Oh boy, can't wait for more average but poorly managed games!
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Laws against monopolies don't exist, anymore, eh?
Because this won't give MS a monopoly in the slightest. There's still tons of Devs and publisher's out there on various states of first, second and third party relationships with MS, Sony and Nintendo and new indie Devs pop up almost weekly. It gives them a massive advantage having CoD as a first party Gamepass title, yes, but that's not what a monopoly means.
People conflate monopoly when they should be saying oligopoly
After this deal MS will STILL be in third place.
3rd place in... What? I'm trying to search around to see what you're referring to here, but I can't find anything.
By total market cap, Microsoft already blows these companies out of the water. By just videogame divisions, Sony and Nintendo are way farther ahead because of hardware sales, but that doesn't really make sense to include in the conversation about acquiring a publisher. I can't find any solid numbers either way isolating publishing, other than that the top 5 in recent years seems to be Tencent, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Activision/Blizzard (with EA hanging around too). Seems like any of those two merging is going to be bad for everyone other than shareholders.
Yes, third place in total gaming revenue. I agree it will be bad, but let's not pretend this is going to shift the market in a big way, because it won't.
How do you figure that 2 of the top 6 merging won't shift the market in a big way?
Also, total gaming revenue wouldn't be a good way to compare it because that includes revenue streams that's are unrelated to Activision/Blizzard. Microsoft is hardly even competing with Nintendo at all considering they don't have a handheld device. And Microsoft releases way more games on PC than Nintendo or even Sony, which further reduces the relevance of hardware sales.
It's the developing and publishing industries specifically that are going to be impacted by this, because that's what Activision/Blizzard does.
The impact to hardware sales will be indirect: I would guess a pretty small number amount of people might switch to Xbox or buy an Xbox in addition to a PlayStation just for version exclusives, but probably not a huge amount as long as Microsoft keeps COD on PlayStation.
Usually I am against huge mergers like this because they rarely benefit the customer, but ActiBlizzard was about as bad as it gets anyway.
Selfishly I hope maybe at least one decent RTS might come from this before everything gets enshittyfied again.
I realize though that OG Warcraft/Starcraft were not the big motivators for MS so the chance is probably slim.
You should look into Stormgate.
It's an upcoming rts from frost giant studios which consists of some of the original blizzard team responsible for StarCraft.
I actually got a spot in the closed alpha this month.
It feels pretty good so far even though unfortunately I can't play as much as I would like due to my job and aspects of my personal life taking a lot of time right now.
I plan on getting at least a couple more games in this weekend.
That's cool. I was never very good myself but I'd like to play around in the noobs ranks. I just hope there's a good story mode.
Microsoft still supports AoE2, and that game is going on 22+ years. Some of the other stuff they've released has been a bit hit and miss, but they at least tried to do something fresh.
I'll take that over ActiBlizz dropping support for the SC2 pro scene for no good reason other than "profitability" any day.
Hell, maybe they can fix WoW classic while they're at it, and say what you will about the guy but if I understand correctly even Chris Metzen is coming back.
Out of all these studios I suppose I like Microsoft's games the most, but I still think it's bad that the regulators didn't shoot down this merger from the view of competitiveness.
I don't think the gaming market is healthy when only a handful of corporations like Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA Games and SquareEnix hold what I assume to be 75% of the gaming AAA market. It restricts creativity and stifles competition and the ones paying the price are going to be us consumers.
Even worse if they go and start vendor locking games to Windows, which sucks for us Linux gamers or Xbox which sucks for Playstation gamers.
Rip
Blizzard was already dead
I mean for gamers in general. This merger will not benefit consumers.
Activision Blizzard was already about as anti-consumer as possible, so in this particular case at worst nothing will change, at best Microsoft might actually clean house and there might be some improvements for the consumers...
I genuinely love your optimism.
Microsoft will use this purchase to further restrict releases to non Xbox consoles, no matter when they agree to to industry bodies. It is in Microsofts interest to only release on their platforms as releasing to PS or Switch will cost them in Xbox purchases.
Yeah, sorry, I was thinking from a PC standpoint and sort of ignored the whole console perspective (though, frankly, the console market seems to have been absolutely fubared from its inception, from a consumer standpoint, so anything Microsoft does will probably be as relevant as farting into an ocean of shit...)
Yeah but game production isn't about the consumers. It's a business.
They've been dead since Activision merged with them.
How many new AAA studios could be created from scratch with this money?
Not too mention losing all the devs who'll probably leave due to the merge anyway.
I didn’t even get D4 yet (but planned to) and all my friends have stopped playing it already ☠️ I don’t think they have anything else up their sleeve at this point. Seems they haven’t made anything new since warcraft.
Overwatch was amazing under Jeff.
You say this, but Jeff was there when they started OW2. He was the one who even announced it and their plan to forcibly replace Overwatch.
And he also stated that he had to fight for even the most basic beneficial things.
He also left not long after.
All signs point to them not listening to him due to greed.
Oof sorry I forgot about that one.
They are still pumping money like crazy though.
D4 was dead the moment they announced D2R. Why would I pay $80 for a game with microtransactions and battlepass when I can pay $50 for a game that comes complete in box?
They should have taken D2R kept the mechanics and just rolled new classes, maps, and items.
I don't want a new game, I just want more content.
Get D4 (Dungeons 4) instead! It's coming out soon!
RIP ABK franchises
lol
All three of them that actually get any focus under ABK at the moment? If anything we might get to see some of the ones usually ignored have a day in the sun if MS wants to diversify their Gamepass offerings. We may get that Tony Hawk's 3&4 remake rather than Volition being thrown in the CoD mines, a Crash or Spyro game with Rares involvement, etc.
This is just "imagine the X-Men in the mainline Marvel cinematic universe!" moment...
I mean, I've not been particularly disappointed at how Disney has handled the Fox properties. They've had some duds with the Star Wars and Marvel lines, but the stuff that's come to D+ under the Fox banner, Solar Opposites, all the Simpsons, new Futurama, films like Banshees of Inershirin, Prey, No One Will Save You, etc have all been pretty good.