Glad to see an organisation other than UK government opening their eyes to what this would actually mean to the industry as a whole and the president it sets.
As much of a mess Acitivsion Blizzard is, large acquisitions like these are generally not good for consumers. Buyers have to make a return on their purchases.
In this case, gamers on platforms other than PC and Xbox may not be able to play new Activision games if this deal goes through.
Agreed, I was considering getting Starfield (if post-launch opinions are that it's good) on my PS5 due to an aging GPU, but hey, Bethesda are now owned by Microsoft, so that choice has been made for me.
And why did you make the choice to buy a PS5 instead of an Xbox? We both know that answer, and that's why this deal and the Zenimax one happened. I'm not exactly a fan of it either, but nor am I a fan of Sony being so far ahead due to a few exclusives; I'm also not a fan of exclusives.
I 100% agree with you. The way I see it is Sony has kept hold of a lot of their big 1st party studios, e.g. Naughty Dog, Santa Monica, Insomniac and... nurtured is maybe the wrong word, but supported them throughout each PlayStation generation. Those studios have then put out mostly consistently good, if not great games, building up a strong library of 1st party titles.
On the flipside, Microsoft had Halo, Gears of War, and Forza, the former two which kind of just... sputtered out, and Forza having competetive counterparts on the Sony machines. Their recent moves, like the aggressive pricing of Game Pass and acquisition of third party studios feels like such a desperate attempt to claw back a userbase, which is their right as a competitor, but yeah, I don't like it.
Ideally we'd have no exclusives at all, but realistically, they could at least all come to PC.
Aggressive pricing of Game Pass? It seems pretty reasonable to me. But also, even if Microsoft had "nurtured" other franchises internally rather than acquiring them, games of that size take so long to make these days that if they were ever going to catch up, they'd have to have started like 7 years ago.
Aggressive pricing of Game Pass? It seems pretty reasonable to me.
I think £7.99 a month for the amount of games available, also including EA Play (which I think is like £4.99 on Steam on it's own), with day 1 releases, and the ability to play on both Xbox and PC is pretty aggressive. Especially when it's local installations and not streaming. I don't think it's necessarily as good a value proposition as it was nearer to launch now PSPlus has restructured, but I'd argue it's still good value.
if they were ever going to catch up, they'd have to have started like 7 years ago.
And true, but if they were in a position where they didn't have to catch up, we would still have the large third party developers / publishers doing what they're doing now, and not be causing console exclusivity to become an even bigger divide.
That price for Game Pass makes a lot of sense at the scale that Game Pass operates at and always intended to operate at.
What the large third party publishers are doing now is looking for buyers, as they see their undiversified portfolios reaching their apex without a Plan B. Zenimax was looking for a buyer and clearly tried Sony, which you can see in their exclusivity deals for Ghostwire Tokyo and Deathloop. Square Enix tried to make themselves attractive to Sony, but that deal seems to have fallen through, probably around the time credit became more expensive. EA was looking for a buyer, but few can afford them, so they had been shopping at Disney's and Apple's doors.
Indeed. I think also people are failing to realise that there's more to this than just MS acquiring Activision / Blizzard in and of itself, but rather, what it says for the industry in general and Microsoft's continued acquisition of other game studios. What happens when all of the major studios are Microsoft-owned?
We already know what happens when Microsoft owns most of an industry: Closed standards, vendor lock-in and in general poor quality.
If Microsoft wants to give an impression of a cross-platform company, they need to formally support cross-platform GUI development on .NET and open source DirectX, until that happens, they just want to lock in players to Xbox and Windows(people seem to forget that just because you can buy hardware from a couple of different vendors, pc-gaming is very much closed down.)
What happens when all of the major studios are Microsoft-owned?
My guess is that that's probably not something that will happen, just for economic reasons. It's not free to acquire studios and their IP -- you have to pay money for them. That'd basically mean Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo having to buy up a large portion of the industry.
Microsoft specializes in being a platform provider. They provide a platform to build things on. The reason that being a platform provider is in a good place is because they are the "chokepoint", the only party that is essential to the whole ecosystem. That gives them leverage based on the size of what's built on the platform, but they don't have to provide the capital to build all the stuff that depends on their platform. They try to buy up the industry, and that model doesn't really function any more.
In previous statements, Microsoft has downplayed the deal and claims that Activision Blizzard doesn’t have “must have” games.
That’s … that’s a really huge kick in the face to a company that once held the title of biggest MMORPG in the world (at least on Blizzard’s side of the table, don’t really care about CoD that much). But I’ve been saying Blizz should’ve gotten WoW onto consoles by now, because ESO is beating their asses in that department.
Let's be honest: this whole purchase was designed to get Bobby Kotick out of a Jam regarding his SA at Activision problems. He is currently back to denying that anything was going on there, and the whole purchase was basically just a play to get the media off covering it.
One can only hope for calmer, reasoned heads in a new smaller community. While this might have some short-term benefits for a subset of the gaming population; long term this will be nothing but detriments. Larger companies, getting larger and consolidating their markets has never come with long term benefits for consumers across any industry; and I do not expect gaming to be any exception.
TBH when this was announced I was fully expecting little to no resistance to it given prior history; so I'm pleasantly surprised that at the very least some real effort is having to be put in.
Reading through the comments over on the other site about the recent CMA block left me very saddened by the state of our community as a whole.
I can understand being disappointed (to some extent), but I can't understand why people were so absolutely adamant that Microsoft/Blizzard was good for the consumer, or the industry as a whole.
Also the amount of bad takes on Brexit mixed in really didn't help the situation.
I think that people are so tired from ABK shenanigans that they consider it getting Microsoft management an improvement.
I agree, it would probably improve, at least short term.
But consolidation under half a dozen gigantic corporations makes me feel icky. Specially because Microsoft has a bad track record in the past
In the short-term it would benefit PC gamers. ActiBlizz has been losing fanbase/PR recently, while Microsoft's firms have been gaining favor. We can imagine Microsoft straightening up some of the kinks in ActiBlizz and having them release games without the insane unfettered greed that they have been showing.
Playstation users may lose out on some new games.
Consolidation of the market is typically bad, and it would be especially bad if Microsoft execs (or at least the MC part that is responsible for gaming) went the way of ActiBlizz, as it would bring many games under another greedy company. However, we can argue that you can't go much worse than what ActiBlizz currently is - at a reasonable bad-case scenario, the games from ActiBlizz will simply remain bundled with garbage support and microtransactions.
What I'm saying is, this is a low-risk scenario. There isn't much to lose from cutting ActiBlizz leadership out of their positions. The only lose-case here, for PC/xbox gamers, is if (unpurchased) ActiBlizz suddenly gains a new, better leadership, and that is very unlikely.
I am in favor of allowing the purchase, as a gamer. I'm not in favor of allowing the purchase if we're looking at business statistics because Microsoft can become too big of a factor in the business of the gaming world through purchases like these.
Add comment