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Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal approved by UK regulators
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/13/23796552/microsoft-activision-blizzard-cma-approval-uk
Microsoft is now free to close its giant Xbox deal.
Or just windows store exclusives..
I'll eat my fine leather hat before I use that dog shit store again.
Keep in mind that that's extra special because I don't own a fine leather hat, so I gotta buy one first.
oh okay as long as it's on pc we don't care. cool. Honestly I have such a hard time with the video games community. for a long time I was a big supporter of the idea that a certain company shouldn't be buying up exclusives because games should be for all.
but as soon as Microsoft started doing it, everyone has this apathetic response suddenly because "i got mine". As soon as the shoe is on the other foot gamers show themselves real quick.
Because Nintendo and Sony are doing it too, but at least Microsoft is putting their games day one on PC... They're going to make their games exclusive one way or another, but this is preferable to the way other companies are doing it.
This whole thing has confused the ever loving balls out of me. Xbox and Microsoft having been getting MURDERED over the last few years and ridiculed by pretty much everyone for one reason and one reason only, they have no games. Why get an Xbox? PlayStation and Nintendo have all the good exclusives. Xbox has nothing.
Now, Microsoft goes out and buys up some IP's and studios that have games they can make exclusive if they want (even tho they've said over and over they won't for the ones that currently aren't console exclusives but we'll see on that one). So, for the first time in pretty much forever they'll have the opportunity for console exclusives other than Halo and now everyone is complaining that they'll make the games console exclusives. It's like the biggest damned if you do, damned if you don't for them lol.
"Fuck Xbox they don't have any good exclusives."
Microsoft goes out and gets good exclusives
"Fuck Xbox they're making the good games exclusive."
There's a third way here though, MS could make good exclusive games themselves and leave Activision available for everyone.
That's not quite how this works tho. Microsoft doesn't make games. Sony doesn't make games. The only exception is Nintendo but even they outsource a ton of devopment to studios like 1-up studios, monolith soft, retro studios etc. These companies just make a console that plays games and then they try to buy rights to good games or studios so they can make their games exclusive to that console to bolster sales. Sure, sony and microsoft could pour tons and tons and tons of money into creating their own studios i guess that make their own branded games but they have decided to focus on hardware sales instead. This is especially true for microsoft where the xbox is just a small part of the business where the PC market is their focus.
From a business standpoint, it makes 10000% more sense to just try and acquire other businesses that do the work under you and you just publish their games. Which is why nintendo, sony, and microsoft all try to do it so much. I mean Sony alone has bought 14 development studios since last year.
Astroturfing is a very real thing that major companies participate in to sway public sentiment.
Especially if they released a really successful game and then they released a really bad one that got them sued by their shareholders and they had to issue a public apology but internet sentiment is somehow still positive. Especially if that game had a $163 MILLION marketing budget.
It's modern advertising. Just start a friendly discussion on social media about your product or service with some purchased or fresh accounts, or just upvoted anything positive and downvote anything negative! Imagine the effect you could have on discussions if just a single person focused on this 8 hours a day for weeks, compared to organic discourse.
People worry about Russian or Chinese botfarms but don't stop to think that corporations are the ones with the most to gain from altering public perception worldwide.
yes, this is the part where I gave up trying to say
"Hey it's bad these guys make their games exclusive, pc players and xbox players and whatever should all be able to play these games"
because now fuck it, why bother. pc players and xbox players do not care as soon as they got theirs. they won't show the same support as soon as they get their games.
Why should I show support for players on other systems, if players on other systems will not show the same support back?
pc players and xbox players do not care as soon as they got theirs.
Sony players don't care as long as they get theirs
Nintendo players don't care as long as they get theirs
Who cares? Fans will be fans.
Sony players don’t care as long as they get theirs
I used to, you generally saw the sentiment of "this isn't good for us, we dont' want this", now everyone is suddenly okay with one company owning all this stuff because it comes out on pc.
It's hard to care about people complaining about exclusivity anymore, because they only care when it affects them personally.
Thats arguing in bad faith, given that even after the buyout, Zenimax still produced games on the other devices. Arkane Lyon (deathloop), ID interactive (Doom), Tango Gameworks(Ghost Wire Tokyo), Mojang(Minecraft) and auch still produced games for other consoles, despite being owned by Microsoft.
Microsoft puts its developers games on other devices more often than the reverse. Its only within the past few years that Sonys been putting about half of its titles on PC.
Most of those were preexisting contracts they needed to fulfill. You're the one who's arguing in bad faith.
It won't fulfill your apparent need to have people pat you on the tummy and say you are a good boy but:
PC more or less is THE second platform (or first, with console as second) for a lot of people at this point. So if the option is:
- Studio goes out of business because a great game didn't sell amazingly well. See Mimimi for a "good" example of this
- Soft or hard acquisition results in games trapped on a single platform with questionable backwards compatibility policies. Bayonetta 2 and 3 being nintendo exclusives until the end of Nintendo is a "good" example of this
- Soft or hard acquisition results in game that is console exclusive to one platform, but also on PC
I'll always pick 3. Because as console prices increase? A "couple years old" gaming PC is not horrifically expensive (so long as crypto stays in the shitter...).
But also? Shit like Geforce Now and other streaming solutions means that people (who don't live in the ass end of nowhere and have such horrible internet they wouldn't be able to download the day one patches anyway) can play these games on their macbooks or even their chromebooks.
It won’t fulfill your apparent need to have people pat you on the tummy and say you are a good boy but:
Okay, we know where your head is. but i'm going to engage anyway just to say that i'm looking for solidarity, and not finding it. I'm finding selfishness. Previously I was in support of not having things exclusive, I didn't want it, It didn't benefit me. but I'm not seeing that support back from pc gamers like you.
Do you think it's okay for me to say "it's okay for final fantasy games to be exclusive to one system, you should have bought a playstation". are you happy with that statement?
I'm confused. You're angry because you want games on the PlayStation? Nobody forced you to buy it. There are plenty of good games on there, and Sony do the same. I'm not crying that Bloodborne isn't on PC. (not publicly)
Also, your wording was CONSOLE exclusive, so my comment pointed out that they're not only on consoles, which is great! They're open for more people to play.
Just get a PC and play everything! (except bloodborne)
I’m not crying that Bloodborne isn’t on PC
I used to say that I think it should be. Now I don't. why don't pc gamers want to support games being available everywhere?
Of course games should be everywhere, but exclusives sell consoles.
To answer your question about PC gamers, it's not that we don't want games to be everywhere, its because they already have the system where all the games go, so why should they even think about it? We don't care about your console wars, just get a PC and stop complaining.
'Madmen elevator meme'
There is no way that Gamepass is going to remain a good value once it's past trying to get new members in the introduction phase. I would give it at most 2 years before the enshitification really takes hold. It could be merely months since they are trying to look good to regulators right now.
Is gamepass dies the Xbox on pc store will too... Then they'll come grovelling to steam and the deals come back 😅
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.
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.
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There's also the big issue that Microsoft isn't just a giant games publisher, it also owns one of the only 3 consoles with a viable market, and they absolutely dominate the PC operating system market, including their graphics API, store and dependencies.
Steam Deck has put a small thorn in their OS side. It used to be ridiculous to have a Linux gaming computer, but it’s become much more viable thanks to the Deck’s existence.
Basically to say Microsoft wouldn’t be able to pull a massive move like requiring Windows subscription prices without a lot of gamers going to Linux.
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...)
I have seen so many comments cheering this merger on because they have gamepass... No, we can't all think beyond short term.
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.
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.
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.
That merger reminds me of this sketch: Halo: The Future of Gaming https://piped.video/JFtoanBDjOE
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.
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.
Finally. Screw the UK for holding this up. 100% pissy I ended up posting for Diablo instead of having it on gp.