$69b Activision deal totally helps gamers and saves them money, says Microsoft Microsoft has put forward its argument against the US trade regulator's attempt to block its massive purchase of games dev Activision Blizzard from going through, claiming the deal would be good for consumers. "The acquisition of a single game [Call of Duty] by the third-place console manufacturer cannot upend a highly …
If anyone thinks that The Board at Borkzilla gives a flying fart about gamers I have a bridge to sell them.
You don't spend $66 billion to improve gamers' lives. You do that to increase revenue and do "your duty" to the shareholders.
I don't think that Borkzilla is going to slowly push all those franchises towards the XBox descendants (although I can't see any reason why it wouldn't), but I fail to see what benefit it will do to me.
Competition is supposed to be good, or so I've been told, and this move severely reduces competition.
So, somebody please give me reason to think positive about this (not holding my breath).
..."You do that to increase revenue and do 'your duty' to the shareholders".
I think Microsoft misunderstood the memo...you're supposed to answer the Call of Duty not buy it.
Anyway, jokes aside...I hear the next Call of Duty will be called "Corporate Warfare" and will have some epic loot boxes with skins for your staplers, hole punches and filing cabinets.
With the battle pass you can get skins for your lawyer.
I'm also looking forward to Boardroom Royale...basically 99 people drop into a map and every 2 minutes there's a managerial reshuffle and if you're in the wrong zone, you get made redundant.
There's going to be several weapons available to use in open combat like spreading vicious rumours and taking credit for other peoples work. As your squad appointed team leader you get access to special weapons that you can deploy on other teams such as unreasonable deadlines, tiny budgets and charging 10p for coffee.
"There's going to be several weapons available to use in open combat like spreading vicious rumours and taking credit for other peoples work. "
Will there be a special token somewhere in gamespace that allows you to have somebody perp walked out of the company by accusing them of collecting naughty photos of those too young? (only works one time but blows through any defense).
How exactly will it damage competition?
Keep in mind that Activision is already far, far up Shit Creek, and if you ever again want to see them release another game (of sufficient quality to be taken seriously), they've got to be taken over by someone.
Who else would you rather see do it? Amazon? Alphabet? Elon?
"Keep in mind that Activision is already far, far up Shit Creek, and if you ever again want to see them release another game (of sufficient quality to be taken seriously), they've got to be taken over by someone."
They may just need to get the right person(s) in to lead the dev teams. They should have plenty of people that know how to code games and artists that can skin things up a treat if they are given a theme or world description. Companies that have been in the business for a long time will also have files full of components to draw from.
This is the new Microsoft, whose new CEO wants to be "agile".
The next Call of Duty will be released with severe bugs and crashes, because Microsoft laid off all the quality control people from Activision soon after they bought it. You, the paying customer, will be expected to tell Microsoft why and how it isn't work for free. But you will be asked frequently for your feedback, which will promptly be ignored unless it is nothing but praise for what they are doing. And then when you are finally used to the way things are, the whole user-interface will change for no good reason. And then later you find out that some parts of the game that you already played are radically different because somebody at Microsoft thought they could do that level better. Of course, that redone level will be full of bugs.
You haven't played the new COD, have you...
The latest iteration released with severe bugs and crashes, and getting Microsoft's UI designers, especially for Windows 10, anywhere near it will be an IMPROVEMENT to its current interface. That's how bad Activision and its dev houses are right now.
Want an example? If you're in a party with someone, and the party leader changes game modes, it will boot you, the party member, out of whatever menu you're in.
One thing that's happening is that we're getting far better and compact gaming experiences from game developers working in smaller studios. People are getting fed up with Activision, EA, et all promising the next episode in a franchise, taking 5 years to release it and it turns out to be an absolute abomination.
Games like Astroneer and No Man's Sky, smaller more carefully crafted games that don't need a PhD in Physics to understand and remember the control system. They're bult from small, humble beginnings and the games actually work. No Man's Sky was an abomination to begin with but it's not recognised as one of the great PC games of the last 5 years.
I mean these responses are so cheeky and senseless, could've been written by ChatGPT or something.
It sounds totally like NewSpeak: deny everything and turn it around 180 degrees. "It's not bad for competition, it's good! It's not bad for games, it's good for them! Prices won't rise, they'll get cheaper!"
Companies like Amazon, Facebook, MS and alphabet shouldn't be allowed to grow.
It would be a very beneficial for people if globally all the large companies would be broken up.
With smaller companies we get better products and prices because of competition and they can't act like a major force subduing elected politicians.
People in smaller companies often have better jobs, since they are not reduced to small and expendable cogs, in small companies they make a difference.
The Soviet system produced bad results because nobody made a difference and people stopped caring.
"It would be a very beneficial for people if globally all the large companies would be broken up."
The problem is some companies need to be large to do the work they do so how do you draw the lines and who will do the calculations?
There used to be a limit to how many media outlets an individual or corporate entity could own in the US. The premise was that it protected the country from propaganda blitzes. Those restrictions have mostly come down and I suspect that it was due to some strategically placed pallets of cash and promises of cushy jobs with no requirement that the person actually show up once they get the position.
It wouldn't be long before the Ministry of Determining Which Companies are Too Big will be infiltrated with paid stooges.
"Is the Ministry of Determining Which Companies are Too Big to Fail infiltrated with paid stooges, or is it just natural symbiosis / self-preservation that makes them act?"
Companies that are too big to fail seem to me as more of a religion. It's a concept that doesn't get rigorously tested and the reasoning seems to be supported by a very thin bit of scaffold. Those that decide which companies can't fail are the same group that often have extensive investment portfolios containing those companies.
"Those restrictions have mostly come down and I suspect that it was due to some strategically placed pallets of casg...."
Two words describe when this and so many other things were FUBAR in the USA.
.
.
Ronald Reagan
when they speak, they lie through their back teeth.
While I'm not a gamer other than Sudoku and Spider Solitaire, members of my family are and all of them are 100% against this. Two said to me. "If MS takes over Activision then I'm done with all their games for good."
We have seen people leave Twitter since Musk took it to the hard right POV. I expect the same voting with their feet will happen here. MS may find that their buy is not as good business as they might have thought it would be.
IMHO, nothing they have bought has improved after they took over and mostly ruined it.
As I don't use any MS product now, they can ---> See Icon.
“While I'm not a gamer other than Sudoku and Spider Solitaire, members of my family are and all of them are 100% against this. Two said to me. "If MS takes over Activision then I'm done with all their games for good."We have seen people leave Twitter since Musk took it to the hard right POV. I expect the same voting with their feet will happen here. MS may find that their buy is not as good business as they might have thought it would be.
IMHO, nothing they have bought has improved after they took over and mostly ruined it.”
There's very little worth buying anyway; seems every one of the big companies is still obsessively pushing multiplayer and tie-ins with other franchises that don't interest me at all. Single-player RPGs and adventure-type games are more my thing but require time, effort and thought to design and they're just too greedy. Smaller companies have partly filled in the gap and while the size of the company and budget needn't hamstring them (I mean The Ascent was a great game and I got loads of playing time out of it) it does place some limitations on what they can do and it seems it's becoming like the music industry where you hear about interesting stuff by word of mouth rather than through the media.
Part of me still hopes that the next Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls will somehow miraculously be awesome but the real creative forces behind them at their peak moved on many years ago and we're into Duke Nukem Forever territory in terms of when we might actually see them. In the case of TES, I suspect that MS will retain the classic Bethsoft bugs but may well nuke modding which was arguably the main part of their appeal; and of course EA has effectively done that already with DA soon after buying Bioware: one of the things that was nice about going back to Oranges recently was being able to mod it as much as I wanted (even though it's a PITA), while DA2 didn't enjoy official support and Inquisition was practically impossible. I should really just accept that was then and look elsewhere for new stuff to play.
@Gene Cash "Bungie is a cautionary tale." Cautionary tale to who?
2000 Microsoft buy out Bungie who become part of Microsoft's Game Division until 2007 when Bungie became a private company again. During those 7 years Bungie developed 3 successful Halo games. Bungie produced one more Halo game published by Microsoft in 2010.
Bungie have continued to develop successful games such as the Destiny series. Originally published by Activision under a 10 year publishing agreement (2010), since 2019 when Bungie terminated their agreement, Destiny has been published by Bungie.
To me that's a tale of success. Afterall Bungie did not just survive being owned by Microsoft they were successful at Microsoft and after Microsoft. They also managed to terminate a publishing deal with Activision Blizzard early so Bungie can certainly deal with the big companies.
So maybe it should have been a cautionary tale for Sony who acquired Bungie earlier this year.
They could have gone "we are Microsoft, we don't need revenue from loot boxes and battle passes and skins, we're fine with income from selling games and DLC, we'll have only minor cosmetics and glam in our cozy little cash shop!"
There would have been much cheer and rejoicing! EA and Epic and maybe even some of the Japanese and Korean shops would have had to join or be left behind.
Considering the date today, they could have been the Tiny Tim to the Scrooges!
But they didn't. Because we all know why...
I'm so glad to be of an age where I still saw they great days of gaming. Before the darkness took over completely, before those things mentioned above and when you received a whole game that you owned, before game publishers became quasi-legal drug pushers and gambling enablers.
Hey guys, I have a thought: let's buy CoD and license it to Sony, etc. It'll increase our bottom line a little this year, which will help.
But: next year - once we have Sony's gamers nicely on the hook - we release a new version of CoD that needs an additional library that Sony have to license from us on some kind of per-console, annual fee. To paraphrase Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption: Lord, how the money will roll in!
For $69bn, you'd think a company such as M$, supposedly a software powerhouse, could come up with its own games. They could recruit the top game designers and builders with generous signing bonuses, great compensation tied to meeting certain goals and outfitted with the most awesome studio to work in that isn't located in the midst of some dismal large city downtown. Let's say they allocated $1bn/year to the endeavor with a cap of that $69bn. I'd think they'd get some return along the way that's worth something. They could also tie up the best games craftsman through having the best place to work for those truly talented and willing to work.
After the shitshow that was Diablo III and it's auction house nonsense, you would have thought people would have woke up to smell the coffee. WoW is thoroughly exhausted even by its most ardent fans.
Why new releases of COD remain popular is beyond me. The only ones on the Quake III engine are good. Nothing since then.
Marketing I guess still holds a lot of sway, and perhaps also, a perceived lack of competition. There's a reason why I like the little indie Devs now...
Please Microsoft, buy Wargambling, sorry I meant Wargaming Inc and sack the whole bloody lot. Once great products going to seed and company only caring about revenue, loot boxes, premium time, battle passes, more special offers than Asda, almost impossible grinds for poor rewards that would make a male laptop club blush and don't forget to include the monthly PR disaster !
AHH yes, wargambling. That outfit that started from legitimate wargaming and then turned to evil. Anyone else play their online Dr Bellis Antiquitatis game?
WoT in its early days were talking about infantry, ATGs and historical battles. We all know where they went instead.
Toxic multiplayer with internet randoms is about as appealing as a napalm enema in any case so the ongoing obsession with such gameplay is an easy no-sale for me.
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