Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard

Despite not pirating PC games due to not wanting to risk viruses I am very invested in the cracking scene, since they lead to positive outcomes of some companies removing DRM earlier if a crack comes out. Used to be they'd just be left in indefinitely. Thank you pirates.

Piracy against big corporations? Sure, but indie devs? That's gonna hurt them far more and they usually haven't done anything to uustify it

Agreed, besides for a few companies in the triple A space the indie scene has grown so much to the point where I don’t feel like I’m missing out on great gameplay, stories, and/or graphics anymore.

Okay there... And before thay Sony was trying to lock Starfield away on their side so what's your point? The current market is driven by exclusives thanks very much to Sony and Nintendo.

It’s almost certainly a positive to see Bobby Kotick (boy do I struggle to maintain this site’s cardinal rule as far as he goes ) losing influence in the “AAA” games industry; but it’s not good to see MS buying every studio they can get hold of. Both these things can be true simultaneously.

My biggest concern with MS’s rampant acquisition spree is what happens when there’a an economic downturn (as already seems to be the near future); will those newly acquired studio be subject to the corporate euphemism that is _dOWnSiZiNg? How many working on moderately niche titles will be out of a job and their work indefinitely shelved?

Forza. That’s it. They weren’t behind Fable, they weren’t behind gears of war, they weren’t behind halo. Microsoft has nothing to show here. Every developer they’ve bought in the past has turned out nothing special afterward, just sequels of diminishing quality.

The same execs that bought the company already half way through development of Starfield, and rather than delivering anything new or of value, only wanted to make sure it was extinguished on other systems?

Sony were reportedly in talks to purchase full exclusivity of Starfield, so can't blame MS.

only wanted to make sure it was extinguished on other systems?

I hope you're similarly malicious about Sony's exclusives too.

lemmy needs an op indicator

Yeah, this is like watching two bad parents fight for custody of a child. Microsoft is ab-so-lutely going to limit the reach and quality of this game off their own system. They might fulfill the letter, but their intentions are clear.

Bought them and made their games Microsoft exclusives.

I think to many of us, Microsoft is definitely the best option for someone buying Activision/Blizzard. They have been willing to give new life to old IP, they have given purchased studios freedom and support to follow their projects and take the time needed, they bring games to both PC and console and now many more platforms with Cloud Gaming, and they have a generally professional work culture.

Microsoft are the best option by far.

Sony wouldn't, and shouldn't, be allowed to buy them even if they could afford them. They're the market leader and we know they would make everything exclusive straight away.

The only other options are companies like Embracer, Tencent, Amazon, or Apple. None of them would be good. Microsoft are basically going to maintain the status quo, while opening up the games to more people on more services.

Edit: think this got double posted.

Yeah this is how I feel. I don't think that stopping this merger is going to make triple a games a much less hyper-capitalistic hellscape but I feel like forcing a change of hands might mean better conditions for the abk devs, because from what I've heard from friends that have worked at Microsoft's studios they've got a decent track record for employee care. Nothing remarkable, mind, but if it gets the devs away from toxic hypermasculine leadership and also gives them more security to make better games, I'm willing to nod the merger along. ABK's games have long had a human cost that I'm not super keen to see them continue to pay yknow

is there any indication that microsoft intends to clean house?

I think that's a fair perspective. The leadership there is very problematic and I would be glad to see them gone. I just hope the industry doesn't continue down this path

Microsoft are no longer interested in selling consoles necessarily, otherwise they'd be holding stuff back from PC as well. They're interested in getting people into their ecosystem through Game Pass.

And while I agree with you that Sony and Nintendo have used plenty of anti-consumer practices, Microsoft has also done so in the past and I think the only reason they've been more pro-consumer of late is because they've been the underdog for a long time now. I would be anticipating a change in their behaviour the more people they get to subscribe to Game Pass, and this Activision-Blizzard deal is a huge step towards that.

Exactly. Sony have spent years leveraging their market leading position to further put them in the lead via paying to keep content and games off Xbox. Their market position is their strength and they leverage it. Microsoft's strength is their financial power, and they're now finally leveraging it. Sony need to be pulled back to the pack and pulled in line with their anti-consumer practices. The more market share and dominance they get the worse they get for consumers, as they've shown many times.

Phil Spencer said every single future Zenimax game is going to be exclusive, so it's not just a few being held back.

Microsoft’s monetary incentive is to kill PlayStation and make everyone buy GamePass. Then they don’t have to put effort into making individual games, they’ll have your money anyway. They’ve shown for years that they don’t care about Xbox making money. They are propping up Xbox with profits from other parts of their business, something that’s usually considered anti-competitive, but that’s out the window these days.

Sony doesn’t buy games to keep them from their competition. Sony buys developers and talented people to make games. Throughout their history Destiny is the only game of note that they’ve purchased and neither it or Bungies next game are playstation exclusives. Every other developer had been largely making Sony exclusives games from the get-go, or didn’t being any existing titles of note with them.

Microsoft can’t run a studio or create IP. Forza is the only title of note that has been created in house. Everything else was done by outside creative and later bought and run into the ground. Could that change? Maybe, but it’s been 23 years and they have jack to show for it. Sony only has a few more years of development experience than Microsoft, but has destroyed them in the quality and quantity department.

The only way this could go well for consumers is if they could manage to negotiate fewer exclusives from both Microsoft and Sony, and I don't see that happening because they'd likely rather gamble on the chance that their exclusive would be the big new IP that makes them billions. So we're really just gonna see more games become exclusives.

It sucks. Exclusives are just bad for consumers, period. Doesn't matter if it's Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft. They all just reduce how many options consumers have unless they're willing to shell out hundreds for a new console. Personally, none of my consoles are chosen because of some trait of the console; they're all just to play exclusives. Not even the Switch -- I didn't buy that to play games on the go or have motion controls. I bought it to play Animal Crossing and Zelda. If I could have played my Switch games (legally) elsewhere, I would have.

Apples and oranges. Those were created as Playstation exclusives, not an existing property potentially made exclusive years after the fact. Decades later, Mario games are still almost entirely Nintendo-only. That's the comparison for God of War, not Call of Duty.

I understand your point but its odd that you picked 2 games that aren't PlayStation exclusives lol. Theyre on pc

Sony already does though, just on PC.

Very true, but Microsoft doesn’t need any of them. And none of them are going to take a “demotion” to be a working executive - to off they toddle to ruin different companies (which is the life of Board members, flitting from Board to Board like human STDs in a pre-penicillin orgy). And Microsoft is big enough to put layers between their own disease and Blizzard - more like Vivaldi. Blizzard will be a small fish in a big pond, and that’s fine. Their best expansions (per many) were made when Blizzard wasn’t in a Board’s crosshairs.

Yeah. I was fine with Blizzard, since they had always developed natively for the Mac. I have to say that I was surprised to find that SE at least tried with their Wine port of FFXIV, and pleasantly surprised when they actually updated to the M chip.

That said, it is huge that Apple licensed the source code of Crossover from Codeweavers. I believe that the end result is basically going to be a game-specific “Rosetta for Windows” in which PC games will run seamlessly on a Mac (like FFXIV does), probably needing only an installer. And last I heard, MS was in talks with Apple regarding whatever gaming platform MS has - and it would absolutely be in MS best interested to tout “our platform [whatever this platform is, I am not deeply versed in the gaming scene] runs on Macs, so we’re not a monopoly."

When was the last time that happened? It's not really a thing anymore in our current environment.

Depends on what you mean. It's a more arduous process -- but even if this injunction were granted that process would still play out unless Microsoft just decided to give up. But in another sense it's not as high of a bar to reach as a preliminary injunction, which the court by process has to make certain assumptions with a presumptive bias towards the party not seeking the injunction.

They also published Sekiro

It's not. It's a fork of FreeBSD.