Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard

I know you you probably think that’s a clever retort, but really it’s just playing apologist on behalf of a corp working diligently to make the marketplace less competitive.

This is simply how things work.

Take, for instance, Returnal. Finnish game company Housemarque made it. They existed as an independent company, and then Sony bought them, to secure their IP moving forward.

That’s how it works, dude. That’s how it’s always worked.

If you want to play it, go buy a PS5. That’s why Sony bought them.

That is so not what happened with Housemarque man. Housemarque worked on a lot of Sony published titles, aka a 2nd party, though they did some multiplatform stuff. The studio was in an iffy state (see the Death of the Arcade thing they wrote) and contracted to do Returnal for Sony at which point Sony brought them on as an internal dev for their dev skills, it had almost nothing to do with past IP that Housemarque owned.

It’s seriously laughable you are bringing them up compared to Activision Blizzard, where the brands are arguably more important than the studios they are getting.

Bloomberg reporting that ATVI was trying to entice Facebook/Meta and others to try to drive up the price.

They existed as an independent company for decades, and existed as two other development houses before that.

Sony bought them to make exclusive games, for Sony… And only for Sony. That’s why they bought them.

Again, you guys seem to have some really weird inability to accept this constant in the game industry which has existed… Forever.

And it’s really funny when coupled with YOUR prior statements about how Microsoft was doomed and could never complete with Sony, because Sony had so many more exclusive titles.

Microsoft is remedying that situation.

They’re just doing it in an insanely effective, sudden fashion.

But it’s that suddenness which is part of the strategy. It’s intended to make a statement, and clearly destroy the suggestion that they won’t have exclusive titles.

Uh, there have been exclusives for years and nothing has been done. What is the difference here all of a sudden?

Hahaha. This idiot.

That dude is like 3 weeks away from talking about ancient aliens.

If Bobby Kotick had only made Activision Blizzard an NFT, we’d all have been made rich today. It’s just simple logic, people.

What does that tweet even mean? “Pay to earn” is just fancy terminology for pyramid scheme considering how those games work - imagine thinking that such a scheme would give “the community” a payout.

If only people could have bought a piece of Activision! Some sort of “stock” to “invest” in the company directly!

Such a crazy idea, must require NFTs and blockchain or something.

Cryptobros and NFT hucksters are so fucking annoying.

Yeah, I think there is a tipping point to reach. Each consumer will have a different threshold to ‘flip’. I imagine some PS players said the Bethesda acquisition sucked because they wouldn’t be able to play game A or game B, but still would continue with Playstation. But after ActiBlizzard acquisition, not being able to play game C, D and E may finally make buy a Xbox. It’s something that is accumulative, each acquisition effect isn’t separate, but built on top of the previous ones, so with each one more and more people will reach their tipping point.

On the other hand the industry is like a big ship, steering and changing directions will take years. It won’t happen overnight. The public perception in lots of countries is that ‘the Playstation’ is ‘the console’, so the effect will be noticed slowly, and only be on full effect by the time of Playstation 6.

Great interview by Dean Takahasi.

Oh, yeah, a tiny floundering indie team incubated over years producing exclusive games for one platform eventually being acquired by that company is exactly like leveraging huge profits an unrelated monopoly to buy the largest publisher in the industry for the express purpose of damaging a competitor that has consistently manage to deliver more desirable products.

Could it be because he gets a huge sum of money and way to extricate himself from his own mess?

Why do you get so silly whenever this sort of topic comes up? Sony has acquired game studios over the years and they’ve leveraged exclusives since forever. Exclusives are why I own a PS4 and will eventually buy a PS5.

Microsoft didn’t spend nearly $70 billion to “damage their competitor”, they spent the money to increase the value of services like Game Pass, xCloud, and whatever else they have cooking.

You know, I think it would have been even more interesting if Microsoft would have bought

EA + Take Two + Embracer + Sega. It would have costed $70B too.

It would be so easy, and probably pretty great to make a WoW based party battler. Put together your party of 5 and work your way through increasing encounters…if this isn’t already in development I’d be surprised, seems like a smash mobile/tablet game.

I can see the line of reasoning. Yesterday people could play Call of Duty and Overwatch on Xbox… and they still will be able to do it in the future. The difference for the future with this acquisition is Playstation players not being able to play them (if MS decides it they want full exclusives).
So more have changed for Sony players than for MS players.

Sure, that’s the case for any acquisition or exclusivity agreement. That’s been a thing since as long as I can remember. I’m not saying I’m a fan as a consumer, but I can’t remember a time when this hasn’t been going on in the console space. It’s how you sell consoles, or in Microsoft’s case, Game Pass subs.

Playstation owners will still be able to play future Call of Duty games, they’ll just need to play on PC or buy an Xbox. Just like I had to do to play Horizon Zero Dawn, Bloodborne, and multiple other games. It’s been like this since as long as I can remember, staring wistfully at my friend’s Sega Genesis.