger completes. Big sales like this don't happen overnight. ABK is keeping him in charge because MS doesn't own them yet. Once they do, it sounds like it's going to get split up into individual segments directly reporting to MS' gaming CEO.
I am very sure that to get the deal done Microsoft would have had to work with Kotick. I am also very confident that they do not support him and that he will be gone way before the end of the year.
Edit: It seems it's not expected to close until 2023 so maybe it takes MS longer to get him out.
Where is that suicide information from? It's the first time I hear about that. (Not disputing that, just did not see that before anywhere.)
edit: ah the WSJ article
>The board of directors was blindsided by the California lawsuit’s allegations, including that an Activision employee killed herself after a photo of her vagina allegedly was circulated at a company party, according to people familiar with the board.
And here
> But here is where it gets even worse. A former female employee who hasn't been named publicly committed suicide while on a business trip with one of her male supervisors. The unnamed supervisor apparently brought sex toys and lube on their trip, and the state investigators believe this and a previous event where the female in question had a photo of her vagina shared around the office Christmas party led to her taking her own life.
Ugh.
How about chill? The deal isn't even going to be completed until next year, and the news is barely 12 hours old at this point and you're already flaming MS for not tossing Kotick to the curb in an announcement blog post? That's not how reality works buddy.
It's already been announced that Kotick is expected to leave after the transition period. I would be shocked if MS didn't address the culture issues at Activision Blizzard.
You're making far too many assumptions. Perhaps the whole situation played to MSFTs advantage, perhaps him leaving is now baked into the deal.
The name Blizzard is still magical to me. As the maybe 15-year old playing Warcraft II and drawing strategies on a piece of paper. I don't play computer games anymore. But it was magical.
They've now fallen so low, it's like it's a completely different company.
Not just "like" - they are a completely different company.
It's well known that in the wake of the huge success of WoW they had to completely re-organize the company in order to be able to properly support a game with an active audience of that size. Their size, their structure, their culture, everything changed.
All the original creators of the magical IPs left a long time ago.
They were good citizens of macOS too. Up until Overwatch.
Right? It came to Switch but not macOS, boggles the mind.
Larger install base I guess. I’d been waiting for the Mac version for years and am surprised it never came.
Back in the day, Starcraft was my thing. I didn't get into Diablo too much, but I thought it was cool. I remember playing the original up to the final level. A few years ago, I played and beat it on my retro PC, and it was exactly as fun as I remembered it.[0] I tried Warcraft, but I didn't get into it.
Even outside of the recent scandal, I've long had mixed feelings about Blizzard: harassing independent servers, always-connected DRM (I got booted out of single-player CoD: MW so many times), and milking franchises with remasters. I will say, though, that after a several year hiatus, a friend and I have discovered StarCraft 2 co-op with weekly mutations, and it's a lot of fun.
SC 2 recently went free-to-play. If the rest of their catalog is added to Game Pass, that will be something. Blizzard games have been stubbornly expensive years after release. I wonder what this means for Battle.net?
Indeed. I remember drawing my own maps on paper before we had a computer at home. It seems so simple looking back.
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 studios too, but by comparison they seem carefully planned. They're usually studios already making (mostly) playstation exclusives (e.g. devs of Returnal, Spider-Man and Dark Souls).
> 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.
Torn on this. On the one hand I completely agree. I doubt there'll be any anti-trust action, first because that doesn't seem to be a thing anymore and second because I can't imagine the American authorities getting in the way of Microsoft's competition with what are, at the end of the day, Japanese companies.
As a gamer who's loved Activision's franchises since childhood, they've run them all into the ground and if Microsoft can do better with them then let them try.
Side thought - maybe Nintendo and Sony will finally join forces to compete, as they almost did in the 90s.
The purpose of antitrust law is to prevent monopolies, not to prevent industry consolidation. Consolidation is fine in the eyes of the law, but monopolistic behavior isn't.
No antitrust action will be taken because even after all these acquisitions, Microsoft still competes with Take-Two, EA, Nintendo, Square Enix, Sony, Tencent, etc., plus a vast number of smaller players (Paradox, Sega, the sixteen gazillion indie developers on Steam...).
> The purpose of antitrust law is to prevent monopolies, not to prevent industry consolidation. Consolidation is fine in the eyes of the law, but monopolistic behavior isn't.
The purpose of antitrust law is to prevent anticompetitive behaviour by limiting the accumulation of market power. The most extreme case of this is monopolies.
I agree that no action will be taken, though. The current status quo is so full of market power abuse that this acquisition looks normal.
Xbox and Nintendo actually joined forces recently to make cross-play happen.
Of what?
I've found an older list in that article: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-xbox-one-and-nintendo...
Notably: Rocket League, Minecraft, Fortnight, Apex Legend, Overwatch
Those are all games that implemented their own cross-play, no assistance from Nintendo.
Doesn't Sony have an insurance / financial business subsidizing their operations[0]? Not to mention a movie studio that rakes in the cash, especially since riding the backs of Disney with Marvel[1]
The interesting one here for me has always been Nintendo, they are a still a pure gamers play, and have managed to thrive in a world of shifting sands, sometimes bucking entire trends in the industry with success, like going all in on the Nintendo Switch form factor (a lot of the industry people thought mobile gaming consoles were dead in the water)
I think there's a lot of competition in this space still, and while I don't like consolidation either, its also hard to say Activision Blizzard is a well managed company at this point
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/business/global/sonys-bre...
[1]: https://www.cbr.com/spider-man-no-way-home-sony-most-profita...
While Sony is a medium sized corporation its revenue is 10% that of Microsoft.
Sony spent 20+ years building up and planning their 1st party studios. Microsoft could do that too, but it would take 20 more years. They don't have the time for that and acquisition is really their only option. I don't like it either, but that's the reality of it.
Agree. If I were in charge at MS, I might have done this too. I can't blame them.
But I imagine Sony execs are struggling to comprehend what's going on. They've done so much right in the last few years. They've built some of the best studios in the world. They've delivered the best exclusive AAA content. Just in the last few years: The Last of us Part 2, Ghosts of Tsushima, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Uncharted.... And despite that, they still might not come out on top. Life isn't fair :).
>> Sony spent 20+ years building up and planning their 1st party studios. Microsoft could do that too, but it would take 20 more years.
Ironically, the Xbox (OG) was released 20 years ago.
Sony's also been historically resistant to letting their exclusives reach PC. That's slowly changing (God of War just hit PC in the past few days and Horizon's been out for a while), but I don't think this really did them any favors. Sure, they need to sell hardware, but there's a long tail on PC sales that can outlive generations of consoles. Microsoft, meanwhile, probably more than any other tech giant today, is the master of the long tail.
I don't think microsoft will be successful here.
First, the price they are paying is insane. The investors will be demanding the results eventually.
Also, buying studios won't fix the culture in Microsoft. They've had so many years and still can't make consistently good games. There are some gems in between but they are usually form partnerships or newly bought studios. Their in-house development seems like actual hell (Halo).
I also suspect that game pass will make them focus on GAS games (service games) with microtransactions, optimised for profit instead of fun.
> The investors will be demanding the results eventually.
I wish I had time to dig into Activision's financials to get a better feel on this.
They earned $2B last quarter, with over $500m going to Cost of Revenue. For a software company, I'm guessing a lot of this is in multiplayer gaming infrastructure. Cost of Revenue is another $716m, with half going to R&D (engineering) and half going to G&A (rent, administration, etc.).
In other words, if Microsoft can absorb the Cost of Revenue into Azure and optimize the G&A a bit, they can increase quarterly revenue by almost 33%. That's $10B/year. Plus, putting Activision's back catalog on GamePass might drive up GamePass subscriber count/retention and back catalog sales (see the first article linked below).
It would be tough to show this as hugely profitable over the short term, but I think they could model out a 5 year ROI very very easily.
> I also suspect that game pass will make them focus on GAS games (service games) with microtransactions, optimised for profit instead of fun.
I'm not a subscriber, but as a casual follower of GamePass I haven't seen it drive more MTX. On the contrary, it seems to have opened the door to more niche-y games that would have a hard time finding an audience elsewhere.
These two articles give developer quotes that are very interesting insights into both gamer behavior and the economics of putting a game on GamePass:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2021/03/19/game-pass...
https://www.gameinformer.com/2021/03/24/deathloop-dev-opens-...
Yes, these are probably MSFT sponsored and it's not all roses, but even if there's a core of truth to them it's encouraging.
> I also suspect that game pass will make them focus on GAS games (service games) with microtransactions, optimised for profit instead of fun.
If they want to go that route, charging by the month isn't the way to do it. There's a reason exploitative mobile games are free at point of sale. I predict that MS stays the course of putting decent first and third party titles on Game Pass and chooses to raise prices rather than mandate that Game Pass games be more exploitative.
Playstation has also bought (and closed) a lot of studios (and one publisher) over the years. A lot of the Playstation 1st party studios were not built from ground up but instead bought.
The difference is that Sony was the original publisher behind many of the studios they have acquired. Presumably these studios wouldn't have gotten traction without Sony backing to begin with.
Yeah for MS is easier to dump cash (you don't have to be creative for that) and outright buy whole studios with their IPs, rather than using brains and actually create something new. Sony is way ahead in that regard, so sad to see money dumping on the other side
Why is it sad? Presumably you work as a software developer. Are you sad that your boss didn't do the programming his or her self, and instead "dumped money" into your bank account?
He's obviously speaking as a consumer. If I was CEO of Activision/Blizzard, and I was getting millions or billions from the buyout, obviously my opinion would be different to that of the consumer that's affected by this.
It's not like Microsoft couldn't have done that from the start. They were the software company, after all, so they probably should have done. They're both over 20 years into the game, now.
MS HAS owned and operated game studios for 20 years. This acquisition doesn't fundamentally change how MS approaches game development.
You're right - but when you look at the list of Playstation exclusives vs Xbox exclusives, you'd hardly know it. A lot of people buy Playstations because there's nothing of interest on Xbox that they can't have.
Didn't it come out recently that they tried to buy Sega 20 years ago, when they were just getting into the business with the XBOX?
EDIT: They tried to buy Nintendo, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25672443
The weird thing I remember some of the best games from my childhood were made by Microsoft Studios - Freelancer, Midtown Madness, Flight Simulator, Age of Empires etc.
Microsoft just purchased a bunch of has-been IPs that still have great amount of nostalgia.
When Zenimax was acquired, it was coming off a couple of failed fallout games, a meh ESO and delayed Elder scrolls 6. Similarly, Activision-Blizzard has been in the midst of COD and Overwatch losing their gaming monopoly to Fortnite, Blizzard failing to create a good game for about 5 years and the big workplace lawsuit.
It feels like Microsoft is taking on the challenge of reviving these companies back to being the powerhouses of old. In that sense it is a big challenge and not as simple as just buying the future of gaming.
If they wanted to do that, they'd probably try to buy Naughty Dog or Fortnite.
It's like acquiring Fiat Chrysler or General motors. Still big names, but clearly not the 'brands of the decade'. You wouldn't buy them to form a monopoly. You'd buy them to revive the brand.
>Microsoft just purchased a bunch of has-been IPs that still have great amount of nostalgia
The #1 and #2 titles of 2021 are has-beens? And they also had the #1 and #2 of 2020.
https://venturebeat.com/2022/01/18/npd-the-top-20-best-selli...
https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/15/npd-reveals-the-best-sell...
Call of duty makes most of its income through sales. So, the revenue seems a lot higher than it actually is. Relatively speaking COD sales have stagnated for a decade [1] while the gaming industry has exploded. In terms of revenue, Fortnite and PUBG eclipse COD's annual revenue [2], while having lower development costs.
COD is admittedly not a has been, but it is like a top athlete in the twilight of their career. Still performing at the top, but no more #1 and the trends aren't looking great.
[1] https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Call_of_Duty
[2] https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_vid...
Also the tactic to use scandals for a drop in market cap before acquisition is quite common in IT. Last year they were valued for 30bn more.
Activision/Blizzard certainly had a big sales tag on their forehead.
> Last year they were valued for 30bn more
On what day? Looks like they dropped from 70bn last year same time to ~50bn at the start of the year and then sold for 69bn.
> Seeing a bunch of excellent third-party cross-platform games become xbox-exclusive is really sad for gamers
What are you talking about? Microsoft is embracing PC and cross play more than ever.
They will be MS exclusive. It's fine if you're a windows gamer, but this is bad news for anyone who plays games on Playstation, Linux/Steam/Proton, or Nintendo platforms.
It also really should be the target of anti-trust action if that was a thing anymore. It's going to be a reality fairly soon that anyone who wants to play all the latest AAA titles will have to own at least two gaming devices.
That's not only annoying from a consumer perspective, but it's counter-productive from the perspective of how much redundant hardware it means in the midst of a chip shortage.
> but this is bad news for anyone who plays games on Playstation, Linux/Steam/Proton, or Nintendo platforms.
Microsoft has been releasing their PC games on Steam the same day they do on their own store for a few years now.
Do you really expect them to continue this practice if they own a dominant share of exclusive new games? With Minecraft they did the opposite: they made bedrock a windows exclusive, and required going through the MS storefront to access it.
MS's track record seems to be only to be pro-consumer so long as it helps their bottom line.
I'm hopeful this continues. I'm sure it's deliberate to make GamePass seem like a killer deal. Hey, it worked for Netflix. Spend $100 on a dvd boxset of your favourite TV series, or stream it all for $10/mo
>>That's not only annoying from a consumer perspective, but it's counter-productive from the perspective of how much redundant hardware it means in the midst of a chip shortage.
This is an excellent point. You can argue that the Switch is so different, it can make sense to own a Switch plus a PS5. But the PS5 and Xbox Series X are so similar it is wasteful to be arbitrarily requiring you to buy both if you want 2 sets of exclusives.
That's ultimately why Microsoft did this. Previously it made sense to just get a PS4/PS5. You get the excellent Sony exclusives, and all the cross-platform games. You missed out on very few good Xbox exclusives. Not anymore.
I'm hopeful this stuff will still come to steam. I'm done having multiple consoles. I have a PS5 and a PC. I'm hopeful that's enough to not miss out on too much.
Why is it bad for Linux users? Does gamepass not work under Proton?
> PC
Specifically Windows, it has to be pointed out these days.
I'm still surprised that to this day Minecraft Java was allowed to survive (albeit just so slightly behind Minecraft Bedrock, but still with some extra features).
Here my kids prefers the Java edition, for its mods.
Yeah, I don't know many people who are playing bedrock because of the spotty mod support and the weird redstone differences making complicated designs harder for no user-visible reason -- I'm sure the code is nicer.
My kids play bedrock because it's cross platform (mostly) and they can play on the switch, PC, tablets, etc.
I wish they could use the Java version to do that, because bedrock is awful in a lot of ways. Microsoft seems entirely focused on merchandising, paid DLC, and driving users toward their paid server offerings. The game itself feels like it has been largely in maintenance mode for a long time, other than the recent caverns update.
It blows my mind when I think about how much money Minecraft must be worth, and how big MS is. Compare that to an indie game like Terraria, Stardew Valley, or Factorio and the difference in quality is night and day.
It's crazy to think that the no.1 best selling video game of all time (by copies sold) derives a large part of it's values from the free work of volunteers.
Meh that’s how things worked in the 90s and the 2000s. Counter strike was a mod as were many other household names
Microsoft didn't invent (video game) platform exclusivity, they merely have perfected it. Thank Sony and rockstar games or Activision, ironically, for this, going all the way back to.. GTA San Andreas, or Tony Hawk franchise.
Any economic statement can be turned around and stated in the reverse way. Maybe it's the gamers who are unwilling to pay enough for games, so the only companies that can afford to make games are console vendors?
> 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...
Honestly, there are so many games these days, I no longer notice when something goes exclusive.
I hear Horizon: Zero Dawn was great. Didn't play it. Didn't pick it up when it stopped being an exclusive because it was no longer new by the time it hit PC.
My dance card is so full of Steam Early Access that I don't even have time for exclusives these days.
I don’t know age of empires 4 seems pretty good to me…
sounds like AWS funding everything else Amazon does that isn't profitable, this isn't a new strategy
Congratulations to Phil Spencer, who started out leading an upstart team at Microsoft for a new game console called "Xbox" and is now "CEO of Microsoft Gaming" - a Microsoft Senior Leadership position.
Oh, and he now leads the third biggest gaming company on the planet:
> When the transaction closes, Microsoft will become the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony.
It will be interesting to see in the medium-term if Satya and the Board spin off gaming into an independent company at some point. But for now it's wild to think about the fact that Microsoft owns the Call of Duty franchise.
I think there should be more (gaming) companies, and (gaming) companies should not be owned by the platforms, so I see this as a pretty big negative for the industry and customers.
Congrats to Phil on his resume bump I guess.
There actually are a ton of gaming companies right now. The indie game space seems to be much healthier and accessible than say, the indie movie business. I hardly buy AAA titles anymore because you can get so many good games for under $20 dollars made by independent studios. Of course, this is based on mostly staying on PC and Steam. I would suspect consoles are not as indie friendly, but it does seem like they have some market access
The Nintendo Switch has a pretty healthy indie offering.
Though there is the switch tax where games that are 10$ on steam are 30 on switch.
I've noticed :/
I'm hoping the Steam Deck will provide a more open portable console.
If the Deck takes off, we will see lots of other handhelds following the same blueprint too.
I wouldn't be too sure to be honest, only companies with a big game platorm can compete with Valve being able to subsidize these and sell them at cost or less, because most game purchases one them will be through steam.
We already have piles of handheld PC's taking off with or without the Deck at this point. I'd love an AYA NEO if the prices weren't so high.
This is the sole reason why I don't play Switch games unless I can get them on sale, or they're exclusive like BotW.
I have a 14" gaming notebook (ASUS G14 2021) that's portable enough and offers decent battery life especially for lighter games with access to my Steam library offline, and plenty of key shops to find games for uber cheap when there's no demo available for me to vet the value of a title first.
Win-wins all around!
Unfortunately, physical copies of games are not depreciating; BotW, despite being five years old, is still selling at full price.
Good for them though, I mean it's a great game, and it means the games don't depreciate much on the secondhand market either. Although I'm confident people don't want to sell physical Switch games, a lot of them have a lot of life in them and become prized possessions.
> Win-wins all around!
Do devs get more money from Steam than Switch on a per unit basis? If not, using Steam means the dev is not winning as much as they could.
You assume that the Steam users are willing to pay the same price as Switch users, but that's not necessarily the case. Volume matters as well, maybe the number of Steam users is way more than the number of Switch users so they can make up for the lower price by selling more.
Exactly this — and devs selling on Steam have the choice to participate in sales or not.
Stadia also has a lot of indie games but thanks to their sales, you end up with a comparable price to Steam sales. Disco Elysium, for example, went on sale for US$18 vs. ~$23 on Switch. Steam's sale price was ~$20.
A wide range of indie games being available doesn't mean it's a viable business for the indies. Many are loss-making passion projects.
Passion projects cannot be described as "loss making".
When passion projects become "loss making", then people loose their passion for it.
Or how many $5/month (for all of them) Apple arcade games are $15+ on the Switch.
But one is forever and one is only for as long as you maintain indentured servitude to the richest company on the planet.
Also most indie games require more brainpower than what Apple Arcade offers. Apple wouldn't know a complex game if a pile of discs with them fell on their heads.
That’s kind of the point. What’s an Apple Arcade game doing on the switch at all? It’s just a money grab to sell a mobile game on the switch.
> maintain indentured servitude
The "lock-in" and the lack of ownership/copyright extension for media provided by their service is absolutely a problem, but it's not "servitude". There's a couple of other members of FAANG where the relationship with users is much more like servitude.
The fact that one lord is more benevolent than another doesn't mean that the feudal system, as a whole, is just fine.
Forever seems like a stretch. When Switch is succeeded, how long before Nintendo shuts the Switch shop down? You can't legally move downloaded games between consoles.
This was a big issue with WiiWare when Nintendo shut down the Wii Shop. People could keep what they had downloaded, but once the Shop shut down, you couldn't redownload anything.
> People could keep what they had downloaded, but once the Shop shut down, you couldn't redownload anything
You can still redownload things. Nintendo says at some point they'll turn that off, but they haven't said when yet.
Ah. My mistake. My point still stands: you're at the whims of Nintendo.
Download is only one way to buy Switch games, and at least I'll still be able to use one console - compared to zero as soon as I stop paying my feudal obligations to Apple.
Not every game on the Switch Store is available on cartridge
And almost every game available on cartridge has some kind of patch only downloadable from the store. Some don't even have all their data on the cartridge and need a download to function at all...
Still more than the zero available for iOS.
Ideological language like this just makes it easy to dismiss you and your arguments.
And despite that, you still failed to do it.
I will maintain servitude to Apple for the rest of my life because of iMessage: if I leave they can subtly “break” my access to messaging with people I care about (and have done so.)
> because of iMessage: if I leave they can subtly “break” my access to messaging with people I care about (and have done so.)
Even if you made sure to unregister your phone number and email addresses from iMessage first? You can do this while still using an iPhone to validate that it's worked before you give it up.
> Even if you made sure to unregister your phone number and email addresses from iMessage first? You can do this while still using an iPhone to validate that it's worked before you give it up.
You are right, of course. And you can also do it afterwards if you forgot. There is no nefarious plan to void your messages when you change phone.
"Indentured".
ta, fixed
The economics of game passes are like this with nearly all of them. The XBox game pass has several games (on both PC and XBox) where their price is multiples of the monthly price.
Don't you have to continue paying the subscription to continue to be able to access those games?
You do—so if I like a game enough, I'll pick it up elsewhere, too. But digital games as a whole get harder to play over time. I've moved my DSi games to my 3DS, and I've got a Wii with a whole bunch of titles.
I hear nobody complaining about nintendotax
Well, I complain about it by not buying a switch. Game prices on the switch is why I haven't gave in to the temptation yet.
Consider the total hours games like BotW offer and divide that into the price. That might alter your feelings that game prices are too high. I know it did for me.
It was about the nintendotax, not the games.. Just like 'AppleTax' of 30%.
You say that like games aren't already kind of absurdly cheap for how much work goes into them. People used to pay $60 of 1980s money for, frankly, pretty shit[0] NES games. That's ~$150 worth of money today. $30 games are downright cheap and I'm continually impressed by how entitled gamers can be when they complain about modern game prices. People pay $30 for a decent meal at a restaurant FFS.
Which isn't to say that you should by a switch. If you don't think it's a good value then obviously you shouldn't. I'm just saying that not buying it because 'the games are too expensive' seems like a pretty unjustified complaint to me.
[0] Not all of them were shit of course, but the catalogue is 90% shit and people did buy a lot of shit games.
Well, consider that you could buy any kind of game first hand for $60, then after finishing it, you could be able to sell if and get some money back.
Today you pay $30 (for some games, but a lot are still $60, $80, etc.) Plus the DLC, credits, extensions, registration to an account no ability to sell it or buy second hand.
Game industry got pretty bad, I've enjoyed it in the past, and I have the ability to just move on and ignore anything game related, what I am upset about is that today's kids are squeezed and coerced in order to play anything, and that is why I wish we had governments trying to put a stop to the current gaming companies greed
$60 was also worth quite a bit more in the heyday of GameStop et al.
What you characterize as "greed" is more reflective of general consumer desires (physical media is pretty dead, and I say this having a paper library of around 500 books) and that games are ever-more-expensive to make.
For the preposterous number of person-hours that go into an AAA title, $100 isn't unrealistic. But there's price anchoring dating back to the nineties now, and that as much as anything is why games upsell the way they do. (The "complete edition" prices are probably more representative of what a sustainable price for a player really is.)
Or we can do microtransactions until our souls bleed and go back to single-use codes in the game case. That's a thing too.
> What you characterize as "greed" is more reflective of general consumer desires
While it is hilarious that you imply that vendor lockin, half finished games, arbitrary difficulty curves meant to stimulate mtx and a lack of ownership is a "general consumer desire" I think it is more reasonable to say that the consumer has no choice. They (or we) clearly still desire to buy videogames, so folks end up buying what is essentially trash.
The dichotomy isn't "buy AAA games" or "don't buy games". It's never been a better time to buy indie games, many of which these days are super polished and rewarding experiences. But the thing is? If you want an AAA game with AAA affordances, the cost of production is going to have to come from somewhere. And--well--it certainly seems like a lot of the market wants those games and those affordances, so yeah, if the player is prioritizing AAA games, then yes, they're expensive, and yes, they're going to get more expensive, and you can either pay it at the front door or once you're inside.
You pay your money and you take your choice. I agree that it's silly, and that's why I don't buy those games. I buy and play a lot of games, but it's been at least five years since I bought a game (that didn't show up from Humble Choice or whatever and is languishing in my game keys spreadsheet) from Activision, EA, or Ubisoft.
I have gotten more enjoyment out of Starsector[0], a game that isn't even on Steam yet, than I've ever gotten out of any AAA game I've ever played. It cost me $15. (I have since bought it repeatedly for friends.)
Yes i forgot about half finished games, that's another perk of modern gaming world
For the amount of person hours having a game sold for $100 is a bit of nonsense, they sell in million worldwide and the people working on it are laid off as soon the production is over, so it's just shared holders and CEO pocketing blood, are we really still thinking that people doing the work are getting anything off the production
Looking forward to trading used games and game assets on ETH L2 (Loopring?).
A lot more than just inflation changed since the '80s. Off the top of my head: massively larger market, better tooling, better hardware, better distribution networks.
Gaming companies aren't entitled to my money. They're allowed to offer games for the prices they want, and the market is allowed to buy them or not.
That may be true, but the switch exists in a market where games are extremely cheap. High quality free to play games, cheap indie games I play for weeks, steam sales, huge numbers of games given away by Epic Games, "free" games with prime gaming, and the insane value of Game Pass. It feels like every time I spend money on a game its free on the Epic Store or "free" on Game Pass within a few months. There's never been a cheaper time to be a PC gamer... assuming you already have a PC.
I still play $60 for games because it's not a big deal for me but it's weird when I already have so much entertainment available for almost nothing. Playnite says I have 1050 games available to play, about 50 are duplicates and about 350 are from Game pass. I've apparently spent less than $600 on steam and much less than that on all other stores. Seems like the market value of the average game is about $1. (Hands waving furiously)
If games are so expensive to make and sell so cheap, how come are the game companies getting bigger and making record profits year after year? Not that the median game developer seems to be much better off for it, though.
Besides, many of those $10 games that are $30 on the Switch are made by smaller teams or even solo creators. Just because some video game properties have grown into giant franchises with multimedia companies pouring tens and hundreds of millions dollars and armies of people into them, that doesn't mean the majority of video game titles around are like that.
Come to think of it, in the light of the countless recent stories of overwork and abuse in the games industry and the scandalous quality issues plaguing high-profile releases in recent years, I'm not even sure if we should be incentivizing games having a lot of work go into them.
How come is it entitlement to not buy things that cost more than you think they are worth, anyway? Expensive things don't become cheap just because they're cheaper than four decades ago nor because they happen to be created and marketed by large corporations with lots of employees.
> If games are so expensive to make and sell so cheap, how come are the game companies getting bigger and making record profits year after year? Not that the median game developer seems to be much better off for it, though.
That's a fair point. My first guess is lootboxes and microtransactions being used to make up the difference, as well as underpaying employees. For big studios it is common to lay off developers immediately after a big release.
Regardless, I don't think that same logic applies to smaller studios.
> How come is it entitlement to not buy things that cost more than you think they are worth, anyway?
That isn't what I was saying, though I admit I didn't make it very clear. If you don't want to buy something because the cost isn't worth it to you, that's perfectly fair. What I am annoyed by and think is entitled is any kind of objective-sounding judgement that 'games are too expensive'.
there are some major differences that mean inflation isn't the best indication for price
the biggest is market size. in 1980, there were very few people buying games compared to today.
also, for non-aaa games, the difficulty of making a game has in many ways gone down significantly. NES era games were at the absolute limit of hardware capabilities, and required a ton of wizardry to fit within size constraints. now graphics expectations are higher, but modern computers are so much more powerful that you can afford a lot more sloppiness.
> I'm continually impressed by how entitled gamers can be when they complain about modern game prices
> I'm just saying that not buying it because 'the games are too expensive' seems like a pretty unjustified complaint to me.
That's because on this topic you are quick on making judgements on people and don't (want to?) realize their reasons for not buying a switch can be valid and these reasons are not attack or counter arguments to the reasons for why you would buy switch games.
I am not an entitled gamer.
edit: and FWIW I was checking the switch page for Disco Elysium and I see that the price tag is the same as Gog's (39.99) but now I don't care anymore about discussing this topic here and now. Nintendotax gone ? Just checked Life is stange:true colours, same price tags as steam.
I guess the difference I'm trying to make is between "it personally isn't worth that to me", which is of course entirely valid, and a more objective-sounding statement of "games cost too much", which I think any objective analysis would say is ridiculous.
I wrote:
> Game prices on the switch is why I haven't gave in to the temptation yet.
Not:
> Game prices on the switch is why it's not worth gave in to the temptation yet.
> I guess the difference I'm trying to make is between "it personally isn't worth that to me", which is of course entirely valid, and a more objective-sounding statement of "games cost too much", which I think any objective analysis would say is ridiculous.
No, you built a straw man argument.
Do I go around asking for a refund because The Witness has been given for free and I paid for it in full upon release ? That would be entitlement. Not buying a switch because switch games are too expensive for me is not being entitled. I also think not buying a switch because I may think switch games are too expensive is not being entitled.
> [..] , which I think any objective analysis would say is ridiculous.
Yeah, way to go. First you suggest in a reply to me that people who think like you think I do are entitled and then you state your opinion is objective and then throw a blanket statement about something no one said and suggest this position is objectively ridiculous.
Fitting username.
You're right, I did kinda read it as an objective statement when it clearly wasn't. My bad.
Oh, well. Okay, then. Sorry for lashing out at you a bit too much maybe, it's one of these days where I am on the edge.
I grumble about it, but I buy them anyway, because they're worth it.
It’s better than the Apple tax where devs have to silently pay whatever fee Apple demands because of the gag order.
Do you really think Nintendo doesn't require an NDA? And that they take less than the 30% from Apple?
The group of truly indie studios is dwindling unfortunately.
Tencent and Microsoft have both spread a lot of money around. Perhaps for varying reasons, namely MS needs to make up for the lack of titles developed for the Xbox Series, and add titles to Game Pass to make it more a more attractive offering.
> The group of truly indie studios is dwindling unfortunately.
This is inaccurate.
I don't have the stats to back it up, but the power of Unity Engine and Unreal Engine have effectively created an indie game developer renaissance.
One of my favorite games at the moment, Hell Let Loose, is published by an indie studio that started in 2017 as a Kickstarter project. They launched their PC version last summer and successfully launched an Xbox port this past fall. It is objectively a better (but harder) game than COD WWII or Battlefield V, both of which are considered AAA titles and have had hundreds of millions put into them for development.
Combine that with the lower barrier to entry with the discoverability of games on Steam and Xbox marketplaces and you have a very hot market. Oh, and consumers play video games now more than ever.
I'm having the opposite experience. I dropped probably $400 on games over the holidays and found three games I wanted to play.
I used to make games, so I hated when people used GameStop because it avoided the developers getting any money. But now I'm thinking that GameStop would be great, because most all but three of the games I bought just suck.
These online-purchase-only systems frankly need a one-hour refund policy. So many games where the controls are just jank (like 100% janky). Like everyone looked at Celeste and thought "This game is good because it's hard" instead of "This game is good because it rewards skill". I'd rather play Celeste and Returnal than these other utter wastes of hard drive. I only made it through Unsighted because you can make yourself invulnerable: fun story, fun ideas, fun levels, jank combat.
Bah humbug.
Doesn't Steam offer refunds for he's purchased within 48 hours or something?
Steam's refund policy is no question asked within 14 days and less than 2 hours of playtime.
I'll check that out. Most of 'em were PS5, and once you download them you can't get a refund.
Ironically, HLL is a lot closer to the original BF1942 than any other game I’ve seen recently.
Inaccurate in what way? Indie studios getting bought by Tencent is true.
Yes, the problem is that the reliance on these few engines is a worrying form of concentration in itself. Especially for the Unreal engine, which is used aggressively to push the Epic games store. How independent are they really when they're so dependent on a single software vendor?
And, to my eyes, Epic uses openly monopolistic practices: they drop the license fee for the engine if you use their game store.
I can think of several recent releases without even searching: Melkhior's Mansion was released this week, Slipways earlier in the year, and Midnight Fight Express coming soon. I don't know if that's representative of indie games or not.
There's so many platforms to build for, and on some (xbox/ps5) a high(er) barrier to entry, vs. low on the PC, or mobile. I'm not surprised that there's much indie action on the xbox/ps5.
As the author of Slipways, it warms my heart to see it mentioned randomly in a HN comment!
As an indie game developer (hard to get more indie than me, I think, since I'm doing this mostly solo), I can attest that it's never been easier to get your game on Steam or a console platform. On Steam it's mostly a matter of a $100 fee and filling a form. Consoles are a bit harder, but still dramatically more open to indie titles than say a decade ago, and all of them are possible to get on even for small developers.
I also wouldn't say that "the group of indie dev studios is dwindling". It's just a matter of the old indie studios "growing up" to become bigger enterprises, but there is tons of other people replacing them on the lowest rung, with teams of several people and true labor of love projects.
Unfortunately, I'm not a gamer, and run a weird version of linux which I don't think you support anyway, but I have played Slipways (a friend purchased it) on the PC, and it's a great game!
Slipways is an amazing game! It's so nice building little galactic empires without fussing with spreadsheets or war.
> The group of truly indie studios is dwindling unfortunately.
Have you looked at Steam recently? Indie studios are doing just fine, and new indie studios are popping up all the time. I'd argue the indie market is stronger than ever.
What about profitable indie studios? Sure there’s a lot of games made by small companies, but how many are around for a 2nd game that isn’t just a shadow of their first game?
I don’t have any stats but would find that interesting, mainly as I’m not sure how much revenue indie studios have. Is the split like 10% get most of the money while the other 90% starve?
Dwindling as in Tencent showing up with a bag of cash and buying a board seat when a studio hits whatever financial metrics they are tracking.
FWIW, I have heard they are hands-off and offer resources, like great groups for closed alphas.
The only concern I have is that they can become more hands on and excersie control over creative decisions in the future.
Personally, I value good stories from mid sized indy studios. The dominance of 2 engines can make things feel a bit homogenized. Pair a great story with another engine, and my interest is piqued.
I assume by "truly indie" they mean "bootstrapped or invested by neutral/disinterested VCs" — as opposed to
1. invested in by one of the platform owners themselves, in exchange for a [temporary] exclusivity agreement, making them essentially a sharecropper on the platform; or
2. invested in almost exclusively by a single bigcorp publisher, making the studio essentially a secret marque of that publisher for projects they don't want associated with their regular brand image.
Many of the games that later make it to Steam, were originally funded by either one of the platform owners, or by a bigcorp publisher.
Changing the definition still doesn't change how many indie studios are out there. There's been zero evidence here that there isn't a healthy indie market, but plenty that there is.
> Many of the games that later make it to Steam, were originally funded by either one of the platform owners
My account is full of games (including top sellers) with no such arrangements. And I have more access to such games than at any time in history.
These indie companies are no more independent (the meaning of the word "indie") than a person hawking MLM products is independent. They're effective employees of a bigcorp — with all the same danger of being "fired" by their publisher at any time for misbehavior.
> What evidence? My account is full of games (including top sellers) with no such arrangements.
Ignore indie games that have been on Steam for years and years, or that only get published on Steam and no other platforms; these are the exceptions to the rule (despite this set containing some of the largest hits by sales volume.)
While there are studios that sell only on Steam and other low-barrier-to-entry channels, 99% of them don't last more than a year or two, because selling only on Steam is leaving almost all your money on the ground. There's a reason that many of these games don't get support updates any more and won't run on e.g. macOS or Linux after any major OS update, despite originally intending support for those platforms: the studio didn't survive.
And while there are indie studios that eventually take their console-exclusive game over to Steam, it's often still published by the publisher on Steam. Take a careful look at the Steam catalog page for the "publisher" field. If there is one? That's who's making the direct revenue on the game sales. Like the publisher of a book. The "author" — the studio — is only getting a commission.
There are a few indie studios who manage to "earn out" their deals with publishers, and take over their own Steam pages (though not usually their console marketing rights — the platform owners don't like dealing with the long tail of self-publishers, they much prefer well-known bigcorps as marketing partners.)
I once found a rock that turned out to be a fossil. Therefore, all rocks are fossils. That's the logic I'm reading from this.
> Don't look at the game as it exists on Steam > Instead, look at any game that's still console exclusive.
So I should ignore all the evidence that refutes your position, and only look at a limited subset of data that does support it?
Having a publisher doesn't invalidate a companies indie label. Being "indie" has never meant being bootstrapped.
Here's just a small list of games I found in less than 5 minutes of looking.
- Five Nights at Freddy - The Binding of Isaac - Hollow Knight - Carrion - Loop Hero - Factorio - Phasmophobia - Frostpunk - Valheim - Satisfactory - Deep Rock Galactic - Stardew Vallley - RimWorld - Terraria - Dead Cells - Cuphead - Among Us - Project Zomboid
> I assume by "truly indie" they mean "bootstrapped or invested by neutral/disinterested VCs"
This is such a narrow, HN-ified view of indie developers that I genuinely have a hard time believing this is anything other than satire.
Valheim, developed by a new indie studio of 5 people, just won PC Gamer's GOTY
Do you have a switch? I can’t make sense of your comment honestly
The last three games I fell in love with; Hollow Knight, Ori, Souls Series, have me believing this. You can build amazing games with a smaller team these days which is incredibly inspiring.
Think of Valheim too — a team of 5 made one of the best selling titles of 2021 with a 95% rating on Steam to this day. That's freaking impressive!
Also Outer Wilds, Subnautica. Small teams that have made Game of the Year winners.
Souls is part of Kadokawa Corporation (which has investment from Tencent). Ori's studio is independent but they've had pretty close ties to Microsoft.
I've been playing Control on consoles, great game, independent studio. Not a small studio either.
Hollow Knight was great; if I hadn't nearly fully completed it at the time I probably would have started another playthrough already.
A short hike, celeste, katana zero, …
The indie scene is great for people who like roguelikes and platformers. If you are looking for much outside of that space, you won't find much.
You're right that a lot of indie games are metroidvanias or roguelites. However, AAA games exist on an incredibly narrow scope these days too. You have shooters, sports, open-world action games, and that's basically it. Rarely do you see big studios deviate into unknown or experimental mechanics.
Indie studios have produced a lot of games with varied mechanics that are just a huge breath of fresh air for me, personally.
You'd never see a AAA studio making Factorio or Satisfactory, for instance. Probably unlikely to see them make a game like Darkest Dungeon, or Don't Starve, or Stardew Valley or Terraria or Starbound or.. the list goes on. You just might have to look a bit deeper to dig through the roguelikes and platformers.
A little reductive I would say? I would add at least:
* Puzzle (The Witness, Baba is You, Antichamber, Manifold Garden, ...)
* Survival/open-world (Minecraft, Terraria, Don't Starve, Subnautica, The Long Dark, ...)
* Horror (Amnesia, Outlast, Layers of Fear, Five Nights at Freddy's ...)
* Management/simulation (Factorio, Stardew Valley, Kerbal Space Program, ...)
* Metroidvanias (Cave Story, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, ...)
* "Walking simulators" (The Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Firewatch, ...)
Some of these maybe you'd disagree with (Are Metroidvanias just platformers? Can Minecraft still be put on a list of indie games?), but I personally think it's a crime to omit at least puzzle games and survival games. The offerings from the AAA space for those is not very impressive compared to the indie space.
There's tycoon games and strategy too. Stardew Valley and Rimworld are at the top of their genres. And games like Dominions, Telltale games. Horror might be up there.
Do we count mods? DotA and CS would be indie if so, but are now quite commercial.
This isn't true, there are plenty of trivial examples to counter this notion.
e.g. Annapurna Interactive has been publishing AAA-quality titles from indie devs for a long time. And most of those games don't fall into the roguelike or platformer vertical.
Roguelike just means you can beat it in one sitting now, which is a very good niche for indie games if you think about it. Slay The Spire, FTL, Rogue Legacy, and For the King are all "roguelike" but fill completely different niches in terms of actual gameplay and features and all are awesome.
There is no storage of indie RPGs and survival-style games either (e.g. Disco Elysium, No Man's Sky, Valheim)
That's not true. Microprose is back and have a lot of indie developed titles coming out this year. They are almost singlehandedly bringing the wargaming genre back from the dead.
All I want from MicroProse is a modern Darklands remake.
I wonder where do Paradox strategy games fall, Crusader Kings / Europa Universalis ones. They definitely don't look AAA, despite offering a very deep gameplay.
And shoot-em-ups and beat-em-ups. It's what I mainly buy on my Switch when there are sales.
But yeah, not many games between AAA and indie. :(
> But yeah, not many games between AAA and indie. :(
Lot of those studios between AAA and indie have closed or have been bought up, by Paradox, Microsoft, Tencent, Embracer/THQ Nordic...
Donut county, poly bridge, angry goose game.. I’d say there is way more variation in indie games
Don't forget 20 survival games per year.
I love indie games but I also wish there was a middle ground between the current generation of AAA titles (not typically my cup of tea) and the indie community
There does seem to be a void in between the two. It's so rare I come across one that it's a surprise. Hell Let Loose was one of those surprises for me. It's definitely in the space of "AA but not AAA" games.
For RPGs, that middle-ground seems pretty healthy. No idea about shooters and other action games, as I don’t play those.
>> There actually are a ton of gaming companies right now.
Yeah, but from TFA:
>> Upon close, Microsoft will have 30 internal game development studios, along with additional publishing and esports production capabilities.
I don't see a need for this and agree with the notion that companies should not buy companies. There are cases where it makes sense, but I think another mechanism needs to be created because buying and selling companies is often too much like buying and selling people in addition to being anti-competitive.
What is a good way to discover these?
I like to follow RPS' reviews page, it introduces me to a lot of PC indie games I'd generally miss in my filter bubble: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/topics/wot-i-think
Go browse itch.io for some inspiration. There's thousands of indie games there. A lot are no more than student projects and demos, but some are really polished and inventive.
You can use the indie tag on steam, or search games under $20, or you can directly ask Google, or Reddit
https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Indie/#p=0&tab=TopRat...
I found some of them on Apple Arcade.
I play almost exclusively Nintendo and indie games on my switch.
There is quite a Nintendo tax on indie games though.
Oddly, the way things had been going with Blizzard over the last few years makes me feel a lot better about MS taking them over.
While I mostly agree with you, I think Microsoft is doing this to compete directly with Sony's plethora of studios to offer more AAA titles on Xbox and Windows exclusively — so from that light, it's not entirely a bad thing.
We already know that Bethesda is keeping their autonomy to make the same great games we love from them, and Starfield is a chance to prove it. The only downside being: Playstation owners losing out on playing what may end up being among the most popular titles in the next 5-10 years if Starfield and TES6 are a success.
If the competition exists for Sony already, why is it necessary for Microsoft to own that competition?
Activision Blizzard already competed with Sony, which is why people think the market is more healthy prior to this acquisition.
In your comment you point out that Bethesda still has their autonomy. So why is it good again for MS to be acquiring these studios? They continue to make the same product in more or less the same way, but now have to appease their MS gods, all while generating more profit for MS to the benefit of not really anyone, except MS.
Points taken! Which is why I mostly agree with the GP. I can't name a single acquisition that did more for the consumer than what was already on offer, so I am generally against them.
My last comments were more in the shoes of Microsoft.
> with Sony's plethora of studios to offer more AAA titles on Xbox and Windows exclusively
Which is also a bad thing!!!
Valid. I am torn between both because I like to see console makers competing and having a reason to innovate somewhere, but as a consumer, I want the ability to play games on any system the developer is willing to support, too.
Buying up studios and locking their games down is not innovation.
It's hard to imagine they will be much worse than the holding company they bought it from. Microsoft have been a lot better custodians of Minecraft than most people thought they would be. Same with github or a number of other acquisitions.
But I agree the concentration is still a problem in itself, even if the owners are OK.
Yeah, because Activision Blizzard was doing so well on its own
You are not entitled to play games or buy platforms. It is a net negative for the gaming industry to be limited in their revenue streams. You cannot split the baby because some customers CHOSE to buy PS5 but the game THEY want to play is on Xbox. If they want to play it, buy an XBOX too. If that is too expensive, the gamer should increase their disposable income.
Gaming is not a human right.
Forcing people to buy some of your products in order to use others of your products is called "tying" and it's illegal monopolization.
No. It's not.
Apple is not obligated to invest into building Apple Music app on Android or Windows. Just because Apple tied Apple Music into their own ecosystem, doesn't mean you are owed anything.
(poor example because Apple Music is on Android and Windows heh)
Replace it with iMessage then.
Have you seen all the indie companies?
> resume bump
yes, because what would he do without.
I think for gaming this is pretty negative that everything is consolidated under large developers. I also don't think that the atmosphere under Microsoft will be better than under Activision.
I hope PC gaming can detach from Microsoft as soon as possible to be honest.
> I hope PC gaming can detach from Microsoft as soon as possible to be honest
In what way is PC gaming attached to Microsoft? Microsoft Game Studios doesn't have a lot of market share in PC games besides Minecraft, and the industry is very diverse. Most games happen to run on Windows, but apart from DirectX they have resisted every attempt from Microsoft to use that in any way.
If PC gaming is attached to anyone it's Valve, but even that is slowly changing.
> Microsoft Game Studios doesn't have a lot of market share in PC games besides Minecraft
Wow, that sucks. They should acquire someone with a bigger catalogue!
They really should, but is Activision-Blizzard that company? Of the 7 Activision releases in 2020 to now 4 are Call of Duty, a game that's much more popular on consoles than on PC. Blizzard is the PC side of the company, but they are mostly games that are slowly dying due to mismanagement. The IP is very valuable, but current PC sales alone wouldn't make Microsoft dominant by a long shot.
They also acquired ZeniMax, which includes Arkane, id Software, Bethesda Games Studios and MachineGames.
And Obsidian Entertainment. And inXile.
> Microsoft Game Studios doesn't have a lot of market share in PC games besides Minecraft
You could see it coming that this is controversial.
1. Microsofts share in publishing video games isn't exactly what you'd call small. They acquired Zenimax Media [1] last year, which is kind of big. That said, Microsoft can't be seen as a dominator in the publishing market.
2. But the argument wasn't necessarily about who owns the most studios. Microsoft absolutely dominates in the platform market on PC. Games are developed for Windows. Period. Everything else is either niche or an extra.
I think my think my argument is mostly based on the precise wording. Make it slightly broader and it would no longer hold.
1) Microsoft holds a very respectable share of the video game market (especially if you ignore mobile). But their share of the PC game market specifically is much smaller.
2) Microsoft is the dominant platform of PC gaming without question. But that doesn't make the market attached to them. Being without alternative or having high switching costs is what makes you attached, not merely using it. Most games are inherently multi-platform, either because they are built in an engine that is or because they are also sold on other platforms (mostly consoles). Not having Linux, Mac or SteamOS builds is usually a business decision, not a technical one. You could argue that they are attached to Microsoft because that's where the consumers are, and that's true in a sense. But that limits what kind of benefit Microsoft can get out of the attachment and what kind of damage they can do - at most as much as it takes to get enough consumers to switch (dual boot, some SteamOS device, etc). In a world where games sell platforms the attachment isn't very strong
> If PC gaming is attached to anyone it's Valve
PC Gaming runs on Windows, not on Valve's OS (while valve is intending to change that progressively).
Which doesn't mean much as long as Windows runs on anything x86 and costs OEMs (relative) peanuts.
It's not like you have to pay royalties to Microsoft if you sell a PC game (but you do have to pay MS/Sony if it's a Xbox/PS game).
It's not either-or, it's both. Both Microsoft and Valve play pivotal roles in PC gaming.
Microsoft are using their platform positions to sell games on Xbox and PC in one, which others can't compete with (because Xbox is a closed market), and their deep pockets to fund Xbox Pass mean it is a little combative rather than genuinely competitive.
I agree with your view point - however it’s hard to see any other outcome for the AAA franchises. Player expectations of a modern title are increasing - as are the time, human, and fiscal capital required to ship a modern title - years of engineering, hundreds of people, hundreds of millions of dollars. The risks are huge - missing your date, or game experience can sink a company - consider what Cyberpunk almost did to Projekt CD RED - to ship they cut to the bone very late in the day. The economics of the AAA business is optimizing towards managing and distributing that risk thru supply-chain and scale. I don’t see a better way on this current trajectory.
>Player expectations of a modern title are increasing
Unfortunately this is not true. Modern AAA franchises do not innovate. They are just shinier. You can find the same systems, and often more complex or creative ones, in games from the nineties and 2000's as you can today. Modern gamers either become jaded, seek out indie games, or, more often, simply buy what is offered.
Remember when the big question used to be "are video games art? CAN they ever be art?" I remember publications like PC Gamer spending a lot of time and energy wrestling with these questions. It wasn't lip service; it was a real goal that game creators at the time pushed towards, because gaming was trying to find acceptance and respect alongside other forms of media. I think that has mostly been lost, now. There is and will always be indie creators pushing their own creations that are inspired, but the AAA market is totally lost, imo, if you are interested in games as more than just a mindless bit of fun. That overarching sense of progressing towards something that could be considered true "art", is gone, for the time being.
edit: didn't mean to sound like I wasn't giving credit to all the fine indie games and game creators out there. There's still artistic and interesting things being created, just not by AAA studios :)
AAA games are about art as much as big budget films are… which is to say: not a lot. You’re never going to see as much risk taken when each game costs hundreds of millions of dollars. There are however tons of “mid tier” studio, what some might call “triple I” big indie studios that put out all kinds of innovative games.
Even Minecraft and Fortnite, two of the most popular games in the world, are systemically quite interesting compared to games 20 years ago. (yes really, Fortnite is much more interesting than you might think looking at it superficially)
Defining “art” when it comes to games is of course subjective. Some would say The Witness is much closer to art than The Last of Us 2, while others would say the opposite… but does it matter? Either way they’re both fantastic games. The medium is still being pushed forward, you just have to know where to look.
Like I said, there will always be innovative indie games. But the AAA studios used to be important in driving artistic and systemic innovation in games, because they had the most money and visibility.
Games like: Elite 2: Frontier, Star Control 2, Heroes of Might and Magic, KOTOR 1 and 2, all had strong writing, narrative, complex and difficult systems to manage, and were innovative in their time. And none were "indie" games (though at the time, some of these games could be made by 1 or 2 people). This is a real difference. Just look at the difference in Blizzard. Warcraft 2, Starcraft, and Diablo 1 & 2 made them hugely influential and successful because of their commitment to quality. Now, they're a joke. But somehow, still one of the biggest gaming companies in the world!
It's not about defining art. It's about a push to create games that can stand up to works of literature and cinema which are considered to be important artistic achievements. I'm happy to hear that there are titles out their which are striving for that, but AAA studios aren't doing that. In fact they actively push new titles as being cutting edge while they retain or dumb down systems that were created decades ago.
Disagree hard on Fortnite. It is very shallow. The building system seems interesting but is superficial. Yes it's integral to winning the match, but its not very strategic...just like Fortnite's shooting and physics are quite cartoony and not very tactical. It is a VERY poor "shooter," but a fun "battle royale game." There is a difference these days.
Minecraft was not a AAA game, it was just purchased by a AAA studio.
Again, I'm not saying that there aren't any games that are artistic or interesting. In fact that's the opposite of what I said in my original post! I'm saying that "The Industry" (which will ALWAYS have the most market share, visibility, and resources) is not creating those games. They are not interested. And that is a sad change from what used to be.
My point was that the kind of budgets of AAA games have now completely dwarf the “AAA” games from 20 years ago. There are still innovative games being made with the equivalent budgets and team sizes of those older games (2-50 people, $10 million or less).
On top of that, there are still massive budget AAA games that are willing to take risks for artistic integrity. Obvious examples of this are things like Death Stranding or The Last of Us 2.
Blizzard’s quality hasn’t actually fallen. They’ve clearly had some internal culture issues but their games have always been stellar. They just operate on glacial timescales which everyone seems to forget. Their last release was in 2016, which was Overwatch, a fantastic game.
And re: Fortnite, if you don’t think the building is strategic, you need to watch some high end competitive matches. It’s incredibly tactical. Each player acts like a real time map designer trying to give themselves the biggest positional advantage (while balancing resource usage etc). I would argue that it uses the full 3-dimensions more than any other competitive game out there.
> Modern AAA franchises do not innovate. They are just shinier.
> There's still artistic and interesting things being created, just not by AAA studios :)
I guess that's my point and I didn't write it very well. AAA publishing/production has become a low-risk money-machine that feeds a very large audience occasionally surprising but increasingly bland content, while making small formulaic incremental changes year-on-year e.g. next-gen textures, bigger maps, more multiplayer servers and modes. Unfortunately a large proportion of players are happy with just that model as evidenced by the revenue derived from it.
Do players really prefer the current AAA space right now though? There are many indie games out there made by a small team (or even one person) that are very popular and successful (e.g. Stardew Valley, Outer Wilds). For me personally, I haven't really enjoyed a AAA game in years. I tend to stick to indie or more niche experiences. I think AAA studios might do well if they split up their massive teams to create many, more focused games instead of one big blockbuster that primarily serve as a vehicle for microtransactions.
If you look at best-selling console games by year, [0, only goes up to 2019] you can see that the list since about 2001 is dominated by sports games and Call of Duty, with the odd exception (usually a Rockstar game). While the gaming discourse has turned against these titles, they are consistently the most popular. If anything, I’m actually flabbergasted that Rockstar was able to turn a Wild West drama into the best selling game of 2018, as it feels so different (that is, less cartoonish) to anything else on the list.
The fact of the matter is that the people who talk about games make up a small portion of the total group of people who play games. AAA still exists because it still rakes in cash, year over year.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/best-selling-video-game-ever...
The success of Red Dead Redemption, and Rockstar in general, is proof that you gamers will appreciate more substantial than sports games (which barely update between editions, and sometimes actually have LESS content than previous editions), and shooters, which have rapidly turned into Skinner's Boxes themselves with all the unlockables and achievements (which hijack the whole point of a shooter from competition between individuals' skill, into a competition between the player and a list of arbitrary "achievements").
But clearly the AAA studios have the market figured out, it's just easier, less risky, and more profitable to make shallow "product" than a rewarding and interesting "game."
I guess my point, and my issue with this take, is that "you gamers" is kind of a useless identifier. Most people who play games are going to stick to the blockbusters, like most people who go to the movies stick to the blockbusters.
And the same complaints hold true in film, where people argue that studios are just taking the safer, more profitable path. But the people who make those complaints aren't the audience that the studios/publishers are targeting, and they are a minority in the larger market as a whole.
I mean, don't get me wrong, there are indie games or whatever that break out or break the mold; Stardew Valley has sold 15 million copies since it launched in early access in 2016, and though I think the CoD game from that year sold more, I guarantee you there are more people still playing SV than CoD: Infinite Warfare. But Activision made their buck and moved on, and that strategy continues to work for them.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming the consumer. I'm just saying that AAA studios have "the market" figured out. They know how to, forgive the use of the phrase, "game the system," to make profit at the expense of quality. They didn't invent it and they sure as hell won't be the last to use it, but they certainly got good at it.
I'm just saying that there is definitely an appetite among the general game consumer for a more complex and cerebral type of game! And that it's sad to see such few of those titles come from the big studios (while at the same time they nickel-and-dime everyone with their dlc's and other schemes).
>Do players really prefer the current AAA space right now though?
God of War, a 4 years old PS4 title, was just released on PC and sold very well. That should tell you everything you need to know...
I don't know what the 5th highest reviewed title of all time that was made available on a popular platform selling well tells me about the state of AAA as a whole to be honest. One data point, for a game considered a masterpiece of the last generation (so the decade), doesn't say a whole lot.
The Avengers was a large AAA game from the world's most popular media franchise and it recently tanked. "That should tell you everything you need to know..."
In general people don't care whether a game is a "AAA" or "indie" when they buy it, they look at reviews and whether their friends are playing it.
There are good AAA games and bad AAA games. The good ones do very well, the bad ones don't do as well. If we move the goalposts to say that the high-grossing/well-reviewed AAA games don't count then of course we're going to end up with a skewed picture of what the market looks like.
Because the Avengers game wasn't very good. On the other hand the recent Guardians of the Galaxy game sold much better and has received overwhelmingly positive reviews.
It’s annoying that MS will probably pull the same crap they did when they purchased Bethesda a couple of years ago: we won’t see releases of most Activision/Blizzard games on Sony consoles going forward.
This exclusivity game has to stop. I understand MS’s motivations — they want people to buy their console, after all. But it’s awful that you can make an educated console decision, and then two years later have a good chunk of games stolen from you because of a merger.
I concur that I’d really like to see Linux take the PC gaming space over. Personally I feel that we should focus on indie games and low-level platform compatibilty — if enough users switch to Linux, AAA studios will have to follow. Except the MS-owned studios who have a standing order to ignore Linux, of course…
The issue is a bit more than that. To make gamers and normal users switch to linux we need to make more GUI apps for linux and increase the accessability of linux GUI / DE.
Just watch the LTT videos about gaming on Linux. Linux is a Cluster** of an OS to troubleshoot and configure.
I'm a dev myself I love my Arch and everything but this OS is NOT meant for normal people.
Its 2022, people don't want to fiddle around with a terminal.
Until Linux and its users don't fix the core problem of linux and thats usability, I don't see people switching to it.
Maybe steam changes this.. but we will see..
> Its 2022, people don't want to fiddle around with a terminal.
Is this a good thing though?
Computer illiteracy seems to be at a new high-water mark with the upcoming generation. They generally know how to punch some buttons to make a few things work, but nothing more.
If anything, I think we should be teaching the basics of the UNIX command line starting around 5th or 6th grade. Get those kids playing around and learning a bit more about their systems. Maybe teach a few little python or Javascript one-liners to automate some stuff. Not everyone will pick everything up, but a lot of overlooked kids would find a new skill that will help them no matter which direction their lives take them.
Just no.
I love the terminal and everything but we should not teach people how to use it. The terminal is not the most user friendly thing out there is it? (maybe its harsh saying "should not teach" but lets say make them aware there is a terminal but there should be alterantives)
I would not get rid of it.. ever, but I would love to see alternatives to it. People are too fixated on working from the terminal and using the terminal that they don't see that its literally the thing that gate keeps people away from trying Linux.
If you've ever worked with Windows GUI settings, it should be obvious that they really suck and memorizing a command line tool is much easier/faster.
People use the terminal because it's easier to learn and use than countless GUI windows.
The concepts aren't hard. People aren't stupid and there's no reason to treat them like they are.
I'm sorry but that comment is very out of touch with how normal, non-tech people use computers. A terminal is a major obstacle for them.
I don't know about you, but I have to tinker with Windows way more than I have to with Ubuntu.
My terminal usage on MacOSX and Ubuntu is equal - only running git commands and AWS CLI. And I play Steam games on my Ubuntu Thinkpad P1.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Windows or Macs are better, I do have a windows machine where I game and do ocasionally some work, but they are miles better when compared to Linux and its ecosystem.
Have you ever tried running an old App on linux compared to windows lets say? Windows compatibility is unmatched. I can effortlessly run old programs and games.
If a linux project is abandoned for a few years, good luck making it run. (and I know you can always recompile etc, but thats besides the point, no "normal" user will compile an app)
Which is not the argument that you originally posted.
You repeated an old cliche(which is false) and now you moved goalposts.
PS: I've tried to run multiple Windows apps that wouldn't run on Windows 11. I have an older In System Programming software, that I have to run in a virtualized Windows XP. So...
AAA studios already target Linux via Android and Stadia, guess why they don't bother with GNU/Linux.
Thankfully, Proton exists, which is what makes Linux gaming something other than a pipedream.
I'm really excited for the Steam deck sometime this year, especially given GPU prices are what they are. Interestingly, Valve's work on Proton/Wine has created a situation where smaller developers are almost less likely to target Linux first class, as the game can just run on the compatability layer and save the dev the work of obscure Linux issues that effect 1% of players.
MS dont care you buying their console, barely make a dollar out of it. It is all about gamepass
Games are software. Changing the upper management/ownership isn't going to change deliverables. If anything, it could delay releases even further out with new overlords. Certainly they can clean house of the former companies HR department as well as any senior leaders that did nothing with previous issues.
It will take a long time before anything material comes from this from a games perspective. I would assume legal agreements are in place for cash-cow games like Call Of Duty on other platforms so that should alleviate any anti-competitive investigation.
I would think women employees would be harassed less under Microsoft
One thing we can say fairly certainly is Bobby Kotick's days are numbered. Everything I've read about the guy indicates to me that he won't do well in the Microsoft corporate culture.
It seems very likely, based on comments Phil Spencer made just 3 months ago, when the acquisition was likely already on the table.
https://www.engadget.com/xbox-phil-spencer-activision-blizza...
Hopefully, that'd probably the best outcome in this whole thing.
I don't really share your impression that everything is consolidated under large developers. Most of the games I've bought over the last few years have all been from relatively small studios (as far as I know anyway, it can be hard to tell).
Very impressive indeed. He was backed by a multibillion dollar behemoth and, against all odds, and despite the commercial failure of the Xbox One (something that would’ve bankrupted any other company), he managed to keep the company afloat long enough to launch another product.
Spending ~$70bn to acquire another company is also impressive. Sure, Microsoft has limitless resources, and using acquisitions to hurt the competition is something they love to do, but still.. He did it. This is his win.
I wonder if he realises what "fun" he's going to have over the next years cleaning out the cesspit that is Blizzard
I've never overseen a merger before, let alone one of this scale, so pardon my blatant speculation... but will that really be such an issue?
It seems to me that the mismanagement of Acti/Blizz is a product of a corrupt corporate apparatus. From the inside of Acti/Blizz, the problem is basically intractible, but I don't think that really applies the same way once you install higher rungs of authority. MS is no stranger to acquisitions, either, so it's not as though they will be asleep at the wheel during this transition.
this buyout is a direct result of the sexual harassment suit (causing a 40% drop in share price since it started)
the company is rotten from the very top, through the middle to the bottom
they're going to have one hell of a time cleaning that up
Given that they plan to keep Bobby Kotick on, I don't think Microsoft understands the problem with ABK all that well.
Look, you almost never fire the CEO of an acquired company immediately, but I'd be very surprised if he's still there in 18 months.
It may well be that he has a job in name in the new structure but not actually a role and after some discreet period he will be put out to pasture. Kind of sucks if you wanted him to receive some sort of cathartic day of reckoning but maybe a pragmatic solution.
The press release says they're keeping Kotick for the duration of the transition, then everyone will report to Phil Spencer. Seems likely that Kotick will be gone soon(ish)
They are painting an exit route for him.
Did they clean out LinkedIn?
LinkedIn didn’t need to be cleaned out.
If their goal was to acquire and learn from the scummiest dark pattern designers, then I agree.
Sounds lovely for the suits.
As a longtime Blizzard fan and a former Microsoft employee, maybe I'm just getting too old for this shit, but there's really only one thing I care about:
Will they finally start getting the fucking games right again?
Old Blizzard is dead and has been for almost a decade--the name's the same but their job now is not to make great games that push the envelope in game design but rather to manage cash-printing franchises. It's hard not to think this when so many of the people behind the original groundbreaking games (StarCraft, WC3, D2) have left the company and in some cases disavowed it.
Be happy that old Blizzard happened, I say, and look on with eagerness to new indie studios, many of which are being run by the same Blizzard vets.
If they can keep the Warcraft and Diablo balls rolling, with competent releases every so often, I’m fine with it. That way we have the best of both worlds: developing franchises, and the indies.
Hopefully first they will fire everyone responsible for cultivating a toxic culture culminating in sexually harassing a women to suicide and having a "Cosby" room at events. Don't care how good of games they are when thats the company behind them.
As a fellow longtime Blizzard fan and someone who retired from gaming (in part due to being too old for this shit),
Don't get your hopes up :)
> Congratulations to Phil Spencer, who started out leading an upstart team at Microsoft for a new game console called "Xbox" and is now "CEO of Microsoft Gaming" - a Microsoft Senior Leadership position
You forgot to mention he started with billions of dollars backing him up. It was not like a small startup or something.
I feel like the "at Microsoft" already implies billions of funding. However, teams within big companies are not immune to reduced funding and cancelling if their strategy does not work.
> billions of dollars
How big were Sony and Nintendo at the time? Even with Microsoft's war chest, it was an uphill battle.
Not really. It was clear that there was space for another large player in the console market. Sega was done or dying, Sony and Nintendo couldn't keep the entire playerbases to themselves (and PC and Mac are barely worth mentioning im sorry to say).
I'd say Sega's floundering indicated the opposite, despite a huge portion of that being own goals. I don't see any fundamental reason the market couldn't have been a duopoly.
And, to the GP point of crediting Spencer, there weren't even many synergies to exploit with a Microsoft console in the first XBox generation. It certainly didn't "integrate" with Windows in any way that made you more likely to buy it over alternative consoles.
AFAICT (as someone who doesn't spend much time console gaming now), its success was essentially built on the back of (1) access to capital, (2) savvy exclusives, (3) intelligent acquisitions, (4) avoiding missteps in hardware refreshes, and in later generations (5) strength of social platform. So, props where props are due, because 4/5 of those are skill. Especially while no doubt having to fight an internal battle against all the other Microsoft political power centers.
IMO, and dismiss this as just gut feeling if you want, but it was just a matter of time before there was a 3rd big player. Console gaming was getting too big, too fast for there to be just 2 options for the market. Someone was going to come along and do it better than Sega. Now, all credit to the bigwigs for having the business savvy to pull it off. But with the size and scale of console gaming, 2 consoles was just not going to cut it. (PC gaming was finished as a true competitor due to cost differences).
My read is that it was really Nintendo's failure to broaden their market that opened up the space. Cart vs CD was a understandable debate when the N64 was being designed. But the GameCube vs PS2 was just... ugh. And Sony has always had arrogance in spades when they get a lead.
I guess, in retrospect, Microsoft's fundamental synergy was "developers, developers, developers!" And realizing trading more powerful commodity PC hardware for decreased programming difficulty was a good deal. There were a large number of developers, or future developers, dissatisfied with catering to {insert Nintendo or Sony weird architecture hoops du jour}.
That's a good point. The Gamecube was definitely underwhelming in it's library of games and frustrated a lot of consumers. I think the point I'm trying to make is that it was basically inevitable that there would be a new major console. The market was too big. I'm sure there was also a chance that this wouldn't happen, and Sega/Sony/Nintendo kept on ruling the market. But it just takes one misstep. And there were two (Dreamcast and Gamecube) right as gaming was really starting to explode into its present-day extent.
I'm not trying to argue about the specifics about what happened, but just in general terms, there was always going to be room for a competitor in a space that big, that was changing that rapidly. Imho.
Makes sense! Between chance of failure & rate of change, the odds looked pretty good.
I'm more flummoxed by the fact that a fundamentally social-native offering didn't disrupt the existing ecosystem, in the 2000 timeframe.
We had chat. We had basic web. Keyboards weren't that expensive, were they? Seems a killer feature for kids.
Not straight "the Web on your console", but something more like AOL, Prodigy, and the late 90s portals.
My only explanation is that the 3 big platform companies were still thinking in packaged software/games, sold retail, terms. Hence XBox Live, when it emerged, was essentially a way to get more value (multiplayer) out of the packaged software you bought.
You forget how big Nintendo's war chest is
> Phil Spencer, who started out leading an upstart team at Microsoft for a new game console called "Xbox"
According to Wikipedia[0]:
> Spencer served as general manager of Microsoft Game Studios EMEA, working with Microsoft's European developers and studios such as Lionhead Studios and Rare until 2008
He came to be in charge of Xbox via his experience managing their internal studios. How's Lionhead doing these days btw?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Spencer_(business_executi...
I would hope so, I dont see activision blizzard being a great acquistion.
Hopefully they fire most of the management, retain what technical talent they decide, and effectively reboot the entire company.
They already decide to keep Kotick... not a very good start.
Think of what you acquire when you acquire a company. You acquire intellectual property - products & ideas, you acquire people - future ideas, you acquire customer base - players. If you behead the company you certainly will lose critical people with it risking the products and customer base too. This isn’t Microsoft’s first acquisition, they’ll manage realignment of the new organization differently than just wholesale ejections. I’m sure Bobby’s new schedule has time for rest while he vests.
At least on the side of Blizzard, almost all of the original creators and developers are gone by now, surely some will follow after the merge.
The video game development industry has a lot of financial similarities to pharmaceutical development.
As a major, why should I take the (large) risk to develop novel product? When I can outsource that function to a large number of smaller companies, who either go bankrupt or produce something of value, which I can then afford to pay a premium to acquire, after its value is known? I.e. if I can substitute money for risk, why wouldn't I?
The IP is the real value here, so this seems likely.
All technical talent already left Blizzard - also the reason why they didn't produce anything (of value) in last 5 years.
They have plenty of technical talent, it’s the artistic vision that left.
Microsoft owns CoD, Doom, Quake, Minecraft, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, and soon Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch.
They're becoming the Disney of gaming, which is scary, but hey, Microsoft gonna Microsoft.
Haven't you heard? They <3 Linux now, they'll never use their position to lock people into their platforms again. They even promised they'll be good.
Can we take a moment to appreciate the irony of decrying platform lock-in when talking about the company that successfully launched a new gaming console against... Nintendo and Sony?
The world, it be complicated, yo.
The fact someone else did something is an absurd justification to do it as well. In a practical level, Xbox is much more locked in than Nintendo, as all Nintendo consoles have PC emulators for it and the devices can be jailbroken.
It's not absurd: it's literally proof of a viable and sustainable business model.
Consoles have always been packaged, standardized, and locked computers. That Nintendo is bad at security isn't proof of any great altruism. It just means they're not good at secure hardware design.
Except they weren't -- until Nintendo came along with their 10NES lockout chip.
Actually Texas Instruments had a go at it with their beige TI-99/4A, but by the time that came out most of the TI-99/4As that would ever be sold were already sold, without the lockout. But it was the NES that turned the locked box into a business model.
Are there even any games still that are only released on Xbox but not Windows so that you might need an "emulator"?
they <3 people running Linux on Azure. But the Windows Server PMs certainly don't like Linux. A large corporation isn't fully uniform.
> They <3 Linux
They love their Linux. I won't be surprised at all if some key games would magically become less compatible with WINE in the future.
So did Google. Turns out promises don't matter.
thatsthepoint.jpg
I've read the GP comment with a strong dose of sarcasm.
The comment is a reference to the song Not Evil.
Well, if they promised.
If they don't get an idealistic visionary, they will probably just follow the best course for doing business - serving as many people as possible.
>>> Disney of Gaming
Yes. I mean the sub-headline is XboxGamePass is now 25M+ subscribers. Logical next step isn't even games: it's convergence.
Curious we don't see similar consolidation in the Japanese market: Square Enix, Konami, Capcom, Tecmo, Bandai Namco, From. Even Nintendo. All seem attractive targets, no?
That's because the Japanese game companies are more or less in friendly coopetition with each other. Both Namco and Sega run game centers (arcades), which means they're buying each other's games to populate said centers (as well as other manufacturers' games). And then there's Smash Bros., in which many of Nintendo's competitors (including Microsoft -- twice) went to Nintendo and said, "hey, could you feature our characters too?" And then there's Mario & Sonic at the Olympics...
Maybe it is just my ignorance, but that type of consolidation seems rare in any market in Japan, not just gaming.
I would say that if there is anything Japanese, and many other asian big corporations, are known for, is consolidation.
Samsung, Toyota, Hyundai, Sony... They all are huge conglomerates spawning across multiple industries.
They aren't really consolidated so much as they're interlocked. Many of the largest companies in Japan own stock in all of the other largest companies in Japan. It diversifies their holdings and insulates them from market fluctuations while maintaining their independence.
I was thinking of those too, but did they get that way via acquisitions or by entering new markets?
It's really a bit of everything. Some like Fuji, Hyundai, or Toyota, I believe have been historically diversifying across several different markets.
Sony did expand on some fronts via acquisitions, e.g. Sony Electronics acquiring Konica-Minolta, Sony Electronic Entertainment acquiring several studios, etc.
And Halo, if we're counting seminal console franchises.
And Diablo. I'm worried for this.
I'm hoping it just means Diablo 3 released sooner since Microsoft has a mountain of resources.
I'm curious how game development is under the large tech companies like Microsoft. Game development is notoriously recognized as a slave driving industry for the labor force. Massive tech companies, like Microsoft, aren't exactly known as places to slack in the software world, but they also don't seem to have as toxic of a labor culture as the gaming companies who pass mountains of costs to their labor to remain competitive (Amazon perhaps being the exception here).
Good news for you, Diablo 3 is already out!
(Itemization and damage looks very bad in Diablo 4 previews though - damage in hundreds of thousands and "strictly better" items instead of trade offs)
Correction, Diablo 4 (you can tell how much I play!). But thats disappointing to hear :(
Awesome news for gaming on Linux. As we all know Microsoft <3 Linux.
It's not like Activision / Blizzard really cared about Linux gaming anyways.
I've had fairly good experiences running Blizzard games under wine over the years. Diablo 3, StarCraft Remastered, and a few others tend to work pretty much perfectly. Based on the versions of Visual Studio and stuff that get pulled in when installing them, I have to wonder if the secret to making a game run well on Wine is just to stick with older versions of the Window-specific libraries rather than the cutting edge.
Look, I found a "/s" under my desk, did you lose this by any chance?
They do own those legacy games but sadly Starcraft is not going to be re-born anytime soon - maybe warcraft IV but we will see.
What will happen to Bobby Kotick now?
Well Microsoft just released Age of Empires 4, which turned out surprisingly well, best RTS since Starcraft 2. I'd say chances we're going to see anything SC3 or WC4 related only went up by this. Maybe there will even be a WoW2 finally.
About time other studios get a chance to work with Blizzards IPs, they did well creating all those beautiful universes, but they struggle so much making just one new game every few years.
In the back of my head I thought AoE4 has had disappointing reviews, but they scored 81 at MetaCritic [1]. [1] https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/age-of-empires-iv
Looks like he will stay (for now):
> Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard, and he and his team will maintain their focus on driving efforts to further strengthen the company’s culture and accelerate business growth.
>Starcraft is not going to be re-born anytime soon
you don't need to make another Starcraft game. you can use that IPs to develop different kind of game like Warcraft is used to make Hearthstone the card game.
Microsoft is buying Activision Blizzard's IPs
True if your goal is to make money.
Starcraft was just a fantastic game - people have been playing it for decades. Not sure how financially successful it has been (fairly well I would imagine) but it has a legion fan base.
That's true!
Almost everyday play map or two on SC:R.
Why they never used Starcraft to compete in the same game-space as Eve Online or Star Citizen is beyond me... though, I think that's just wishful thinking on my part. Love the IP of one and the game play of the other =[
I presume they didn't want to pin such a big acquisition on him leaving but I wouldn't be making any bets on him still being with Microsoft in 2023.
Yeah, keeping the execs around for a while after an acquisition before they quietly exit seems common.
4 year cliff typically unless acquirer wants to push them out.
Hopefully they can start to force Sony into a world where cross console play is a thing if they have enough of the marquee franchises.
Seems somewhat imaginable, since they'll try to do that with Windows and Xbox obviously. At some point with enough games to support that, PlayStation owners will feel left out and Sony might follow. Who knows...
well, maybe once they're in the extinguish phase, it will make room for other gaming companies?
> [...] if Satya and the Board spin off gaming into an independent company at some point.
I certainly think this should happen.
The trillion dollar giants should not span multiple industries. They have absurd monopoly power and can make growing your own niche impossible.
Why does a cloud computing / operating system vendor / hardware manufacturer / business software / developer tooling company also own the third biggest gaming outfit?
Why, for that matter, are Amazon and Apple also movie studios (and soon to be game studios)?
This is ridiculous. These companies never have to compete with you. It's easy for them to funnel money into any effort and clone your product. You can struggle to grow revenue and they can simply allocate an engineering team and marketing budget.
You'll probably also have to buy your competitor's products or pay their taxes at some point.
What's funny is that when EPB of Chattanooga decided they wanted a Fiber Network to build their smart power grid around, Comcast said no.
So they built their own, and Comcast started suing them. A lot of stupid lobby fights later, and EPB Fiber Optics became a separate company with a loan from EPB (power company). Both wholly owned by the City of Chattanooga. EPB had to keep all power monies and all internet monies completely seperate in order to operate; otherwise, they would have too much of a competitive advantage over Comcast.
For the customer, it's just EPB, but for legalize and accountants, it's two completely separate companies, and money isn't allowed to go from the power division to the internet division and vice versa.
Imagine if these conglomerates had to do similar type of accounting. I don't know if that would be a positive for the customer/consumer, but it's an interesting thought exercise. Amazon might even consider shutting down quite a bit of e-commerce if they couldn't subsidize it with AWS...
Are you saying it's a good thing that Comcast was able to break up an upstart competitor? I'm not sure a world where that's easier would have fewer monopolies to today. Even in your example the large and established company was suing the upstart.
I do think advanced scrutiny of government owned companies is a good thing. I also think allowing Comcast to continue to compete with EPB was also a good thing.
I don't think Comcast is in a position to claim victimhood, nor is EPB. However, I would be interested in seeing this type of accounting being enforced for companies that receive grants and significant tax breaks/advantages and have localized enforced monopolies, such as Comcast and several other large companies.
I'm honestly taken aback by how middle of the road you are about that situation.
In what world is it a good thing that instead of accepting an offer to provide a needed service that you're in the business of, you refuse the offer and sue/lobby the requester into submission out of spite.
This world is so, so broken.
I didnt say I liked that Comcast was allowed to lobby to block EPB. But EPB won and they also won customer appeal.
If you read what I said, Comcast, having received billions from the government to build fiber optic networks that they never built, should be under advanced scrutiny, perhaps forced to keep their internet providing monies separate from their TV cable system monies.
I sell some nick-nacks on Amazon and eBay.
Considering how much eBay charges for less - Amazon's eCom is not going to fold, if AWS was separated.
400 - 1400 (Feudal economics)
1850 - 1920 (Railroad + oil/steel trusts)
1880 - 1982 (ATT)
1950 - 1975 (IBM)
1985 - 2000 (Intel/Microsoft)
2008 - current (Google/Apple/Amazon)
2014 - current (Meta)
It's the nature of technology to produce consolidation, before the next breakthrough occurs and incumbents are typically swept away.
On the plus side, the length of dominant periods seems to be decreasing.
And realistically, data portability standards and pricing for cloud & ability to use independent app stores are the biggest tweaks I'd make.
Feudalism is an entirely different beast and either didn't exist or had minor global presence throughout the whole period you listed. Even listing the ancient Achaemenid Empire for example would make more sense in this context.
How would you describe the post-Carolingian economic organization of Europe?
What I was casting about for was the earliest example of innovation-suppressing economic subordination by force, over a wide area.
The Achaemenid (or later Abbasid) seem have featured more individual freedom, with regards to innovation, and less maximally-taxing policy to redirect economic output to ostensible land owners.
I'd suggest reading Susan Reynolds' Fiefs and Vassals. It's a very complex topic and not fit for this thread at all.
If your contention is that feudalism is an inaccurate lense through which to view medieval Europe, then okay.
But the taxing and redirection of excess economic output, accomplished through ownership and lending of land, leading to an underperforming history of innovation, seems borne out by the history of Europe, regardless of the intricacies or framework through which it's viewed.
And that seems pretty on point for exactly what everyone is decrying with regards to consolidation into conglomerates in the tech sector.
Consolidation is not a function of technology, but a function of unregulated capitalist economics.
> spin off gaming into an independent company at some point
Unlikely without regulatory intervention. The added value for MS shareholders here is that MS has now more leverage to gently heard gamers towards their platforms.
Phil Spencer is my favorite executive. His work since he had taken over has been splendid and I like his calm manner of discussing competition. He doesn’t make it into war. He seems like a genuinely nice guy and I am happy to see him succeed.
Does CoD become an Xbox/Windows exclusive?
No chance. COD has consistently been a huge money maker on PS and Vanguard was #1 last year. They would lose out on way too much revenue, not to mention that massive negative sentiment that would bring towards Xbox and big game / console manufacturers. I think certain games like Halo and maybe some Bethesda will stay (ones that have previously been exclusive). But acquiring a AAA company and then cutting off half of your customer base seems like a big mistep.
Bethesda is AAA, and we've already seen that Microsoft is willing to sacrifice revenue short term, by dropping the PS5 version fo Starfield, in order to drive long term GamePass subscription and revenue. There is no point in taking the risk of making a huge acquisition just to share the games with your #1 competitor.
I'd like to see this acquisition blocked, it will be bad for gaming long term to have so much control with one company.
In addition, I believe they have already announced they plan to continue support for other consoles/systems, and they definitely announced they support a PS "gamepass". Wouldn't be surprised if ABK would be included in a PS gamepass (Microsoft ultimately makes money from that).
I think there is some chance that future CoD will not be on PlayStation. They might even be used as a bargaining chip to get game pass on PlayStation. I could see it as, “if you let us put game pass on PlayStation we will sell Microsoft games on your storefront, including Cod. If not, no CoD.”
This paints Sony as the unwilling party. Microsoft can say, “we would love to have CoD on PlayStation.”
Why else buy them? Most Blizzard games are PC first anyway.
Sony (the studio) is an "arms dealer" and works with many different streamers. No reason they can't do the same on the gaming side and release, say, Spider-man, on Gamepass or Stadia after sales on their own consoles slow down.
I don't think Sony has anything against GamePass on PlayStation as long as Microsoft pays its revenue share. After all, there's EA pass on PlayStation.
Microsoft isn't Apple, they have been much more open as of late.
I doubt that existing franchises will become exclusive.
All of the Bethesda games have already been said to be exclusive to Xbox from here on.
That is factually untrue.
https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/xbox-phil-spencer-bethesda...
What are you talking about? That article literally says they're focused on delivering games exclusively to platforms that support GamePass. The next Elder Scrolls and Fallout games will not be on Playstation.
Console exclusivity is no longer the driving force for revenue, that's GamePass.
Selling full versions everywhere else is good business, we saw that from both Microsoft and Sony making more PC ports - and for Xbox it is yet another driver into their subscription model.
Until GamePass is on Playstation, putting Microsoft games on Playstation doesn't drive subscription revenue. We already see future Bethesda titles being withdrawn from PS5, I don't see why this would be different.
There's a difference between "native" MS studios from before the current aquisition wave and recent acquisitions made to bolster GamePass. Last I checked Deathloop did release on Playstation, at least.
Talk about failing upwards.
Phil Spencer only took over after the failure of the Xbox One. They've been killing it since then.
I’m not sure I would describe the state of Microsoft gaming as killing it, but I did miss that he came in after the OG Xbox One release.
The fact that the brand didn't completely die at that point was surprising.
Yep agreed, that was definitely a do or die moment.
The series Microsoft recently put out on Youtube about the history of Xbox is surprisingly good:
Suddenly, the reason for the recent employee purge seems more clear. They never fired anybody for bad behavior before, and now, just soon to be aquired, they do.
20 employees out of 9500 employees is not significant.
You are reading too much from too little.
It could be that the introduction of a process was part of the deal. That it only affected 20 might be a reason the deal was finalized.
That answers the question "could there be enough groundswell to form a blowback," then :(
From the link in the sibling comment:
> A summary of those personnel actions was scheduled to be released by Activision before the winter holidays, but Chief Executive Bobby Kotick held it back, telling some people it could make the company’s workplace problems seem bigger than is already known, the people familiar with the situation said.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Mobile is the largest segment in gaming, with nearly 95% of all players globally enjoying games on mobile. Through great teams and great technology, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard will empower players to enjoy the most-immersive franchises, like “Halo” and “Warcraft,” virtually anywhere they want.
So long for immersive PC and console games.
There's still plenty of money in PC and console games, especially AAA ones. It's a good thing that games expand to mobile. My little cousins in India have no consoles or PCs to play on, but they happily play PUBG or Minecraft with their friends on their parents' phones. Of course, for every wholesome mobile game, there's a 100 slot machine games with no merit.
That's probably a reference to Xbox Cloud Gaming, though.
I agree. They worded that poorly, conflating mobile gaming and cloud gaming on mobile.
Most likely via xCloud, cooperations will always opt for subscriptions.
Wow. No wonder Microsoft wasn't willing to shame Activision like Sony and others, they were in talks to buy it. Ridiculous.
If they were already in talks to buy, how much of it is a case of "wasn't willing", and how much is it "wasn't allowed"?
For all the flak ActiBlizzard deserves for this situation, I'd be happier if it were illegal for Microsoft to publicly give them shit about while already in talks to buy. There's just way too many ways to abuse that for leverage.
Nobody was forcing them to buy them. They were allowed, they chose not to.
I think it’d be problematic for a buyer to take public actions in devaluing its target amid takeover talks. Not just for Activision — but it’d be impossible to see Microsoft’s denunciations as principled rather than profit-motivated
Not shaming is not the same as condoning. Imagine actually expecting a company to comment on every story.
What about this is ridiculous, exactly?
Lose-lose situation. If Microsoft talked shit about ATVI in the months leading up to the acquisition, people would accuse them of doing it in bad faith to hurt the share price and make the acquisition cheaper.
They weren't shaming them publicly, they were shaming them privately to drive the purchase price down.
It's self-serving, but more effective, as it actually got Blizzard to do another round of cleaning house.
I guess the price had already been settled but they probably wanted to distance themselves from the accusations against the company.
These acquisitions are ridiculous. How long till Disney buys Microsoft? Why even bother having more than one company in the US?
I think Disney might struggle to buy Microsoft, given that Microsoft has 10x the market cap.
Microsoft is 10x the size of Disney, so more likely they buy Disney than the other way around.
how do you think the laws should be changed to prevent this?
They shouldn't. Capitalism works.
In who's favor?
What do you mean? In what way does capitalism work?
I'm not a business law type person. Something like, any business with a valuation above, say, $100B (number pulled from ass) should be broken up.
Then it's for good reason Business laws are not drafted and implemented by people like you. Arbitrary and narrow rule of thumb does not make a legislative bill in any functioning modern society.
100% agreed!! But, if someone was a politician and looking for my vote, saying words like "break up big companies" would be a pretty appealing prospect to me.
Vertical integration can be a win for consumers. Also, a law like that (and any law infringing a free market) disincentivizes growth and innovation.
> Vertical integration can be a win for consumers.
I'm not convinced.
> Also, a law like that (and any law infringing a free market)
You don't have a market without competition, which is what acquisitions accomplish. There is no such thing as a free market, by the way, that's a fantasy. There have always been laws governing markets.
> disincentivizes growth
Yes, that's exactly what I want to accomplish. These companies are too big & powerful.
> and innovation.
Huge companies use acquisitions to squash innovation.
Example of good vertical integration: Apple M1/AirPods/iPhone/Apple Music. That's a very convenient ecosystem for users, and it allows Apple to reduce manufacturing cost. We both agree there should be strong competitors to Apple, for the lower manufacturing costs to propagate to consumers as well.
>Yes, that's exactly what I want to accomplish. These companies are too big & powerful.
Economic growth is a consequence of gains in productivity. Therefore, we should champion economic growth because it allows us to do more during a day.
>Huge companies use acquisitions to squash innovation.
Another idea: people set up really innovate companies because they hope to be acquired by a bigger company. In other words – big companies enable an incentive structure favouring innovation. In general, VC:s (which drive most innovation today) hope to exit via an IPO – but selling to a big tech-company is a safety cushion. If we remove the safety cushion – the VC market will be more risk averse and less willing to spend on innovative, but unproven, ideas.
> Example of good vertical integration: Apple M1/AirPods/iPhone/Apple Music. That's a very convenient ecosystem for users, and it allows Apple to reduce manufacturing cost. We both agree there should be strong competitors to Apple, for the lower manufacturing costs to propagate to consumers as well.
I agree this is a very good thing but I think we'd both agree that Apple buying Arm would probably be a very bad thing in the medium-long run. I don't know what the solution is but as a consumer, I'd like companies to collaborate and thrive in a single big ecosystem vs having one big company. For example, Activision games can still be on Game Pass without Microsoft completely owning them and as an end user, I think that is more balanced.
> I'm not convinced.
So you think that cars built by 1 company providing engines and then another company sells you the cabin to put on top?
Should rocket companies not be able to build and launch rockets, or their own sats? Should we prevent Tesla from making batteries? Should Apple or Oxide (if you want a startup) be prevented from developing software and hardware together? What is that other then vertical integration.
Vertical integration is everything, being against vertical integration means that basically every company should only ever be allowed to control a single step in a production process. And its hard even define 'a step' even means, as even things like making steel requires many steps.
If you want things, at least actually figure out what you want because I don't think that is it.
> If you want things, at least actually figure out what you want because I don't think that is it.
I want competition. I want more choices. Acquisitions are the opposite of that.
So no acquisition of any company ever?
I already made a stupid proposal above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29979477
> I'm not convinced.
It might be bad for 3p developers, but it's pretty hard to argue that iOS is bad for consumers despite continuing to gain marketshare in the US.
> I'm not convinced.
We are going for the Cyberpunk future. But instead of Arasaka, Kang Tao, Militech and Biotechnica, we get Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Facebook
I think if one of the tech giants of the world could create an AGI-ish, they should have no problem becoming a single worldwide monopoly in a couple of years...
As someone who spent a good time in gaming, I'm perplexed and sad.
Consolidation always leads to job loss, the industry is very very small. At the same time, legacy publishers have a very different role now.
If I'm an indie dev, I don't need you to print the discs or box things up. The only 2 things publishers really do are QA and Marketing.
QA, for projects with a good community, can be free or very cheap.
Marketing, with again a good community,can be free or cheap. I think about the hikikomori game Pull Stay.
Nothing stops that game from selling millions.
The big publishers are much weaker now.
One could argue that Apple's actually the world's biggest game publisher.
They have the final say as to if your game reaches the masses
> QA, for projects with a good community, can be free or very cheap.
Battlefield 2042, GTA Definitive Edition, Warcraft Reforged, and Cyberpunk 2077 beg to differ.
I'm thinking the one person passion project.
At the same time, the best QA team on earth won't help if you rush the games.
Microsoft has all the pieces in place to make the great next gen MMORPG.
They now have the IP to do whatever they want with our mind, they have the distribution channels, they have the capacity to run servers and also the technology to create truly immersive worlds; their planetary rendering engine, GPT-3 for NPCs, Minecraft, for example.
There is a market for it, the latest awesome release in the space has been World of Warcraft, Amazon's New World is turning out to be a major flop and there's also free publicity in terms of Meta's metaverse.. I'm rooting for Microsoft to create the next gen gaming entertainment experience, however that might look.
They'll certainly market their titles as the next great gaming experiences. I am skeptical that it will come out that way. I personally predict there will be some elements of a great product but not entirely. the ultimate focus is on money and business value, not the product.
At least we have the xbox game pass which is absurdly underpriced.
> I personally predict there will be some elements of a great product but not entirely. the ultimate focus is on money and business value, not the product.
Ultimately, it will depend on the team building it. Microsoft, the entity, couldn't give a rat's ass about the product, but the people building it might.
At this point, technology has advanced to a point where some truly innovative gameplay mechanics could be employed with relative ease. We're living in a summer of AI and game ones are still dumb as bricks. With the power of cloud and current AI research papers, I think a world could really feel alive with today's technology.
I don't really understand these acquisitions made by Microsoft, first Mojang, then Bethesda and now Activision. Is Microsoft trying to revive these companies or it's just trying to leech of the market? At this moment, Activision is living out of in-game purchases, not making good games. Bethesda was almost dead when they bought it.
>Legendary games, immersive interactive entertainment and publishing expertise accelerate growth in Microsoft’s Gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud.
I wonder what this "cloud" means. Is Microsoft planing an alternative to Google Stadia?
>I wonder what this "cloud" means. Is Microsoft planing an alternative to Google Stadia?
This already exists [1]. I sometimes play Sea of Thieves with my kids on a Linux laptop through a browser. The only thing missing is haptic feedback / controller vibration, which makes both steering the ship and fishing difficult.
Mojang owned Minecraft, one of the best-selling video games of all time, even when it was in a "downtrend" because of Fortnite.
Microsoft didn't just acquire Bethesda. They acquired the entirety of ZeniMax, so Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout Shelter, Doom, Wolfenstein, Prey, Dishonored. Clearly not dead by any stretch of the imagination.
Activision Blizzard, despite the sexual harassment allegations, has Overwatch, World of Warcraft (still a profitable title), Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 launching Soon™. From a business standpoint, I'd say they've made the acquisitions of a lifetime.
They're building the Netflix of games with the catalogue to match. Seems like short and mid term, they're focused on owning as many brands/IP as possible, and predictably, efficiently releasing solid games that don't rock the boat too much. See Gears Of War, Forza and Halo. With Bethesda and ActiBlizz, they have enough IP under them to release 3-4 okay games every year, which will make Game Pass a good value proposition when third party support eventually dies out.
This. It’s similar to Netflix realizing they need to own as much content as possible to retain and attract subscribers and keep fat margins. GamePass is where the money is. Once they have your credit card the friction to up sell you is dramatically lowered.
> I wonder what this "cloud" means. Is Microsoft planing an alternative to Google Stadia?
They already have it, Xbox Cloud Gaming. It's mostly a steaming pile of crap that can't handle billing or multi-language users without cryptic useless errors. Quality and latency are pretty bad too, and the games are meh and console versions only ( so it's poor for strategy games for instance).
Mojang turned out to be a brilliant acquisition compared to what roblox is valued at nowadays.
If they don't buy it, someone else will. This way they probably get a bunch of games in their catalogue, they get brand names, people, players, etc. I would say that they don't want to be left out and over run by other players.
Revive? Bethesda will have two best selling games out in the next two years in the fairly empty AAA RPG landscape. Minecraft is a evergreen with kids with over a 100M monthly players
If the hype for the metaverse is a fraction true, and their distribution channels hold, these acquisitions will have been peanuts compared to the value they'll produce.
I have to wonder how much investing in some of today's tech behemoths comes down to viewing them more as a holding company / investment firm and less about their original core products. Microsoft has lost tons of desktop share over the last decade, this should have been a death signal for them but instead amazing acquisitions like Mojang, GitHub, ActBliz have pushed them to an amazing market cap. Similar with FB loosing use as a social media platform but staying in business with Instagram/WeChat etc.
I hold Microsoft shares because I think they have a special talent for doubling down on a good investment. Microsoft has no problems investing $$$ into risky but plausible product lines. They bombed Windows Phone, but their sass offerings were in a perfect place to take advantage of 2020.
In a rapidly-changing marketplace, a certain level of diversification helps increase the odds of survival (it can be overdone; too much diversification, and a company finds itself in charge of a host of projects in industries it doesn't know enough about to compete, which is what put Marvel on the rocks so badly that Disney was able to snap them up back in the day).
Not unlike in nature, a monoculture corporation lives and dies by their business being at all relevant in general, and the market (especially in the entertainment sector) is fickle.
This is truthfully not a big problem in the tech industry when compared to other industries, the big exceptions to this in the tech industry are the much older tech giants like IBM, Cisco or HP whose entire growth model is acquisitions. Compare tech to big pharma, and you'll see one industry still innovating inside big companies and another which is totally acquisition driven.
Once you have billions and billions in profits to reinvest there's hardly a choice, is there? At some point, the firm has to invest in new product lines to support or supplant its tentpoles, and restricting the space of investment opportunities to those generated internally unnecesarily limits its options (viz. AAPL with more cash that it can spend)
Losing market share on the desktop is by design to shrug off regulators while they flex into new growing markets. Their cloud has been a boon to their bottom line extending their reach into government/corporate clients while Xbox has kept Sony from dominating the living room/home.
Diversification is good for any large entity not just an investment firm.
Facebook own WeChat?
My bad, I meant WhatsApp, can't edit
Oh OK for a moment I though "how could I'v missed that ???" :)
I'd shed a tear for Blizzard, but Blizzard died years ago. First it started dying slowly when they figured out they can print money with world of warcraft, then they ruined that like 3 expansions in.
So no loss for the gamers here, move along...
It can really only get better. I almost want to hope it will, but I'm tired of getting burned.
Blizzard was the one game company that I bought all of their games no questions asked. Part of me is sad that this day has come, but the other part of me is kinda hopeful that this will allow for more dedicated focus on traditional Blizzard IP.
Back in the day sure, but the blizzard of 20 years ago is long gone. Diablo 3 is an abysmal followup to D2, every CoD is just an annual rehash, hearthstone is an absolute moneygrab, and HotS is the most watered down moba I've ever played.
Overwatch is cool though.
edit: and oh my god, let's not forget the absolute dumpster fire of warcraft 3 reforged.
WoW vanilla - best mmo ever created HotS - simple but actually very competitive and had a huge esport potential war3/SC - top 2 rts to this day
Diablo 2 Resurrected turned out awesome
CoD was never Blizzard
WoW (vanilla) was so good it had a second successful launch 10 years later
Starcraft 2 remains immensely popular
D2:R was mostly Vicarious Visions (but it absolutely did turn out awesome).
WoW (retail) has had 3 of its last 4 expansions ultimately perceived as failures and is (justifiably, belatedly, finally) having its lunch eaten by the vastly superior Final Fantasy XIV.
Immensely is probably overstating Starcraft 2's popularity, but what popularity it still has is in spite of anything Blizzard has done for it recently rather than because of it. They've essentially abandoned the franchise to wither on the vine at this point.
This is the first acquisition, possibly ever, that I view as potentially a positive for the customers of the company being acquired, if only because Microsoft can't possibly mishandle Blizzard's IP and staff any worse than Activision and Blizzard already have.
So was all the bad press Activision got recently in spite of, or driven by, acquisition plans? What better way to put pressure on a company to give up its independence than public shame and infamy?
Prolly knocked a few bucks off the price at least.
It might have made it cheaper, but I still think it's a bad deal for MS.
Activision doesn't create very much new IP these days, and that's where the talent is that brings new games and gamers to your platform.
I don't think creating new IP correlates that much with profitability these days. Taking a look at box offices, TV, and gaming as well shows that existing IP is plenty profitable on its own.
Maybe not profitability, but I'd say it does with revenue growth. Activation's revenue has been mostly flat for a few years.
I think Game Pass is a great service at a great price and I think Microsoft's overall direction for gaming has been really positive and forward looking; however, I do worry about the consolidation of gaming. Activision Blizzard was fairly user hostile in their business practices, so I don't think this will be a net loss for consumers.
What I am starting to worry about is Microsoft squeezing Sony out of gaming entirely. For a lot of casual gamers Call of Duty was the game or one of a few games they play and have played for years. A lot of those casual gamers own a Playstation. While Microsoft hasn't announced if Call of Duty will be exclusive or not, making the game PC/XBOX exclusive would be doctrine. The only example I can think of where they don't do that is Minecraft, so it is possible.
I can’t imagine a scenario where Sony gets to have COD on their platforms in say… 2-3 years. Bethesda is also now only PC and Xbox. Microsoft is playing hardball because other than the fantastic deal that is Gamepass, they don’t really have a lot of hype building titles (Halo launched to a very mixed reception).
I personally prefer more companies rather than fewer. I also anticipate a large brain drain at Activision studios, like what has already happened at Blizzard. But the Activision brands are established enough (and formulaic enough) that it probably won’t matter either way.
Honest question, how much longer until they try and buy Valve to get Steam? I mean at this point that's the next logical step
As long as they're on a shopping spree, might get Epic also while they're young.
Should we expect a Steam Xbox?
Finally, Candy Crush can be fully integrated into Windows.
I recall already finding that preinstalled on my Windows 10 machine in the past
Yes. But now they can enable more deep integration.
this could easily be the worst part about the acquisition
I’m awaiting the inclusion of Diablo and StarCraft as Easter eggs in Excel and the like. Or Warcraft Minesweepers.
Microsoft Mahjong has Halo backgrounds, so let's get on with the tie-ins.. I'll take SC2 Mahjong tiles.
1. MS buys many game studios (especially those with popular IPs) 2. Puts these titles on Game Pass. Now in the long run, they don't need to sign deals for these IPs to be on Game Pass because they own them, they get their return on investment. 3. More and more games on Game Pass, MS is able to keep its ridiculously good value because they aren't forking out as much to put games on there (because they own the titles). Game Pass subs increase at an even higher rate. 4. Game Pass exclusives, even on PC. More people subbing just for exclusives. At this stage Game Pass is so popular fewer people care that this happens. 5. Other studios feel pressured that their games aren't on the most popular platform, which is no longer Steam on PC, and no longer the digital stores on consoles, it's Game Pass everywhere. They sign deals with MS to get their games on Game Pass. 6. Indie games are losing their ability to be seen on traditional stores due to loss of marketshare. At this point, MS makes it even easier to publish games to Game Pass and indie games take advantage of this.
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.
Another development that's pushing me to indy-only pc gaming. The AAA gaming space has been such a bore for the past 5-10 years.
It’s interesting to me how indie gaming has started to really pop off at the same time there’s massive consolidation throughout the gaming industry. The ecosystem is really turning into blade runner, with these giant zaibatsu corps and a big wave of individuals.
My god I hate monopolies, MS has been on a buying spree and someone needs to stop them, but it will likely never happen.
This acquisition makes Microsoft the third biggest gaming company in the world... Not even the biggest, and far from a monopoly...
Don't get hung up on "monopoly". Their games are only available on their own vertically integrated platforms. They're abusing their dominant market position and should be slapped hard ( full break up and multi billion fines).
Their games are available on PC, sold on Steam, and can run on Linux via Steam Proton. Just because they aren't available on one console doesn't make it that bad.
They can't run on PlayStation, they can't run on macOS, on Linux is thanks to a compatibility layer they have no relation to ( it's not their desire for the games to run there). Furthermore the games aren't available in any of the cloud gaming platforms bar their own ( Xcloud gaming? Xbox Cloud gaming? Who knows, Microsoft probably don't). They're artificially limiting competitors to the detriment of consumers.
“Artificially limiting” by choosing not to port games to those platforms? Would you say the same of studios who don’t port games to PC? Do you believe 98% of the industry is “artificially limiting competitors to the detriment of consumers” by not porting to macOS or Linux?
> it's not their desire for the games to run there
And yet they can prevent their games from running on Proton like some devs have done by anti-cheat measures. IIRC Overwatch refuses to run on Linux and risks a ban because of the Vulkan translation layer.
I agree in theory, but having exclusives is a requirement to compete with Sony and Nintendo, two companies that are somewhat outside the reach of US regulators. How to handle competition against foreign pseudo-monopolies isn’t an easy question.
That means Nintendo should be slapped "hard" too, since we're not getting hung up on legal definitions.
I'm not sure how good a deal this really is.
I can definitely see why MS bought up publishers and developers to add to their stable - they can now, like Netflix, sell a monthly recurrent service that will keep their customers entertained with 'free' releases available on day#1, plus a leased library.
But (to me at least), they were already there. I'm there on PC and think the sell is even easier on Xbox. Buying Activision seems a bit pointless. Sure they can now fold in wavering CoD lovers, but the franchise is already looking a little wobbly - but they're paying for a company that's valued as selling a game every year for $50 to lure in the subset of customers who now think game pass is now worth it with CoD. (That's a shitload of new subs they need, or the price is going up)
My larger concern is that when they bought Zenimax or even minecraft, they'd paid well for 'good bones' they could build on. Activision is really just a pile of slightly rusty franchises (https://www.denofgeek.com/games/activision-blizzard-microsof...)
Now maybe they can revive some of those - Doublefine knocking out episodic Gabriel Knight makes me moist, or simply Guitar Hero with new weekly tunes - but MS could have done similar for a lot cheaper.
If I'd had the money in my bank account, I'd have maybe just had a slush fund to pick up and promote new talent/IP.
If they really wanted infra, Steam is still out there. If they wanted IP, Sega.
except that Blizzard has the best IP, and the only viable MMORPG today
good point - htf did I miss that?
I hope they bring back Battlezone - Activision rebooted it in 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1998_video_game)) A great single player and co-op "real time strategy" game that ran on a simple protocol called ANET (http://www.kegel.com/anet/) (http://www.strickleton.com/anet/) Most servers are dark now but there's still a great community keeping this game alive. It had very robust tools for building and sharing your own maps for deathmatch and strategy campaigns. One of the first games I ever fell in love with.
Blizzard has been on a downward slope for years, I don't know if they can rebound.
In the grand scheme of things I prefer seeing them absorbed by Microsoft than by Tencent.
Activision Blizzard has been seriously mismanaged. They have very nice IP and a fanbase that is still somewhat loyal because of the glories of the past, but Microsoft would need to revitalize the management and the creativity.
- Overwatch hit the ground running to massive success, but hasn't materialized Overwatch 2 and has stagnated.
- Warcraft III Reforged is a total disaster and abandoned.
- WoW has a wide following of people in its vanilla form (i.e. taking things awy from what it has become), and the extensions aren't bringing a lot of value. There is speculation on whether it has hit its peak and is in decline.
- The Starcraft Remaster is basically the same game but with a bit nicer graphics.
- Diablo 3 seems to have done well.
I do hope it gets revitalized and the IP gets new life with better management, but Blizzard has been struggling.
The conspiracy theorist in me suspects this acquisition is a way for a disgraced ownership and upper-level management to golden-parachute out of the company without having to just quit.
Simply quitting would be seen as a sign of failure and would leave a lot of their performance-based compensation behind... But getting bought, that's a different story.
Why would Microsoft want to participate in that scheme, though?
To gain control of another game studio with a stable of popular franchises.
>The Starcraft Remaster is basically the same game but with a bit nicer graphics.
At least with that, I think that's exactly what the audience wanted. Anyone who wanted a different (and mechanically easier) game has Starcraft II.
Theres no speculation on WoW, it has been dying since Cataclysm which was released a decade ago.
lol how was the Diablo 2 re-release. Seriously has been upsetting to watch their fall.
I guess this is what you call Microsoft buying the dip, Activision's price fell by half since Feb 2021 until today!
Everyone talking about Blizzard, meanwhile, Activision is one of the original game publishers (1979). (Supposedly picked their name so that it would come alphabetically before "Atari".) That's older than EA.
When's Microsoft going to bring back Pitfall?
Wow, has MS gotten that profitable or has Acti/Blizz been doing that badly to be considered a „good deal“?
Tho, it certainly fits what MS has been going for with its gaming division; Game pass ultimate has a weird lack of „third party aaa” titles in certain genres.
For example EA Play is included in game pass ultimate, but by now all the new EA stuff is locked behind “EA Play pro”.
Having the whole Acti/Blizz lineup in there would be quite the offering. Particularly all the Call of Duties were never really sold in a “get all of them!” way. Now all of them might end up for “free” on game pass.
Nadella transformed a company that was at risk of turning into the next IBM into the 2nd most valuable company in the world. Where have you been the past 9 years of his tenure?
I am betting this is not going to last. Their core products are losing customers.
What core products are you talking about here? I don't see office going anywhere. Azure only seems to be gaining market share, not losing it.
which one? Azure? Windows? Office? Xbox? Bing? SQL Server? VS / VS Code / .NET / C#? GitHub?
Azure?
I always wondered, what are the exact steps between announcing to acquire and actually acquiring.
Especially this:
> Microsoft will acquire Activision Blizzard for $95.00 per share, in an all-cash transaction valued at $68.7 billion, inclusive of Activision Blizzard’s net cash. When the transaction closes, Microsoft will become the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony.
What exactly happens between now and "when the transaction closes"? How long does it take? Is there anything that would make it not close?
The main one is that the shareholders get to review the terms, and if more than 50% of either company’s don’t like them, the deal is off.
They need approval from shareholders and regulators in every country they operate in, and then do a bunch of legal work. It's not unusual for such big acquisitions to take years to be finalised ( for instance a regulator might impose divestment or limitations), or even to fall through ( e.g. Boeing-Embraer, Alstom-Siemens, Nvidia-ARM).
Well if you can't buy Nintendo, then go and buy out everyone else.
After all, this is all how the metaverse is going to become a reality and that is how Microsoft is going to create it.
Wow, this is great for Blizzard games. Bliz has had the hardest time getting out of their own way for the last decade or so. The industry has moved from the "pay for the game + subscription" model but bliz has never been able to come to terms with that as a company. Hopefully Microsoft reverses this on day one and makes their games and content available with either Game pass or retail + Gold for multiplayer.
Now I'm seeing (elsewhere) people bandying around the idea that Microsoft engineered the harassment reports and subsequent lawsuits to drop Activision-Blizzard's share price and push the shareholders to sell.
I'm not saying that the harassment reports were false, just that Microsoft could have helped people talking to the press/organize the lawsuits, pushing up the stories in the medias and so on.
It really feels like Microsoft is trying to basically create the "Netflix" of gaming here, and I think that just like Netflix they're going to see a lot of success as basically being the first to market to do so, and other companies are going to be left scrambling. The acquisition email mentioned that activision has 400 million "monthly active players", mimicing the language of MAU that is the current trend right now. The goal is to get 1/2 a billion people giving them $10 a month on gamepass, not to get 1 time purchases for $60 every 5 years when a new Elder Scrolls title ships.
I think that this should really put some fear in Valve and I'm not sure what their play is from here. I know that Steam has a lot of goodwill built up but it feels like they've just coasted on Steam for so long, and it was inevitable that the larger players would look at their fat 30% cut for so little work and decide that wasn't going to last. A lot of people thought that Bethesda games would keep coming out for Playstation when the acquisition was first announced, and after it closed MS confirmed that going forward future title would be exclusive to them. I can't see any reason to this this will different, and especially just making these titles available through gamepass alone, not in a launcher or as a separate purchase. Do people think that Microsoft is spending tens of billions just to make sure that Valve can get a 30% cut on sales of COD and Fallout? It's like saying that Netflix is going to let Disney+ carry Stranger Things, because hey, Disney would pay them money to do so. Valve is like the cable company right now, someone else makes the content and they provide the delivery of it and skim off the top. Now that you have competing and more convenient delivery services, its going to be a lot harder to exist. Where do they go from here?
How does the exclusive game work now? It's okay to have exclusives to compete with the big boys but surely the rules are different once you get to this scale. When you get close to a monopolistic position using exclusives to lock out competitors is abusive. Though MS is still not quite in a monopolistic position yet... they're getting close.
Sony already locks out competitors with exclusives, whether via studios they acquired or games they pay to make exclusive.
Not to mention that ATVI is a behemoth but their catalog isn't the same "everything-store" as 2000s ATVI (or current EA), it's a few (big) franchises. Hell, the Bethesda deal had more franchises involved.
Can you imagine Call of Duty becoming an Xbox exclusive? Big hit to Sony!
This is a megaton deal for Microsoft. Some of the biggest franchises, exclusive to their console/gamepass.
I wonder what will Sony do now?
After the initial promo Game Pass price (and using the Xbox Gold -> Game Pass "hack") I got my first bill for $45 for the quarter. I started to go cancel it as I play my xbox in fits and spurts but I've got to say $15/mo for the massive catalogue available (and this was before Bethesda or today's news obviously) is a really good deal for me. I easily get at least 1 game a quarter of play out of it and that would normally cost $60 and require a lot of though/research before purchasing, instead I can try games with reckless abandon and only play the ones I like. That said, I couldn't care less about cloud gaming, the controls feel "soft" and/or laggy to me still (I'm on fiber symmetrical and I've tried on Mac, Xbox One/Series X, iPhone, and iPad, all with an official Xbox controller and wired for all but the iPhone/iPad).
There is some discussion on the Blizzard forums as well by the gamers. [1] Likely on EU forums as well.
[1] - https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/microsoft-buying-act...
Excited to see what this will mean for some of the gaming franchises.
Overwatch has been on shaky grounds due to uncertainty surrounding the league and the release of the sequel.
Heroes of the Storm is still my favorite MOBA even though it's clearly on life support. I'd love to see Microsoft try reviving it once more by doing a big Heroes 3.0 push.
I hope they clean up Blizzard. It's been sad to hear everything - my best friend growing up got a dream job there a few years ago, and it's sad to hear how his childhood dream got crushed by a toxic management team (he loved just about everyone he directly worked with, including his boss).
Apparently the price tag is $68.7 billion. How long until they recoup the investment?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-buy-activision-bliz...
That's not how it works.
And now you know why they fired dozens for harassment yesterday. Cleaning house for the new owners.
I dread the day they switch the Blizzard app launcher to a MS account. You just know it is going to be a nightmare to sort out.
Beyond petty nonsense - Sure wish we had some antitrust laws in this country. The consolidation of every industry gross.
Maybe it actually works
maybe you're talking about account issues, but I find that the battle.net launcher has been pretty great.
It doesn't actually launch the game for me. I'm not a windows user so I could be using it wrong, but when a game asks if I want the shortcut on my screen (in this case Warzone) then I double click it, and it just opens the blizzard launcher instead of the game.
Also just in general, it'd be nice if the game itself worked as well as the in-game store which never has any issues.
Sounds like an amazing deal for Microsoft. Activision shares had it rough recently so the price isn’t that bad and ITS AN ALL CASH DEAL.
With inflation probably coming in a big way it sounds like a great idea to spend all that money now.
On one hand I feel that consolidation is bad for gaming when a platform is buying IP for exclusivity but on the other hand this was a great decision by Microsoft. Activation Blizzard has been is a slump and has been stuck in releasing or should I say re-releasing the same games for a while now but they could have done it much better. Any half decent version of World of Warcraft 2 will be worth more than 70 billion by itself. Seems to me Activision Blizzard did not realize just how much value in IP they had in their games and are selling based on their current cash flow only.
We see here another example of why Valve is investing so heavily into Linux and Steam Deck.
* 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.
== MS acquires formerly preeminent corporation for 30% discount ==
MS announced today that it was acquiring Activision Blizzard Inc. (ATVI). This news comes on the heels of a year filled with government lawsuits, internal leaks, low morale and poor performance. Many analysts have commented that years of failing to invest in their IP and a string of poorly-received sequels have diluted customer and stockholder faith.
The past year has seen ATVI stock plummet after it was made public that the company was not being managed or governed in any meaningful way, down approx. 30% prior to today's announcement.
I don't see any discount. They're bying at $95 per share. Look at YTD and 5Y prices.
The 30% prior isn't the price they're bying at.
Fair point, and conceded.
Oddly though, I nearly tried some weak defense. Outrage algorithms are destroying my brain.
My very first thought after seeing the headline: There is NO WAY antitrust regulators would approve such a deal, considering this is the biggest game acquisition ever.
But hey, at least better than being acquired by Tencent, eh?
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.
As if a former CEO of Microsoft hasn't engaged in similar behavior
Oh dear more consolidation in the gaming space. Not good for the consumer.
What's the general view on the medium to long term value of Unreal 5 vs Unity? We have exposure in our team to Unity (for VR apps) but equally very impressed with Unreal 5.
Like many here I'm a former Blizzard enthusiast, and frankly I can't see how MSFT can fuck Blizzard any worse than Activision did. It's a net positive.
Even if blockbusters like CoD aren't Microsoft (PC+Xbox) exclusive, the power of "play it first on GamePass" or "Plays best on Series X" is extremely compelling.
Streamers, influencers, and competitive players whose livelihoods are based on some of these games will almost be forced into playing on the platform that gives them an advantage, whether that's an extra couple weeks of access or slight optimizations.
A bit interesting to see that not much mentioned about blizzard's declining and Activision being a low grade money grabbing game studio, which collectively Activision Blizzard is heading to irrelevancy. Or I might get the wrong impression. Or its just blizzard is going into oblivion.
Most comments are about monopoly. But is A & B really that good? Or its just more of a optimization of financial strength between A &B and MSFT?
I think Natella's execution for Microsoft has been scary smart. This one feels shocking and obvious at the same time, similar to Github.
This is great for XBOX (Microsoft), but terrible for the industry and us consumers. Less competition isn't good for us. First Bethesda, now Activision Blizzard... One has to wonder what they'll acquire next, and they have the money to throw around comparatively to the other big players in the market (Take 2, EA, Ubisoft, Warner, and more importantly, SONY).
a lot of comments seem to be concern about the antitrust.
Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard just put them in number 3 slot. Tencent and Sony are far bigger in gaming. if Apple lawsuit didn't take down Apple store just forced Apple to allows third party payment option. i don't think Microsoft will get slap with a antitrust. Microsoft isn't even number 1 in gaming.
Tencent doesn't have one of the major consoles nor the vast majority of desktop operating system installations. If someone was going to encourage the government to stop the merger I'd expect them to try defining the market along terms different from just "size of gaming revenues". They'd target more the synergies that could be used to anticompetitive advantage and limit customer choice.
Not to say that will happen. Just that if it does, it wouldn't be on dollar size in game sales alone.
In terms of the "console war" competitive landscape, Tencent is not relevant as they're not a significant stakeholder in that market.
The evaluation is between Sony and Microsoft and this shifts things pretty significantly toward Microsoft.
This is... unexpected. Wow and COD on Gamepass?
Can't wait for an Overwatch 2 Developer Update that starts with "Hi, I'm Jeff from the Microsoft team."
Gotta love that headline including the phrase "to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone, across every device"… I'ma have to cry "bullshit" on that "every device" part. They mean "every device Microsoft can control" or "every device Microsoft approves of".
I don’t this is as likely as many people in these comments seems to. MS will still profit hand-over-fist on games sold on the Switch and the PS5. Many people even buy the same title multiple times across platforms happily!
They have no reason to pull out of those markets.
My read on this: a lot of the key talent at Blizzard has left or been let go - if Activision stuck it out another year you would see their stock dip lower on bad news around Overwatch 2/Diablo 4/WoW. This is a great way for the shareholders to cash out before that happens and leave Microsoft to deal with it.
Wait… WHAT?! Wow. Incredible to follow up the Zenimax acquisition with this. Was just playing a game via cloud gaming yesterday and thinking about how smooth it was and how MS was set for the future with GamePass. Congratulations to the Xbox org and MS in general. Hope to move back out to Redmond soon… ;)
Being DRM-free and Linux gamer, this has no impact on me, but MS still gobbled companies like inXile and Obsidian in the past. So I don't see it as a good trend. MS feels like a black hole in this sense. It swallows everything. Nothing comes out.
At least they didn't mess up Minecraft on Linux so far.
I think it’s a good thing with all the recent crap happening at Blizzard, this is a shake up. Management that’s incompetent will be shuffled out, and replaced with management focused on building great games. Phil Spencer is like the Kevin Feige of the gaming world at this point.
This makes a lot of sense for both companies. Activision need to clear out large swaths of their board and executive suite. Microsoft has consistently lost console market share to Sony with each console generation. They are also ceding ground in the computer gaming sector.
Microsoft now runs two of the apps I spend a lot of time in: Visual Studio Code and StarCraft II :)
I wonder what this means for the classic IPs of Blizzard, like WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo. Especially StarCraft could use an update - I would immediately buy a SC III for the Mac. Unfortunately, there was no update since SC II was ported to Metal some years ago.
There's not likely to be any more mac x86 development from anyone going forward, and I think M1 is enough of a branch that it makes it difficult to justify it.
I can understand the difficulty of Mac ports, if a game doesn't support Metal yet, but that is the case with StarCraft. In theory, a recompile might do.
I'd love if they might breathe some life back into Starcraft 2, or even start working on 3. Normally I'd be worried when the company that owns my favorite game gets acquired, but it'd hardly be possible to do less with it than they already were.
Warcraft 4 please. They made Age of Empires 4 happen too
Good point. And AOE4 is apparently quite good too.
Can somebody please explain to me, why is it allowed for a company like MS to buy all of their (indirect) competitors?
Even after this purchase, Microsoft's gaming division is still smaller than Sony by revenue..
There are still lots of other large publishers out there.. EA, Take Two, Embracer, Tencent, Epic, etc... I'm sure I'm forgetting some big obvious ones even.
They are definitely not "buying all their competitors" as you put it.
> Microsoft’s gaming division
Isn’t that the point? Why can something as large as MS have a “division” that can go into mergers and acquisitions as if they were a separate entity?
> There are stills lots of other large publishers
…goes on to name 5.
> They are definitely not “buying all their competit
Sure, you can be as pedantic as you want and jump through hoops to come to that rationalization.
The gaming industry has been in consolidation mode for years, mostly due to the up-front investment required to produce AAA games. All the large players are buying the smaller ones, it's not just Microsoft.
And I guess you can question my use of the subjective word "lots", my fault. I still think there are _enough_ large publishers around in the gaming industry that you can't really start throwing around terms like "monopoly" or "anti-trust" etc...
I was mostly just pointing out that the original comment was factually inaccurate by saying MS were buying up "all their competitors".
I'm not trying to rationalize or "jump through hoops" here. We're all just debating and guessing, having a conversation..
If you somehow accidentally assigned me to the opposite 'side' from the one you appear to be on, let me gently correct you.. I don't care enough about this to be picking sides.
> Why can something as large as MS have a “division” that can go into mergers and acquisitions as if they were a separate entity?
Especially when Microsoft is using the rest of Microsoft to subsidize said "division"
Valve/Steam would be the biggest competitor on desktop, with nearly 30 million active users.
>>Tencent, Epic,
You said Tencent twice ;)
Tim Sweeney maintains more than 50% ownership of Epic.
Smaller than Sony or smaller than Playstation? Sony does a lot more than just vidya
I'll let you do your own research.
Fair enough. Looks like it was Sony Interactive Entertainment
In our legal system, actions are legal unless there is a law making them illegal.
If you are referring to anti-trust laws preventing this, then MS would need to be buying a huge number of companies to monopolize the gaming market, not just Activision, in order to be in violation of this law.
But they span ten or so different industries with a $2T market cap, and it's full of unhealthy monopolistic synergies. They can wield this power to force deals and push out competitors across their multiple business units.
They can "ask" gaming companies to use Azure if they want to run on Windows or Xbox. They can ignore Mac and PlayStation as platforms. They can bundle software licenses, payment gateways, and design hardware that only works in one ecosystem.
This is the modern monopoly. Good luck competing with it or avoiding their platform fees as you try to grow your revenue. You'll undoubtably wind up feeding your direct competition somehow or another.
Yeah this is bad for everyone overall. Disney is an even worse offender if you're looking at synergistic monopolies.
Monopolistic synergies are not a legal reason for anything. This is what people imagine the law is, but it isn't.
> They can wield this power to force deals and push out competitors across their multiple business units.
The only way this would matter is if you can prove that they have some monopoly in any one market and use that monopoly position to drive up prices.
So if somehow could leverage their Windows OS as to sell games for 1000$ rather then 100$.
Microsoft does not have monopoly in any one market as far as I can tell.
Because the federal government doesn't stop them, quite plainly. They fear it would stifle innovation and competition. It's the same reason why egregious white collar crimes rarely get punishments. I wish I was making this up.
I guess since there are so many competitors in the gaming market, the US government doesn't care. Not like this acquisition with make Microsoft have a majority share in the entire gaming industry.
Why wouldn't they be allowed to? Companies acquire smaller companies and competitors all the time, it's called consolidation.
One party want to sell, the other wants to buy. As long as the deal doesn't breach any anti-trust laws, it's good to go.
If this type of deal ( vertical consolidation through acquisition of competitors, and then removing those former competitors' content from competing platforms) isn't illegal, antitrust laws need to be adapted so it becomes so. It's impossible to deny it's purely in detriment to the market, competitors, and consumers.
Anti-Trust is quite openly defined. The courts in the 70s tried to establish a consistent way to judge it. The basically defined it as consumer can be forced to pay higher prices. You can read about Judge Richard Posner.
Either there would need to be some revolution with the legal profession, or congress would have to pass some new law.
What the judges realized is that by an more open definition pretty much any company and any merger could be said to be against anti-trust.
So if you want such a law, you need to actually get some exact definition of how every is judged that can be consistently legally applied.
This deal has to be approved by a lot of regulators before it will go through. AB is a global company. MS thinks it will take at least 12 to 18 month before the deal will happen. Or not, since regulators are a bit iffy with big-tech these days.
But overall even though it's a big acquisition both together will still remain one amongst a few big gaming companies.
this will only make them the third largest gaming company
What upsets me is that this news totally overshadows the news that Activision literally just fired 30+ more people for sexual misconduct.
And now the metaverse is solidified as a new buzzword for venture capitalists to pour money into despite collaborative VR being a thing for almost a decade already. Won't be long until they combine it with NFTs and use an inefficient & expensive blockchain to handle the marketplace of avatars and the like.
The more I think about this - the more I hope that Microsoft does another starcraft and gets it in the works. That way my young children will get to play starcraft in their teens (10 year dev cycle imho). That would be a small win for me :)
I continue to be very uncomfortable with gigantic companies becoming more gigantic for any reason, even though all involved players are already ones I've been carefully avoiding even accidentally giving money to for several years
The most important question I have is: will they replace Bobby Kotick?
EDIT: "Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard. [...] he and his team will maintain their focus on driving efforts to further strengthen the company’s culture."
Shame on you, Microsoft.
I share your dismay. Even if you're someone who doesn't care about the issues that have come to light over the past year, the blatant mismanagement (dare I say running into the ground) of the once golden Blizzard portfolio has been painful as a long-time Starcraft 2 fan.
For a moment, I was truly hopeful that we might see some reinvigoration for blundered projects like the Warcraft III reforged.
Perhaps even some hope that Microsoft might breathe new life into Starcraft II, which still stands as an incredible game.
/sigh
Everything under Blizzard's portfolio feels like it has been left to rot. The only thing they seem to put effort into is their Pay-To-Win card game, Hearthstone.
Unfortunately even under new management I don't see Starcraft getting much love, the focus is now on cross-platform games and RTS games are PC only (which is a small niche compared to the overall market).
Given how ActiBlizz doesn't even want to acknowledge Starcrafts existence anymore, excluding it from Blizzcon e-sport highlights and leaving the broken ranked system unfixed for I don't even know long it's been, I believe change in company culture there would need to be pretty substantial to bring some love back to Starcraft.
Moreover I recall them saying SC2 was the final chapter on the IP.
I mean now that MS owns them maybe they can pull a Win11 :p
They catapulted over the shark with the conclusion of SC2's campaign, so it wouldn't surprise me, buuut if I've learned anything in this era of reboots, it's that no IP is really dead, some of them just hibernate for a while, and promises a popular franchise is done aren't worth the electrons inconvenienced to convey it.
I'm not so sure. Microsoft recently revived their Age of Empires franchise, and has has been pretty good about supporting it as an e-sport (sponsoring tournaments & streamers, reliably re-balancing, releasing updated versions, etc.). I wouldn't be surprised if they took a long term view for the much-larger-RTS Starcraft, especially given its size relative to AoE.
Wait, did they start putting effort into Hearthstone? I stopped playing a couple of years ago. To me, the bellwether is whether the game still locks up for a second right before a match starts as it synchronously produces a megabyte of logs or something.
The game never really felt that great after Ben Brode left. Battlegrounds was pretty OK though.
They put a lot of effort into their new game mode (which might as well be an entirely separate game from Hearthstone), but by all indications it flopped pretty hard.
There has been more activity than normal on the core game mode and Battlegrounds, although mostly focused on content (whether actual cards or cosmetics) than actual technology changes or new features.
Yep. Overwatch is an empty husk of a game and community it once was.
I would _guess_ that ousting a CEO AND acquiring the core company at the same time are expensive propositions - I'd also guess that MSFT fully plans to address the leadership issue there (Kotick) but going to give him a year to age out of the newly acquired company and take his golden parachute elsewhere.
Smaller M&A where it's easier to swap the leader (like a startup - which most of us are used to) is MUCH easier/cheaper/faster than swapping out an established CEO of a public company.
They'll do it because he's a liability and they want to make a statement to the new company - but it'll be slow.
yeah, it's going to take a little time for Microsoft to worm its fingers in there and get a feel for a massive org like that. I've got a feeling Kotick is going to be out of there within a few years.
I remember a Starcraft II fan map named Bobby Kotick TD. If he hits you, you loose money. If you hit him, you loose money too. It was banned after a short time.
To be honest, I think Microsoft and Activision deserve each other.
At least you don't lose money though.
>I remember a Starcraft II fan map named Bobby Kotick TD. If he hits you, you loose money. If you hit him, you loose money too.
I love it! Political Opinions as a Game!
Maybe you'll be happy to hear that Polandball have a game on Steam..
The reason he's still there is because this deal has probably been in the works for a while, and they weren't going to cut him loose until it settled. I'm sure that as soon as it's possible after the acquisition that he'll suddenly decide to spend more time with his family, pursue other interests, or get sent to the farm to play with the other dogs, whatever euphemism you like.
Honestly, this is the sort of thing they have to say right now - the deal isn't closed yet, and saying they're going to dump him might lead to shareholder lawsuits, especially if the acquisition is blocked.
Realistically, there's a high chance that within a few months of the acquisition being completed he'll be expected to leave quietly.
Businesses learned long ago there are plenty of very easy legal ways of making people leave of "their own accord" by adjusting work environment factors to a point no sane person would stay in the position.
If you take over a company, you don't necessarily want to plunge it into even more chaos than the acquisition will create already by immediately getting rid of the CEO. It's entirely possible that they will get rid of him after a transition phase.
I'm hiring now, and I had the pleasure of interviewing someone who was leaving Blizzard. He was pretty sharp and I was bummed that I had to pass on him.
Anyway, I think this acquisition will actually stop the bleeding snd create some stability
Stephen Totilo shared this back in June of last year. Apparently Bobby's got an agreement signed that if he gets terminated he makes $292 million off of it, double what he made last year.
So that might be part of it.
https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1407658278893592579
Microsoft is spending $70 billion all-cash on this, an extra quarter billion isn't much. I don't expect they'll cut him loose until after all the ink is dry.
How long is that valid for? Also does buyout by Microsoft count as a “change of control” … I’d bet Microsoft would wait out whatever time span that’s valid for and then immediately refuse to give him another one and can him…
Agreements like that are evidence that boards don't always take into account the health of the company as a whole when making decisions.
Looks like he'd be terminating "with good reason" himself after a change of control and getting $292m?
Aren’t those types of severance packages typically invalid if you’re fired for good cause (like sexual harassment)?
This can't be permanent. I bet this is to keep the markets happy in the short term while this gets absorbed, and then Kotick will "retire" at some point in the next year.
I'd buy shares right now if they had gotten rid of Kotick.
Even though it would cost an additional $275 ish million?
Literally the next sentence:
> Once the deal closes, the Activision Blizzard business will report to Phil Spencer, CEO, Microsoft Gaming.
So no, they aren't keeping him around. Good call.
That doesn't say that Kotick will be gone, it says that he'll be reporting up to Microsoft.
Golden parachute incoming... Probably hanging around for a few months until the buyout completes, then off he goes.
Apparently his shares are worth about 385 million and his golden parachute is like a maximum of 293 million.
So if Microsoft buys out and fires Kotick, he'd walk away with like 678 million dollars. It's pretty weird that there are people who are happy about this proposition and are not named "Robert Kotick".
Corporate speak sometimes requires you to read between the lines.
Thats what I thought. A CEO reporting to a CEO isnt going to end well.
Who exactly do you think the CEO of Microsoft Gaming reports to? This is a pretty common corporate structure. I've worked under a total of 4 CEOs in a hierarchy before (CEO of an investment firm reports to CEO of the owning bank's European investment division reports to CEO of Europe reports to actual CEO).
CEO within CEO is for separate Business Units or divisions, which is clearly not the case here.
How is Activision Blizzard not a business unit?
It probably isnt and it should become an integral part of Microsoft Gaming within 3-6 months. There is nothing dramatically different between it and other gaming projects/units in MS Gaming. This is not a large enterprise acquiring a startup and letting them run independently.
Go ahead, name a country that doesn't have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains.
There's nothing to read into. He is categorically going to being staying on.
There's still a CEO of Mojang. So maybe they keep him, maybe they won't.
They wouldn't muddy their happy upbeat acquisition announcement by mentioning they're pushing him out, though.
So it's wrong to draw any conclusions yet.
No, he's just going to report to Phil Spencer it looks like. He will still lead Activision Blizzard. Might be different once we know more details.
I do not see that saying that at all.
No way Microsoft lets this guy stick around. This is the best soft landing the board could possibly provide for the ceo.
Probably keep him until they restructure the Activision Blizzard somewhat. Like Separating Blizzard and studios under Activision if needed.
Maybe they can't get rid of Mr. Kotick yet..
Does anyone has any doubts it's anything but a transitional position ?
Bobby "Culture" Kotick
Read the whole paragraph. Once the deal closes Activision will report to Phil.
Can you supply some context to this denounciation?
There’s probably an essay that could be written to answer your question, but the short version is that Kotick is not a gamer, but an executive. He specialises in extracting maximum value from an existing property, everything else be damned.
For example, Activision had a successful franchise Call of Duty that did releases every 2 years or so. Kotick’s insight was that they could release one every year and basically print money. He was right. He then used that money to acquire Blizzard, a company that had many beloved franchises. He then applied those same principles to the running of Blizzard, to the point where the company releases half baked, buggy, awful excuses for games. An example of this is Warcraft III Reforged. They did it because re-releases of old games are a reliable way to monetise nostalgia.
And that’s just the somewhat justifiable part. Because making money is good, right? Shareholders love that shit.
What’s less defensible is the toxic work culture that was fostered under him, where sexual harassment was endemic. Of course he never saw the fallout of that. They fired some patsies and called it a day.
> For example, Activision had a successful franchise Call of Duty that did releases every 2 years or so. Kotick’s insight was that they could release one every year and basically print money.
To be fair though, they put two studios on it, which is very unlike other annual games, and a much better approach for WLB and avoiding (some) crunch.
"Activision CEO Bobby Kotick Knew for Years About Sexual-Misconduct Allegations at Videogame Giant"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/activision-videogames-bobby-kot... — mirror at https://archive.fo/fzdAv
And if you're completely out of the loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Department_of_Fair_...
As a developer I have a strong dislike against CEOs that say things like...
> The goal that I had (...) was to take all the fun out of making video games.
> The executive said that he has tried to instill into the company culture "skepticism, pessimism, and fear" of the global economic downturn
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/activision-games-to-bypass...
Or May be the whole woke uprising thing was to drive the market cap down so Microsoft could get a better deal. As usual the media doing the bidding for the big tech.
Dismay over Kotick actively hiding sexual abuse and protecting the abusers is a "woke uprising"? That's a shitty take.
Yeah and surely the timing of this whole campaign has nothing to do with it. That’s exactly what a “woke uprisings” is. Conveniently exploiting victims to fit your own benefits be it political or economic. Last 2yrs have seen plenty of that.
So far, only allegations. Outside the US, in the civilized world, we expect people to be found guilty in a court of law under the due criminal process.
I'm not American but on this side of the pond we expect more proof than twitter allegations before firing people.
Hopefully woke culture will take more of a toll on US tech and we will see more US companies opening up in Europe. The US tech centralization is bad for the world (and US consumers).
There's more to it than twitter allegations, you know. Real people have been hurt.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/activision-videogames-bobby-kot...
I am not saying real people weren’t hurt. But some of these allegations are years old. You don’t think those same insiders who were pushing those stories in news media could buy the lows and now riding the spike in the stock price?
So you don't think your original comment was (or at least seemed) dismissive of the allegations and was instead purely a note on the timing of them coming to the public?
Are CEOs who make 100+ million USD per year responsible for the behavior of those under them? What about when they are informed of such behavior and do nothing?
Sometimes it seems we hold those working the drive-thru window at a fast food place to a higher standard than major CEOs.
I don't like sanctimonious woke policies like we get from Microsoft, but these allegation seemed to be corroborated by multiple people.
Don't think Microsoft is any better than Activision, although most software developers aren't really famous for being outgoing womanizers.
Activision's value skyrocketed under Kotick, not sure why they would want to replace him.
Value skyrocketed, but IP was demolished. Warcraft and Starcraft are two of the most popular game franchises ever. Today, nobody cares about the story of these games anymore. Popular characters have been written into a wall or killed off in an unsatisfying way. The overall story is a tangled mess of retcons, 1000 IQ BBEG, and directionless plot lines. While Activision made record profits, they did it at the cost of player numbers. Every new character is shallow, uninspired, quickly killed off, or never used again after their initial use(Bwonsamdi, Rexar, many more). By failing to appease players with the story, and putting systems designers in charge of gameplay, they have been draining the value of their IP for the last 10 years.
For games to be successful today, they need popularity. Twitch streamers need to play it. Youtubers need to make "how-tos", and word of mouth is king. Activision drove the final nail in their coffin with the PR nightmare this year. No amount of necromancy (Warcraft Reforged, Classic WoW, Diablo 2) can save the company long term.
Totally Agree. Inspiring games like Horizon Zero Dawn just don't come out of Blizzard anymore.
On the other hand, since the news that he knew about years of sexual harassment at the company the stock has dropped 33%. If "maximising shareholder value" is the only metric for success it seems that making one of your employees kill themselves for failing to tackle a culture of abuse seems like a poor way to do that.
And 100% of that drop (and more?) has been recovered for shareholders by this acquisition.
One could argue that Microsoft would have paid more, and I’m sure some enterprising lawyers will get paid by tricking some shareholders into suing over that, but that’s like arguing with the waves about when high tide is.
Corporations should be about maximizing value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders. Historically the creation of a corporation had to be justified to be in the interest of public good. Anyway I agree.
Kotick got a good run for the shareholders - he's now a liability having had all the sexual harassment under his watch. The sexual harassment/lack of leadership discipline has discounted the sale price of ATVI (microsoft swoops in) - he sticks with firm for a bit during transition to ensure smooth transfer and steps away afterwards. I don't see any other way - he's become a liability especially for a company like Microsoft.
I don’t think this acquisition is about stock value as much as it is about acquiring IP and games for MS game pass offering.
Short term it was increased but how much long term damage was done? Warcraft III Reforged has yet to receive most of the promised features or even a single patch.
I've played World of Warcraft since the first Beta and it's been a great ride, at least up until the last expansion. The news of Microsoft's acquisition has me hopeful for great new MMORPG.
Activision Blizzard is finally being acquired?! Yeah, no wonder, they are not doing well these years.
Wait, it's an all-cash transaction valued at $68.7 billion?! So at least Microsoft believes they are doing well...
Feels like we're getting to the point where this could be anti-competitive.
Even if CoD remains cross platform, if it's free on GamePass well that's a pretty severe competitive edge to the Xbox platform.
Free? Game pass was never free.
> Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard.
Not for long, I bet!
> This acquisition will accelerate the growth in Microsoft’s gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse.
Just like that -- they're in the metaverse!
Can't wait until metaverse will fail to lure gamers. The hype is on par with NFTs, in both vitality and lack of substance.
Don't forget Microsoft also has metaverse for Business and business has a lot of free floating money. This is also also a pie Meta wants a slice of.
>> "to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone, across every device"
Should say "to bring the joy and community of gaming to XBOX AND WINDOWS USERS, across every MICROSOFT device".
If your device runs a somewhat modern browser and you have a reliable internet connection you can just stream from the cloud.
You can now waste your time and money in Windows, Office, Azure and xbox games all with single Live account! Waiting for microsoft to buy junkfood chain and pfizer to complete the experience.
As I just finish my binging of HBO's Succession, I do wonder what the inside conversations leading upto this (+ Blizzards "/cultural issues) would have really liked looked like!
Blizzard defined my childhood with diablo 2, starcraft, and warcraft 3, wow. But even the sequels (SC2, D3) and remakes (D2:R) never recaptured that magic.
Is the blizzard IP actually worth that much these days?
Not happy about this but Blizzard is pretty much done for the foreseeable future. I sure MS money would help revitalise the company on half a decade or so. All I want is StarCraft 3
Damn, Zenimax and Blizzard under the same roof.
Might as well try to sell your PS(whatever) now before there are no games.
However with the DOJ taking more shots at large companies, MS should be worried about this one.
This move is a hedge against Apple and is not about gaming as much as it is about maintaining Windows client side hegemony.
Apple is almost certainly planning to release AR/VR headset in the near future, this raises the question; what hardware is going to be used to power this headset; I'd bet Apple is working on a console like iDevice, or probably more likely an external GPU, that can be used with any Apple device.
Now imagine if Apple decides, admittingly in a very un-Apple like fashion, to allow anyone to run MacOS on their iPads, and iPhones; what that would do to consumer Windows market share.
This primarily establishes a moat against Apple, not Sony, and protects consumer Windows, not Xbox.
I can't imagine anyone losing any sleep over an AR/VR powerplay.
Microsoft also got Kotick to leave.
The cultural integration will be a lot easier than other M&A integrations; everyone at Activision is probably ready to move on from their current culture.
Will the DoJ jump in? Only two gaming consoles in the world and one of it is buying one of the biggest game developer for both platforms. Very good reason for DoJ to jump in
As much as the HN crowd dislikes to hear it, the biggest gaming console in the world is the smartphone. PC Gaming is almost as big as the entire console market, bigger than any individual platform. Any publisher-focused antitruster would have microsoft leaning very hard into those facts.
This is the second big publisher they're buying recently, after Bethesda.
Bethesda is an order of magnitude smaller
Nintendo would like to have a word
The Nintendo Switch waves hi...
Does Nintendo compete with Sony and Microsoft? Their segments are different. They compete with Xbox and PS just like Apple TV and the iPhone apps do, not head on. So yeah only two console companies in that segment of the market.
Does this mean that Blizzard engineers get a FAANG salary now?
No, they'll have to settle for Microsoft pay. Still probably a moderate bump for them, though.
They might create an employee retention fund.
C'mon Microsoft, do a Starcraft 3. Pretty please!
Starcraft 2 is one of the last game I still play with my ("old timer") friends for social interaction in the Covid era.
> Microsoft will acquire Activision Blizzard for $95.00 per share, in an all-cash transaction valued at $68.7 billion, inclusive of Activision Blizzard’s net cash
Dayum. Such cash.
I hope they don't ruin cross-platform COD. It's not without it's quirks but getting friends on PS, PC, and Xbox in the same game has been incredible.
One of those Rare (rip Rare) moments where I want the old Microsoft back that killed off studios left and right. Blizzard needs to be put out of their misery.
> Microsoft will acquire Activision Blizzard for $95.00
And yet the stock stabilized at $83, meaning a lot of people are not sure the purchase will actually go through.
Purely from the perspective of the job market, this move sucks. Before you could get Activision to bid against Blizzard to bid against Microsoft.
I hope incoming reorganization will not kill D4
But is it a good deal?
Wrt Blizzard specifically, where is the amazing company that designed Warcraft, Starcraft, WoW, ...
I find their recent offering ... bland.
I'm just glad I didn't buy a PS5. I'd be worried if I were Sony. Unsurprisingly, their stock is off by 6%...
There is something that amuses me about 'Call of duty, World of Warcraft, overwatch, Diablo, Candy crush'
Here's hoping the Battle.net client doesn't get merged into the abomination that is the XBox gaming app.
This just solidified my position as a hardcore Sony fan. How can I support a gigantic megacorp merger like this?
Even after this acquisition Sony is still the bigger fish in terms of games.
It's basically an IP sell off. None of the good game designers are left which the only thing that matters.
Is this going to mean huge pay bumps for ATVI employees more in line with what Microsoft pays tech employees?
All we need now is a Microsoft VR / Metaverse platform and FB/Meta can finally sink into oblivion.
oh boy. I am happy and crying at the same time. I have an idea where this is going and "vendor lock in" is going to be a hashtag for a long time now.
I am Team X-Box because I just like it much more than the Playstation, buuut at some point we will all pay our MS-Fees like the powerbill.
If anyone has a chance at a legit “metaverse experience” it’s a tech giant who develops video games.
I don't think so. Microsoft development is too entrenched to pull off something that requires so much synergy. Currently I'd say Fortnite and Roblox are serious metaverse contenders, but one that takes the cake will probably be some new viral product made by fresh blood. Microsoft might buy them, though.
If VR/AR is believed to be the forefront of the Metaverse than Microsoft is in the best position to do so with Work into HoloLens (AR) + kinect , numerous IP’s to use to build meta worlds, and the capital to burn.
What’s left to really show they’re going this direction is to release a VR that works on Xbox.
I feel like this buries the lede a little, Microsoft is acquiring Blizzard for 70 billion dollars.
I wonder how much of this was driven by Nadella. MS has made some brilliant purchases recently.
I hope they invest more in the Diablo franchise. It's been a lot of fun on the new Xbox.
Well after all the shit Blizzard have done in the last years, I can imagine it was a bargain.
Dude. Antitrust please stop this.
holy smokes!
now maybe the personnel and HR and abuse can be handled since this is going to be run by a company with adults in the room and we can focus on not abusing people and instead focus on games! Here's to Diablo 4 and maybe a Starcraft 3?!
Hey, at least, all planets are aligned for the Banjo-Kazooie remake by Toys For Bob.
I wonder if this means XBox game pass will at some point include a WOW subscription
I’m excited for what this could mean for undervalued IP like StarCraft and Diablo.
I feel like the larger a developer/publisher becomes, the more mundane their titles are (because they are trying to saturate more global markets).
Diablo 4 being pushed back until Microsoft could oversee its development and release is pretty much a death sentence in my book.
Can't wait for the SC2 servers to run on a single slow VM in the MS cloud...
Still not going to buy anything from the dumpster fire that used to be Blizzard
We gotta break up the monopolies again. These companies are getting tooooo big.
Good. Maybe they can fix WoW.
I wish Apple can also acquire some game studios to produce games on MacOS...
They are long overdue for a break-up. I guess the US elite thinks otherwise.
If you want them to break up you'd first need to get the law changed. There are larger game companies still.
It's an absolute shame Bobby Kotick will continue to function as CEO.
Love the article header image. One of these games is not like the others.
I just deleted my blizzard accounts last week. Looks like perfect timing!
Power law going to power law.
I am sure this will result in better games than if not, lol.
Will Activision drop support for Sony and Nintendo platforms eventually?
Game by Game basis I expect. I doubt they'll pull CoD from Playstation, it would be terrible PR and they can sell a positive in having it for free in GamePass.
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 don't think Gaben will sell... And why would he, he has company he build over the years to do what ever he wants. With very robust income streams just by existing and occasionally releasing crap for Dota 2 and CSGO... Or continuing to sell other peoples games and taking 20-30% cut in process...
Already personally likely making more than enough money for him. I can kinda see point of selling when you want to do something for your dreams, but if company is doing your dreams what is the point.
>I don't think Gaben will sell
He is ex long time employee of Microsoft and if the price is right he would probably sell. But Microsoft's mind is on Xbox/PC, cloud gaming, Xbox pass etc.
Valve is 50% owned by Gabe; you can't buy it without working with him. AB was publicly traded, much easier to buy (up to and including a hostile purchase if necessary).
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?
Can anyone educate me on why I have been -1?
They deserve each other
This makes me even more glad I quit Blizzard Games long ago.
I anticipate some curious bugs for playstation versions.
Am I the only one thinking they paid really too much?
Too bad two evils don't cancel each other out.
aside: what's with the shared URL on this post? dated 1/14 something "_trashed" and redirects to today's release
Lol look at the URL funny :) "__trashed"
Does this mean that Microsoft now owns Infocom IP?
Microsoft continues brute force drive into gaming industry, with zero creativity but outright buying whole gaming companies, and probably locking out competitor out of IPs
I mean with everyone jumping for joy on this news, this is Microsoft's 2022 definition of "Extinguish". It's clever but a reheated version in the 1990s, with a new twist:
1. Buyout the company / developers and they now report to Microsoft.
2. Use a subscription model (game pass) to reduce and undercut the game, SaSS price close to free.
3. Sell the game on other platforms for the RRP.
In the case of software like GitHub, the best tools are now free forever on a near unlimited scalable cloud which many competitors cannot compete with, especially free. Squeezing the competitors to reduce prices and exit entirely. (Extinguish)
OpenAI is next up on this.
This is a good thing. Fools run Activision Blizzard; let MS go in and take over.
Does that mean that MSFT now owns Infocom IP?
Overwatch 2 PC/Xbox exclusive in 2030??
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?
Can anyone educate me on why I have been -1?
Would there be a anti-competitive angle?
Bobby Kotick really wanted to retire.
I mean it can only get better right?
There is nothing so bad that it couldn't be made worse.
Say goodbye to originality in games
Excellent job, MSFT M&A team.
Can't wait for cloud gaming.
Another big boy move. Satya Nadella is a proper CEO. Warms my heart to see someone competent up top at Microsoft again
Curious if WoW's business model will change after this. The whole monthly game time thing is really outdated.
What does this mean? It's outdated if you mean modern games ditch it in favour or more predatory methods such as gambling and pay-2-win micro transactions. It's pretty nice if you're the customer and you want to know up-front what the experience is going to cost (unless the publisher double-dips like Blizzard has started to). Notably FFXIV still uses a monthly subscription.
I wish I owned that stock...
No acquisition of this size should ever be allowed. This is way too much consolidation. Microsoft is buying their way to becoming the #2 or #3 gaming company in the world. They should have to innovate and compete their way to the #2 or #3 gaming company in the world.
Who is going to be able to compete with Xbox Game Pass?
Disney already owns some huge percentage of all entertainment, we just need to wait for them to buy Microsoft's gaming division now.
Based on current market valuations, it seems more likely for Microsoft to be able to buy Disney than the other way round.
Wow, thats the future i am looking forward to.
'You have a choice, you can pick Microsoft or Disney. More options would only confuse you'
Microsofts market cap is 10x disneys. It's more likely that microsoft would buy disney (and perhaps spin off theme parks and cruises).
Or Microsoft to buy Disney, which is probably more likely.
Counterpoint: It's gaming. It is a space with a low barrier to (indie) entry and it is not part of some critical infrastructure. Maybe it is lamentable, but I am not sure antitrust would be my way to go for this.
It will be tough to sell $60 games when you can get the entire library of Microsoft games, plus their partner networks, for $10/month.
Not to mention the potential platform abuses whereby MS can now gate their property behind Windows and Xbox.
And I’m not even that creative. Surely MS will get a return on their $70,000,000,000 investment whether it’s better for the gaming economy and consumers, or not.
The games industry is trying to push $70 MSRP this generation, so I see the savings in Game Pass and potential pressure on standalone pricing to be good.
Given that nearly every popular $60 game now has microtransactions, loot boxes, (paid) season passes, and maybe even (paid) DLC, there's absolutely no reason for the price increase. They're already making buckets of cash (and turning a profit) at the "just $60" price point.
I get this, but this is what bothers me sometimes with these laws, because getting all these games for $10 is better for the consumer, that is why it dominates the market.
Breaking it up just means you end up with a worst product for the consumer and a higher expense.
I think you need to have a longer time horizon. Microsoft cannot justify spending $70B to offer the entire catalog of games for $10/month. They'll use this economic advantage to muscle out the competition and then they'll start adding tiers, raising prices, and other anti-consumer behavior.
This is a common tactic to win public approval for anti-consumer acquisitions. It's always better for there to be more competition, not less.
Self-reply: The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it is. Call of Duty, Minecraft, Warcraft, Doom and TES are under one roof where they were under five (or non-existent) 15 years ago.
Whether or not it's legal, it should not be celebrated.
> It is a space with a low barrier to (indie) entry and it is not part of some critical infrastructure.
How many indie games are there for Xbox?
A lot? Certainly far more than I can ever get to. Even more on PS and PC. Not exactly sure what you're getting at.
and microsoft still takes 30% of their revenue
More than you might think. Manifold Garden is one that comes to mind; if you're looking for them in the online store thing, you can find them, although of course they're not the games with discs and cases at Walmart or Target or wherever.
Microsoft has been championing indie games for three generations now. This was the wrong question for sure.
One counterweight mechanism that might work really well is a higher % tax for these massive organizations - of which then ideally direct that funding to support and fund creativity/competitors, etc. Whether that accounts for and counters all the potential pitfalls of companies with such gravity and power, I don't know?
Disney? it own all the media and franchise IPs like Star Wars, Marvel...etc.
I don’t consider past regulatory failures as a reasonable counter argument to regulating current transactions. I would wholeheartedly supported forcing Disney to divest much of their portfolio.
Along with that perhaps implement rules of integrity - that you can't alter story lines (multiple movie release versions) for various reasons, else you can't earn revenue/profit from democratic-free nations [or at least nations doing their best to working towards understanding the rules necessary for an ideal level of freedom as maxim, e.g. driving on the right side of the road, excessive force for self-defense isn't acceptable, etc]; or perhaps these modified movies act as a Trojan horse library - which can later be proof points to help educate, enlighten their population by showing the contrast - and arguably why they'd want to exclude it.
Idiocracy and Demolition Man were both prophecies
Deeply regretful news.
Should have bought EA
Bye bye Bobby!!
would have preferred if m$ invested that money into new IP's instead of purchasing bloated franchises so that it can sandbox them behind it's paywall.
Cool. Now let’s update anti trust laws so they can be applied much more readily and start enforcing it. A healthy, competitive market that encourages entrepreneurial innovation has no room for these trillion dollar anti-competitive conglomerates.
My name is Grom Hellscream, He/Him.
So now I'm boycotting Microsoft products? What a weird purchase to make. Did they not know this company is the current star of the gaming industry's long-standing workplace harassment issues?
IMHO they new and it probably drove the acquisition. Kotick gets to cash-in an insane amount of money and retire in 6 months - 2 years, MS gets the biggest independent game company out there and sends Sony a(nother) message they won't forget.
Microsoft tries to have an inclusive culture, and generally succeeds far more than their peers. Once Kotick is out I may well end my Blizzard boycott.
"Bobby Kotick will continue to serve as CEO of Activision Blizzard, and he and his team will maintain their focus on driving efforts to further strengthen the company’s culture and accelerate business growth."
I'm expecting/hoping for Microsoft employees to protest his involvement. They have successfully steered Microsoft in the past.
If they fire him after taking over can't they give him less in severance for the many reasons why he is hated?
However, they could also be withholding that until next week so they can get more news out of this acquisition, saying that he (and hopefully a lot of management) is stepping down would make a lot of news on its own, doing it now would muddle it.
I have been boycotting Microsoft since the Halloween documents, and now I have to uninstall Hearthstone from my computer.
Joking aside (I got over my Microsoft hatred when they started to finally embrace Linux and FOSS, YMMV (though I was salty about Nokia ditching Maemo!)), I have a deja vu:
Microsoft + Elop -> Nokia + Elop -> Nokia + Elop = Microsoft.
Microsoft + Ybarra -> Blizzard + Ybarra -> Blizzard + Ibarra = Microsoft.
Sure, I don't mention Kotick. I don't give a shit about Activision's IP, so no problem for me there. Its Blizzard's IP which I like, or perhaps rather, liked. Cause its gone downhill.. ehh.. 'somewhat'.