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So, Microsoft now owns Activision Blizzard. How will this affect the rest of the industry?
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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At first, I was somewhat surprised that this was even a question - then I reminded myself that they’re asking how the merger will affect the industry, not the players.
I don’t care how it affects the industry. I’m not a high-level executive with a gaming company. Are you?
For the players, I don’t think it’ll be that great. Whatever savings are made due to the merger won’t be passed on to us. They never are. What’s good for players is competition between many companies, all doing their best to attract customers. An enormous, monolithic conglomerate will do us no favors.
There are too many articles posted in gaming communities which are actually just business articles which happen to be about companies involved in making games. Obviously it affects everything, but like you I don't care about business bullshit!
The impacts it has on the industry affects what kinds of games get made.
Yeah, that’s what the last two sentences are about.
A big company will take fewer creative risks and be more likely to limit investments to proven formulas. They’d rather just churn out sequels to huge moneymakers. On the other hand, more competition means more incentive to try something new and interesting in the hope of hitting it big.
Yeah, but the big company that the bigger company just bought refused to make smaller games and constrained their catalogue over the past 20 years to make fewer and fewer games. This bigger company, via Game Pass, has an incentive to put out more games than Activision has been. Microsoft has an incentive to try to compete with Sony in a way that Activision hasn't had competition for Call of Duty since...when was the last good Battlefield game?
If things actually work out to the benefit of the players, then great!
The most aggravating thing for me personally as a PC gamer with an obsession with fidelity/graphics, is any Microsoft acquisition becomes focused on console first (to sell Xbox) which leaves every game as a neutered PC port that had to be made shitty enough to run on consoles... It's very irritating.
That hasn't been true for a number of years, at least anything developed on Xbox.
Depends on your definition of savings, if the entire actblizz catalog ends up on gamepass then it's a huge savings for gamepass subscribers.
...for now. This is actually why I don't like that this merger has gone through. My guess is the strategy will be spending the next few years making GamePass such a value that it's basically a must-have and dominates the market. Then they start jacking prices up and ruining the service.
That will likely happen, maybe. We really don't know until it happens.
We're literally watching that happen to just about every tech company right now. My Lemmy front page right now is "YouTube/amazon/netflix/disney+ are all jacking prices and ruining the services." Although modern MS has a lot going for it, they have a long, long history of this exact behavior. And aside from that, it's just a feature of unregulated or poorly regulated capitalism. All consolidation eventually leads to negative outcomes for consumers.
You really don't know the history of Microsoft, do you?
I said it would likely happen, I wasn't denying it.