Represent.
Represent(ative) of bad opinions
I wonder if they'll keep COD yearly, or give it longer development cycles
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Breaking: Microsoft to acquire Activision-Blizzard in near 70$ billion deal
- Thread starter Draugoth
- Start date
Bitmap Frogs
Mr. Community
smh, cheering on this stuff
ComputerBlue
Member
Proven wrong on 1 and 3, crazy about Xband though, I never knew about that.
With Avatars though, I didn't mean literally Mii's and Xbox avatars, I meant avatar as in a profile picture, doesn't matter though.
ChuckeRearmed
Member
MS now owns Quakecon and Blizzcon. They can have their own E3 like event by themselves now .
West Texas CEO
GAF's Nicest Lunch Thief
R6Rider
Gold Member
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
But this is different from arcades going out of style. That happened naturally. Is MS bought 75% of all 3rd party studios and then just decided to NOT launch a new next-gen console 5 years from now......that's not natural. It's not what the gaming public was asking for and demanding. It'll be MS manipulating the market.
fallingdove
Member
Nope, I am saying fuck companies that spend $70B to restrict my consumer rights. And I don't have to support these companies on PC either.
If this consolidation continues, and you have to subscribe to Xbox for Activision, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Playstation for Take Two, Capcom, and Squareenix, and Nintendo for whatever else, gaming may very well be dead.
Putonahappyface
Gold Member
Thank fuck I don't like anything by Activision.
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I don't see the Monopoly here. Microsoft will still be 3rd in the gaming business behind Tencent and Sony.
Sony's already doing their best to lock up AAA JRPGs and to secure a near monopoly in the fighting games sector.
Loxus
Member
Does a house make video games?
Portugeezer
Member
Filthy
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
People talking monopoly?
A third party company that does $8 billion sales in an industry that does about $200B globally.
Ya, ok. lol
A third party company that does $8 billion sales in an industry that does about $200B globally.
Ya, ok. lol
Hawking Radiation
Member
WHAT THE FUCK?!
Imagine waking up to this.
I couldn't even pee straight.
Imagine waking up to this.
I couldn't even pee straight.
Dr. Kitty Muffins
Member
Sony should just poach the talent from Microsoft and build new studios.
M1chl
Currently Gif and Meme Champion
So much cis people /s
DaGwaphics
Member
They've said they wouldn't do acquisition announcements at E3 anymore because it overshadows the games.
frogger
Member
They should make it every 2 years, and have the studios make new IPs. But as long as it sells, they will make it annually. I never understood the appeal of COD. In the 360 era, I was a big COD fan, but I still only played the single players.
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StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
ZywyPL
Banned
WHOLE 5$ MORE THAN IT IS NOW?!? Holy shit, how I'll ever recover from this, I guess I'll need to find a second job :/
Slayer-33
Liverpool-2
Banjo64
cumsessed
I mean, maybe. But you’ll be getting an absolute metric shit tonne of games day one from MS’s first party studios. For the CoD bros alone on PlayStation it’s £70 for the game annually and £50 for Plus. That’s the same RRP cost of Game Pass Ultimate for a year at present.
Personally I wouldn’t pay £15 a month for Ultimate, it’s currently £10.99.
I’d happily just pay for the basic tier to be honest if the deals on Ultimate dry up and they try to price hike. Personally I don’t think they’ll hike it too much but maybe £12.99 by the end of the generation.
Halo is now free to play and I’d still get the Forza’s, TES, Fallout, Starfield, Fable, Perfect Dark, Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2 and Hellblade 2 on the basic plan.
WitchHunter
Member
AB has 390 mill monthly active users. So MS essentially payed around ~175 bucks per person.
They have the talents and creativity...
Imru’ al-Qays
Member
Microsoft is spending a lot of money to buy companies and properties because that's the only option left to them - they've tried to develop their own IPs and it hasn't really been working out that well. It takes a lot of careful, patient work to build up studio capacity and Microsoft is fundamentally a tech monopolist, it's not a media business like Sony.
Sony doesn't have the resources to get into a bidding war for every company under the sun, but it does have the studio capacity to create hit series to rival the ones that Microsoft has purchased. Sony needs to develop or purchase high-quality first-party exclusives that compete in the specific genres that Microsoft now has a presence in, particularly WRPGs and FPSes.
The FPS market is pretty saturated, so simply buying Bungie might be the best solution.
The WRPG market is wide open, though. With the demise of Bioware and the troubles at CD Projekt, Microsoft/Bethesda is really the only game in town when it comes to AAA WRPGs. If Sony can reconstitute a Bioware-caliber studio that focuses more on the story than on the open world (Bethesda's forte) I think that would put them in a strong position. Or they could buy CD Projekt, whose value has surely tanked recently.
Microsoft is spending a lot of money to buy established companies because they can't develop good games internally, and a lot of their spending is not directed at the console space. Sony doesn't need to spend as much money on acquisitions to be competitive - they can focus their energies on creating hit IPs to counter specific weak spots in their lineup.
Sony doesn't have the resources to get into a bidding war for every company under the sun, but it does have the studio capacity to create hit series to rival the ones that Microsoft has purchased. Sony needs to develop or purchase high-quality first-party exclusives that compete in the specific genres that Microsoft now has a presence in, particularly WRPGs and FPSes.
The FPS market is pretty saturated, so simply buying Bungie might be the best solution.
The WRPG market is wide open, though. With the demise of Bioware and the troubles at CD Projekt, Microsoft/Bethesda is really the only game in town when it comes to AAA WRPGs. If Sony can reconstitute a Bioware-caliber studio that focuses more on the story than on the open world (Bethesda's forte) I think that would put them in a strong position. Or they could buy CD Projekt, whose value has surely tanked recently.
Microsoft is spending a lot of money to buy established companies because they can't develop good games internally, and a lot of their spending is not directed at the console space. Sony doesn't need to spend as much money on acquisitions to be competitive - they can focus their energies on creating hit IPs to counter specific weak spots in their lineup.
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Nikana
Go Go Neo Rangers!
You never could.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
No one believes that though. And we have every right not to believe it.
Kdad
Member
Just sit down.
Punished Miku
Member
Even then, if you get 1 indie game a month you like you're breaking even.
The other 20 titles would just be gravy.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
You realize there's a difference between one game being exclusive and buying a publisher and making 30 games exclusive right?
Null Persp
Member
Well, now it's time for Hexen 3 from ID Software.
Imru’ al-Qays
Member
CoD is really the only franchise where this is even relevant, though. Blizzard isn't really a console company, almost all of its properties sell overwhelmingly on PC. And obviously Candy Crush and the rest of King's shit is irrelevant for consoles.
DeceptiveAlarm
Gold Member
I'm a big fan of wow and diablo. This is great news. No way Phil does worse than Bobby. They already have Mike Ybarra in charge ober there.
squallheart
Member
This. I mean it's a big move but i don't play any of their games except overwatch and i stopped playing that 2 yrs ago. It's a good strategy since MS is mostly multiplatform publisher.
RaySoft
Member
I don't think the Xbox division has had a profitable year since they started. I could be wrong though.
It's quite usual practice to pay for the services you use from other divisions within the same company, but I dont know if MS are doing it this way or not.
ZywyPL
Banned
Not really, people paying for PS+ instead of XBL and giving a cut from the game/DLC/MTX to Sony instead of MS is not very lucrative. And this applies to every other game in the wider picture since those players aren't on you ecosystem.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
I have no problem with that.
Looking at all the money I spent buying DVDs, BRs and CD music discs over 30 years, what a waste of money. I dont need physical ownership for everything. There's only so many times I'm going to watch Casino or Goodfellas on DVD.
well, I thought Bethesda would be as big as it would get for a while, now we're playing at another level.
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
Fair enough. And yeah, online gaming goes WAY back, everything WRT stuff like Xband (and while at it, Sega Channel, which was basically a prototype GamePass in 1995) is incredibly interesting.
I don't care much for avatars or Miis, etc. myself but there's a market out there willing to pay for premium versions of them, might as well give them what they want if you can get some extra cash from it. And all things considered, it's extremely benign stuff, just a dumb little picture or virtual 3D model. Better than it being an NFT by far (unless Miis, Avatars etc. mutate into NFTs :S).
IIRC 360 Kinect was a massive success for them financially and that's likely around when the division started bringing in a lot of profit. People tend to forget how big Kinect was from that 2010 - 2012/2013 period, a ton of the Wii audience moved over to it for example (and that system had a very unusual hard drop-off atypical of other hugely successful game systems).
From what it sounds like, MS themselves have brought the Xbox division into the fold in the same space with their Azure division, so I'm not exactly sure if Xbox are paying out of their own allocated operating budget for Azure. We do know they had to divert a ton of Series X units to Azure, though, so that's likely an incurred cost on the division for sure. Question is how big of one would it have been; at most that was probably like 500K Series X units. Some BOM for the retail units could be cut but they'd have to pay for additional RAM for example.
That's maybe $250 million in all for those Series X units to Azure, wouldn't really be too big a hit on division net profits, though it'd cut them down a bit for sure. It's about the longer-term investments though.
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Yeah. and so were the ones Bethesda was working on ... until they were out the door.
Kdad
Member
Haven't played an AB game in years and wasn't planning too...but if these go exclusive it does take some checkboxes away from SONY with regard to their 3rd party content and THAT is a long term problem for them from a console hardware perspective.
I've been a PS stan since day one but with their move to PC and potentially less 3rd party content I can see myself just going PC with GamePass and PSNow. Its saddening that we are seeing the end of consoles for someone my age who has been there since Magnavox
. (I fully expect Nintendo to be an outlier for longer but they too, at some point, will get out of the hardware game)
Ul
I've been a PS stan since day one but with their move to PC and potentially less 3rd party content I can see myself just going PC with GamePass and PSNow. Its saddening that we are seeing the end of consoles for someone my age who has been there since Magnavox
. (I fully expect Nintendo to be an outlier for longer but they too, at some point, will get out of the hardware game)Ul
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mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Then you are rooting for the death of video gaming. :-(
ComputerBlue
Member
Actually the funny thing about it, which just came to me, is that now on Xbox you can upload and use any picture you want for free, as long as it isn't offensive and passes their filter.
ZywyPL
Banned
I love how there's He/Him next to a guy and She/Her next to a woman, like yeah, I'm that dumb I couldn't tell... Call me back when there's It/They, then it'll be actually interesting.
Salty Popsicle
Banned
It's pretty funny that a whole bunch of ex-Microsoft employees have now rejoined the company through this acquisition. Off the top of my head I can think of Mike Ybarra who was senior executive at Xbox and Rod Fergusson who was head of the Coalition.
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