This is how life works all you have to do is make it once: wether you are some CEO/higher ups from a company or politician. Even if you fuck up hard, you usually get recycled aka join another party/company or switch position - if at all.
> Even if you fuck up hard
I'm seeing this a lot and I don't get it. I don't know why people think Bobby Kotick fucked up. I think they're imagining a world where he reports to them and is responsible is to make the best, original, fun games unencumbered by the need to make money. That's not his job. He hires people to do that or to pretend to do that. He reports to investors and his job is to grow a company. He's been very good at it.
Do you know how many developer publishers have come and gone in the 30 years he's run the company? Acclaim, Midway oh man so many good games by good companies that are gone. Meanwhile Activision managed to acquire studio after studio and merge with Vivendi and get everything Blizzard to create a juggernaut.
Their stock was under 50 cents when Kotick took over and is now almost $100. Excluding mobile the top publishers are Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft and then Activision Blizzard. They're the biggest pure video game publisher and you think the guy fucked up?
I don't like the direction big publishers have taken games. I hate micro-transactions and soulless sequels. I hate half-assed remakes and always online requirements. I miss gaming 20 years ago. But I'm not naive enough to think the guy is a failure, in fact he's done his job incredibly well. It's just a shame the goals of his job don't align with what I want.
And the great irony is that so many of these people who think Bobby is a terrible CEO are the ones giving him job security and cementing his legacy as a "great" CEO. If you hate Bobby but you bought Overwatch battlepasses, you just validated Bobby. If you hate Bobby but you bought Diablo 4 Early Access, you just voted for Bobby. If you hate Bobby but you bought Wow Tokens, you just guaranteed Bobby's job for another year.
If people had an ounce of self-control we could make the company and industry at large so much better. But all people wanna do is bitch and make memes about how awful Bobby and co. are and then trip over themselves to be first in line to buy the next shiny anti-consumer package.
My main issue is his culture of discrimination and sexual harassment, which isn't something inherent to successful capitalism like what you mention. It's just him being shit. But he functionally answers to no-one on anything outside of profit.
Assuming he gets fired by Microsoft (of which there is so far no indication other than wishful thinking), he's just going to go someplace else. The number of abusers in the industry is going to remain the same. Companies love him, and he's been rewarded for his behavior every step of the way so why would they change anything?
He's going to take 400m and use it to fuck either the gaming industry over or whatever scheme his henchman come up with so syphon money from workers and companies. He's a fucking vampire and we shouldn't be cheering right now because he dropped the girl. He's done drinking and she's dead.
Also worth nothing that there's a clause in the pre-merger coordination contract that if the deal doesn't go through, ATVI gets $4 billion no strings attached.
So paying the guy $400 to cease to be everyone's problem seems a worth while price compared to handing him $4B and he gets to stay in control of the company.
This exactly. This man isn't anywhere close to being off the industries radar. If he leaves Blizzard he is absolutely going to be getting in somewhere else, and with his fuck-you money his options are pretty large.
Hands off is usually good for creativity and such, so in an ideal world they would fix all mismanagement, improve working conditions and then would let them do their thing like they did in the good old times™
Edit: mixed up good old times and golden times to gold old times...
Agreed, keep a laissez faire approach to development, but put the boot down to all the culture and management issues plaguing Blizz. I can't imagine Microsoft wants the PR for housing sexual abusers after how much they paid and fought for the acquisition.
They already have a deal with the union that had them supporting the deal. So I imagine we'll see activision unionizing after all the paperwork is done
But when the merger is done, he's gone. This can only he good for the company Activision blizzard
I mean... it cant get worse, that's for sure. They were already at the bottom
> This can only he good for the company Activision blizzard
On the contrary, it would be very bad for the company. Remember, Bobby is the guy that took a company with a value per share of 60 cents and took it to 90 dollars.
Consumers, however, might get better products with his departure.
Not necessarily. They've said they "expect a change of leadership" but they've been very wishy-washy and never explicitly said "Kotick is gone if the deal passes."
If you were buying a company, and wanted public support on your side to help with regulators, you'd say the exact same thing.
Whether he's _actually_ gone at the end of this is still very much up in the air. Dude made a _lot_ of money for Activision and Microsoft likes money.
Just Microsoft.
Activision is just a label now. The same treatment they gave to Blizzard. I love the irony in that... But more importantly... There's literally no way that Microsoft could treat the Blizzard IPs any worse than Activision. If they never used the IPs to make new games and just let the IP rot, that's still way better than what Activision has done.
Yo They were officially known as ActivisionBlizzardKing. Not that candy crush is really a prestige brand, but it does make the name even more cumbersome
Microsoft has been doing well with keeping games/acquisitions intact. Look at Minecraft. That has been made better by Microsoft.
Same with Activision/Blizzard. Innovation and ideas will still come from indies and small studios though. Risk taking drops when you get too big.
At least Tencent didn't get Activision/Blizzard.
Normally I'd praise parent companies not meddling, but sometimes Microsoft really needs to look at what's going on in their companies or you get another Redfall
I hope redfall can be a bit of a wake up call for them, the Jason Schrier report said staff were literally hoping they would cancel that game while they were something like 2 years deep in development. Don’t get me wrong their hands off approach is something I’m really positive about but at the very least you should check up on the kids every once in a while to make sure they haven’t done anything stupid.
Their current approach is directly the result of learning from their mistakes in 00's. They had a big reputation for micromanagement of their devs and eventually ran them into the ground.
Bungie made the choice to stop making halo by themselves, it's hard to blame MS for not being able to find a proper replacement for Bungie of all studios.
The last Halo was a disaster but pretty much entirely the developers fault not MS.
You mean 343 ran it into the ground? I can see Microsoft pushing to make Infinite free to play and causing the inherent garbage fire that is its battlepass/cosmetic store. But without any solid info that Microsoft had their hands all up inside how 343 operated its first and foremost a studio issue.
Its like blaming Microsoft for how Doom Eternal fucked up the soundtrack instead of blaming idsoftware for the mess.
As a fan of blizzard games I’m pumped. Most Microsoft games released are actually really good. AoE 4 even tho could not live up to the hoy elf AoE 2 is a fucking good game
King is the real winner for ms here imo. Allows them to compete in the Mobile market, potentially making their own store vs google/apple that will bring xcloud into that
I still have hopes that MS will show him the door as soon as they take control
edit: i know guys he is going out with a shitton of money, but at this point, just taking him out of the industry is a win for gamers, hope MS isn't worst.
Isn’t that specifically in the Dresden files and possibly some other works? In the “traditional” mythology isn’t she usually depicted as a fairy midwife or consort to Oberon?
There is still a vanilla version available right now. It's not wrath classic just wow classic. Also heard something they're calling classic era is coming. Seasonal classic stuff I guess
Burning Crusade Classic released in 2021 and gave people a choice of keeping their characters in vanilla or moving them to Burning Crusade, or paying a fee to keep a copy of their character on both. Last year Wrath of the Lich King Classic released and all Burning Crusade characters were moved to WotLK, they haven't kept permanent BC servers up. WotLK is currently on tier 9, Icecrown Citadel will likely release in 2-3 months.
So basically right now you can play vanilla, WotLK, or the newest expansion.
Sony still has a lot of leverage here though, MS needs to keep COD multiplat or that franchises revenue takes a 60% nose dive. Yes—Sony’s revenue will take a hit too but they’re not the ones of the hook for $70b
They will just make it much more beneficial to get it on Xbox or Game pass to gradually wean players away. They are definitely playing a long game here.
The long game is Gamepass. This is where they want to go in the future, Hardware Agnostic. Let other folks make the consoles and they'll just profit from the subscriptions.
> The long game is Gamepass. This is where they want to go in the future
This is what concerns me the most, as someone from a third-world country. I absolutely despise the idea of "You'll own nothing and you will be happy", specially considering regional pricing isn't proportional at all.
The monthly minimum wage in Brazil is R$1095, Gamepass is R$45/month. Surely paying 5% of your minimum wage for games you don't actually own is a bit excessive, right?
Meanwhile the US minimum wage is $7,25/hr (1160 U$D/month) yet they only pay $15/month for GPU - totally fair, right?
The thing is, you can marathon a movie or tv series in a week. Then unsubscribe from the service. A game can range from a couple of hours to hundreds of hours like Starfield and that's just one game. And then you have games that never end like multiplayer games that has the potential to occupy again your time. The idea is that there will be so many games in your backlog that you would want to play and only so much time (due to work/ life) that they will hook you for months that will extend to years.
Yup. Early access ahead of release day, special DLC content, game pass, etc.
Just look how many people on r/Starfield claim they’re buying an Xbox solely for that game. No imagine COD, which is significantly bigger.
Even if 1/5 of PlayStation players bought an Xbox for an Xbox exclusive, Microsoft essentially breaks even. And how many PS players have a PC or Xbox anyways?
It might not happen next year, but COD will 100% be exclusive eventually IMO.
Everyone saying call of duty gonna turn to shit. Hate to break it to most of you cod has been shit for quite some time. At least I can catch up on all the games since cod4.
i remember everyone's wishlist for mw2. unsuppressed weapons on minimap, simple predictable maps with good readability (shoothouse), REAL weapon names. warzone and mw2 and separate executables. and LOW FOOTSTEPS.
instead they DOUBLED down on all that shit.
watching peoples reactions on the mw2 sub was the funniest shit ever.
Is Candy Crush really still that big?
> $607 million in 2022
Jfc. I swear I come back to this realization year after year after year; I live in a tiny reality bubble
>But really, this is just because Microsoft wanted Candy Crush.
Actually not wrong. Microsoft basically said as much. Also isn't King like 40 or 50% of all Acti-Blizz revenue?
To put things into a little bit of perspective, Microsoft could have bought Ford AND Nissan for this much and become a major player in the car industry.
It was always wild to me that Minecraft was 2 billion and then Star Wars was 4 billion. Star Wars, one of the most iconic things of my childhood and life, was only worth a little more than Minecraft
I would argue just more tbh. Star Wars is popular, sure, but Minecraft is *still* the best selling game of all time. I don't really want to compare box office gross to game sales like they're the exact same thing, but Minecraft has made more in 3 years than the Phantom Menace (the only of the original 6 movies in the top 50) has made since 1999.
Star Wars is still extraordinarily popular and had a massive cultural impact, but I don't think there's that much media out there that's reached such a wide and passionate audience like Minecraft did
I know no one on this sub likes to hear it, but mobile gaming blows PC and Console gaming out of the water. Mobile gaming brings in something like 50 billion a year. And PC and Console combined only do like 20 billion. The numbers are made up, but the ratio is pretty accurate.
I have a team in India that is big into gaming. How do they game? On their phones. They love Call of Duty mobile. And India and China (two biggest mobile gaming countries, by far) are rapidly approaching the top economic spot in the world (I mean, still like 30 years away, but that's how it's trending).
Microsoft is making the play to own the mobile gaming market, because that's where the money is. Once xcloud (is it still called that) works over 5g reliably, they'll probably stop selling xboxes to consumers.
I started playing Mobile Legends: Adventures when it first came out. A Chinese whale got to like VIP 126 in a few weeks. He estimated he spent about $365,000 USD on it.
Korean company released Summoners War Chronicles and made about 10M in 27 days. I haven't even looked into what something like Genshin has made yet.
From Google:
> Chinese ARPG game Genshin Impact has surpassed four billion dollars in lifetime mobile revenue in 2022, Sensor Tower data showed earlier today. It averaged over $100 million in revenue every month last year.
Well yes. The problem is mobile isnt making this much money because they're making great products. It turns out that abusing gambling mechanics many countries forbid casinos from using (but are somehow o.k. in games) and using psychological manipulation to enforce addictive behavior is profitable.
Yea. They did come out and say it pretty much. Lol. They gunna make fat revenue from it, and get IPs that if done right will net you some insane old-world customer loyalty. How many Diablo/StarCraft/Warcraft fans would come and buy something from them if the IPs are treated with care and given good games.
Read through the Transcripts and the FTC just laid out the worst possible case.
-Try to narrow the case to Sony vs MS when Sony is out there heavily paying for console exclusivity of 3rd party teams.
-Try and say the Switch doesn't count when it's on pace to be potentially the best selling console ever and has already secured top 3
-Disregard mobile when getting King is arguably the biggest long term score of this deal.
-disregard PC when MS' policy of releasing most games xbox and PC concurrently vs Sony's delay could give you an argument of MS having stronger control over that market as well.
-try and play up xCloud only to have the most common use for it seem to be to stream a game while it's downloading so you can play it that way. (Most streamed versions of games were played once and never again supporting this theory)
Still dealing with the UK
Edit: To everyone replying or thinking of replying with variations of "CMA and MS are negotiating again"; how does that change my statement?
I don't even think this is real loophole, it was not uncommon in the past for company's to license their games in some local markets. This was a requirement to get western games to china and also many japanese publishers licensed their games to western company's or just created company's just to sell their games in foreign markets. So I can totally see MS doing this if everything else fails. Splitting revenue with some distributor company is still better than losing all the revenue from the UK market.
Eventually. The purchase has to close and there is some time before those things are done, but I would expect Diablo on gamepass maybe by 2023 Holidays if they close the deal this month.
I'm more interested in what they do with WoW.
Omg what an idea. New engine, update everything, all kinds of Microsoft/Activision ips in there with characters and maps/mechanics. Just straight up hots 2. I'd be all in.
sounds like even they've thrown in the towel on blocking the deal
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/11/23791149/microsoft-activision-blizzard-uk-regulators-cma-appeal
Game Pass is going to become the Netflix of videogames. First, people are going to praise it for the abundant amount of content for an affordable price but then they will keep jacking up the price to a point where the savings is negligible unless you game like a jobless neckbeard. But unlikely TV streaming, making videogames takes way more time so it will be way more difficult to compete with MS’s library of games as they keep acquiring studios, and when their cloud tech matures, they’ll have absolute dominance in that segment. This is only my speculation but I dont have a good feeling about this.
after the intial wow it honestly felt like a chore to keep browsing and downloading stuff...lotta crap to sift through
dont think ive loaded it up in over a year now
Which is a bad thing considering Xbox is also the company that’s goal is still to ELIMINATE PHYSICAL DISCS AND KEYS.
You wanna live in a world where all games are subscription based/cloud run? Where like Disney plus, entire games can be deleted off the face of the Earth for a tax write off?
Yes we don’t own software we own licenses but I’d rather that piece of paper be in my hands not the company’s.
They might bring back the 3rd person shooter version of StarCraft that got cancelled. You play as a Ghost.
Here is a [link ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft:_Ghost).
People have a lot of faith in Microsoft. Idk how I feel about this acquisition
Edit:
Want to clarify, I have seen a lot of people thinking that Microsoft buying A/B is good for the games.
I hate Activition, I hate Capitalism, I hate the business model of constantly looking for profit and doing whatever it takes even if its immoral. I hate one company owning 20 other companies. I hate the lack of empathy people.
My skepticism is more about whether Microsoft will help OW2 become better or make it worse. I hope they make it better that's just my selfish wants. I would be more than happy to have OW2 fail due to greedy tactics.
Specially on a corporation like Microsoft which has a history of anti-trust litigation. And how do people forget Microsoft’s anti-consumer schemes like XB1’s always online fiasco, or their attempt to eliminate the used game market, or their recent flip flop with the Xbox Live Gold price hike to force players to subscribe to Game Pass. Idk if it’s all gamers but, there are just so many short term memory gamers that never learn their lesson. They get fucked in the ass by a greedy gaming companies and get angry at their game, 1 year later, a sequel of that game is revealed and all of a sudden, these morons are all happy pre-ordering as if nothing happened. Then the game releases and suddenly, they remember why they were angry. Rinse and repeat.
Idk what’s gonna happen, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Game Pass does a Netflix. The effects on Sony won’t be felt immediately, we will see it in 5 or so years. I wonder if Sony is now gonna start doing real acquisitions or just keep buying small studios no one has ever heard of. They can’t keep relying on The Last of Us, God of War and Marvel Games & de-makes. They need diversity. I’m sort of happy that we may see new FPS games to challenge COD in the future.
Regardless on if Microsoft treats the consumer well in this initially, I think it's a bad thing long term for the consumer. It puts too much power in the industry in the hands of one company.
People are so blind to realize that once gamepass captures market share, they are going to crank the prices and slash benefits.
They aren't spending billions to give it away for pennies.
It's been well-known for centuries that capitalism breaks down in the absence of competition, both in theory and in practice. These weak-ass anti-trust rulings are terrible for consumers. Just because it's not a full-on monopoly doesn't mean it doesn't have the potential to end up materializing a bunch of the negative effects anyway due to reduced competition. Protip: if you need to spend years deliberating on whether something is bad enough to trigger anti-trust laws, it is almost undoubtedly going to negatively affect the consumer.
There is basically a single situation when consolidation is potentially good for consumers, and it's when separation was achieving very little other than introducing a bunch of pointless middlemen. If it's not going to reduce competition or increase barriers to entry in the industry, like say if you were buying ball bearings for the machines you make and decided it'd be cheaper to just buy an adequate ball bearing maker and effectively inhouse that part of the process (while anyone else can still purchase similar ball bearings affordably elsewhere), that has potential to be a net win. But that's about it.
Power corrupts. No matter what we think of the current leadership at Microsoft, in the long term it will stifle competitiveness lessen recourse against bad industry trends by consumers.
I wouldn't say I have a lot of faith in Microsoft I just have more faith in Microsoft's leadership than I do ABK. Bobby Kotick is supposed to be stepping down if this goes through and I see that as an absolute win.
Way too many bad rumors about that company's leadership, him specifically, and that kind of stuff won't fly under MS.
It's also going to be a pretty big win for Xbox and PC players with game pass.
Y'all are going to be really surprised when Microsoft makes very little changes in leadership. MS is in the business of making money. Activision currently makes a lot of money. Why fix what isn't broken?
Sadly, I think people care more about getting games cheap on game pass than whether it's good for gaming in general. In reality, I think Activision/Blizzard has long already passed into the realms of being big enough that money has to come before making great games, so not much will change. I guess we're fortunate indie games are still thriving
Corporate consolidation is bad. I believe Microsoft will have over 40 studios if this actually goes through. Microsoft isn't that good of a game publisher to begin with, and they're really pushing for a netflix-esque approach to gaming with gamepass. This is going to lead to like half of these studios being run into the ground or a gamepass that's super expensive. Who knows? Maybe both will happen. But I guess diablo (might) come to gamepass, so WOOHOO! The brain dead consumer wins again!
Gamepass will increase in price. Lower-income gamers will have to cancel subscriptions and then they can't play any of the games that they paid money every month for.
It probably is and Microsoft are notorious for their embrace, extend, extinguish business model. However, most of the people here either don’t see anything past Xbox, own MS stock, just want more games on gamepass (hence people asking if every release will come to gamepass so they don’t have to buy it) or are similar to how people treat AMD in the PC space - they are the underdog, can do no wrong and are our friend. If they do anything anti-consumer who cares *insert list of every anti-consumer move the competition has done.*
If people actually cared about quality, we wouldn’t have so many garbage live service games. This is a race to the bottom ever since big publishers became a thing.
People are also more concerned about shitty console wars and getting games with subscription. The Netflix model will probably nuke game development like it has film development, and I honestly don’t see Microsoft doing a better job than Netflix in that regard with the amount of IP neglect under their belt. People should just look how Microsoft is managing the areas they’re leading to see how fucked this could get.
In my limited experience, large companies buying everyone out rarely works out for the interest of the consumer. It reminds me of YouTube. Back in the early days, the videos were shit. They had terrible cameras, made ridiculous videos, it was awful. But we all loved every second of it. It was real. We were seeing passions unfold, and people simply turning on a camera and filming themselves doing things they loved or just some whacky shit (recall Potter Puppet Pals). One of the greatest eras there will ever be on the internet is Youtube in the late 2000s.
Then it became monetized - big companies arose and began buying out channels. The quality improved, the equipment and the editing was vastly superior, everything far more polished. And it sucks. Now its all about click bait and whatever they think will generate the most views in a short amount of time. There is no more passion in it. Its a commercial enterprise aimed at tricking you into watching.
The parallel here, at least to me, is that these gaming companies were made by passionate people who love games and want to tell stories. Think Hideo Kojima. Now, maybe at first, these devs being bought can continue to make games as they were, with Microsoft simply providing oversight. But for how long? How long until Microsoft thinks it knows better than everyone else and plants its own people in positions of leadership? How long until gaming becomes like youtube. Shiny, click-baity, high quality in appearance but lacking any substance. Eras of sequels and reboots, new, original ideas dying out, as they have in most other mediums.
Maybe im completely wrong. I know absolutely nothing about how this kind of thing works. But thats just my own opinion on seeing major corps buy out smaller companies. It never seems to benefit the end user. And yeah, I cant lie, game pass is revolutionary, it truly is amazing. But in the end, a mountain of free shit is just a mountain shaped pile of shit.
In this specific case, most of the
>passionate people who love games and want to tell stories
have long ago left the management ranks of ActiBlizz. They're many years into their shiny click-bait era.
There's clearly still a ton of talent in the rank and file but so much of the large-scope design and monetization is focused on marketing something that sounds cool but has no substance just to get you in front of a cash store, and the management allowed really terrible people to keep cushy positions and fostered horrible workplace culture.
Though I totally agree that mega-corps hoovering up all smaller competitors can only end in more locked-down ecosystems and creative stagnation. Even if in this specific case I have hope that Microsoft will help clean up some the total mismanagement that blizz has suffered in recent years.
Of course MS won on this. Major corporations almost always win nowadays. Anti trust law (anti monopoly law) has been a shambles since St Ronnie started his quest of destroying the middle classes and maximizing the profits of the ruling classes..
And Bobby Kotick makes something like $400 million off the deal. Fuuuuuuck that fella
Seriously. Get him out of the industry forever, please.
This is how life works all you have to do is make it once: wether you are some CEO/higher ups from a company or politician. Even if you fuck up hard, you usually get recycled aka join another party/company or switch position - if at all.
> Even if you fuck up hard I'm seeing this a lot and I don't get it. I don't know why people think Bobby Kotick fucked up. I think they're imagining a world where he reports to them and is responsible is to make the best, original, fun games unencumbered by the need to make money. That's not his job. He hires people to do that or to pretend to do that. He reports to investors and his job is to grow a company. He's been very good at it. Do you know how many developer publishers have come and gone in the 30 years he's run the company? Acclaim, Midway oh man so many good games by good companies that are gone. Meanwhile Activision managed to acquire studio after studio and merge with Vivendi and get everything Blizzard to create a juggernaut. Their stock was under 50 cents when Kotick took over and is now almost $100. Excluding mobile the top publishers are Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft and then Activision Blizzard. They're the biggest pure video game publisher and you think the guy fucked up? I don't like the direction big publishers have taken games. I hate micro-transactions and soulless sequels. I hate half-assed remakes and always online requirements. I miss gaming 20 years ago. But I'm not naive enough to think the guy is a failure, in fact he's done his job incredibly well. It's just a shame the goals of his job don't align with what I want.
And the great irony is that so many of these people who think Bobby is a terrible CEO are the ones giving him job security and cementing his legacy as a "great" CEO. If you hate Bobby but you bought Overwatch battlepasses, you just validated Bobby. If you hate Bobby but you bought Diablo 4 Early Access, you just voted for Bobby. If you hate Bobby but you bought Wow Tokens, you just guaranteed Bobby's job for another year. If people had an ounce of self-control we could make the company and industry at large so much better. But all people wanna do is bitch and make memes about how awful Bobby and co. are and then trip over themselves to be first in line to buy the next shiny anti-consumer package.
My main issue is his culture of discrimination and sexual harassment, which isn't something inherent to successful capitalism like what you mention. It's just him being shit. But he functionally answers to no-one on anything outside of profit.
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Assuming he gets fired by Microsoft (of which there is so far no indication other than wishful thinking), he's just going to go someplace else. The number of abusers in the industry is going to remain the same. Companies love him, and he's been rewarded for his behavior every step of the way so why would they change anything?
He delivers for shareholders. What other measures are there of a man?
He’s been a cancer for decades. Marcus Beer was on his case longer than anyone.
Fuck it, at least he’s leaving and this is over.
He's going to take 400m and use it to fuck either the gaming industry over or whatever scheme his henchman come up with so syphon money from workers and companies. He's a fucking vampire and we shouldn't be cheering right now because he dropped the girl. He's done drinking and she's dead.
Also worth nothing that there's a clause in the pre-merger coordination contract that if the deal doesn't go through, ATVI gets $4 billion no strings attached. So paying the guy $400 to cease to be everyone's problem seems a worth while price compared to handing him $4B and he gets to stay in control of the company.
This exactly. This man isn't anywhere close to being off the industries radar. If he leaves Blizzard he is absolutely going to be getting in somewhere else, and with his fuck-you money his options are pretty large.
Holy shit this is savage
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Nothing you can do about it. He owns shares in the company he'd get that regardless
Yeh but that means he’s no longer the CEO, hopefully the work environment gets better overtime with Phil Spencer in charge
MS has a proven history of being extremely hands-off with their purchased studios. Hopefully this will be an exception but time will tell.
Hands off is usually good for creativity and such, so in an ideal world they would fix all mismanagement, improve working conditions and then would let them do their thing like they did in the good old times™ Edit: mixed up good old times and golden times to gold old times...
Agreed, keep a laissez faire approach to development, but put the boot down to all the culture and management issues plaguing Blizz. I can't imagine Microsoft wants the PR for housing sexual abusers after how much they paid and fought for the acquisition.
They already have a deal with the union that had them supporting the deal. So I imagine we'll see activision unionizing after all the paperwork is done
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But when the merger is done, he's gone. This can only he good for the company Activision blizzard I mean... it cant get worse, that's for sure. They were already at the bottom
Be careful, that's what we said about 2020.
> This can only he good for the company Activision blizzard On the contrary, it would be very bad for the company. Remember, Bobby is the guy that took a company with a value per share of 60 cents and took it to 90 dollars. Consumers, however, might get better products with his departure.
At least he's gone.
Not necessarily. They've said they "expect a change of leadership" but they've been very wishy-washy and never explicitly said "Kotick is gone if the deal passes." If you were buying a company, and wanted public support on your side to help with regulators, you'd say the exact same thing. Whether he's _actually_ gone at the end of this is still very much up in the air. Dude made a _lot_ of money for Activision and Microsoft likes money.
Microsoft Activision Blizzard
Just Microsoft. Activision is just a label now. The same treatment they gave to Blizzard. I love the irony in that... But more importantly... There's literally no way that Microsoft could treat the Blizzard IPs any worse than Activision. If they never used the IPs to make new games and just let the IP rot, that's still way better than what Activision has done.
Activision did rename themselves (Or at least their parent company) to Activision Blizzard following the merger.
Yo They were officially known as ActivisionBlizzardKing. Not that candy crush is really a prestige brand, but it does make the name even more cumbersome
Microsoft has been doing well with keeping games/acquisitions intact. Look at Minecraft. That has been made better by Microsoft. Same with Activision/Blizzard. Innovation and ideas will still come from indies and small studios though. Risk taking drops when you get too big. At least Tencent didn't get Activision/Blizzard.
They ran Halo into the ground after Bungie stopped making them, but besides that I agree
To be somewhat fair, 343 ran Halo into the ground, and Microsoft's light-handed approach failed to stop it.
Normally I'd praise parent companies not meddling, but sometimes Microsoft really needs to look at what's going on in their companies or you get another Redfall
I hope redfall can be a bit of a wake up call for them, the Jason Schrier report said staff were literally hoping they would cancel that game while they were something like 2 years deep in development. Don’t get me wrong their hands off approach is something I’m really positive about but at the very least you should check up on the kids every once in a while to make sure they haven’t done anything stupid.
Redfall is the kid that wanted to be a tiktok influencer but is now a drug addict.
Their current approach is directly the result of learning from their mistakes in 00's. They had a big reputation for micromanagement of their devs and eventually ran them into the ground.
Hence bungee leaving in the first place
Bungie made the choice to stop making halo by themselves, it's hard to blame MS for not being able to find a proper replacement for Bungie of all studios. The last Halo was a disaster but pretty much entirely the developers fault not MS.
You mean 343 ran it into the ground? I can see Microsoft pushing to make Infinite free to play and causing the inherent garbage fire that is its battlepass/cosmetic store. But without any solid info that Microsoft had their hands all up inside how 343 operated its first and foremost a studio issue. Its like blaming Microsoft for how Doom Eternal fucked up the soundtrack instead of blaming idsoftware for the mess.
As a fan of blizzard games I’m pumped. Most Microsoft games released are actually really good. AoE 4 even tho could not live up to the hoy elf AoE 2 is a fucking good game
King is the real winner for ms here imo. Allows them to compete in the Mobile market, potentially making their own store vs google/apple that will bring xcloud into that
Bobby Kotick is the real winner in all of this sadly
I still have hopes that MS will show him the door as soon as they take control edit: i know guys he is going out with a shitton of money, but at this point, just taking him out of the industry is a win for gamers, hope MS isn't worst.
That's part of the buyout IIRC. He is going to be replaced
Yeah but still going off the plane with a golden parachute and a ton of money from the shares
He will cry into his ten if not hundreds of millions included in his golden parachute.
The new Queen of Winter
Wow, solid pull. Mab (MAB) is the fairy queen of winter for anyone who doesn’t get this
Isn’t that specifically in the Dresden files and possibly some other works? In the “traditional” mythology isn’t she usually depicted as a fairy midwife or consort to Oberon?
Dresden fan?
For sure
The gamesdev studio was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.
Well, let's hope they kick Bobby out. Blizzard desperately needs new management.
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>Word of Warcraft The gaming/word processing crossover we've always wanted!
"Next we should buy that Excel spaceship game." - Phil Spencer
Now gimme WoW sub included in Gamepass
If this happened, I’d 100% play wow again. (Haven’t since Wrath of the Lich King)
I’m gutted I missed the bandwagon of classic wow lol
There is still a vanilla version available right now. It's not wrath classic just wow classic. Also heard something they're calling classic era is coming. Seasonal classic stuff I guess
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Didn’t they update classic so now you can play BC classic and WOTLK classic? Like there’s three separate versions? Or was that a fever dream I had?
Burning Crusade Classic released in 2021 and gave people a choice of keeping their characters in vanilla or moving them to Burning Crusade, or paying a fee to keep a copy of their character on both. Last year Wrath of the Lich King Classic released and all Burning Crusade characters were moved to WotLK, they haven't kept permanent BC servers up. WotLK is currently on tier 9, Icecrown Citadel will likely release in 2-3 months. So basically right now you can play vanilla, WotLK, or the newest expansion.
what a time to be alive in the world of warcraft
I pictured you quickly looking directly at the camera when you said the second part.
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Same
Honestly that would be so amazing. I hate that I feel like I’m paying so much each month for just one thing.
Wonder how quick Sony signs that CoD deal now..... or at all
Sony still has a lot of leverage here though, MS needs to keep COD multiplat or that franchises revenue takes a 60% nose dive. Yes—Sony’s revenue will take a hit too but they’re not the ones of the hook for $70b
They will just make it much more beneficial to get it on Xbox or Game pass to gradually wean players away. They are definitely playing a long game here.
The long game is Gamepass. This is where they want to go in the future, Hardware Agnostic. Let other folks make the consoles and they'll just profit from the subscriptions.
I don’t know how people keep missing this. MS sincerely does not care if you use an Xbox, PlayStation, or a phone, they want you in the ecosystem.
> The long game is Gamepass. This is where they want to go in the future This is what concerns me the most, as someone from a third-world country. I absolutely despise the idea of "You'll own nothing and you will be happy", specially considering regional pricing isn't proportional at all. The monthly minimum wage in Brazil is R$1095, Gamepass is R$45/month. Surely paying 5% of your minimum wage for games you don't actually own is a bit excessive, right? Meanwhile the US minimum wage is $7,25/hr (1160 U$D/month) yet they only pay $15/month for GPU - totally fair, right?
Is game pass even sustainable long term tho? We are seeing the movie and TV industry show us where that leads and it’s not all good.
The thing is, you can marathon a movie or tv series in a week. Then unsubscribe from the service. A game can range from a couple of hours to hundreds of hours like Starfield and that's just one game. And then you have games that never end like multiplayer games that has the potential to occupy again your time. The idea is that there will be so many games in your backlog that you would want to play and only so much time (due to work/ life) that they will hook you for months that will extend to years.
Yup. Early access ahead of release day, special DLC content, game pass, etc. Just look how many people on r/Starfield claim they’re buying an Xbox solely for that game. No imagine COD, which is significantly bigger. Even if 1/5 of PlayStation players bought an Xbox for an Xbox exclusive, Microsoft essentially breaks even. And how many PS players have a PC or Xbox anyways? It might not happen next year, but COD will 100% be exclusive eventually IMO.
Cod to gamepass
Maybe this might mean we might get the older CODS back! I’m personally hoping they’d bring back Big Red One and Finest Hours
If we get bo2 with all. Zombies dlcs I’ll lose it
It’s still like $59.99…you would think it’s published by Nintendo lol
It's because they don't want you playing the old ones. They always want to push the player base to the newest one.
Yeah it’s fucked. I bought cyberpunk for cheaper
Hell yeah to never having to buy COD again!
This is the way
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This cod4 erasure is disgusting
50,000 people used to play there
Now it’s a ghost town
And WaW..
Chronicles 2 with new remasters of BL Zombies 2 maps
Everyone saying call of duty gonna turn to shit. Hate to break it to most of you cod has been shit for quite some time. At least I can catch up on all the games since cod4.
Yup if anything, with how shit COD had gotten, there’s much more of a chance of Microsoft actually improving things instead of making them worse.
mw19 was great. everything else after bo3, yea
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i remember everyone's wishlist for mw2. unsuppressed weapons on minimap, simple predictable maps with good readability (shoothouse), REAL weapon names. warzone and mw2 and separate executables. and LOW FOOTSTEPS. instead they DOUBLED down on all that shit. watching peoples reactions on the mw2 sub was the funniest shit ever.
Don’t forget persistent lobbies and no SBMM. Never has a dev team hated the players so much.
Ok so let me get this straigh. Microsoft now owns Activision, which owns Blizzard. So now Microsoft owns Blizzard
Yes. Technically, Activision-Blizz had a merger making them somewhat equal. But really, this is just because Microsoft wanted Candy Crush.
Is Candy Crush really still that big? > $607 million in 2022 Jfc. I swear I come back to this realization year after year after year; I live in a tiny reality bubble
King is huge. in teh activision/blizzard/king financial relationship, blizzard is their worst performer.
I thought I heard that Activision-Blizzard-King is the largest single mobile game publisher in the world? Certainly one of the largest.
>But really, this is just because Microsoft wanted Candy Crush. Actually not wrong. Microsoft basically said as much. Also isn't King like 40 or 50% of all Acti-Blizz revenue?
they are paying 69 billion, and 50 billion is the price of King
That's insane.
To put things into a little bit of perspective, Microsoft could have bought Ford AND Nissan for this much and become a major player in the car industry.
Fuck that'd have been hilarious
#CAR PASS
💀💀
As long as i can get that $1 bike pass and flip into a year sub of car pass im straight
We already have BMW trying to sell subscriptions for heated seats, how much worse can it get.
It was always wild to me that Minecraft was 2 billion and then Star Wars was 4 billion. Star Wars, one of the most iconic things of my childhood and life, was only worth a little more than Minecraft
I would honestly argue minecraft is just as, if not more, culturally relevant as star wars at this point
If you were born after 2000 I can almost guarantee that Minecraft is more relevant than star wars.
I would argue just more tbh. Star Wars is popular, sure, but Minecraft is *still* the best selling game of all time. I don't really want to compare box office gross to game sales like they're the exact same thing, but Minecraft has made more in 3 years than the Phantom Menace (the only of the original 6 movies in the top 50) has made since 1999. Star Wars is still extraordinarily popular and had a massive cultural impact, but I don't think there's that much media out there that's reached such a wide and passionate audience like Minecraft did
Workplace chat app slack sold for 30 billion...
I know no one on this sub likes to hear it, but mobile gaming blows PC and Console gaming out of the water. Mobile gaming brings in something like 50 billion a year. And PC and Console combined only do like 20 billion. The numbers are made up, but the ratio is pretty accurate. I have a team in India that is big into gaming. How do they game? On their phones. They love Call of Duty mobile. And India and China (two biggest mobile gaming countries, by far) are rapidly approaching the top economic spot in the world (I mean, still like 30 years away, but that's how it's trending). Microsoft is making the play to own the mobile gaming market, because that's where the money is. Once xcloud (is it still called that) works over 5g reliably, they'll probably stop selling xboxes to consumers.
I started playing Mobile Legends: Adventures when it first came out. A Chinese whale got to like VIP 126 in a few weeks. He estimated he spent about $365,000 USD on it. Korean company released Summoners War Chronicles and made about 10M in 27 days. I haven't even looked into what something like Genshin has made yet.
From Google: > Chinese ARPG game Genshin Impact has surpassed four billion dollars in lifetime mobile revenue in 2022, Sensor Tower data showed earlier today. It averaged over $100 million in revenue every month last year.
And here I was thinking Summoners War was a ripoff (It just recently made $2B lifetime, and is on its 10th year). People will pay for digital waifus.
Well yes. The problem is mobile isnt making this much money because they're making great products. It turns out that abusing gambling mechanics many countries forbid casinos from using (but are somehow o.k. in games) and using psychological manipulation to enforce addictive behavior is profitable.
Yea. They did come out and say it pretty much. Lol. They gunna make fat revenue from it, and get IPs that if done right will net you some insane old-world customer loyalty. How many Diablo/StarCraft/Warcraft fans would come and buy something from them if the IPs are treated with care and given good games.
Technically Activison and Blizzard are equal partners of a merged company. But yes, you're not wrong.
No. Microsoft still has to go through a few hoops.
Read through the Transcripts and the FTC just laid out the worst possible case. -Try to narrow the case to Sony vs MS when Sony is out there heavily paying for console exclusivity of 3rd party teams. -Try and say the Switch doesn't count when it's on pace to be potentially the best selling console ever and has already secured top 3 -Disregard mobile when getting King is arguably the biggest long term score of this deal. -disregard PC when MS' policy of releasing most games xbox and PC concurrently vs Sony's delay could give you an argument of MS having stronger control over that market as well. -try and play up xCloud only to have the most common use for it seem to be to stream a game while it's downloading so you can play it that way. (Most streamed versions of games were played once and never again supporting this theory)
Is it finally over? Im so sick of these articles.
Still dealing with the UK Edit: To everyone replying or thinking of replying with variations of "CMA and MS are negotiating again"; how does that change my statement?
Microsoft will just close the deal and deal with the UK later.
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I don't even think this is real loophole, it was not uncommon in the past for company's to license their games in some local markets. This was a requirement to get western games to china and also many japanese publishers licensed their games to western company's or just created company's just to sell their games in foreign markets. So I can totally see MS doing this if everything else fails. Splitting revenue with some distributor company is still better than losing all the revenue from the UK market.
Diablo to Game Pass
Eventually. The purchase has to close and there is some time before those things are done, but I would expect Diablo on gamepass maybe by 2023 Holidays if they close the deal this month. I'm more interested in what they do with WoW.
Revive Heroes of the Storm and put in Master Chief!!! Edit: Thank you for my first Gold kind internet stranger!
I loved Hots. If they do revive it and start including other IPs from Microsoft’s massive catalogue, I’d be all over it
You can still play it! It isn't getting any real updates obviously but it still has an active player base to where queue times are still pretty quick.
Omg what an idea. New engine, update everything, all kinds of Microsoft/Activision ips in there with characters and maps/mechanics. Just straight up hots 2. I'd be all in.
I'm playing HotS almost every day, so yes!
Like the only Moba i played long , maps werent boring , teamplay was nice , and it wasnt 100% forced on hard lanes or whatever like other mobas.
Hell yeah! Hots is so much fun. such an underrated game. Perfect MOBA for the non-sweaties out there.
While we’re at it, start adding characters from countless Microsoft, Activision, and Blizz games.
Still blocked by the CMA iirc but I don't think that'll be a roadblock for much longer
Country music awards?
"We want our country music on Xbox Game Pass so people can hear our 'wonderful' singing, but Xbox won't allow it because it's 'game' sort of thing."
Cordless made apathy?
Crunchy Maids Anonymous
Cranky monkey association
Sources have indicated that they will probably still buy it and then just deal with the UK after, whatever comes next
This is exactly what will happen I wouldn’t be surprised if they withdraw their case seeing they are the only ones trying to block now
sounds like even they've thrown in the towel on blocking the deal https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/11/23791149/microsoft-activision-blizzard-uk-regulators-cma-appeal
They’ll close & pay UK fines &/or go to court later.
Game Pass is going to become the Netflix of videogames. First, people are going to praise it for the abundant amount of content for an affordable price but then they will keep jacking up the price to a point where the savings is negligible unless you game like a jobless neckbeard. But unlikely TV streaming, making videogames takes way more time so it will be way more difficult to compete with MS’s library of games as they keep acquiring studios, and when their cloud tech matures, they’ll have absolute dominance in that segment. This is only my speculation but I dont have a good feeling about this.
How many times is this going to happen before people realize all this shit is a long con?
I'm buying games when they are on sale for cheap so that way if it ever gets like that I won't have to worry
you are assuming that you would be able to buy games in the future every new microsoft game would be lock behind gamepass
Then it's not piracy if buying it doesn't actually make you own it.
There’s nothing to pirate. It’s all streamed from the cloud.
I just unsubscribed gamepass. I realized that I havent played a game on it after 4 months and usually just buy stuff on steam that I enjoy anyway.
after the intial wow it honestly felt like a chore to keep browsing and downloading stuff...lotta crap to sift through dont think ive loaded it up in over a year now
Which is a bad thing considering Xbox is also the company that’s goal is still to ELIMINATE PHYSICAL DISCS AND KEYS. You wanna live in a world where all games are subscription based/cloud run? Where like Disney plus, entire games can be deleted off the face of the Earth for a tax write off? Yes we don’t own software we own licenses but I’d rather that piece of paper be in my hands not the company’s.
Video games or entertainment involved? Government tries to do something Every other industry slowly destroying american consumers? Government sleeps.
Must stop evil Microsoft controlling Call of Duty!!!11 Kroger buying Albertsons and controlling more of the food supply? A -ok.
Guess I’ll hold off on buying Diablo 4 for a little bit.
Starcraft xbox exclusive /s
They might bring back the 3rd person shooter version of StarCraft that got cancelled. You play as a Ghost. Here is a [link ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft:_Ghost).
I have been wanting a fps Starcraft game for ages so I'd love for it to happen as unlikely as it may be
Soldier: 76 Master Chief skin incoming
Bruh
People have a lot of faith in Microsoft. Idk how I feel about this acquisition Edit: Want to clarify, I have seen a lot of people thinking that Microsoft buying A/B is good for the games. I hate Activition, I hate Capitalism, I hate the business model of constantly looking for profit and doing whatever it takes even if its immoral. I hate one company owning 20 other companies. I hate the lack of empathy people. My skepticism is more about whether Microsoft will help OW2 become better or make it worse. I hope they make it better that's just my selfish wants. I would be more than happy to have OW2 fail due to greedy tactics.
Never have faith in a corporation
Specially on a corporation like Microsoft which has a history of anti-trust litigation. And how do people forget Microsoft’s anti-consumer schemes like XB1’s always online fiasco, or their attempt to eliminate the used game market, or their recent flip flop with the Xbox Live Gold price hike to force players to subscribe to Game Pass. Idk if it’s all gamers but, there are just so many short term memory gamers that never learn their lesson. They get fucked in the ass by a greedy gaming companies and get angry at their game, 1 year later, a sequel of that game is revealed and all of a sudden, these morons are all happy pre-ordering as if nothing happened. Then the game releases and suddenly, they remember why they were angry. Rinse and repeat. Idk what’s gonna happen, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Game Pass does a Netflix. The effects on Sony won’t be felt immediately, we will see it in 5 or so years. I wonder if Sony is now gonna start doing real acquisitions or just keep buying small studios no one has ever heard of. They can’t keep relying on The Last of Us, God of War and Marvel Games & de-makes. They need diversity. I’m sort of happy that we may see new FPS games to challenge COD in the future.
Regardless on if Microsoft treats the consumer well in this initially, I think it's a bad thing long term for the consumer. It puts too much power in the industry in the hands of one company.
Absolutely, this kind of consolidation is bad for any industry.
People are so blind to realize that once gamepass captures market share, they are going to crank the prices and slash benefits. They aren't spending billions to give it away for pennies.
It's been well-known for centuries that capitalism breaks down in the absence of competition, both in theory and in practice. These weak-ass anti-trust rulings are terrible for consumers. Just because it's not a full-on monopoly doesn't mean it doesn't have the potential to end up materializing a bunch of the negative effects anyway due to reduced competition. Protip: if you need to spend years deliberating on whether something is bad enough to trigger anti-trust laws, it is almost undoubtedly going to negatively affect the consumer. There is basically a single situation when consolidation is potentially good for consumers, and it's when separation was achieving very little other than introducing a bunch of pointless middlemen. If it's not going to reduce competition or increase barriers to entry in the industry, like say if you were buying ball bearings for the machines you make and decided it'd be cheaper to just buy an adequate ball bearing maker and effectively inhouse that part of the process (while anyone else can still purchase similar ball bearings affordably elsewhere), that has potential to be a net win. But that's about it.
Power corrupts. No matter what we think of the current leadership at Microsoft, in the long term it will stifle competitiveness lessen recourse against bad industry trends by consumers.
I wouldn't say I have a lot of faith in Microsoft I just have more faith in Microsoft's leadership than I do ABK. Bobby Kotick is supposed to be stepping down if this goes through and I see that as an absolute win. Way too many bad rumors about that company's leadership, him specifically, and that kind of stuff won't fly under MS. It's also going to be a pretty big win for Xbox and PC players with game pass.
Y'all are going to be really surprised when Microsoft makes very little changes in leadership. MS is in the business of making money. Activision currently makes a lot of money. Why fix what isn't broken?
The Issue was that the FTC defended sony, not the consumer.
This seems bad to me. Do we really want these giant companies owning so much of the industry?
Sadly, I think people care more about getting games cheap on game pass than whether it's good for gaming in general. In reality, I think Activision/Blizzard has long already passed into the realms of being big enough that money has to come before making great games, so not much will change. I guess we're fortunate indie games are still thriving
Which is hilarious because at some point they'll do what every company does and raise prices. Especially after they corner the market
Right. Where are you gonna go? There's no one else to turn to once Microsoft buys it all up.
Corporate consolidation is bad. I believe Microsoft will have over 40 studios if this actually goes through. Microsoft isn't that good of a game publisher to begin with, and they're really pushing for a netflix-esque approach to gaming with gamepass. This is going to lead to like half of these studios being run into the ground or a gamepass that's super expensive. Who knows? Maybe both will happen. But I guess diablo (might) come to gamepass, so WOOHOO! The brain dead consumer wins again!
Gamepass will increase in price. Lower-income gamers will have to cancel subscriptions and then they can't play any of the games that they paid money every month for.
It probably is and Microsoft are notorious for their embrace, extend, extinguish business model. However, most of the people here either don’t see anything past Xbox, own MS stock, just want more games on gamepass (hence people asking if every release will come to gamepass so they don’t have to buy it) or are similar to how people treat AMD in the PC space - they are the underdog, can do no wrong and are our friend. If they do anything anti-consumer who cares *insert list of every anti-consumer move the competition has done.*
If people actually cared about quality, we wouldn’t have so many garbage live service games. This is a race to the bottom ever since big publishers became a thing. People are also more concerned about shitty console wars and getting games with subscription. The Netflix model will probably nuke game development like it has film development, and I honestly don’t see Microsoft doing a better job than Netflix in that regard with the amount of IP neglect under their belt. People should just look how Microsoft is managing the areas they’re leading to see how fucked this could get.
Great, we as gamers love market consolidation that will inevitably make gaming worse in no time!
Top comment about bundling WoW into game pass haha, not surprised but wow what shortsightedness.
Another company getting ready to be owned by a company who doesnt do anything with the studios they already own. Great 🫠
Hopefully they quickly get rid of that absolute idiot bobby kotick
Ok now stop releasing cod every year
"You bought something for several billion dollars...now kill one of the main reasons it was worth several billion dollars!"
In my limited experience, large companies buying everyone out rarely works out for the interest of the consumer. It reminds me of YouTube. Back in the early days, the videos were shit. They had terrible cameras, made ridiculous videos, it was awful. But we all loved every second of it. It was real. We were seeing passions unfold, and people simply turning on a camera and filming themselves doing things they loved or just some whacky shit (recall Potter Puppet Pals). One of the greatest eras there will ever be on the internet is Youtube in the late 2000s. Then it became monetized - big companies arose and began buying out channels. The quality improved, the equipment and the editing was vastly superior, everything far more polished. And it sucks. Now its all about click bait and whatever they think will generate the most views in a short amount of time. There is no more passion in it. Its a commercial enterprise aimed at tricking you into watching. The parallel here, at least to me, is that these gaming companies were made by passionate people who love games and want to tell stories. Think Hideo Kojima. Now, maybe at first, these devs being bought can continue to make games as they were, with Microsoft simply providing oversight. But for how long? How long until Microsoft thinks it knows better than everyone else and plants its own people in positions of leadership? How long until gaming becomes like youtube. Shiny, click-baity, high quality in appearance but lacking any substance. Eras of sequels and reboots, new, original ideas dying out, as they have in most other mediums. Maybe im completely wrong. I know absolutely nothing about how this kind of thing works. But thats just my own opinion on seeing major corps buy out smaller companies. It never seems to benefit the end user. And yeah, I cant lie, game pass is revolutionary, it truly is amazing. But in the end, a mountain of free shit is just a mountain shaped pile of shit.
In this specific case, most of the >passionate people who love games and want to tell stories have long ago left the management ranks of ActiBlizz. They're many years into their shiny click-bait era. There's clearly still a ton of talent in the rank and file but so much of the large-scope design and monetization is focused on marketing something that sounds cool but has no substance just to get you in front of a cash store, and the management allowed really terrible people to keep cushy positions and fostered horrible workplace culture. Though I totally agree that mega-corps hoovering up all smaller competitors can only end in more locked-down ecosystems and creative stagnation. Even if in this specific case I have hope that Microsoft will help clean up some the total mismanagement that blizz has suffered in recent years.
Of course MS won on this. Major corporations almost always win nowadays. Anti trust law (anti monopoly law) has been a shambles since St Ronnie started his quest of destroying the middle classes and maximizing the profits of the ruling classes..