Gaming

It's all for game pass. They want to lock people into their favourite games with a subscription, that's where the money is for Xbox at the moment, all these buyouts are for securing their service as 'the one to want' before others clamber into the space. So I suspect things at ABK will continue as they have been doing for the most part, but with the games on game pass and maybe some more Xbox ports.

One thing missed is the fresh set of eyes on old IP.

Some of the older games / IP that is being bought over has had no or little interest with the old group, so the new company may have a team inside that says "hey we use that now".

It doesn't always work. But it's better than nothing.

Layoffs have already hit this and other industries, including Microsoft, regardless of buyouts, and since this deal is fresh, it will likely happen again in the near future. But there's no need for them to squeeze value out of what they bought. They can revive dormant IPs just by making sure they run on modern platforms and putting them on Game Pass. That alone is a tremendous amount of value that Activision couldn't get regardless of how much they squeezed.

And a lot of people who leave or are let go in these situations go on to form new studios. If you think about it too, it doesn't make much sense that the jobs would disappear. The industry will support a certain number of games being produced, and someone's got to make them still.

A worse outcome to me still seems to me to be a world where Sony is uncontested in its console space.

Very well said

This is the correct answer. The same is playing out in so many other industries; the big players don't bother innovating anymore, it's easier to make more money by buying out their smaller competitors and essentially killing them by subsuming them.

Consumers have fewer and fewer real options for anything, everything costs more and more (the majority of current inflation is actually driven by execs realizing they can just raise prices and blame it on the "economy"), and the quality of everything is going down because why bother with quality when the goal is to make more money?

"But the free markets will solve this! A company making a better product will win over consumers!", the market liberal says. "Oh, a competitor! We can't have that, let's buy them and make sure they can't affect our bottom line" says the megacorp, and before you know it the "superior option" will have disappeared because producing it was 15% more expensive than producing shit.

If Microsoft and Sony get into an acquisition war, Microsoft will beat Sony out each and every time.

Microsoft just has WAY more cash, they're a much bigger company. Sony can't afford to do that.

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.

My wonder is how do you degrade from an IP that Activision Blizzard already ran into the ground?

After Baldur's Gate 3, contrasted against what EA's Bioware has output lately, I'll bet Microsoft is happy to let their RPG studios continue doing what made them a success in the first place.

They also bought out ZeniMax in the same deal, which means they also have ESO under their rap sheet.

The only thing that effectively changed in ESO since the acquisition in 2020 is that they added the endeavor system to the game, so there was an excuse to sustain loot crates and give people a means to get the loot crate items in the game... though that system is frankly still BS since the amount of endeavor and gems needed for that fluff is in real world dollars ridiculous. As is, I dumped ESO completely after High Isle and went back to only playing GW2 (I have been in both games since beta), since the nonsense happening in ESO was enough for me to see that Microsoft running into the ground was not an issue - ZoS already managed that themselves...

I imagine it will be the same for WoW. Zero sum game.

I didn't even bought the 3rd SC2 expansion, I bought the 2nd one and not even playing through half of it. I did play a bit of overwatch due to friends asking me to play with them, but quickly drop it cause I really don't have time to grind or play that game and keep up with the meta.

I’m more upset about Obsidian and InXile.

I'm with you on that one.

Obsidian and InXile had just started getting some new promising franchises up and running (Wasteland & Outer Worlds). It'd be a shame if they went 'Storefront Exclusive' already.

The last minute EGS timed-exclusive deal already screwed with the first TOW game's launch.

The concept of Storefront Exclusivity just shouldn't be a thing at all.

We add John Halo to ow2. Thats the fix you wanted, right?

• Microsoft-activision-blizzard exec

The employees being treated better under MS is probably the only positive about a trillion dollar conglomerate purchasing multiple of the industry's largest third party publishers in the industry's largest purchase ever.

This acquisition doesn't benefit the average gamer in any actually good way

In the same vein: I hope they make a new Killer Instinct. PS4 was THE console for fighting games last generation. Microsoft is sitting on IP that would create a lot of hype for a sequel in the fighting game community. The dual sense controller is rumored to have a mushy D-pad while the Xbox controller has a very clicky one. Microsoft could make a real statement about fighting games having a home on the Xbox. To me, it seems like a really obvious strategic decision. The only problem is that fighting games are relatively niche so the weight of that decision isn't too high.

I expect more stabs at RTS, with Microsoft going to get more people to game on a computer. They did buy the company that made WarCraft and StarCraft.

As much as I'd love to see that, they won't do an RTS. Even Blizzard has not touched RTS games since their popularity waned against the League of Legends type games. The closest we got was the StarCraft "HD remaster" from more than half a decade ago.

The era of RTS pretty much ended a decade ago with StarCraft 2.

The big video game companies pretty much only chase trends. They've always done that.

Whether it was platformer games on the NES after the success of Super Mario Brothers, fighting games in the arcades after the success of Street Fighter 2, or Grand Theft Auto 3D clones after the success of GTA3, or loot shooters or DOTA clones or whatever - the game industry at a large scale is mostly risk averse.

Only privately run companies like to pursue certain genres that aren't necessarily the most popular or profitable.

If you want to see new RTS, you're going to have to look for relatively small indie companies - probably ones with some of the grizzled old industry vets who worked on the actual games. Those guys are the only ones who will make those sorts of games now.