legacy24
Member
Did I read that right? We've got two more years of this?
Geez.....wonder how Phil's gonna look when its all done.
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Microsoft / Activision Deal Approval Watch |OT| (MS/ABK close)
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DeepEnigma
Gold Member
You can ignore the thread. *poof* it goes away.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
So, his mentor is "buy buy buy it all with daddy's money?"
Man, much strategic, many philosophical... (see what I did there?)
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bentanchorbolt
Banned
The difference being that Ed Fries was in uncharted territory. Xbox wouldn’t need to buy up so many studios now if they didn’t stop investing in their first party in the latter part of the 360 gen.
That’s what I’ll never understand. The 360 was an absolute hit, with the commercial sales you wanted to see and a slew of 1st party and 3rd party deals. Owning both a 360 and PS3 was a requirement if you loved games. Not sure why divesting in the brand was even a thought.
feynoob
Member
You can thank Don for running xbox to the ground. this dude came around and stopped investing on their 1st party.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Nah, I refuse to still subscribe to "Don the fall" guy. It's an easy out card for a bigger issue that still plagues then to this day.
feynoob
Member
Check out xbox first party during his reign
If it werent for the shit that was Ps3, xbox would have been in a worse position.
3rd parties publishers were having issues making their games run properly on ps3. This meant exclusives games for xbox. Plus COD and halo success. These trend covered the big hole, which xbox had, and that was the lack of 1st party studios.
If it werent for Phil, Xbox would have had the smallest studios number in the industry.
bentanchorbolt
Banned
I see the problem with Don Mattrick being twofold. He saw the Wii and how it targeted people who didn’t normally play games, he wanted Kinect to do the same thing but the market didn’t want that. The second problem, PS3 and 360 became Netflix boxes and they really wanted the Xbox One to be that but for all your entertainment, which the fact that it has an HDMI-IN for your cable box says everything you need to know about how that plan a big focus. That push plus the mandatory bundled Kinect means they skimped on the rest of the hardware and still came in $100 more than the PS4. Add that to a mix-message reveal and some poor policy’s they had to walk back, Don rolled the red carpet out for Sony’s dominance.
It takes time rebuild your brand and that isn’t just mindshare and prestige. The lack of investment into quality 1st party studios was a big fuck up and one that can’t be righted overnight, something Phil has been trying to rectify since he took over, and there have been missteps along the way. We all know the Bethesda deal will pay off because obviously, and the solid studios like Rare, Turn 10, PlayGround Games, and The Coalition, will deliver like always. The biggest problem as I see it is 343i failing to deliver a concrete MCC and multiplayer for Halo, and folks like The Initiative not having shown anything of value yet while having leaks come out that makes their work sound like a nightmare. Instead of spending $70b on Activision, they should have spent some of that cash moneyhating both timed deals and contracting 3rd parties to make exclusives like they did with Mass Effect back in the day. I have no doubt that Hellblade 2 and Avowed will be bangers when they come out, and Starfield could be GOTY 2023, but 2022 was a snore for new Xbox content and that could have been rectified with better planning.
bitbydeath
Member
I disagree, it was Phil who shutdown 7 or so Xbox studios and Xbox One had a great exclusive output until Phil showed up.
Remember Titanfall, Sunset Overdrive, Ryse, Killer Instinct etc, it wasn’t until Phil took over that it became Halo and Forza on repeat.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
I wouldn't call him the fall guy, rather the guy who led them to the fall.
feynoob
Member
Shutting down is not the same as not providing the studios.
Don was the boss before phil. He didnt invest on Xbox 1st party. That is his fault.
Phil provided xbox with enough studios, that xbox has now 23 studios. That is something Don couldnt do during his lead.
feynoob
Member
and the worst offense is not providing enough studios.
I get that they are seeing this new market. But who goes after a new market, without a proper studios? They had tons of chances to increase their studios count, but they didnt do it.
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bentanchorbolt
Banned
Consider too that during the 1st year, the biggest games were from 3rd parties they signed deals with. Looking at you Titanfall and Sunset Overdrive and Ryse.
Hopefully the 23 studios pay off. I’m sure they will, but folks are getting restless.
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Menzies
Banned
I think the Don Mattrick-era design decisions with the Xbox One, were unfortunate, but not without some logic behind them. The Wii and motion controls were a market success. Historically, multimedia has also been a driver for console adoption. Many PS2's and PS3's were picked up as cheap DVD/Blu-Ray players. So, while we armchair analyze the poor and 'obvious' miss-steps they had some grounding in logic.
Ed Fries, Don Mattrick, Phil Spencer all went through different challenges with respect to the board of directors of their era. Their vision and plans to execute is only as good as the board tightening or loosening the purse strings allowed.
The worst offense was leaving the division in such bad shape Microsoft didn't want to invest in them anymore until 2018. There was going to be no fast fix. It takes years to rebuild after things decay from neglect from parent company.
bentanchorbolt
Banned
I get why the decisions were made and they aren’t necessarily bad ones at face value, but when you are set to deliver a gaming box that should be the focus, but the lack of focusing on your core audience resulted in a box that was quite a bit weaker than the PS4 and $100 more expensive. The bad messaging was unfortunate and they walked it back, but they were still left with the more expensive and less powerful device, and not enough studios to make quality games on a regular basis. The top games in the launch window all came from 3rd party devs: CryTek, Insomniac, and Respawn.
bentanchorbolt
Banned
Yep. This is why I cut Phil Spencer a lot of slack. What he’s managed to do in his time as Xbox Boss is something that will set the brand up for a lot of success moving forward. We are in the growing pains stage which looks worse because Sony has a mature pipeline of devs that continually release solid games, making this specific era in Xbox look extra anemic.
IFireflyl
Gold Member
Very this. The Xbox 360 era was beautiful for gamers. Even with the PS3's Cell processor issues there was plenty of content coming from both sides. Xbox actually had a wider variety of games, and I could easily and happily flip between the two. Microsoft didn't just drop the ball in the Xbox One era. They put the ball in a canon, and then pointed that canon towards the ground before firing. The PlayStation 1/PlayStation 2 era was the Golden Age of gaming just because of the huge amount of content that came from Sony and the third-party output, but the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era was the era where both sides had great choices, and this led to competition. I hope Microsoft turns it around, although I still think that this huge acquisition is a bad idea.
Warablo
Member
Most of those aren't even first party studios. They really haven't been in the business of making games except Halo, Forza and Gears.
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MidGenRefresh
*Refreshes biennially
My post is from another thread that was merged with this one. Seems like mods agree, we don’t need this trash polluting gaming discussion.
GHG
Member
To be fair based on what we saw at the game awards he's not too far off this already.
Yoboman
Member
There was a time in history where MS had extremely tight ties with Bioware, Team Ninja, Remedy and Epic in their peak. And the all time fail move of selling off Bungie.
There's a hypothetical timeline where MS wasn't mismanaged and instead turned those second party relationships into first parties. They could have had a first party lineup of
Bungie
Bioware
Epic
Turn10
Team Ninja
Lionhead
Rare
Bizarre Creations
Playground Games
Mojang
Remedy Games
bentanchorbolt
Banned
Yep. Crazy to think how well Xbox did with partnerships but as we can see only a few of those studios are still around under the Xbox banner.
Agent Icebeezy
Welcome beautful toddler, Madison Elizabeth, to the horde!
Another former FTC commissioner basically says that the FTC's case sucks. Bad press across the board from people in the know. Lina Khan is an ideologue. She had no as her answer and thought of the best way she could to support it.
OsirisBlack
Banned
I must have missed that part. You might have mistaken the words difficult or uphill battle for sucks. Listening to this guy he obviously has no clue about the video game market.
Whoever here thinks 10 years in gaming is a long time doesn't understand the video gaming market either. For reference, Xbox 1 was released 9 years ago.
Some of the opinions I'm reading are very short-sighted. Do you think Microsoft is dumb enough to not know what they are sitting on? Ten years is a brief moment in time when you can exclude "competition" in perpetuity after that ten-year period.
I think what he doesn't understand, it's not that anyone is suggesting no one can have exclusives. This entire thing is to prevent consolidation. It wouldn't be hard to show from a move they just made what their intention is. It also wouldn't be hard to prove by simply looking at their other market strategies.
The worst issue Microsoft has right now is its leadership directly addressing Sony. When looking over their finances no one with any common sense will ever believe that Sony could make Microsoft smaller. If we are all being honest it's a feat of ineptitude the likes of which the world has never seen before that they are not the market leader. You have had near unlimited funds since you entered the market. Literally no excuse outside of ineptitude and piss poor management.
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7 or so is quite the stretch
You’re proving his point. The only MS owned IP in that list was made by a third party studio. All the rest were investments made prior to the Xbox launch to launch a console MS thought would sell 100M+ units and - at the very least - dominate in the US.
Making 3rd party deals like that cost money, and it wasn’t a Spencer issue that MS dramatically cut back on investment in xbox after the poor launch. With only 6 first party studios, no surprise there was a ton of repeated IPs.
Agent Icebeezy
Welcome beautful toddler, Madison Elizabeth, to the horde!
Why the Microsoft Activision Merger Will Succeed Despite the FTC
The FTC wants to block the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but the legal reality is more complex and MS will likely succeed.
www.escapistmagazine.com
oldergamer
Member
This logic is false unless it was officially announced for the platform. For all you know it could have been cancelled on playstation before shipping.
For all you know it could still release on playstation 5 years from now. Ms doesn't have to advertise it.
You guys need pick a different hill to die on. This argument is weak as fuck.
oldergamer
Member
That's a claim you cant make without evidence to back it up. You have none other then "feelings". Really weak position to argue.
You dont even know if bethesda would have survived with all the studios it had to launch the game without getting purchased.
There is no commitment or evidence to back up that claim. If you want to maje up scenarios the how about for all we know, Bethesda didn't have a playstion port years before release (im sure it didnt exist on previous gen consoles and why port years in advance ) and sony wanted to buy exclusivity based on a pc build. The rumor sony tried to buy exclusivity came from before ps5 launched if memory serves.
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Why the Microsoft Activision Merger Will Succeed Despite the FTC
The FTC wants to block the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard, but the legal reality is more complex and MS will likely succeed.
This part is super interesting? Seems like the market has already spoken on this issue for 50 years.
feynoob
Member
Are you saying independent 3rd publishers don't put their games on all platforms?
Because that is the topic here.
Bethesda/zenimax before the purchase we're doing that.
Once MS bought them, it meant no PS5 games, aside of contractual games.
bitbydeath
Member
1. Twisted Pixel
2. Press Play
3. Lionhead
4. Team Dakota
5. Xbox Fitness
6. Decisive Games
7. BigPark
8. Lift London
9. Good Science Studio
10. Microsoft Studios Victoria
bitbydeath
Member
And that one IP was developed by a third party, but that was my point. All of that stopped.
This is both a horizontal and vertical merger.
feynoob
Member
None of them matches ninja theory or obsidian.
The_Mike
I cry about SonyGaf from my chair in Redmond, WA
Damn was 8 pages behind.
Read them all, expecting to read some interesting news, only to find out you all are continuing trash talking and pull stuff out of your asses, throwing up votes depending on which camp you all are coming from, like 2 groups fighting each other in the lunch break in school
Read them all, expecting to read some interesting news, only to find out you all are continuing trash talking and pull stuff out of your asses, throwing up votes depending on which camp you all are coming from, like 2 groups fighting each other in the lunch break in school
bitbydeath
Member
That wasn’t the question.
ZehDon
Gold Member
If the Xbone is 9, then that means 10 years ago the entire industry believed Microsoft's next Xbox would wipe PlayStation out of the console market after the disastrous PlayStation 3 generation nearly bankrupted the entire Sony corporation. COD and Xbox 360 were joined at the hip. PSN was a fraction of its current size. Now, PlayStation is an unstoppable juggernaut, it just told Governments around the world it'll go out of business without COD, and PSN is the biggest most profitable console network in the world. A decade is a life age in a tech industry.
Your post basically says Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to use its money, and yet, you also claim that it not buying its way to pole position is "ineptitude the likes of which the world has never seen before". So, which one is it?
The rest of your post is hilarious, too. For someone decrying the lack of understanding of the video game industry, you're displaying a pretty significant lack of understanding of the industry, or the way its businesses are structured. For example, Xbox is a division of Microsoft, it doesn't have "unlimited funds", and Sony Corporation has actively sought to keep Xbox small. Prior to the current generation, Sony established a clear 2.5:1 lead with PS4, meaning at a minimum, Sony have over 60% market share compared to Xbox. So, surely that was enough, right? No - heading in to PS5, Sony sought to lock up major third party releases as a PlayStation timed exclusives, or establish exclusive marketing, or establish exclusive content. They couldn't buy COD, so they locked up the marketing and timed access. Not only did they lock up two of Zenimax's titles as timed exclusives - Ghost Wire and Deathloop - Starfield too was nearly a PlayStation timed exclusive. Sony Corporation spent big, because it didn't want Xbox to be able to compete. Period. It tried to use its dominant position in the industry to make sure Xbox stayed small. Spencer convinced Nadella to invest, to give Xbox the resources it needs to compete against a competitor who has been the industry's dominant player for over twenty years. And now Xbox have it... and we're getting posts like: "Why didn't Microsoft just buy its way to number one? Shows how terrible they -- wait, they're actually spending their money? No! They shouldn't be allowed to just do what I said that they should have done!!!"
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feynoob
Member
The point is none of those studios, aside of lionshead were any significant.
There was no reason for them to continue, with that quality output
and recently Studio Alpha (though that was more commercial)
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bitbydeath
Member
You could say the same about some of Xbox’s current studios, but that’s not to say they couldn’t be something more if given the chance.
feynoob
Member
Did you check the output of those studios?
And did you seriously compared them to current studios?
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bitbydeath
Member
Yes, and yes.
feynoob
Member
You need to check out what those studios were doing.
No company would foot the bill, if that is their output.
bitbydeath
Member
Wiki should show what they have made if you have forgotten. Team Dakota was extremely promising and is better than a number of their current studios.
feynoob
Member
So it's like dream game.
What about other studios?
oldergamer
Member
Im not talking about third party publishers in a general sense, im talking about Bethesda specifically. Actually no they didnt put games on all platforms. Pretty sure the switch didnt see games day and date with the others on all titles they released.
Again you dont know what ms or bethesda has planned post purchase. They have only announced a few games. Nor do they have to say x game is coming to playstation until they are ready to do so. They certainly didnt stop supporting PlayStation games post purchase.
Swift_Star
Banned
What is weak is your attempt to pretend a multiplatform game wouldn't be on PS platforms.
New document uploaded by the CMA from another company (AFAIK). I don't think the CMA are going to be posting random peoples documents.
Largely pro the deal, obviously they may just want an world where they can be acquired.
Based on the content, wonder if it's a company or a consumer rights organisation now.
Largely pro the deal, obviously they may just want an world where they can be acquired.
Based on the content, wonder if it's a company or a consumer rights organisation now.
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