Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard

I also remember one of their CFOs saying even with a big bank balance, they didn’t usually pay cash out of that account(s). It was worth it from an expenditure to take out a loan and pay off that loan.

I don’t get the details on it, but it was interesting.

Things are really gonna get interesting when Gabe retires and Microsoft buys Valve/Steam.

MS only has that much money to spend on games because their non-gaming related businesses are incredibly profitable. If Xbox was independent it would never have such resources. It isn’t anywhere near that successful.

Oh, absolutely. MS is losing boatloads of money on game pass, but even if you discount that and look at the rest of their gaming business they aren’t coming up with seventy billion freaking dollars.

This isn’t even close to the largest corporate acquisition in history though.

Vodaphone bought Mannesmann in 1999 for an inflation adjusted value of $284 billion.

Ok, we do that, and, assuming it’s not one of the scam ones, or one who does charity by perpetuating dependencies, or one who owned/controlled by someone who lobbies for nothing to change, we get to feed some people for a year. For how many years do we do that, losing wage share, purchasing power, infrastructure, affordable bills, political power, etc, until we can say it doesn’t work?


I have no particular issue with the purchase, as I barely care about what any of the companies involved or affected sell. But it’s one more small step into having a tiny amount of corporations siphon rent out of allowing business to have a chance at growth-enabling profit, while double dipping by spying on consumer habits and selling the knowledge.
I don’t mean that cyberpunk is around the corner, or that any particular deal is a portal do the end times. But thinking that MS is now good, actually, because it doesn’t do the exact same things as 20 years ago, as if nothing else changed, is naive. But fine, say they are ethically amazing right now; what if they, or Amazon, or whatever, decide not to be when no one has any other profitable/affordable choice for a particular market (or they are all pretty much the same, as it tends to happen)? What then is my concern.

I think this is a legit concern, if you start getting to a point where they have a dominant control over the market, but they aren’t close to that point yet.

True, but MS is only investing that kind of money because they believe they will get a return on that investment. They aren’t investing $70B to lose money or break even. This isn’t about past revenue/income, this is about future revenue/income.

Strawman, that’s a really weird take, you are responding to me and I never said anything about MS being “good”.

Sorry, I understand the dividing line wasn’t enough of a separation and should have made two separate posts. At least after writing it.
The second part isn’t in reply of anyone in particular. I just usually don’t know how to add a comment that is kind of a middle ground in several things.

Assuming Microsoft put gaming developers on their standard engineering payscale, I doubt they will have too many problems, honestly.

While you can argue about whether having those kind of cash balances is good financial planning by the megacorps, and the nature of the economy that creates them, it’s not causing a money supply squeeze or anything because of the way the modern monetary system works. It’s not like there’s a certain amount of coinage and MS have a tenth of it in a vault.

Microsoft being the saviours of linux gaming would be the kind of irony this world needs.

The QA group, 34 people, not all Raven.

Hah, seriously. Bet you anything Microsoft’s engineer bands are significantly higher than just about any gamedev studio’s, much less a notorious underpayer like Blizzard.

This you?

I can neither confirm nor deny any involvement in said lawsuit.

Haha, I was going to post that in the WTF forum. Totally hilarious to think that there’s a case to be made here over a refund of their rental cost. I can’t imagine a judge or jury saying that a movie trailer represents a contractual offer to the viewer.

See also:

The court also added this gem of a reason in its dismissal of the case: “The callow youth featured in the commercial is a highly improbable pilot, one who could barely be trusted with the keys to his parents’ car, much less the prize aircraft of the United States Marine Corps.”

Photo of the douchebag judge who wrote this:
image

Were you that young man @Timex ? :)

I can neither confirm nor deny that Pepsi owes me a Harrier.