It's official, Microsoft now owns ABK
It's official, Microsoft now owns ABK
Today we welcome the teams at Activision Blizzard King to Team Xbox. It's a good day to play.
I love Game Pass, but I don't like monopolies. I wish regulators had blocked this. Also: https://www.theonion.com/just-six-corporations-remain-1819564741
I was laughing at the onion article and stopped- was that really published in 1998 ?!?!? Or is the date also a joke?
It reads like it's from 98. The references to Blockbuster, Daimler-Chrysler, McDonnell Douglas, and Bill Clinton tipped me off this was an old one.
It really is that old. According to their Supreme Court amicus brief: “Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.” Seriously though, read that brief. It’s a masterful piece of satire.
The wayback machine has it archived as early as December 2017, no idea beyond that.
It's hard to block mergers based on a company involved being a monopoly if none of the companies involved are monopolies or will become monopolies.
Regulators have to come up with a different set of rules to block "large but not monopolistic mergers" without also just effectively protecting the actual leader in a given industry from competition.
IDK how you block it when it probably doesn't even make Microsoft the leader in the console space.
How have I never read that? That's amazing.
What a sad day for gamers. Microsoft now has all it needs to extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on consoles, just as they do on PCs already, and the regulators will give them a wink and a nudge.
They can't even manage to beat Steam on their own OS to be fair lol
Write a more stable gaming launcher on your own OS than a 3rd party company (impossible)
I had no issues with GamePass for years and was like this isn't as bad as people say. Then out of the blue I started getting the Download Gaming Services error and wasn't able to play anything. Looked it up and this has been an issue for years. I tried all the solutions I could find and ended up just canceling my GamePass and haven't used it since.
Consoles are walled-gardens altogether. Also poor Sony set the markt rules with their 3rd-party exclusives for how many generations now?
If you want to keep gaming as far away from enshittificarion as possible, then set up a linux gaming pc. It's not bad anymore.
We are so far away from that being even possible, let alone likely. Even Valve has successfully decoupled about 95% of PC gaming from Microsoft.
I'm talking about the platform, not the store front. Windows has far more than 90% of the PC gaming world market share, far more than what's enough to monopolize the PC gaming scene; GNU and macOS are a super distant second and third place. Whenever most people talk about "PC gaming", what they really mean is Windows, even though there are other PC platforms out there.
Big corpo is bad but Microsoft is far behind in the console space and in the gaming pc front. They won't extinguish playstation anytime soon.
Whilst monopolies are a terrible thing for consumers.
PlayStation and Nintendo still have the best first party lineups and IP available to them. I don’t think this is as big of a deal as people would like to make it seem.
I do agree this should have been blocked by regulators just as I thought with the Bethesda acquisition. Sony also with the acquisition of Bungie.
There should be a restriction on the purchasing of studios/publishers of a certain size.
Certainly isn’t going to hurt Sony or Nintendo. I also don’t think this is the big WIN that Microsoft thinks it’s going to be either.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
That applies to open software standards, what does it have to do with buying cash cows?
Because, to the majority of console gamers in the Americas and Europe, Call of Duty, FIFA, GTA, and Madden are the Only Games That Actually Matter™. There are a few million people that buy PlayStations just to play 1-2 of those games to the exclusion of everything else.
Now that they've taken out one of the four major reasons why people outside of Asia buy PlayStations, they can extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on console gaming. It's sickening.
And somehow, I don't think that Sony resurrecting the Resistance series & making it into an annual release that always launches during the holiday season will make much of a difference.
It applies to most business.
- You give a positive face to the market you’re in (Game Pass, Phil Spencer, pro-dev vibe, etc).
- You buy chunks of the market (Activ-Bliz-King is a massive chunk), while saying it’s good for the industry.
- You squeeze the company of its IP, while bleeding the market dry of money. All of which kills, or at least hurts that market.
Right now, Micro$oft is in the Extend phase.
It doesn't even apply to software standards lol. It's a dumb "playbook" probably made by some coked out Microsoft middle manager in the 00s that wasn't even widely successfully used. Lemmy's crappy example of it is Google "killing" an extensible messaging protocol, which is nonsense because they didn't kill anything (you don't "kill" a protocol), they extended it into a proprietary version. You know, because it's extensible.
The only relevance "embrace, extend, extinguish" has in today's society is as an excuse to spread FUD and ragebait on Lemmy.
EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!
Nice Doctor Who reference
YOU ARE AN ENEMY OF MICROSOFT; YOU MUST BE DESTROYED
Yes, embrace, extend and extinguish my breast milk drinking.
Well at least Microsoft can't ruin Blizzard any more than Activision ruined it.
say hello to the monkeys paw
Maybe we'll get SC3, though I'm sure they'll want to make it SC3 the mmorpg live service micro transaction game.. Need additional Pylons? That'll be 10c thanks..
Fuck Activision
Especially Bobby and all the ones he enabled
It's a shame the UK's Competitive Markets Authority let this merger go through after all. I can't wait for the future, when 90% of the most popular games are made by 3 companies
the government was desperate for a post brexit trade deal
Honestly this is bad for the gaming industry.
I understand a lot of game pass subscribers want more free stuff.
But just look at what Netflix had became after its success.
Or even just look at MS’s track record in using their monopolies to bully competitors.
Years later we will look at this and watch the tragedy unfold.
Pretty sure most of the abk staff were just keen to get rid of Bobby. Maybe shortsighted but hey, MS isn't the worst company to work for.
Now gut the boys club C Suite from ABK and help the thousands of employees.
Kotick is out in January at the very least. I think there is a 60 day waiting period before employees can begin unionizing, as part of the deal.
That's the hope..
That's quite interesting, leaving aside all the monopoly arguments, I think this has potential to being very beneficial to all blizzard games, and so to us.
It looks like Kotick will be leaving after the transition so that's a great start. My dream is that this all somehow leads to the full Overwatch PvE campaign coming back onto the table again (given that their attempts to provide long-term replay ability without doing the work seem to be floundering now, there's a chance right?)
Team fuck overwatch and everything blizzard made
It'll definitely be interesting to see how MS treats Blizz's ongoing IPs. There's definitely opportunity to improve things there with Diablo 4 not keeping people's attention and OW2... being OW2.
They showed Alex Mercer from Prototype in their announcement video
They knew
It would be funny if they renamed Toys for Bob to Toys for Phil.
Lol
Who, the rapper?
@KyuubiNoKitsune cool. Bobby firing when?
Apparently at the end of the year. Obviously going to get a good payout in the process..
@KyuubiNoKitsune as long as he's gone I'll take it