Whats gonna happen to Sony, how can they compete? Feel so bad for Sony. I felt this way with Dreamcast too… too litle too late. can the same happen to the PS5? Is the PS5 now a waste of money to buy now that CoD is gonna be exclusive? is Last of Us and Spiderman enough to buy a Sony console? What if MS buys the talent from Naughty Dog and Santa Monica and Insomniac? Is that mean to Sony to do that?
Isn’t Sony still bigger than Microsoft when it comes to games?
They can’t sign contracts in the other company’s name, obviously, but it is absolutely standard for them to say what their plans are (and yes, that includes making “commitments” that obviously don’t have any force until completion). There may even be provisions in the merger agreement between the companies which restrict what the target can do before completion to prevent it from devaluing the merger.
I want Microsoft to buy me. I’ll sell out for 1/10th of what they paid for Activision. Just send me the check, and I’ll get started!
I’m ok with that… As long as they don’t leave money on the table by having you only on the MS store and Steam. Qt3 users have been enjoying your posts first for many years!
Exactly. The only reason they aren’t doing what Xbox are, is because they can’t afford to. That’s the only thing that’s stopped them doing to MS what MS are about to do to them.
Sony is fundamentally in a different business than Microsoft. Sony makes money by selling hardware and licensing games. Microsoft wants subscriptions and is happy to lose money for years to get them.
Remember, when Xbox came around MS was envisioning that other companies would build Xboxes and MS would just supply the OS and games. Like, MS would dictate the specs, but then you could have different electronics companies churn out their own competing Xbox machines. Except the console business doesn’t work that way because it was the razor/razor blade model of losing money selling the razor and making money on the blades. And everyone outside of MS knew this. Which is why MS ended up having to get into the hardware business.
The irony is that MS may actually be getting to that original vision in a way, because the hardware doesn’t matter if everyone is in the cloud. Which is why I can play Halo Infinite on a Macbook or an Android phone.
I sorta do think MS still makes consoles, because you still need to provide updated hardware specs for developers to target and you still need the hardcore gamer in your corner. But, again, MS is making it easy for anyone to play their games regardless of platform (except in those cases where the platform holder locks them out).
For all we know, this acquisition is kind of a huge risk. Moreso because of the expectation that Gamepass will rise in subs, the 25 million subs announced kind of surprised me as being LOW… i expected something more than 35-40 million. This tells me there might not be enough amount of games to draw people to this service and that its not as enticing as something like a Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Netflix is at 200M and it runs on everything under the sun. Until very recently Game Pass only ran on Xboxen and the streaming stuff is confusing in that neither Xbox Game Pass nor PC Game Pass includes it and there isn’t any standalone “xCloud Game Pass”, instead you need to get GP Ultimate. So the cloud streaming stuff isn’t exactly popular, it’s just a neat “hey did you know you can do that?”
It’s a huge risk. If you read the various articles, Phil is saying Microsoft is betting on gaming being a core business like Amazon shopping.
69 billion dollars.
A corporation just spent small country GDP money to buy an entertainment corporation. It’s funny how we all seem to be overlooking just how much cash was just handed over in the whole “haha Sony is screwed” discussion.
The American government has allowed a corporation to grow big enough to be able to hand over an unimaginable amount of cash, without anyone blinking an eye.
Truly a watershed “all hail our corporate overlords” moment in our freefall descent into naked corporate oligarchy.
I think the general discourse on this topic around the internet could pretty easily be interpreted as a whole hell of a lot of collective eye blinking.
Not to mention some people are maybe a little hesitant to bring a politics discussion (“The American government has allowed…”) into a games thread, even if the two topics do at times overlap. I personally don’t mind it, but I know others like to keep the two apart as much as possible.
If we’re going all “socialist”, yeah, sure, “allowing” a private entity to have so much money lying around is pretty dangerous to democracy.
Or, to bring it back into gaming, it ruins the gameplay. The point is to go out and grind, put the work in, be a better player, not just buy out the fat loots that other players have grinded.
I think that translates well enough.
Raven Software employees have unionized, so that’s something else interesting to see how Microsoft handles
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-21/activision-employee-group-forms-union-a-first-in-video-games
It’s not really a first for video games, is it (referring to the Bloomberg headline)? @Nightgaunt’s shop is unionized, I believe.
Good on them for unionizing regardless. I think it’ll be healthier for the games industry overall. I have no idea why the industry continues to chew up and spit out their most important resource year after year. Just ask EA how well it’s going for them over in BF2042 land.
It’ll be new to MS though, there are no unions there.
Oh yeah, for sure.
He tweeted a correction
The original headline was going to have “a second in video games”, but it read awkwardly and was rejected by Bloomberg editors.